Harris: [00:23:47]
That's just a beautiful Ricoeur quote. It is the impetus, the foundation for my interest in Ricoeur; this is the a moment of liberation that is embedded in Ricoeur's philosophy and hermeneutics. The title [for my book] that I submitted to Abingdon Press was Getting in Front of the Text. And that's what Ricoeur is talking about in general -- about getting in front of the text and not being "a slave," to the meaning behind the text, which gets at this whole notion of the intention of the author. What did the author intend? Ricoeur is moving beyond that, saying essentially that the intention of the author is not the critical point, it is the intention of the text itself that is more important.
Harris: [00:26:24]
And I want to make it clear, however, that Ricoeur is not distancing himself totally from people like Schleiermacher* and others, but he is offering a kind of new interpretation himself, because there is value in getting behind the text, which is the typical way of exegesis or executing a text, you know, to find out the history of the text. How did it originate? What is the form and all kinds of other criticisms that get to know more about how the text came to be and all of that. That has its point and that has its place and it has its value. But in my view, it is not the privileged position of getting behind the text, but in getting in front of the text. And I think personally I have to develop this more, because this is the contribution in many ways of the African American, particularly when we talk about text and talk about scripture of the African American, or the black preacher in terms of getting in front of a text that by its very nature [embodies] a certain element of distanciation from the Black experience.
And it's definitely the basis of Beyond the Tyranny of the Text. Because the biblical texts in slavery were tyrannous in a sense. They were used in a tyrannous way by the slave masters [and] plantation preachers. And so, the slave, [and] even the slave preacher who could often not even read the text, had some kind of understanding that in the language of the slave experience, everybody talking about heaven ain't going there. Wade in the water. God's going to trouble the water. These codes in the slave linguistics and language pointed to something beyond equitable, beyond writing, that I think the slave had an understanding of. And it's almost inexplicable. But at the same time, you know, they recognize that, yes, this religion of the white man had a component that was grounded in the politics of oppression and injustice and so forth.
So again, I reiterate when Ricoeur says the meaning of the text is in front, I interpreted that to mean that, from a biblical perspective and a scriptural text, that this text potentially harbors elements of liberation that have not been discovered or imagined. So, to get in front of the text is to vector toward liberation, to vector toward a transformation.
Hawkins: [00:31:06]
How is such an approach different from, say, reader-response theory?
Harris: [00:31:17]
Well, yeah, I think that there is embedded maybe in [Ricoeur's] notion itself some understanding of reader-response theory. I mean, the reader also participates in not only the interpretation of the text, but in the creation of the text or the recreation of the text as well, because every text is encumbered with gaps in it. And the reader has the responsibility of filling in those gaps in the text itself. In some sense that makes the reader a participant in not only the interpretation, but in the writing and rewriting of the text itself.
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