perpetuates and “renews itself in constant repetition” ( TM , 103). Play is
medial holding a “primacy...over the consciousness of the player” ( TM ,
104). Stated differently: “all playing is a being-played” ( TM , 106; cf.
Georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason [Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1987], 48: “Games and works of art both
have an essential priority over the individuals that experience or play
them”). The crucial thing here is the mediality, the refl exivity of play; when
one plays a game, one enters a reality which holds primacy; the player does
not control the play. Instead, play moves to and fro and players participate
in it. As the intensity of play increases, one becomes aware (in varying
degrees) of the interpenetration of play itself in, among, and between the
players.- “The fundamental thing here is that something occurs ( etwas gescheiht ).
Neither is the mind of the interpreter in control of what words of tradition
reach him, nor can one suitably describe what occurs here as the progres-
sive knowledge of what exists” ( TM , 461). - TM , 290: “Understanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than
as participating in an event of tradition, a process of transmission in which
past and present are constantly mediated.” - Tradition “is language —i.e., it expresses itself like a Thou” ( TM , 358,
emphasis original). - Cf. P. Christopher Smith, “The I-Thou Encounter ( Begegnung ) in
Gadamer’s Reception of Heidegger,” in The Philosophy of Hans- Georg
Gadamer , ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), 509–525.
Smith shows the biblical roots of this encounter, explaining that one fi nds
one’s true self “not by recovering ourselves from the social world consti-
tuted by language...but precisely by coming ever more fully into our being
together with others in this very social, cultural world” (517). - A text’s yearning to speak (again) is the result of the codifi ed presence of
the author: traces of the author remain in the text; thus, text is not merely
an epistemologically constituted collection of data, but also an ontologi-
cally constituted entity. - Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice , trans. Donald
F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1977), 56. See also James Risser, “Communication and the Prose of the
World: The Question of Language in Merleau- Ponty and Gadamer,” in
Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspectives , eds. Patrick Burke and Jan
van der Veken (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), 131–144,
“written texts present the real hermeneutic task of transforming the ideal-
ity of the word back into language as speaking—i.e., communicative event”
(133).
44 C.C. EMERICK