On the Challenge of Migration: Critical Hermeneutical Perspectives

At first glance, it could seem slightly out of place to dedicate an issue of a newly founded journal dedicated to hermeneutics – albeit to a critical strand of hermeneutics – to a topic such as migration, forced displacements or refugees. Indeed, for the lay reader, is not hermeneutics, at least methodologically, primarily concerned with the interpretation of texts? Let us concede, still at this first, naïve level, that such an approach might indeed look strange. But allow us to wager that it might contribute to grasp what is at stake and perhaps even change the terms of this fundamental debate. Indeed, when applied to an analysis of societies as such, including their political and ethical problems, it provides a perspective that is lacking in other approaches. First, because a key lesson of hermeneutics is that no existing, historically constituted society is a tabula rasa that could, as it were, be ruled by a whole set of “invented” ideals, no matter how fair they might seem, and that every “revolutionary” attempt to start a political order from scratch ultimately ends up in “terror”. Second, because a closely connected lesson is that, in the realm of human action, (e)valuation is a constitutive principle. Regardless of the naïve, and sometimes even toxic attempts by (neo)positivism, virtually nothing in the practical realm (comprising ethical, political and social issues) is value-free. That much is asserted by key authors working at the intersection between philosophy and economics, such as Hilary Putnam (2004) or Amartya Sen (1987), when they put forward their analyses of the fact-value entanglement, but the same applies to a hermeneutical perspective on the practical realm. The combination of the first two hermeneutical lessons allows us, on the one hand, to grasp the existence of shared collective traits, such as collective identities and their cultural heritage, including their partial sedimentation (to which Ricœur would call “ideological” in a constitutive sense) but also, on the other hand, to understand how, their existence and relevance notwithstanding, these must be prevented from becoming completely reified, as if, in virtue of a bad analogy pushed too far by an essentialist epistemology, identities came to be seen as being completely self-sustained and thus exclusive and hostile towards its “others”. On the contrary, a social hermeneutics, and namely one that takes stock of Paul Ricœur’s notion of narrative identity, understands the inherently fluid and mutable character of any collective identity...