Repetition in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

Abstract

It was Heidegger who made ‘repetition’ into a fundamental category of the hermeneutical process. It refers to Dasein’s explicit transmission of the possibilities that are as having been. However, it is not simply a matter of reiterating the tradition, but of ‘destroying’ or transmuting it in order to expose the possibilities relevant to the historical situation in which Dasein finds itself. Repetition thus understood is not a static reproduction of a meaning fixed once and for all, but the revival of a meaning subject to continual review and revision. Repetition in this sense keeps the tradition alive by constantly exposing the new and hitherto hidden possibilities of meaning that it offers.