Review of Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (eds.), Carnal Hermeneutics, New York

Samuel R. R. Underwood

Carnal Hermeneutics is a collection of essays published in 2015 in the “Perspectives in Continental Philosophy” series by Fordham University Press. The contributors fall into two categories: established French philosophers (Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Julia Kristeva, Michel Henry, Jean- Luc Marion, Paul Ricoeur, and Emmanuel Falque) and younger Englishlanguage phenomenologists from Ireland and North America who often take much of their inspiration from the Continent (Edward Casey, Anne O’Byrne, Emmanuel Alloa, Dermot Moran, Ted Toadvine, Shelly Rambo, Karmen MacKendrick, and John Panteleimon Manoussakis). The collection is edited and introduced by Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, whose call for a more “carnal” hermeneutics gives unity and contemporary philoso-phical import to the collection. In the book and in their wider appeal to contemporary philosophers, Kearney and Treanor seek to indicate a “carnal turn” in philosophical hermeneutics, which they hope will serve as a corrective to the “linguistic turn” embraced by Gadamer and Ricoeur in the 20th century. Their claim is not that the linguistic turn was entirely a mistake, but rather that, in Kearney’s words, “the journey from flesh to text often forgot a return ticket”. The aim of carnal hermeneutics, then, is to initiate this return journey. And, crucially, this return ticket is itself not one-way; it is an endless roundtrip journey from flesh to text to flesh to text.