Cultural Barriers or Flawed Hermeneutics: Martin Heidegger’s “Dialogue on Language”

Martin Heidegger’s “Dialogue on Language”[1] between himself and a Japanese who visited him at his home in Freiburg in March 1954 is the best known but not a singular event of this kind in the last century, either in respect to the topic (the opposition between the East and the West) or setting. The three dialogues of the Platonic kind we are referring to in this paper, involving three major figures of the twentieth century intellectual history – W.B. Yeats, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida -, are all sites of debate on cultural differences. Generally perceived as statements in the unsurpassable distinctions of mental make-up mapped onto geographical frontiers, these European-Japanese encounters seem, at a closer look, to convey quite the opposite meaning, encrypted, however, at a deeper, subconscious, level of a false consciousness, nourished by fashionable ideas of the moment. Lurking beneath Lacanian “letters in the unconscious” inscripted by master narratives of racial and cultural differences in non-empty (embodied) subjects, there are the universal drives of a plural intentional subjectivity that can be interpreted and communicated across cultural barriers.