Edward Casey: Subliminal Hermeneutics in the Wake of Place

Abstract

This chapter first provides a brief map of Edward S. Casey’s work, as a guide to its relevance to the hermeneutics of place. It then articulates two of Casey’s distinctive contributions to this topic: his study of moving, bodily implacement as key to the determinate appearance of things in places, places and place itself; his highly innovative work on what he calls periphenomena. Periphenomena, such as glances and edges, are peripheral to phenomena, yet guide our moving, bodily implacement, and are ingredient in our encountering places, and things in places, as determinate phenomena. Periphenomena, though, are beneath direct notice and inherently escape clear determination or delimitation—they are what I call subliminal. These two contributions together imply a third, underlying point that I draw out of Casey, namely that a hermeneutics of place and indeed all hermeneutics turns on a hermeneutics of place, that is, an account of hermeneutical activity as itself arising from and granted by place—yet the place that grants meaning is not some already fully given and determinate foundation, but is subliminal. This has ethical implications.