Response to Liangjian

Gianni Vattimo

Santiago Zabala

pp. 161-163

in: Silvia Mazzini, Owen Glyn-Williams (eds), Making communism hermeneutical, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Abstrakt

The title Liu Liangjian contribution, "It's Time to Change the World, So Interpret It!" sounds very much like an order, instruction or command. Even though we always try to avoid these sorts of statements, there is a great temptation to use it now. This change of heart likely has a lot to do also with Eduardo Mendieta's contribution in this volume, in which he claims that Hermeneutic Communism reads like a manifesto. Perhaps, in the tradition of the manifesto, we should also have called everyone to interpret the world as clearly as Liangjian does. His contribution is not only remarkable in that it points to the similarities between "weak thought" and an ancient Chinese sage of Daoism (Laozi), but also insofar as it questions "whether interpreting is enough to bring alternatives, emergencies, or events to the world." In order to respond to this fundamental question, Liangjian reinterprets communism from a Chinese perspective in relation to our preference for the South American alternative.

Cited authors

Mendieta Eduardo

Liangjian Liu