Post-interpretation

Quentin Skinner, the brilliant and extremely charming historian at Cambridge, has just delivered a neat lecture that pretty much explains what I was trying to get at a while ago: how Foucault would reply, frustrated, to Derrida. Rehearsing many of Derrida's arguments, marrying them with nice, clear analytic language, Skinner in "Is It Still Possible to Interpret Texts?" (The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Volume 89, Issue 3, Date: June 2008) tries to ask if we can interpret anything anymore: in short, what the use of hermeneutics is in a post-hermeneutic world, a world subjected to the Derridian critique.
His only mistake--but it is a really, really crucial one (and I think I was making it too until recently)--might be thinking that Derrida, and not Foucault, is really trying to kill off hermeneutics. Derrida wants to use hermeneutics at that point where it collapses: that is, use it otherwise. So describing him as someone who levies a critique against hermeneutics is way off the mark.
Why? Derrida, precisely by not simply criticizing hermeneutics, produces something more by way of hermeneutics. Where I am going in my series on Ricoeur, Derrida, Bentham and hermeneutics is precisely to this point. It isn't by escaping hermeneutics that Derrida escapes hermeneutics: this is the simple and yet annoyingly impossible thought that counts here, and what makes any effort to recall what he says as the main propositions or theses in a critique--as is going on a lot in Oxbridge, it seems, recently, as if Derrida were Kant--well, this is what makes this a misrepresentation of Derrida's position. What has to be thought is precisely how his thought is a series (if one could group them) of a-theses that have their place not a critique, but a dismantling or deconstruction of hermeneutics, as he so thoroughly tried to explain in his seminars in the 70's and in The Post Card, especially. So at issue is not just a problem regarding how his theses are interpreted, but a problem in regarding the status of what Derrida wrote: in short, he's not simply a philosopher, and his critical acts, therefore, are not those of a philosophical critique--that is, a critique like Foucault's.
However, moving in the direction of post-interpretative description of the Foucauldian sort that Skinner advocates here most certainly helps bring the particular Derridian contribution to this problem more to the fore. I most definitely think it is a better direction for interpretation generally. The question Derrida asks, however, is whether this will only produce more of the same. Is post-interpretation still interpretation? Is it really something that would be otherwise-than-interpretation? It might have a higher probability of being so, yes. But one can't fall back on this reason all the time. Still, we get what is crucial, yet again, from Skinner: a sense of the "kinds of histories" that would result from this endeavor.