Notes from the Keynote

Reading Texts:

Approaches, Context, Critique

These notes summarise three broad approaches to reading texts in social and political theory. They are not exhaustive, but provide guiding frameworks to think with. The team has compiled the notes together based on the transcript (generated via AI) of the keynote address delivered by Prof. Gurpreet Mahajan on 'Reading Texts: Approaches, Context, Critique' as a part of the two-day online workshop cum reading circle discussion on the topic: Reading Texts in Social Science: On Method and Meaning, held online on September 18, 4:00 PM (IST), organised by The Office of Interdisciplinary Studies (IDEAS), in collaboration with the Kashf Initiative.

Preface: What Do We Mean by “Text”?

● A “text” can mean many things: books, essays, inscriptions, events, or even culture.

● Today’s focus: written texts in social and political theory (e.g., Plato’s Republic, Hobbes’ Leviathan, Mill’s On Liberty, Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj).

Method 1: Reading in Context (Author’s Intended Meaning)

● Assumes the text has an identifiable author writing for contemporaries.

● Words carry meanings shaped by linguistic practices of the time.

● Beware of projecting today’s meanings back onto older texts (e.g., “democracy” in Aristotle ≠ “democracy” today).

● Context is not just biography; it includes debates, issues, and values of the time.

● Aim: Recover the author’s intended meaning by reconstructing context.

● Key figures: Quentin Skinner, Wilhelm Dilthey.

● Exercise: Move between part and whole—word, sentence, text, debate, intellectual tradition.

Method 2: Fusion of Horizons (Hermeneutic Approach)

● Associated with Hans-Georg Gadamer.

● Critique of Method 1: we too are historical beings with our own frameworks and prejudices.

● We cannot simply “step into” the author’s world.

● Instead, reading involves a fusion of horizons:

○ Our pre-understandings meet the world of the text.

○ The historical distance is not a barrier but a resource—it produces new meanings.

● Example: Kojev reading Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as class struggle; feminist readings of Hegel.

● Aim: Expand and transform our own horizon through dialogue with the text.

Method 3: Reading Beyond the Author (Ideas, Worlds, and Deconstruction)

● Author’s intention is no longer central; the “author is dead” (Foucault, Derrida).

● Reading seeks to open a world that speaks to us today (Paul Ricoeur). ● Strategies include:

○ Deconstruction (Derrida): focus on absences, contradictions,

juxtapositions.

○ Intertextuality / Semiotics: understand texts through their relation to other texts.

○ Binary analysis: explore how categories (sacred/profane, good/evil) shape meaning.

● Aim: Generate new perspectives and ideas relevant to present concerns. ● Note: Not “anything goes.” Some readings are more fruitful because they reveal richer or sharper insights.

Key Takeaways

1. Contextual Method: Reconstruct the world of the author.

2. Hermeneutic Method: Acknowledge our own historicity; create a dialogue between horizons.

3. Post-structural/Deconstructive Method: Move beyond the author to explore how texts can open new worlds and meanings.

All three offer valuable tools. Reading is always both historical and creative, both interpretive and constructive.

Summary: Three Methods of Reading Texts

1. Contextual / Historical Recovery

● Core idea: A text is a product of its own time. To understand it, we must recover the conditions in which it was written.

● Focus: Author’s intention, historical and political context, linguistic conventions.

● Method: Reconstruct the debates, audiences, and intellectual traditions surrounding the text.

● Strength: Guards against anachronism and misinterpretation.

● Limit: Risks fixing meaning in the past, leaving little space for present dialogue.

● When to use: To situate thinkers like Mill in 19th-century struggles over democracy, religion, and authority.

2. Hermeneutic / Fusion of Horizons

● Core idea: Understanding is dialogical — it emerges in the encounter between the world of the text and the world of the reader.

● Focus: How the text’s meaning expands when our questions meet the author’s perspective.

● Method: Recognize our own prejudices and historicity; allow horizons (past and present) to merge.

● Strength: Keeps reading alive and relevant, avoiding a purely antiquarian exercise.

● Limit: Risk of over-assimilating the past to the present if not handled carefully.

● When to use: To ask how Mill’s anxieties about majority opinion resonate with current debates on majoritarianism.

3. Post-Structural / Deconstructive Reading

● Core idea: Texts are not closed systems — they contain silences, contradictions, and openings for new meanings.

● Focus: What is left unsaid, excluded, or marginal; how binary oppositions are constructed.

● Method: Deconstruction, intertextual analysis, genealogy of concepts.

● Strength: Reveals power dynamics, hidden assumptions, and unthought possibilities.

● Limit: Can underplay the author’s own meaning or historical rootedness.

● When to use: To explore tensions in Mill — e.g., his universal defense of liberty vs. exclusions in colonial contexts.

Bringing Them Together

● Historical recovery anchors the text in its time.

● Fusion of horizons makes the text speak across time.

● Deconstruction unsettles and re-opens the text for new futures.

Together, these methods show that reading is not just decoding meaning, it is a practice of history, dialogue, and critique.