Of birth, death, and unfinished conversations

Please forgive me, but I do not know how to open this paper without first making two very personal, almost private remarks. There are two reasons I cannot find a conceptual starting point for what I want to say: first, what I want to discuss concerns that which never fully translates itself into a concept, never fully lets itself be translated at all; and second, what I want to say concerns an intimacy that I am reluctant to lose, even if it means that I am not quite able to communicate what it is that so holds me to this intimate "truth" (for lack of a better word). This "truth," this experience that seems undeniable, concerns conversations. More precisely, it concerns the questions raised by those conversations that have been fundamentally interrupted. I am speaking of course of how it is that death interrupts every conversation we have had or will ever have. While conversation is among the key notions for Gadamer-it will be at the heart of how it is that hermeneutics can be seen as emerging out of ordinary experience-the limits of conversation and the ways in which conversations can be interrupted-is never a topic that he addresses in any extended way. And yet, it is clear that to think through the significance of conversation one does need to address this inevitability. Among the most penetrating treatments of this question comes from Derrida's effort to speak about how it is that Gadamer's death interrupts, and yet how at the same time it preserves as well, the conversation that he and Gadamer struggled to maintain. Derrida's argument, that there is something "infinite" to be understood about the conversation in this experience of its interruption, points to the relation of conversation and ethical life that was for Gadamer at the very heart of how he understood the project of hermeneutics.