duction of Presence: What Meaning
cannot convey, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2004.
Putting aside the many precautions taken by Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht to expound his
position with nuance, one can bluntly summarize his main thesis in The Production of
Presence as follows: it is time to question the omnipotence and centrality gained by
"interpretation" as a research practice in the humanities; more precisely, the
epistemological framework implied by "interpretation" must be shifted, so as to create a
locus for theory which is, in the author's own terms, nonhermeneutical and
nonmetaphysical. In essence, the humanities are enjoined to renounce their purely
meaning-based epistemology, and "get their hands dirty" (78) by engaging with the
bodily, sensorial dimension of the world, its very "presence", "substance" – and even
"Being". This, by all accounts, – indeed, by Gumbrecht's own account in The Production
of Presence – is a rather controversial view of the task of the humanities, a one, in truth,
often considered to be a paramount of intellectual bad taste and philosophical naïveté