This essay will attempt to explicate a key idea which governs the methodology of interpretation. It concerns the way in which a text is addressed to someone. Elsewhere we have noted that the writing–reading relation is distinguished from the speaking–hearing relation not only in terms of the relation to the speaker, but also in terms of the relation to the audience. We have asked: for whom does one write? and we have answered: for anyone who can read. We have also spoken of the ‘potentialisation’ of the audience, which is no longer the partner in dialogue but the unknown reader that the text procures. The culmination of reading in a concrete reader who appropriates the meaning will thus constitute the theme of this essay.

It is obvious that we shall rediscover the old problem of the role of subjectivity in understanding and, therefore, the problem of the hermeneutical circle. But this problem is presented in new terms, as a result of the fact that it has been postponed for so long. Instead of considering it as the first problem, we have pushed it back to the end of our investigation. What we have said in other essays about the notion of interpretation is, in this respect, decisive. If it is true that interpretation concerns essentially the power of the work to disclose a world, then the relation of the reader to the text is essentially his relation to the kind of world which the text presents. The theory of appropriation which will now be sketched follows from the displacement undergone by the whole problematic of interpretation: it will be less an intersubjective relation of mutual understanding than a relation of apprehension applied to the world conveyed by the work. A new theory of subjectivity follows from this relation. In general we may say that appropriation is no longer to be understood in the tradition of philosophies of the subject, as a constitution of which the subject would possess the key. To understand is not to project oneself into the text; it is to receive an enlarged self from the apprehension of proposed worlds which are the genuine object of interpretation.