The responsibility to understand, then, demands that we enact and cultivate the capacity to converse. This responsibility comes into focus as a ‘predicament of the exception’. As we have seen, every situation we find ourselves in demands that we understand it, without exception. Yet, each situation is just as much exceptional because factically different from any other possible situation. In this chapter, I argue that the demand that we enact and cultivate our capacity to converse is, accordingly, really a capacity for displacement. This demand is not first of all directed by a concern to reach agreement, even if the capacity to converse is oriented toward or involves the pursuit of agreement. More originally, this demand is to be open for and to grapple with the displacement we experience in the predicament of the exception posed to us by every situation. The capacity to converse: this does not mean the capacity to reach agreement; rather, it means the capacity to become interpretively open by putting ourselves into question and holding ourselves in this openness in the face of the challenge it poses to even our deepest prejudices.

The claim that the capacity to converse concerns not agreement but displacement runs up against familiar criticisms of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Whatever else it is, the experience of displacement is a confrontation with alterity, the other or exteriority. Critics have long objected that Gadamer's hermeneutics affords too little credence to such exposure to exteriority. A principle criticism is that in Gadamer's hermeneutics, displacement is not a definitive dimension of our experiences of understanding and interpretation but comprises only an intermediary phase of an occurrence, or event of understanding. Here, the experience of displacement is characterised as an interruption in our initial understanding of something. But, as this criticism goes, Gadamer believes that such interruption can (at least in principle, if not every time in practice) be superseded through the achievement of a novel, richer and deeper understanding. Accordingly, Gadamer's hermeneutics suggests that such interruption is provisional. Indeed, because he sees such interruption as provisional, his approach is said to emphasise not ultimately the importance of displacement, but, despite many of his own assertions to the contrary, the continuity of hermeneutical experience.