SOMIGLIANZE, DIRITTI E DOVERI DELL’INTERPRETAZIONE UMBERTO ECO TRA STORIA DELLE IDEE E SEMIOTICA

This article tackles some of Umberto Eco’s ideas about normality and pathologies of interpretation by showing why he recovers certain paradigms in the history of ideas, particularly those understood as encyclopedic sets of cultural habits depicting how things tend to go. While arising within concrete contexts, the theory and practice of interpretation, with their leading rules, do not belong to the plane of the texts that are their objects. While Eco applied his theory of controlled multi-interpretability of texts ever since the studies conducted in Opera Aperta, he employed it as a test bed for hermeneutic paradigms, such as hermetic semiosis and the esoteric interpretations of Dante, only after the semiotic turn. The article’s conclusion reflects upon the lawfulness, if not the necessity, of a distinction between literary text and document tout court, the duties of the interpreter, and achieving the rights of the interpretation.