Exploring Indeterminacy: Jonas Lüscher, Radical Interpretation, and Passing Theories of Love

The article is an interpretation of a short story by the German-Swiss author Jonas Lüscher. The piece, I sustain, gives us reasons to go back to the debate about interpretation of literature from the 1990s and give the debate some new twists. Lüscher’s I-narrator is a “field linguist”—a figure that I connect to Willard Van Orman Quine and Donald Davidson and their model of “radical translation” and “interpretation”. Lüscher’s field linguist is suffering from not finding a correct translation and, thereby, she he or they are losing the concept of love and falling into what I call “the void of meaning”. In my interpretation, the text also suggests that we can find a cure to this “void of meaning” when we outgrow the representational picture of language which taints our picture of love as mirroring one another’s souls, minds, and desires. Once understood that the indeterminacy of meaning, as outlined by Quine and Davidson, is not leading to relativism but to an overabundance of meaning, we can live the adventure of interpretation with the enthusiasm and excitement that come from getting engaged by someone and something interesting though we will never completely grasp its or their meaning.