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While translating the supreme Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode), Vattimo comes to terms with one of the key words of Gadamer’s book, perhaps more dense and fascinating than the famous pre-understanding (Vorveständnis), coined together with another great student of Heidegger, the theologian of demythification Rudolf Bultmann.
This word – splendid: pure poetic thought – is Bannkreis. But Vattimo limits himself to turning with a simple: “circle”. That is, he only translates Kreis. He ignores Bann.
Strange. Of that compound word, Bann is in fact the part fullest of evocative meaning. Elusive, almost. Bann is a spell and a spell; illusion; spell and magic. In short, Bannkreis is, for Gadamer, the very light and above all unnoticed cloud that envelops us when we try to understand what is “out there”: that is, external reality, as – for example – any text/sign to be interpreted can be (artistic, legal, religious, musical, etc.). And to increase the mystery, even a great jurist of refined Gadamerian philosophical training, Luigi Mengoni, in his general theory of hermeneutics applied to law will use the same correspondingly reductive lemma, “circle”. Even for him, Bann is as if he doesn’t exist.
That impalpable cloud is our pre-judgments, the pre-conceptions in which we are “always already” immersed without realizing it: from which – says Gadamer – we should know how to escape («Hier fragt es sich genauso, wie man aus dem Bannkreis seiner eigenen Vormeinungen überhaupt herausfinden soll»); or perhaps – Paul Ricoeur would later argue, verbatim evoking Heidegger, the Last Shaman – into which it is necessary to know how to penetrate correctly (“Das Entscheidende ist nicht, aus dem Zirkel heraus-, sondern in ihn nach der rechten Weise hineinzukommen”).
Only under these conditions – continues Gadamer – does the almost mystical encounter between the interpreter and the text/sign succeed in achieving the sought-after Horizontverschmelzung, the fusion of the two respective horizons. A little (but is it just my illusion?) like the longed-for and heart-rending cossirar of the Troubadours, who would like to unite their own with the Beloved’s sky, in an embrace that binds both together with all their constellations of meaning: the longed-for con/sideratio, precisely.