Gadamer's Hermeneutics and Kristeva's Intertextuality

After giving a brief overview of the Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and term "Itertextuality" used by Kristeva, and showing consequences of these concepts on reading, understanding and interpreting of texts, the aim of this article is to offer an comparative account of the two approaches. For drawing the picture of hermeneutics in the mirror of intertextuality, we should first of all, discuss the concept of text. For Kristeva, any text is the absorption and transformation of other texts and so she calls it a production. In this way, the act of reading, plunges us into a network of textual relations and to interpret a text, to discover its meaning, or meanings, is to trace those relations. So in Kristeva's hermeneutics assertions of objectivity, scientific rigors, methodological stability and other highly rationalistic-sounding terms are replaced by an emphasis on uncertainty, indeterminacy and some other ideas like the "death of author".