Kristeva's Hermeneutics and Intertextuality

The present article gives a brief overview of "intertextuality” in order to show the consequences of this concept on reading, understanding, and interpreting of texts. Drawing the picture of hermeneutics in the mirror of intertextuality requires the discussion of the concept of text. For Kristeva, any text is the absorption and transformation of other texts; hence, 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".