By what means do we arrive to make claims and to what extent are the claims we make solidified by our sense of commitment to a community? Among the fascinating aspects of language is its capacity to cultivate communities of speakers who share a notion of reality on the basis of interaction. The failure to reach an agreement that could serve as the basis for a sense of belonging to such a community may even be experienced as an ‘intellectual tragedy’ (see Cavell, 1979). But who are ‘we’ in such contexts, and who is ‘the Other’? On whose authority do we make claims, and on whose authority do we deny the claims of others? This presentation considers the issue of making claims in relation to the ethics of interpretation. In so doing, it asks what is at stake in making claims. For instance, if we want to create the necessary conditions of possibility for an ethical encounter with the other, do we then have to call our own claims into question? And what counts as claims? Are merely verbal expressions claims or do we make claims also in embodied interaction?
Invited keynote.