The Creative Temporality of Dialogue: Surprise, Event, and Hermeneutic Transformation

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Published: Dec 30, 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.32334/oqnfp.2024n55a1016
Keywords:
Surprise, Dialogue, Temporality, Event, Hermeneutics

Main Article Content

René Armand Dentz
Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais (PUC-Minas)

Abstract

This article investigates the temporal structure of surprise within face-to-face dialogue, proposing that such surprise discloses a specific form of creative temporality, distinct from linear chronological time. Drawing on Claude Romano’s hermeneutics of the event, Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time, and the dialogical conceptions of Martin Buber and Hans-Georg Gadamer, the argument is made that surprise constitutes an irruption of meaning that unsettles expectations and opens new horizons of mutual understanding between interlocutors. The analysis further integrates Giorgio Agamben’s messianic reading of kairós and Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of metaphor and conversion, which together help to frame surprise as both a poetic and ethical force. It is concluded that the moment of surprise is the core of a temporal structure of encounter in which language, listening, and reciprocal transformation are interwoven.

Article Details

Issue
Vol. 32 No. 55 (2024): Nietzsche and perspectivism dossier
Section
Other Themes
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Author Biography

René Armand Dentz, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais (PUC-Minas)

Adjunct Professor II in the Department of Philosophy at PUC-Minas, where he teaches Anthropology and Ethics and Reason and Modernity. PUC/FIP 2025 researcher, he is developing the project Contemporary theological foundations of forgiveness: dialogues based on Paul Ricoeur and René Girard. He is also Full Professor at FUPAC-Mariana (Law), Professor at IDHMH Governador Valadares (Theology), and lecturer in the Postgraduate Program in Spiritual Care and Chaplaincy in Health Units at the São Camilo University Center/SP. He has been working as a clinical psychoanalyst since 2012. He has four postdoctoral degrees: in Theology (Université de Fribourg Switzerland, Universidade Católica Portuguesa Braga, PUC-Rio, all in 2019) and in Education (University of Warsaw Poland, 2018). He holds a PhD in Theology from FAJE (2017, CAPES 6), with the thesis Freedom and forgiveness based on the thinking of Paul Ricoeur. He is a researcher and author with a consolidated output at the interfaces between Philosophy, Theology, and Psychoanalysis. His work covers Fundamental Moral Theology, Moral Theology of the Person, Sexual and Family Moral Theology, with special emphasis on the relationships between freedom, forgiveness, and memory. He is also dedicated to the implications of Artificial Intelligence and technology for subjectivity, mental health, and the experience of the sacred. His thinking brings together hermeneutics (Paul Ricoeur), psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan), deconstruction (Jacques Derrida and Mark C. Taylor), and theological phenomenology (Jean-Luc Marion, Emmanuel Lévinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Luc Nancy), exploring the links between ethics, otherness, and spirituality. Author of several books, among the most recent: Reasons for Forgiveness (Ideias Letras, 2023), Reasons for Forgiveness (2023), Contemporary Pains (2024), and Forgiveness: Dialogues between Philosophy and Theology (Paulinas, 2024), finalist for the 2025 Jabuti Academic Award, also published in Spanish by Paulinas Colombia (2025).

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