This text discusses the relationship between truth and interpretation in modern hermeneutical projects. The first aim is to analyze the hermeneutic and aesthetic theories of the Enlightenment by comparing the concepts of hermeneutic truth and aesthetic truth. Both support a type of rationality in interpretation that has its sources in Leibnizian perspectivism and in the semiotic consequences of the ideas of resemblance and pre-established harmony. The second purpose of the text is to outline the history of discoveries concerning the unconscious, from the Enlightenment, through Romanticism, to the projects of the hermeneutics of suspicion in the 19th century (Nietzsche, Freud, Marx). Unlike Foucault, I argue that the idea of resemblance is not abandoned after the 16th century, but is found at the heart of the hermeneutic and aesthetic projects of the Enlightenment of the following centuries, especially in the way the question of the author's intention is discussed. The third purpose of the text is to nuance Foucault's thesis that the hermeneutics of suspicion rejects the idea of an absolute beginning of interpretation. The conjunction of interpretation and power makes use of an absolute beginning because of the utopian claim to scientificity that the interpretative techniques of Freud, Marx and partially Nietzsche have. Based on Sloterdijk's observations, I show that this claim to scientificity (which was intended to be anti-mythological and demystifying) remains, in fact, unfulfilled, with new mythologies emerging in its place. Starting from here, the final aim of the text is to question Foucault's thesis according to which, with Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, hermeneutics separates from semiotics, the infinite circularity of interpretations representing the weapon to fight against the prejudice of the absolute existence of signs. Although correct in principle, Foucault's thesis must be amended, since the new type of interpretation fights against semiotics by actually reintroducing the fixed world of signs into interpretation, as the basis or infrastructure, i.e. a layer of invented meaning used as the basis of reductionist explanations. Thus, the claimed scientificity of interpretation turns not only into mythology (Sloterdijk's thesis), but even into ideology.
