What would happen if structures, forms, and other stand-alone entities thought to comprise our intellectual toolkit – words, meanings, signs – were jettisoned? How would a work written in a purportedly dead language, like The Iliad, or penned in a foreign tongue be approached if deemed legible without structures such as meaning-bearing signs or grammatical rules? A New Philosophy of Interpretation charts a novel course in response to these questions, coining an original concept of discourse (or talk!), that Joshua Kates presents as more fundamental than language. In Kates’ conception of discourse, writing and speech take shape entirely as events, situated within histories, contexts, and traditions themselves always in the making.