 The issue about the relationship between art and language is not one of linguistic capture but of finding the appropriate words to open the content of aesthetic experience. What is meant by the notion that an artwork addresses us with a meaning? Although an agent of the linguistic turn of the twentieth century, Gadamer’s reflections on language run counter to many semiotic theories. According to Weinsheimer, “the dualism of signifier and signified has no phenomenological basis” for Gadamer “since in speaking we have no awareness of the world as being distinct from the word” (Weinsheimer 1993, 162). Gadamer speaks of the perfection of the word as being the disappearance of any gap between sense and utterance. Poetry would be the “paradigm case” of an artwork with a clear and immediate presentation of meaning. Yet this is seemingly inconsistent with the notion of a work that “stands-in-itself”. If aspects of its meaning are withheld, sense and utterance are once again separated. The word, it would appear, signifies something beyond itself after all. There is, in other words, a tension between Gadamer wanting to hold that the work of art and the world that comes forth within it are indivisible and saying that the world which a work invokes is larger than the work itself. The poetic word, insofar as it is poetic, stands-in-itself; and yet as word it invokes something beyond itself. Gadamer’s speculative account of meaning collapses, it would seem, into a referential account of signs. Speculatively charged words refer to other signs or patterns of meaning beyond themselves. This suggests that words are self-negating signs: when they function as they should, they disappear into what it is referred to. To conclude that words operate as representational signs seems quite contrary to the account of art functioning in the manner of a symbol. Closer inspection suggests that Gadamer’s account of the speculative account of meaning is presentational after all. Let us restate the question.