Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel:
The Irresolvability of the Gadamer-Habermas Debate
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Conclusion
The radical gap inherent to this debate is a double-inscribed failure. The impossibility of a final convergence is show from the Gadamerian perspective, while a universal resolution is strictly prohibited from the Habermasian point of view. Nevertheless, this outcome hardly satisfies and we are still tempted to resolve this debate in some meaningful way. Meaning after all is a Lacanian 'forced choice' and the lack of sexual relation cannot but call for its signification to make up for this traumatic fact. We just sketched out how Ricoeur attempts to cover over this fact with sophisticated arguments supporting points of convergence between the debaters. But we saw how each of these points bias one side of the debate and thus disregards the core logic of the other side. It is simply not the case that the one misunderstands the other so that with proper adjustments the two sides can be pulled together. A second option of siding with Habermas over Gadamer fares no better as this amounts to conceiving the debate united at some 'higher' meta-level. Indeed a convergence theory is ultimately a masculine resolution. This leaves the pro-Gadamer option. On one level this is no better than declaring Habermas the winner of the debate. Commentaries choosing sides usually point out that their favorite understands the other side better than the reverse. Our counter-point is that such understanding is often at the expense of one of the two antonymic propositions of the other side. As per the analysis above, the thesis and antithesis of the other must simultaneously be considered to truly understand what their antonymic relation inscribes. On another level, the pro-Gadamer option is superior to the other two possible alternatives. Commentators like How (1995) become useful to us insofar as they suspect the logical priority of feminine space and thus make a case for Gadamer. This paper presents the debate with this priority in mind and indeed often explicitly demonstrates this very point.
A few final points of clarification are nevertheless in order, for the priority of feminine space is actually phantasmatic. Logically speaking it indeed has priority over masculine space.26 But since the antonymic formulae use non-Aristotelian logic expressing spatial relations, in no way can we consider the mathematical and the dynamical as two species of the same genus. For ultimately we are dealing with the topological, not the logical. So where critics may see Gadamer and Habermas differing on the displacement of a space they are said to hold in common, we must instead view this as deceptive and consider how their unique antinomies each articulate a unique spatial relation.27 It should also be stressed that while this paper proceeds somewhat diachronically by implying the dynamical develops from the mathematical, this is only done in order to present the debate in a more systematic fashion. So while the antinomy of Gadamer seems to temporally precede that of Habermas, their distinct separation in time is as much a mirage as their separateness in space. Yet we have been implying there is a gap between their two sides, a gap that must be preserved since it is productive to – even constitutive of – the very debate itself. To finally conceive how this gap acts as the very causal force impelling each side toward its impossible and prohibited abridgment, we could consider the mathematical and the dynamical as occupying the two sides of the paradoxical figure of the möbius strip.28 With this topological model in mind, we do in fact move 'Back to Bedrock' through tracing the contours of the debate (as the subtitle of How's work suggests) but the foundation encountered is perhaps not as solid as expected. For by moving from one side to the other along the mӧbius strip, we enter a radically different space where the two sides do relate but only because of a 'twist' to its one-dimensional surface, a twist which effectively curves space itself. Locatable nowhere, this twist is doubly-inscribed as the gap between Gadamer's feminine-mathematical and Habermas' masculine-dynamical space and the gap which 'clears the space' for their debate to actually take place. It is this twist of space which aligns itself with the thought that there is no such thing as a resolution to the Gadamer-Habermas Debate.
Extension of topological thought beyond this debate as an innovative methodological approach to textual engagement would need to justify its operating assumption that any text necessarily contends with the fact that there is no such thing as a sexual relation. Demonstrating how each text articulates this failure through the predominate use of either feminine or masculine logic could compellingly trace the explanatory cause of its enunciated content back to its topologically-constituted sexuated position of enunciation. Psychoanalytically speaking, such a methodology would need to accord with Žižek's late-Lacanian teachings of how the 'impossible' experience of thinking both sets of sexuated formulae nevertheless does happen and explore its impact on the textual level. If each set articulates a distinct space, their impossible overlap – a negative intersection to be sure – involves a little piece of the real, the Lacanian objet a. Putting this into operation as part of a non-hermeneutical phenomenological approach would involve thinking the two sexuated spaces of a text simultaneously in a way which resists reducing one to the other. A methodology rooted in the sexuated formulae would succeed only where it effectively destroys any trace of ever having been used, thereby clearing the space for the arrival of textual truth qua embodied textual jouissance. Such a methodology must therefore also accord with Hegelian speculative thought. Phenomenologically speaking, the lesson would be how the reader must not overlook his own subjective position as he engages with texts, being fully prepared to wager the imaginary (meaningful) content of his subjectivity to effect a radical break with the past. Perhaps it could be said that the subject – more feminine than masculine – is the impossible gap between the two sexuated positions, one of which is necessarily assumed in order to articulate the failure of a traumatic encounter with il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel. Hermeneutically speaking, the subject emerges as pure difference in relation to his being and is subsequently faced with the forced choice of meaning constituted as the metonymical pursuit of that being in the textual field of the Other. Here we see that if our being is impossible to attain, it is precisely for this reason we must prohibit its attainment. Full acknowledgment of this puts an end to our self-indulgence with the infinite meanings of the text.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
