LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 1
PETITIONS TO MEANING
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Section 1.1 sketches the classical period of hermeneutical thought from its initial appearance during the Reformation to the close of the 19th century. Highlighted are the religious, philosophical and historical roots of the hermeneutical circle of meaning. Section 1.2 focuses on Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology which comes to dominate 20th century hermeneutical theory, especially after Gadamer popularized the approach in 1960. Section 1.3 recounts significant attempts in the 1960s–70s to break the newly ontologized hermeneutical circle by returning to the epistemological framework of the previous century. At stake in the debates which ensued is methodology as such, whether hermeneutics may be classically deployed as an interpretive tool to appropriate textual meaning, or whether its conscious use should altogether be abandoned for the meaning of the being of understanding.
1.1 Hermeneutics
[E]verything that is no longer immediately situated in a world... is estranged from its original meaning and depends on the unlocking and mediating spirit that we, like the Greeks, name after Hermes: the messenger of the gods.
—Hans-Georg Gadamer
Much of the work aiming to re-introduce or further advance hermeneutical theory in the forty-five years since Palmer first introduced hermeneutics to the English-speaking world begins with what now seems an obligatory discussion of the term itself. In their opening pages we learn how the word hermeneutics carries an obvious relation to the wing-footed Hermes as its etymological roots lie with the Greek verb hermēneuein and noun hermēneia, generally translated as ‘to interpret’ and ‘interpretation’ by way of the Latin interpretatio. Although today this etymological connection to Hermes is questioned, the associative link is still valuable as a heuristic device to illustrate the complexities of interpretation. For Hermes’ task was anything but simple. In order to transmit the messages of the gods to the mortals, he had to be fully conversant in both idioms. Never a mere verbatim announcement, each expressed delivery of what the gods had to say effectively involved intertwining levels of explanation and translation in order to render their words intelligible. So while the aim of hermeneutical interpretation suggested here – to bring that which is strange and unfamiliar to meaningful understanding – may appear to be straightforward, exactly how this is accomplished proves much more difficult to grasp. In the following discussions this methodological question is approached not by way of the history of the term itself but rather through what this term has come to designate.
It is with good reason that the term usually evokes the religious sphere in most people’s minds. For it is there that interpretation first reached a level of self-awareness so as to differentiate critical explanation and analysis of texts (exegesis) from the rules, methods and theory governing it (hermeneutics). Yet
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