LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 1
PETITIONS TO MEANING
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tradition has been propelled through the centuries by an unsettling presence dwelling within the very field of meaning itself.
In contrast to Nietzschean perspectivism and its allowance for a multiplicity of hermeneutical circles, Dilthey is thoroughly in line with traditional approaches that confine meaning within monolithic circular turns. In fact, by considering life itself to be the ultimate horizon for thought, he effectively expands the hermeneutical circle to its classical limits. This circle he places at the foundation of his newly conceived human sciences. Once again Kant leaves his mark, as Dilthey’s project notably includes a draft for a Critique of Historical Reason. This draft even comes complete with its own set of historical categories of which meaning is the most basic. As per the Romantics, meaning is what the understanding seeks in an artwork or a text when set into dialectic with larger historical processes. However, Dilthey additionally considers such objects as so many ways the human race communicates, endures its artistic creations and generally objectifies its spirit in social formations. In other words, these objects are public expressions of lived experiences and so embody nothing short of the socio-historical world itself. Their examination thus offers a glimpse at the unity and connectedness of a person, an artwork or a text in its overall life-relationship. Accordingly, Diltheyan understanding turns in an effort to establish a universal law or ordering system which could subsume particular objects to the spiritual meaning of the whole life-nexus. It now appears the path initiated by the Protestant Reformers has been brought to its natural conclusion. For it is difficult to imagine how the hermeneutical circle might be further widened. With the 20th century poised to give birth to new disciplines which will increasingly place this hermeneutical stance into defensive posture, Dilthey may be said to stand at the closure of classical thought on meaning.
1.2 Hermeneutical Phenomenology
[H]ermeneutics, used as an adjunct word to ‘phenomenology,’ does not have its usual meaning, methodology of interpretation, but means the interpretation itself.
—Martin Heidegger
What Heidegger accomplishes in the last century is an order of magnitude greater than what Schleiermacher accomplishes in his own. Indeed if the history of hermeneutics was plotted on a linear graph, with Heidegger the line would take an irreversible turn, or else break outright to begin again in another direction. This break can be precisely dated to the 1927 publication of Being and Time, a revolutionary work which effectively announces the arrival of hermeneutical phenomenology. This new interpretive approach was destined to attract scores of faithful adherents, including the early-Lacan himself. For it forcefully discloses the problem with treating meaning as if external to the subject. From Heidegger’s perspective, the classicals had done just that, only
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