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LACAN AND MEANING

SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS

CHAPTER 1

PETITIONS TO MEANING

— page 23 —

meaning. Accordingly, Gadamer’s account of the hermeneutical circle is more justifiably critiqued as involving a vicious turn, having been effectively confined to a field of pre-given meanings. It is therefore not surprising that he overwhelmingly speaks of Dasein in historical terms, as an interpretive consciousness both affected and effected by history.

Perhaps if Gadamer had more fully conceived the anticipatory gesture of understanding as future-oriented, he would have been relieved of his often repeated worry that Truth and Method had come ‘too late’ and was thus superfluous in its theoretical attempts. He might have then foreseen how his work would unsettle the wider interpretive community previously unexposed to its methodology. Or more precisely, its lack of methodology. For the title was intended to be ironic and might read instead ‘Truth, not Method’ to better accord with its hermeneutical phenomenological concern for truth conveyed in modes of experience unverifiable through methodological procedures. In a community with a centuries-old tradition of developing hermeneutical techniques, this simply would not do. Understandably then, the 1960s–70s would witness a series of debates regarding matters of fundamental importance to interpretive theory – a fact which confirms that far from arriving too late, Truth and Method appears to have arrived just in time.

1.3 Hermeneutics (Redux)

Now, by what right do I return to a pre-Heideggerian naïveté and allow it?

—E. D. Hirsch Jr.

After 1960 it became increasingly difficult to carry on as if the Heideggerian turn had not been made. Of course, the individual practitioner could continue using traditional hermeneutical techniques blissfully unaware of the alternative. But for the theorist, the existence of hermeneutical phenomenology was now an undeniable fact. Moreover, it appeared unavoidable: lying at the presuppositional level of traditional techniques, it seemed to necessarily factor into the future progress of interpretive theory itself. Not all were entirely convinced, however, and the interpretive community would accordingly divide into two groups. One group came to unabashedly embrace hermeneutical phenomenology. They eagerly sought to expand its ontological approach into additional fields, much like what Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, Jean-Paul Sartre and Lacan had already done in France years earlier. The other group sought instead to champion the tradition’s epistemological foundations as established in the 19th century. Yet not exclusively, for they would later come to make important concessions to Heideggerian thought. An examination of this latter group proves the most rewarding, especially in its earliest days when such concessions were largely absent. In the end, the issues they highlight ultimately argue against their wholesale efforts to turn back the clock prior to Heidegger.

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