LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 2
WITHDRAWALS FROM MEANING
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historical texts, whereby the two extremes are placed into dialogue within the linguistic boundaries of the text itself.
According to White, it is precisely these boundaries which account for the text’s symbolic and mimetic effects. So like Saussure, he treats language essentially as form and not substance. But in post-structuralist fashion, this form is set into motion. White’s text is an internally self-propelling force, a system of signs or codes which shift at the formal level of its language. His interpretive effort thus abandons direct concern for the text qua meaningful product, to instead rigorously follow its internal processes of code shifting which produce that meaning. Such analysis is what makes the text-context problem resolvable. In a certain way, textual form has its own content. The context is already in the text, in the specific modalities of code shifting. In other words, the context does not shed hermeneutical light on the text. Rather, the context itself is illuminated in its detailed operations by the structural moves made in the text at the level of its form. Quite unimaginable for Gadamer, what makes the classic text so intriguing is that it actively draws attention to, and makes as its own subject matter, its own processes of meaning production.
At the same time, the dynamic process of overt and covert code shifting calls up and establishes a specific subjectivity in the reader. Consistent with post-structuralism, White argues that the materialization of this subject is precisely just that: not a Subject which maintains its identity from text to text, but one thoroughly produced in, by and through the structures of the text in question. In the end, the meaningful experience of the text consists in the imaginary relation this structural subject strikes with the text’s representation of the world. The development of Lacan’s thoughts on the subject’s relation to the structure of meaning is discussed throughout the final chapters. But first aesthetic theory is examined for the manner in which it withdraws from meaning.
2.3 Aesthetic Theory
The image suspends the course of the world and of meaning – of meaning as a course or current of sense (meaning in discourse, meaning that is current and valid): but it affirms all the more a sense (therefore an “insensible”) that is selfsame with what it gives to be sensed (that is, itself). In the image, which, however, is without an “inside,” there is a sense that is nonsignifying but not insignificant, a sense that is certain as its force (its form).
—Jean-Luc Nancy
As the preceding section endeavored to show, the structural mechanics of language form a limit to the hermeneutical pursuit of meaning. Aesthetic theory also recognizes that meaning is not all there is. But its own investigation into non-meaningful domains employs a methodological approach abandoned by structuralism. Derived from the Greek aisthanesthai [to perceive], the very term aesthetic suggests how the subject plays a pivotal role. For the theorist interested
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