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SEXUATED TOPOLOGY AND THE
SUSPENSION OF MEANING

A NON-HERMENEUTICAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL
APPROACH TO TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

WILLIAM J. URBAN

INTRODUCTION

The end of my labours is come. All that I have written appears to me as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.1

I mean. These two words are often heard today at the beginning of an interlocutor's speech, so frequently in fact that most people pay them no mind. This phenomenon, however, is quite curious. Whether occurring on the AM radio talk show, in the formal and informal debates of higher academia or anywhere else a dialogue of some import is undertaken, these words usually do not seamlessly flow into those which follow. It is much more likely the case that a brief intervening pause will ensue before a chain of words is taken up anew. In verbatim transcripts such a pause would be written with the elliptic '...' to indicate that perhaps a false start has occurred or else as registering the interlocutor's own acknowledgment that his turn to speak has arrived, in which case these two words might be said to function as filler or as a stalling tactic effectively equivalent to the 'um' and the 'ah.' The reading offered here corresponds to how an attentive onlooker might assess the situation. From his perspective the interlocutor would look momentarily hung up, almost as if whatever is to be said somehow seems to pend for the speaking subject who, for his part, is vaguely aware that more time will be needed for a full articulation. Yet at the same time these opening words mark the common experience that whatever is to be said has somehow already happened but suddenly zoomed ahead, placing the subject into the equally disadvantageous position of having to play catch-up. Given this wavering between a not yet and a too late, the question immediately arises: what is the essential nature of this entity – commonly called 'meaning' – which seems to simultaneously place the subject both ahead and behind it?

Phrasing the question this way already presupposes that meaning has the status of an object with which the subject may square off. Undeniably scholars long ago had unwavering faith that a truthful meaning was embedded within the pages of Scripture and/or the manuscripts of the ancients. But far from being strictly a thing of the past, this in many ways continues to be the most natural way of schematizing the relation the subject strikes with the text. For although adjustments are needed to compensate for the state of contemporary scholarship in the current ideological climate which eschews notions such as truth and essence, it is nevertheless the case that today's scholar equally conceives his task as involving the employment of appropriate interpretive tools to release textual meaning that is not initially forthcoming. There is, however, a fundamentally different approach that has been pursued by certain scholars of the humanities for the last century. For them meaning is not taken to be an object so much as a substance or medium within which the subject is immersed when engaging with texts and other objects. In stark contrast to the older approach which operates as if a gap exists between the subject and meaning, here the subject is deemed to be always already a meaningful subject. Yet this does not imply that the objective quality of meaning is thereby lost since the claim made by these scholars is that an even greater objectivity is achieved by directing attention to meaning qua medium. Indeed these two fundamentally different conceptions of meaning are both to be commended for rejecting the commonplace idea that meaning is entirely relative and cannot be understood as objective in any sense.

Given these two fundamental conceptualizations of meaning before us today, which is closer to the truth? At first glance the more traditional conception certainly appears rather naïve, overlooking how the very pursuit of meaning qua object is itself a meaningful project for the subject. Yet the problem with the relatively newer conception is that it downplays the crucial factor of subjectivity in questions of meaning, precisely the factor involuntarily captured whenever meaning shifts from a noun to a verb to which the subject's I is closely (yet not identically) aligned: I mean. Of course answering in this fashion is only to critique the one by the other. But this does serve as a reminder that when it comes to fundamental questions, the very field within which they occur appears complete. This is true in the present case where meaning clearly turns in upon itself. Initially functioning as the subject of a question, it somehow eventually ends up constituting the very field in which this question is entertained. Ultimately the very option before us today is nothing if not a meaningful option. Accepting this fact places one in the growing company of scholars favoring the newer conception and from this perspective a vote cast in the older direction is grossly negligent, overlooking how the newer conception enjoys logical precedence despite having arrived much later on the historical scene.

There are consequences to our increasing acknowledgment of this precedence. Generally speaking, it is largely because meaning is now conceivable as an a priori substance within which the subject always already dwells that today we are everywhere swamped with meaning, overburdened with it, weighed down with it. Where once scholarship in the humanities aimed for singular points of truth without losing sight of the universal, it has become increasingly verboten to even raise such questions let alone strive for them. It seems that only a further dissemination of meaning will now do, a condition easily met by simply declaring that a new context has been discovered for such and such a textual object and then proceeding to interpret accordingly. The overall result has been a proliferation of interpretive scholarship from almost every conceivable angle. But more is not necessarily better and unfortunately much of the scholarship pursued along these lines has often amounted to little more than self-indulgent displays of how I mean.

If it is agreed that the newly revealed a priori dimension to meaning makes it impossible to revert to an earlier time when meaning could be treated simply as an external object and further that this has undesirably led to today's tendency to celebrate the overproduction of meaning, how is one to proceed? Is it the case that treating meaning qua object and meaning qua medium forms our ultimate horizon? It is the contention of the present study that there is a 'beyond' to this horizon and that historically the first explorations of this beyond-of-meaning roughly dates from the origin of the newer conception of meaning. It is further contended that this exploration culminates in the thought of Jacques Lacan whose specific project in the early 1970s to delimit a radical possibility is his most consequential. This possibility does not concern a hitherto unknown third conceptualization of meaning. Nor does it require us to necessarily disagree that these two conceptualizations of meaning completely exhaust the field of meaningful possibilities. Rather, what Lacan's thought makes possible is the suspension of the very field of meaning itself. Motivated by the belief that breaking free of meaning is a truthful event for the subject, the following work offers a demonstration of how this is theoretically accomplished.

A general description of the two parts which compose this work is as follows. More detailed introductions with breakdowns of chapters and sections will be found at the beginning of each part.

Part I provides the context for the present study and serves in three main capacities. Firstly, it functions as a literature review of historically significant thought on meaning. As meaning is not an established scholarly field, the approach has been to select important texts by leading scholars of both the past and present which at least tangentially touch upon the subject. So while many of these texts may be considered primary ones in their respective fields, they are here effectively treated as secondary texts on meaning. They have been organized into the five established scholarly fields of hermeneutics, phenomenology, (post)structuralism, aesthetic theory and psychoanalysis, each of which forms a chapter. While some of the texts in these fields quite directly deal with meaning and prove to easily yield up what may be called their 'theory of meaning,' others require a deeper excavation process. In a few cases analogies with theories of meaning already articulated must be made to draw their examinations to a conclusion. However, with every text reviewed the endeavor is made to extract out its theory of meaning without losing sight of its own overall project which, to reiterate, often aims in directions other than those with an expressed concern for meaning. But it should equally be stressed how both the scholarly fields and the individual scholarship which compose them are assessed as per the particular texts actually under review. This is not only to make the scope of the discussion more manageable but also to immediately put into practice the type of close textual reading the present study champions. Secondly, the review of historical scholarship provides a rationale for Part II where a psychoanalytic approach is developed to demonstrate the suspension of the hermeneutical circle of meaning. For one of the main theses of the review is that an increasingly fatal struggle with meaning has been implicitly undertaken by these five scholarly fields as a whole as they have advanced through history. Yet they have failed to adequately address the crucial dimension at stake. The exception here is Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis which has clearly delimited a nonsensical element that effectively acts as the cause of meaning. But even in this field there has been little attempt to leverage such insight for the expressed purpose of systematically theorizing how the subject's hermeneutical pursuit of meaning is suspended whenever this subversive element is encountered. By developing an approach with such an aim in mind this deficit is thereby corrected. In this sense the existence of such an approach can be viewed as a response to and outcome of the historical struggle with meaning. In conjunction with this aim the review is additionally designed to position the subject to best appreciate the proposed re-conception of textual meaning. Lastly, important terminology, conceptualizations and theoretical schemas are introduced as they arise during the examination of the texts under review. Their initial discussion within this limited context nevertheless provides an adequate foundation for understanding the subsequent part of this study which submits these elements to a more intensive analysis and development.

Part II forms the more original part of the present study. As a psychoanalyst Lacan is not primarily concerned with meaning (and even less so with textual analysis) but the modest number of incidental statements he does make throughout the three periods of his career in no way prevents one from picking up this fallen fruit and articulating three corresponding Lacanian theories of meaning. This articulation is made in the last section of Part I. What is additionally developed in Part II is a highly structured model that attempts to capture an approach to meaning that is faithful to the subversive efforts of Lacan's third and final period. Imagine a square with two sides where one side harbors the hermeneutical circle of meaning while the other its potential suspension point. Just such a square is rigorously constructed over the course of two chapters from three major building blocks: Lacan's four formulae of sexuation, his theory of the four discourses and his work in topology. These three components of late-Lacan's work are uniquely combined and taken in directions which deviate from the way they were originally presented and from the way they are usually exploited today. Fittingly, these chapters primarily focus on Lacan's texts from the early 1970s where he endeavors to inscribe the psychoanalytic notion of sexual difference into logical notation. Particularly relevant are those texts where this notion is articulated in unexpected ways, as in the case of L'étourdit where this is done via the manipulation of topological figures. Also pertinent to this undertaking is Aristotle's Organon, which is examined in some detail as Lacan originally derived his formulae of sexuation by supplementing the Aristotelian logical system with modern logic. As well, the recent commentaries by Guy Le Gaufey and Christian Fierens are critical to this undertaking and are at times taken up quite closely.

While it is true that the development of a non-hermeneutical phenomenological approach in Part II is very much positioned as a response to and outcome of the historical struggle with meaning, it should also be appreciated how it nevertheless 'posits is own presuppositions' in the sense of having dictated to a large extent the selection of those scholarly fields actually reviewed in Part I. Concisely said, while it may be the case that Part I begets Part II, it must equally be appreciated how the latter embodies the entire trajectory which led up to it. Despite how this gives the appearance that the present work is a selfenclosed field entirely removed from any and all factors of subjectivity, this is simply not the case. Even here the subject counts. However, this is not to be understood merely in terms of textual style or any other discernible marks found in the text bearing authorial voice. For an author maintains such imaginary presence in the mind of the reader whether he indulges in or refrains from, say, the use of the first-person narrative; indeed this is true with even the most abstract of mathematical texts. Rather, it must be conceived how the subject factors into the text at the very point which eludes it. In other words, the very fact that the textual field appears to be self-enclosed is what allows the author to be held ultimately responsible for the success or failure of his work. What the present work endeavors to articulate is that a possibility like this arises only because a point exists such that when occupied by the subject, it effectively operates as the suspension of the very field assumed to be self-enclosed.

As the majority of texts employed in the present work were written in a language other than English (mostly German and French), a general note on the use of translations is warranted. In some cases only a single translation was found to be in existence. This is especially the case with earlier texts from the hermeneutical tradition. But where two or more translations were found, the 'official' translation is preferred over 'unofficial' ones. This particularly concerns the texts of Lacan. In most cases official translations exist for those texts of his actually examined, but significantly one does not for L'étourdit which is extensively taken up in Part II. In this instance citations come from either of the two unofficial translations found, although the liberty has been taken in a few cases to modify a citation made from one by means of the other in order to achieve greater clarity (this is duly noted in the text). Where two or more official translations exist, a well-established translation may be preferred over newer ones as the latter often modify key terminology and thus make it difficult to square their translations with pre-existing secondary literature (e.g., Kant). But this consideration may be set aside for the sake of clarity (e.g., Heidegger). In any case, the translations used for each text are detailed in the Bibliography as well as in the Notes.

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