Thinking With One’s Feet:
Lacanian Theories of Textual Engagement
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Conclusion
We have shown how already with the Symbolic Lacan of the 1950s, the hermeneutical strategy of uncovering deep meaning – a tradition the young Imaginary Lacan of the 1930s once played a part – is exposed as deficient for not adequately addressing the very framework with which the subject approaches a text. But it was not until the Real Lacan of the 1970s returns to phenomenology that the concern with the signification of texts is thoroughly suspended through its ‘impossible’ identity with a paradoxical point which re-frames the hermeneutical framework.
By working through the difficult topology embedded in the final seminars, Lacan offers us the opportunity to experience how the meaning of a text is not some buried treasure given in advance waiting to be unearthed in our pursuit of the ethical foundations of the Other, but rather is constituted through a series of (failed) interpretations. When we experience how these interpretations are part of the text itself, of how ‘through our interpretations, the Text itself is in a way “in search of itself”... [ how] by means of our reading of the Text, the Text itself reads and (re)writes itself,’ then we have reached a proper Lacanian textual reading. (Žižek 2002: 174n37) This reading quite simply confronts a text with its own hidden presuppositions, thus revealing its disavowed truth. (Žižek 2006: ix) The unsettling truth for us today is that it is the very hermeneutical pursuit of the ethical Thing of the text which masks how a radically free and truthful reading of the text is indeed possible. Today, we can no longer play the perverse game of cat and mouse with a supposed noumenal truth of a text. It is here that Lacan becomes the most consequential of Kantians, bringing Kant’s practical philosophy to its truth with his implication that one cannot legitimately scapegoat the text for one’s reading of it.
If what constitutes our hermeneutical horizon when we engage with a text can be thought of as a set of signifying elements, because of the ex-sistence of the absent ‘no presupposition,’ this horizon is positioned at the same level at its elements so the proper interpretive gesture is to find that one paradoxical element in the text that is the absence of this element itself. This is the same as saying our hermeneutical framework must be again en-framed by one of the very elements it itself discloses. Otherwise, there is no way to account for why the framework does not collapse in on itself. The absent ‘no presupposition’ performs this crucial function of keeping such minimal distances.
Another name for this absence is the Lacanian subject, the pure thought of which could be placed into speculative identity with, of course, one’s feet. This subject continues to terrorize the hermeneutical approach, amounting to ‘a bone caught in its throat’ as Žižek might say.19 But at the very same time and precisely as such, this subject constitutes the very space and the very possibility of textual interpretation.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
