LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 1
PETITIONS TO MEANING
— page 13 —
as long as the Church remained unchallenged, the impetus to develop rules for textual exegesis was virtually nonexistent. For centuries the meaning of Scripture was intuitively assessed on four levels: the literal, the allegorical, the tropological, and the eschatological. But for Protestant Reformers like Flacius, thinking in terms of these four levels did not involve exegetical work (which, etymologically speaking, aims to ‘bring out’ the meaning of the text) but rather simply produced eisegesis (whereby meaning is ‘read into’ the text). In 1567 Flacius publishes his Clavis Scripturae Sacrae, effectively a system of rules abstracted from the traditional exegetical practices the Counter-Reformation would unwaveringly reaffirm. Central to the Clavis are two groundbreaking principals to be understood from a point of view which takes Scripture as both perspicuous and self-sufficient. The first asserts the basic intelligibility and non-contradictory nature of Scripture. The second forcefully re-asserts the thinking of the Reformers en masse regarding the internal coherence and continuity of Scripture. With these principles Flacius argued that an ambiguous passage was not an invitation to impose an external interpretation to render it intelligible. Rather, it was to be read in light of the whole within which it is found. Moreover, for the first time there was formal acknowledgment that textual ambiguities exist. Granted at this time the failure to comprehend was not deemed to be due to a resisting textual object, but rather as lying with the interpreter in the form of ignorance of the proper rules of exegesis. Yet this is also a positive first, for it subtly brings a subjective element into the discussion of interpretive technique, if only in a negative sense as a deficiency to be overcome.
The importance of this 16th century challenge to the authoritative readings of Scripture by the Church should not be underestimated. Indeed with it the first great crisis of meaning arrives: biblical exegesis, once unified under the discourse of a single master, fragments into a multiplicity of techniques increasingly governed by guidelines and provisional rules. Within a few centuries a sizable and de-centered body of Scriptural signification accumulates. Yet it is important to note that the intentions of theologians to universalize textual theory from the particularities of exegetical practice actually only extended to biblical texts. Likewise, the universal aspirations which concurrently developed on a lesser scale amongst jurists and philologists remained inside their respective hermeneutical spheres. A case in point concerns the Enlightenment pedagogue Chladenius. His dogmatic faith in the universal rules of reason drove him to exclude Scripture as well as any text not deemed to be a reasonable discourse or writing, as the very title of his 1742 work suggests. The philologist Ast can also be singled out for the select attention he bestows on the texts of antiquity as most expressive of the original unity of Geist. In general, these failures to seize on a truly universal textual strategy prior to the 19th century do not illustrate the empty intentions of theorists so much as their inability to grasp universality as a regulative ideal. For such an ideal is operative only at the exclusion of its full realization. It will be up to the Protestant theologian and preacher
« prev next »full text of Lacan and Meaning
FREE Lacanian-themed puzzles
