LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 1
PETITIONS TO MEANING
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explained by the structures of the human psyche, such interpretation attempts to divine the creative process so that the original experience represented by the text rises again as an event for the interpreter. However, these readings come at a cost. They conveniently overlook how Schleiermacher, in both his early and late work, insisted on the equality between the two moments of the understanding which he took pains to set into dialectical relation. This was a development of that reciprocal relation Ast first articulated between the particular and the universal: not only does the part derive its meaning from the whole (as Flacius discovered), but the meaning of the whole must be sought through the level of the part. In a word, Schleiermacher’s understanding is his own version of this seemingly endless, inescapable circle – the famous hermeneutical circle – whose obscure turn is lost precisely when reduced to only one of its moments. In the latter half of the 20th century Lacan will bring this obscurity to greater light. But only after this circle has become as all-encompassing as possible.
The scope of hermeneutics certainly takes on greater universality when Humboldt and Droysen rearticulate Schleiermacher’s double-faceted notion of understanding as the very foundation for understanding the historical world. Again, a debt is owed to Kant whose notions riddle the texts of these Romantics. Through discussions of the sensible intuitions of time and space, of manifolds and of the faculty of imagination, they manage to double the hermeneutical circle outside itself: while the historian certainly plays his part, hermeneutically grasping the meaning of a particular event in a whole synthesized through the power of his imagination, he only does so within the overall historical trajectory of the noumenal Idea, a Necessity said to lurk behind all contingently linked events. This may give the impression that these men no longer feel there is such a thing as objective history, especially given Droysen’s belief that all origins are relative. But this would be going too far, for they more simply recognize its inaccessibility. Yet this epistemological failure is not as disastrous as it would have been in previous centuries. For Romantic hermeneuts the investigation of historical phenomena cannot but bear the interpreter’s subjective imprint, conditioned as he himself is by the forces and events of the historical past. Thus in a curious twist what is originally thought to be the object of investigation gives way to the true object, namely, these latter forces and events that shape the historian’s investigative practice. Recognizing this lends to an otherwise subjectively-appropriated historical understanding an objectivity entirely unimaginable to thinkers prior to the Kantian turn. What further suggests itself is how it is no historical accident that interpretive knowledge was discovered to move in an endless circle only after Kant theorized the conditions of the possible experience of objects. For it was precisely that theorization which first made it possible to articulate the hermeneutical circle as the objective condition of understanding itself.
For its part, what Romanticism adds to the German Idealist break with the Enlightenment is a new notion of language. In the hermeneutics of Chladenius,
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