LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 1
PETITIONS TO MEANING
— page 19 —
other words, there is no need for exegetical technique to release meanings confined to the contents of particular judgments. For such meanings are secondary to the primordial meaning enveloping the very activity of textual interpretation. With the nature of interpretation now defined on hermeneutical grounds, the interpretive approach suddenly becomes the thing itself. This is why the fundamental question raised on the opening page of Being and Time does not simply concern being. Significantly, this question concerns the meaning of being.
However, since the term hermeneutics connotes proceeding along methodological lines, it presupposes a gap between the subject and the thing – a problem the ontologization of the hermeneutical circle was intended to overcome. It is therefore not surprising that Heidegger refrains from using this term for the remainder of his career, with the single exception of his 1954 dialogue with a Japanese. There it comes to light how presentations of the hermeneutical circle turn it into an object of use and so must be avoided. In order to dissolve the last remnant of abstract subjectivity, Heidegger now speaks of authentic dialogue to allow for a showing of the thing to take place. Evidently, circular turns still occur between the message and the message-bearer of the thing in dialogue – we are just not to speak of them. More precisely, we cannot speak of them, since the presence of the thing is only graspable during its sway of usage. This is readily confirmed by the experience of the well-intentioned reader who hears what a difficult text like Being and Time has to say while actively engaged with it, but is often at a loss as to what was just read once it is set aside.
While Heidegger begins covering over the religious roots of hermeneutical phenomenology soon after Being and Time, these roots are re-exposed when Protestant theologians like Bultmann and Ebeling employ the new interpretive approach on Scripture. The practical advantage to examining work with an exclusive textual focus is that it helps bring elements into view which might otherwise languish in the realm of high theory. But more importantly, their work stands as a superb testament to the break hermeneutical phenomenology makes with past approaches which ‘apply’ abstract interpretive frameworks ‘onto’ textual objects. For this new approach actually ‘instantiates’ itself through the text in question, thoroughly entangling textual elements with the understanding, and thus the being, of the interpreter. This is certainly the case with these theologians, whose faith in the redeeming message of Scripture is inseparable from their reading of it. The suspicion that interpreters often stumble over themselves while interpreting is here amply confirmed and, moreover, justified as the proper way to proceed.
Consider, for instance, how Bultmann fleshes out the temporality of understanding as the cumulative wisdom of Protestant theology. From his standpoint, the entire Reformation itself was a global refusal to allow the fore-structures of understanding to be guided by anything other than the light cast by
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