LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 1
PETITIONS TO MEANING
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sermon. Generally speaking, the verbalized word is an event through which the text becomes proclamation. And hermeneutical phenomenology as ‘word-event theology’ is to facilitate this proclamation by allowing the Scriptural word to open up, mediate and bring something to understanding.
Again, this amounts to stepping into the circle of understanding correctly. In Ebeling’s own formulation, proper understanding is not understanding of language, but understanding through language. Anything short of this would objectify linguistic elements and hinder the word-event; the interpreter would then require guidelines to proceed, as philologists in previous centuries had required. But by treating language qua medium, such hindrances are thoroughly removed. Here nothing could guide the interpreter as he takes soundings of his understanding. Only the echo of his inquiries would be heard returning from its ground. In the end, this confronts the interpreter with having to make his own decisions on just how to proceed. Yet if this configuration opens a radical abyss of subjective freedom similar to that seen with Bultmann, it is just as quickly filled with the same petition to the theological beyond. For Ebeling is quite clear that God’s word serves as the ultimate ground of understanding. This is confirmed by anyone bearing witness to the kerygma during the sermon, whose word transforms the past proclamation that has taken place into proclamation that takes place, in the hic et nunc.
Despite the adaptability of Bultmann’s existential theology and Ebeling’s New Hermeneutic for the analysis of any text, their overtly Protestant concerns virtually ensured the new approach they put into play would remain in relative obscurity. These men argued that not only did hermeneutical phenomenology originally arise with Christian thought, but that it was most at home with the New Testament. While secular scholars could perhaps live with these religious roots, they obviously could not abide being limited to the religious sphere. Nor could the first architect of hermeneutical phenomenology be counted on to popularize his own revolutionary approach. Heidegger’s Being and Time was simply impenetrable to anyone unwilling to devote to it serious study. Compounding matters, a hermeneutic of Dasein no longer strictly guided his subsequent work. Thus it would take an event of some magnitude to put hermeneutical phenomenology on the map. From the benefit of hindsight over half a century later, that event was Gadamer’s 1960 publication of Truth and Method. This landmark work made Heidegger’s crossing of hermeneutics with phenomenology widely accessible to scholars in the human sciences. This is not to imply that all so easily converted to the new faith. An account of the divisive reception of Truth and Method will be made in the following section. But first the Gadamerian understanding of meaning is introduced.
Roughly speaking, this understanding is Heidegger’s own made user-friendly. Gadamer does of course supplement the work of his former teacher in novel ways. Yet these largely serve a clarifying function, in line with his particular talent for translating demanding theory into terminology, concepts,
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