LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 1
PETITIONS TO MEANING
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and issues already familiar to most scholars. For instance, he collectively designates the fore-structures of understanding simply as prejudices – a term at once suggestive of the need for testing. In historical terms, it calls into question the two extremes of our inherited past, from the Enlightenment’s too easy rejection of the authority of tradition in the name of reason, to the Romantic reversal which blindly embraces tradition. He urges us to instead seek the (middle) ground to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate prejudices, a rational ground where the authority of tradition is rightly acknowledged as harboring legitimate prejudices. So in light of Lacan’s preeminent scholarly reputation, perhaps it is only fitting to acknowledge his judgment of Antigone as superior to ours and accordingly grant it precedence. Doubly so when considering how this ancient text has been passed down to us through the centuries, quite possibly for the very lesson Lacan says it bestows. In general, Gadamer contends that classic texts of tradition are as likely a source for legitimate prejudices as persons occupying positions of authority when they exercise their unique expertise.
But it seems a user-friendly Heidegger is a Heidegger slightly misunderstood. For Gadamer tends to subsume the future-orientation of understanding to its past-orientation. The net result is that the abyss of freedom glimpsed in both Bultmann’s and Ebeling’s Protestant recovery of Heidegger thoroughly fails to make even the briefest of appearances. Again, no fault can be found with Gadamer’s presentation skills. In explaining the process of understanding, he begins with the past temporal component: tradition is what establishes our sphere of possible meaning, and thus its horizon delimits the frontier of our inherited set of prejudices. Here Heidegger’s term horizon is strategically deployed to suggest how this set is not a static or permanent precondition, but can contract through the exclusion of a subset of prejudices, or else expand to encompass a larger set. This implies a capacity on our part to participate in tradition and change its prejudices, a capacity put into play whenever we endeavor to understand a product of tradition, like a classic text. In so doing, we project the text’s horizon and attendant prejudices within our inherited horizon. The two horizons are thus initially out-of-synch. But through the procedure of testing prejudices, they can be fine-tuned until fused together. With this fusion of horizons, complete understanding of the text’s subject matter has been achieved.
The problem with this otherwise elegant explanation is how the entire process of reaching understanding is conceived from within an orientation to the past. In fact, Gadamer expressly formulates the anticipated completion of this process as a Heideggerian fore-conception. This is symptomatic of his general tendency to collapse the two temporal components of understanding into one, thus annulling their inherent tension. In contrast, Heidegger, Bultmann and Ebeling minimally maintain this tension as an opening up of space for self-determination, actualized through meaningful appeals to the (religious) thing. But by presupposing no such tension, this space is always already steeped with
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