LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 1
PETITIONS TO MEANING
— page 24 —
The first concerted response to hermeneutical phenomenology is a booklet published by Betti just two years after Truth and Method. It is also the most visceral. In it, Betti takes Heidegger, Bultmann, Ebeling and especially Gadamer to task for having dispensed with the classical notion of an interpreter externally opposed to objects of meaning. The subject-object schema is elemental to any methodological framework, and by arguing against its use these men are said to threaten the very legitimacy and objectivity of interpretation itself. To combat this threat, Betti provides hermeneutical canon designed to return interpreters to the glory days of Dilthey where the objects of the human sciences were understood to be on par with those of the natural sciences. His proposal effectively reactivates an abstract subjectivity. As Gadamer perspicuously noted, Dilthey’s efforts to achieve scientifically valid knowledge of historical objectifications required him to subtract his consciousness from the historical flux. Given this impossibility, his project of modeling the human on the natural sciences was fatally flawed. On this ground Heidegger would build his own approach, completely abandoning the subject-object schema for the meaning of its surrounding ontological envelope. Yet Betti doubts whether this truly delivers on its promise of greater objectivity. Does it not instead lead interpretation into a hopeless relativism, where the object at stake is itself fatally overshadowed by the subject?
Betti locates the problem of subjectivism with hermeneutical phenomenology’s failure to distinguish interpretation from understanding. This makes the hermeneutical circle appear unbreakable. Accordingly, the theoretical work Heidegger et al. undertake has nowhere else to turn but to descriptions of consciousness engaged in interpretive activity. Using Kantian terms, Betti reproaches these men for merely addressing the quaestio facti, when the true task before the theorist is to answer the quaestio juris with methods for the correct execution of interpretive activity. Quite simply, interpretation is procedure and understanding is its result. The two elements can and must be kept distinct. Otherwise, the objectivity of interpretive results is jeopardized. To add insult to injury, Gadamer further conflates understanding with a third element: application. When Lacan projected Antigone within his Freudian horizon, this effectively amounted to an application of its lesson onto circumstances Sophocles could not have foreseen. With a fusion of horizons, this gap closes. However, Gadamer would argue that a full understanding considers the series of its historical applications, like those made by G. W. F. Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard and Heidegger. For Betti, this is madness. An active interest in understanding is not enough. Interpreters must be technically trained to properly analyze the underlying laws which form the specific objectifications under consideration. At minimum, then, an adequate mastery of the ancient Greek language is required to correctly understand the meaning of Antigone.
Hirsch would whole-heartedly agree. An understanding arising from multiple applications is no brave confrontation with Nietzsche’s insight into the
« prev next »full text of Lacan and Meaning
FREE Lacanian-themed puzzles
