LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 1
PETITIONS TO MEANING
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never-ending array of possible meanings. Rather, Hirsch feels it is evidence of failure to maintain a basic philological distinction in place since Boeckh, one which pits textual meaning against its critical treatment in wider contexts. What Gadamer purports to take away from a text is not its meaning but the significance of its meaning, as per his own personal evaluation of the text’s journey through history. Once again hermeneutical phenomenology is charged with subjectivism and relativism. It appears to be an ‘anything goes’ approach. How could it not license the claim that Antigone is a play about gardening, if this was the madman’s understanding? Yet if Gadamer would invalidate this claim just as quickly as the rest of us, surely objective standards exist. Both Hirsch and Betti place these standards with the author. The text means what the author intends it to mean and any interpretation approximating this meaning is deemed valid. The notion of authorial intent clearly returns meaning to its pre-Heideggerian status as an external object, along with renewed aspirations for an interpretive science. For understanding need only aim at this object to break its circular turn.
However, the scientific aspirations of interpretive theorists in the mid-20th century are more nuanced than those of Dilthey. Hirsch strives for validity – not certainty – when augmenting 19th century hermeneutical principles with contemporary procedures. Central to his project is a revival of Schleiermacher’s psychological interpretation. This is precisely what is needed to reproduce the textual meaning which originally sprung from the unitary mind of its author. Given the self-identical, determinate and unchanging nature of this meaning, it stands to reason it can pass to another mind. Accordingly, the interpreter is to attempt a reconstruction of the author’s stance, while preserving his own. This latter stance includes mobilizing interpretive tools to facilitate the successful passage of authorial meaning. Of course, a subject capable of splitting his consciousness in this manner is entirely ruled out by hermeneutical phenomenology, as Gadamer’s notion of projected historical horizons suggests. But with the hermeneutical circle returned to the textual level, Hirsch need but supplement classical philology with new genre classifications to reveal how textual parts can provide autonomous footholds on the textual whole. Difficulties in applying linguistic rules are also eased by making use of probability theory. Being the very logic of uncertainty, this modern tool additionally provides a scientific measure of the text’s probable meaning. These and similar procedures are what underlie Hirsch’s (and Betti’s) conviction that even the hermeneutical circle in its traditional formulation can be broken.
The integrity of hermeneutical phenomenology was not left undefended. Gadamer often directly countered these attacks himself. Or else a third-party would do so on his behalf, with Palmer leading the charge with his staunch endorsement of Heidegger et al. at the expense of Betti and Hirsch. But in retrospect it was a different type of attack which most engrossed the interpretive community. Launched from hermeneutical phenomenology’s homeland of
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