LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 2
WITHDRAWALS FROM MEANING
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distributive space of signs. Whereas 16th century thought could dispose of signs uniformly as if occupying a homogeneous space, in the 19th century signs began to stage themselves in a much more differentiated space. The possibility of an alternative interpretive methodology had arrived. Texts no longer needed to be interrogated for their deep meanings. Now, interpretation could project itself out over such depth to expose the textual secret as absolutely superficial.
Without the possibility of arriving at a final meaning, there is nothing to draw the interpretive activity to a close. In a Nietzschean vein, Foucault argues that no sign presents itself passively without already being an interpretation of other signs. Interpretations aim not at signs but at other interpretations, an activity Foucault characterizes as violent seizure. With interpretation logically preceding the sign, the sign has thoroughly lost its 16th century status as a simple benevolent being which proves the benevolence of God. The positive space it once occupied is now deemed negatively infinite without real content or reconciliation. Accordingly, the sign becomes ambiguous, suspicious, even outright malevolent. It collapses under its own interpretive weight, dissolving into the semiotic structures which otherwise support it. Believing differently is to profess faith in original signs which refer to meaningful subjects and objects standing outside the semiotic system. This would submit semiology to hermeneutics and signal the death of interpretation. For Foucault, the very life of interpretation begins by placing semiology prior to the hermeneutical field of meaning.
Post-structuralist insights into meaning have been employed by lesser known figures like LaCapra and White. In particular, their 1980s project to rethink intellectual history constructively carries out a linguistic turn to textual analysis. For his part, LaCapra underscores how the notion of textuality frustrates the usual concept of reality. Textual representations of the past are not a given. Not just its meaningful recovery, but its very existence is always already contingent on the way texts use language. Thus, the interpretive key to meaning is not had by reading a text in its ‘proper’ context. LaCapra considers a series of common text-context strategies, only to reject each in turn. At one extreme, the context of authorial intention à la Hirsch is defective for its unitary conception of meaning which lends itself to empirical verification. At the other, Gadamer’s fusion of horizons and other contextual modes of interpretive discourse overlook how discourse functions in texts. As an alternative, a text is better conceived as a complex use of language, or else as a multivalent event in the history of language itself. So if text-context terminology is desired, the former synchronic conception might be set against the diachrony of the latter conception. This would channel investigations to intra-textual uses of language, dampening the intellectual’s unwarranted concern for core meanings, as well as the historian’s tendency to slide into an uncontrolled plurality of meaning. The intellectual historian is thus called on to make a performative approach to
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