LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 2
WITHDRAWALS FROM MEANING
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in the aesthetic realm, sensory perceptions become the investigative tool to gather in phenomenal objects for examination. The way these objects appear to the investigator is therefore significant, a fact which aligns aesthetic theory with phenomenology. At least in the sense that subjective experience delineates the appropriate investigative venue for both disciplines. Of course, the experience of art is not without meaning. Centuries older than structuralism or phenomenology, aesthetics has proven itself more than capable of extracting out meanings from objects of art. But in recent decades there has been a discernible shift in theoretical focus. Explorations are increasingly being made into what disrupts the meaningful experience of art. Highlighted below are contemporary French thinkers who have theorized on the nature of these disruptions, particularly with respect to the Kantian sublime.
In the early 20th century, Benjamin challenged the traditional notion of translation. As Hermes exemplified, an unfamiliar tongue effectively elevates the disruption of meaning to its complete impasse, while translation permits meaningful messages to flow once again. But for Benjamin, translators who propagate meaning between languages fail to give adequate voice to the intentio of the original. This is especially true of poetic works where regaining the expressionless creative Word is of utmost importance. To accomplish this, he reasons that a translation should pursue its own course by reproducing textual sense tangentially. Meaning would then cling loosely to the resulting text, even plunge irretrievably into the abyss of its language. Ideally, translation and original become one, like interlinear Scripture. Indeed, here lies Benjamin’s prototype, a text identical with truth without the mediation of meaning. It is thus unconditionally translatable.
A half-century later, redemptive-like qualities begin to be directly assigned to the abyssal void itself. Consider how Baudrillard calls the art world’s bluff. Artists present their artwork as null. But this pretense of meaninglessness is precisely what compels consumers a contrario to attribute deep and hidden significance to aesthetic objects. Baudrillard argues that real insignificance is exceedingly rare. He locates the problem with a loss. In the past, the representation of the world through images kicked off the power of illusion. Today, the value of art is instead linked to a pure circularity. Subjects who enter the image accordingly lose the capacity for illusion. A passion for illusion can be recovered, however, with poetic thought. Such thought stands at the violent crossroads of meaning and nothing. It wagers that ‘nothing’ runs underneath meaning, and so aims to ex-center reality by attracting the void to its periphery. This opens up a creative space, where creation proceeds from the energy of signs and not from the accumulation of meaning. On the contrary, the subject must aim to destroy substantive meaning in a spectacular event, thereupon restoring its illusory quality. In structuralist terms, Baudrillard’s poetic thought similarly attends to the formal level of language so as to account for the appearance of its meaningful content. But the difference between the disciplines
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