LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 2
WITHDRAWALS FROM MEANING
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reality functioning outside of art. There is only a multiplicity of folds in the sensory fabric of the common. These folds are due to the inherent fissure of sense, the conflict between sensory presentation and the making sense of it. This notion is modeled on Kantian imagination, the essential force of sensibility, which likewise suffers a temporal lag between the apprehension and comprehension of its perceptions. In the end, he finds disputes over the meanings of aesthetic objects to be disputes over what is given and the frame within which these givens are seen.
Rancière’s investigations are centered precisely on this frame – a stand-in for the Kantian schematism. His account of what it has disclosed, as well as the different forms it has assumed in the past, is not just to provide a general history of aesthetics. The true intent is to formulate a new distribution of the sensible which could continuously rupture given relations between things and meanings. In other words, he rigorously works to maintain the gap between the two. Anything which might intervene is driven towards dissolution. Rancière thus undercuts Lyotard’s preoccupation with the Thing qua aspect of the aesthetic object. The Thing may disrupt meaningful aesthetic experience just as much as the gap from which it arises. But Rancière’s mathematical logic exposes the substantive Thing as ultimately phantasmatic. There is simply no stable or solid base from which the subject could withstand the violence of imagination as it endeavors to overcome the inherent gap between its own apprehending and comprehending functioning.
In a certain way, Deleuze and Nancy would disagree. Their work has not only uncovered similar disruptions to meaning. It additionally opens up the possibility of sustaining these disruptions. This achievement is made possible through a third option not covered by either mathematical or dynamical logic alone. In contrast to Lyotard and Rancière, Deleuze and Nancy think the two logics together. Needless to say, the difficulty of their work is an order of magnitude greater than the former. However, they have helpfully made detailed analyses of particular artworks. These artworks instantiate, rather than just illustrate, their respective theoretical projects. That is, a particular artwork is its commentary ‘on’ it. This implies that the minimal gap between the two is somehow sustained. Indeed, Deleuze and Nancy have delimited an object which proves to be the source for the preceding disruptions. From the perspective of this object, Lyotard is overly concerned with the Thing appearing in the wake of its withdrawal, while Rancière expends too much effort on the gap it leaves behind. But the subject may also strike a different relation to this elusive object. As it paradoxically entwines the subject- and object-sides of the aesthetic experience, fully assuming this object permits the sublime to be more consequentially endured.
Deleuze articulates the emergence of this nonsensical point – what might be called the sublime object – through the paintings of Francis Bacon. At stake in Bacon’s work is the need to break from mere figuration and narration. These are
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