LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 3
LACAN ON MEANING
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hermeneutics which integrates disturbing elements of the text into an overall cohesive narrative. Otherwise said, the text is like a fragmented child, with the interpretive gesture amounting to the act of reassembling the text into the wholeness of a mirroring interpretation. Textual gaps index interpretive failure and simply must be resolved, as they impede the text’s full integration into the field of meaning. It is as if the text casts a disturbing gaze out from these gaps, resulting in an unsettling experience which the interpreter endeavors to neutralize through hermeneutical technique.
The first period of Lacan’s career culminates with his écrit “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (1953), popularly known as his Rome Discourse. While using his name only twice, this paper nevertheless bears the distinctive mark of Heidegger as it generally links together the subject, language and speech on the basis of a reading of psychoanalysis that is undeniably hermeneutical phenomenological. As he writes, ‘[i]f psychoanalysis can become a science (for it is not yet one) and if it is not to degenerate in its technique (and perhaps this has already happened), we must rediscover the meaning of its experience.’5 Like Heidegger’s problematic of unveiling meaningful truth, the very notion of the unconscious calls for an exegesis to reestablish the censored chapters of the subject’s history. This is analogous to the interpretive task of clarifying obscure texts. And just like for hermeneuts from the medieval period onward, this task is linked to truth. But in the present case this takes place phenomenologically, through ‘the Word realized in discourse that darts from mouth to mouth, conferring on the act of the subject who receives its message the meaning that makes this act an act of history and gives it its truth.’6 But simply because Lacan stresses language and speech throughout this paper, one should not conclude that he is a structuralist. In 1953 his use of the phrase ‘symbolic order’ still refers to the substantive matter and imponderable meaning of symbolic objects and not to the mechanics of signifiers. Thus the claim that the Freudian ‘discovery was that of the field of the effects, in man’s nature, of his relations to the symbolic order and the fact that their meaning goes all the way back to the most radical instances of symbolization in being’7 is a reading of psychoanalysis that situates the symbolic order qua system of signifiers behind a primary concern for a being grasped through meaning. Later, Lacan straightforwardly writes that ‘psychoanalysis in its early development...[was] intimately linked to the discovery and study of symbols’ and that this new development ‘expresses nothing less than the re-creation of human meaning in an arid era of scientism.’8 This is significant because, as he wrote earlier,
5 Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” 221.
6 Ibid., 215.
7 Ibid., 227.
8 Ibid., 238–9.
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