READING A CHALLENGING TEXT
(Activity designed and led by
Susan Callahan)
We’ll start off today’s activities
by examining our own reading processes as we work with a challenging text. Please choose one of the two excerpts
below. When you’ve chosen and worked
through your choice of text, do the comprehension questions on your own. Then
do the reflective questions as a group:
FIRST CHOICE: From Hermeneutics
& the Human Sciences by Paul Ricoeur, edited and translated by John B.
Thompson, Cambridge University press, 1981.
This
essay seeks to describe the state of the hermeneutical problem, such as I
receive and perceive it, before offering my own contribution to the
debate. In this preliminary discussion,
I shall restrict myself to identifying not only the elements of a conviction,
but the terms of an unresolved problem.
For I wish to lead hermeneutical reflection to the point where it calls,
by an internal aporia, for an important reorientation which will enable
it to enter seriously into discussion with the sciences of the text, from
semiology to exegesis.
I
shall adopt the following working definition of hermeneutics: hermeneutics is
the theory of operations of understanding, in their relation to the
interpretation of texts. So the key
idea will be the realization of a discourse as a text; and the elaboration of
the categories of the text will be the concern of a subsequent study. The way will thereby be prepared for an
attempt to resolve the central problem of hermeneutics presented at the end of
this essay: namely the opposition, disastrous in my view, between explanation
and understanding. The search for a
complementarity between these two attitudes, which Romantic hermeneutics tends
to dissociate, will thus express on the epistemological plane the hermeneutical
reorientation demanded by the notion of the text.
I. From regional hermeneutics to
general hermeneutics
The appraisal of hermeneutics which I propose converges towards
the formulation of an aporia, which is the very aporia that has
instigated my own research. The
presentation which follows is therefore not neutral in the sense of being free
from presuppositions. Indeed,
hermeneutics itself puts us on guard against the illusion of neutrality.
I
see the recent history of hermeneutics dominated by two preoccupations. The first tends progressively to enlarge the
aim of hermeneutics, in such a way that all regional hermeneutics are incorporated into one general
hermeneutics. But this movement of deregionalisation
cannot be pressed to the end unless at the same time the properly epistemological
concerns of hermeneutics—its efforts to achieve a scientific status—are
subordinated to ontological preoccupations, whereby understanding ceases
to appear as a simple mode of knowing in order to become a way of
being and a way of relating to beings and to being. The movement of deregionalisation is
thus accompanied by a movement of radicalization, by which hermeneutics
becomes not only general but fundamental. Let us follow each of these movements in
turn.
1. The first locus of
interpretation
The first ‘locality’ which
hermeneutics undertakes to lay bare is certainly language, and more
particularly written language. It is
important to grasp the contours of this locality, since my own enterprise could
be seen as an attempt to ‘re-regionalise’ hermeneutics by means of the notion
of the text. It is therefore important
to be precise about why hermeneutics has a privileged relation to questions of
language. We can begin, it seems to me,
with a quite remarkable characteristic of natural languages, a characteristic
which calls for a work of interpretation at the most elementary and banal level
of conversation. This characteristic is
polysemy, that is, the feature by which our words have more than one meaning
when considered outside of their use in a determinate context. Here I shall not be concerned with the
questions of economy that justify the recourse to a lexical code which presents
such a singular characteristic. What is
important for the present discussion is that polysemy of words calls forth as
its counterpart the selective role of contexts for determining the current
value which words assume in a determinate message, addressed by a definite
speaker to a hearer placed in a particular situation. Sensitivity to context is the necessary
complement and ineluctable counterpart of polysemy. But the use of contexts involves, in turn, an activity of
discernment which is exercised in the concrete exchange of messages between
interlocuters, and which is not modeled on the interplay of question and
answer. This activity of discernment is
properly called interpretation; it consists in recognizing which relatively
univocal message the speaker has constructed on the polysemic basis of the
common lexicon. To produce a relatively
univocal discourse with polysemic words, and to identify this intention of
univocality in the reception of messages: such is the first and most elementary
work of interpretation.
Within
this vast circle of exchanged messages, writing carves out a limited domain
which Dilthey, to whom I shall return at length below, calls the expression of
life fixed by writing. These
expressions demand a specific work of interpretation, a work which stems precisely
from the realization of discourse as a text.
Let us say provisionally that with writing, the conditions of direct
interpretation through the interplay of question and answer, hence through
dialogue, are no longer fulfilled.
Specific techniques are therefore required in order to raise the chain
of written signs to discourse and to discern the message through the
superimposed codifications peculiar to the realization of discourse as a text.
Comprehension
Questions for “First Choice” (Paul Ricoeur)
Once you have completed your reading assignment, answer the
following comprehension questions:
A. Hermeneutics has
something to do with understanding written texts.
B. This article is a good
introduction to reading theory.
C. This
article was written for a reader who has already studied
philosophy
and rhetorical theory.
You do not have to write out this answer, but could you? Why or why not?
SECOND CHOICE: from Jacques
Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis by Ellie Ragland Sullivan,
University of Illinois Press, 1986.
In
the Lacanian context language is not a static or passive tool waiting to be
manipulated by knowledge or thought. It
finds its principal raison d’être in serving as a tool for exploring and
elaborating unconscious experience within the conscious realm. By consciousness, then, Lacan does not mean
consciousness of something.
Instead, consciousness has become a mode of perception which negotiates
Desire via substitutions. Given this
de-ontologized picture of thought, it follows that Lacan will reject
philosophical hermeneutics: the science of interpretation. Hermeneutics enjoins phenomenological
thinkers to find the essence of a text by a minutely detailed description of
it. Hermeneuticians are misguided,
according to Lacan, in believing that meaning inheres in an object and is
therefore accessible to perception through objective methods. By refusing the Freudian Cogito—actually
the Desidero—at the basis of any person’s experience, they are
the philosophical Idealists (Seminaire XI, p. 141).
Furthermore, Lacan finds the accusation of intellectualization that has
been leveled at him truly paradoxical: “If one knew what I think of the Intelligence,
assuredly one would be able to take back this reproach” (Seminaire XI,
p. 148). The Desire that governs
consciousness is not that of substance, Lacan has pointed out, but is there at
the level of primary process (Seminaire
XI, p.140).
Referring
to the contemporary theologian and philosopher Paul Ricoeur, Lacan stresses
that the hardest thing for a philosopher is “to know the realism of the
unconscious—that the unconscious is not ambiguity of behavior, nor future
knowledge which knows itself already by not knowing itself, but lacuna, coupure,
rupture, which inscribes itself in certain lack. M. Ricoeur agrees that there is something of this dimension to be
reserved. Simply as the philosopher
that he is, he hoards it to himself. He
calls that hermeneutics” (Seminaire XI, pp. 140-41). Philosophers generally believe that a text
holds something, some meaning that can be brought to light through the science
of interpretation. It is hard for them
to accept that the surface (text) does not contain meaning (as bottles
contain wine), but takes on meaning only to conceal a deeper gap: standing
behind the text is an unconscious system of repressed meanings whose roots lie
in Desire.
Comprehension
Questions for “Second Choice” (Ellie Ragland-Sullivan on Lacan)
Once you have completed your reading assignment, answer the
following comprehension questions:
A. Hermeneutics fails to account
for the science of interpretation.
B. This article successfully illustrates
the relationship of language to
unconscious experience.
C. This
article was written for a reader who has already studied Freud and
Ricoeur.
You do not have to write out this answer, but could you? Why or why not?
Reflective
Questions
After you have answered the “comprehension” questions,
answer the following questions about your reading experience.