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Gadamer Needs
Lacan: Gadamer's
Approach to Tradition
a
Angelika Rauch-Rapaport
a
London Metropolitan University
Published online: 21 Oct 2014.

To cite this article: Angelika Rauch-Rapaport (2003) Gadamer

Needs Lacan: Gadamer's Approach to Tradition, Journal of
the British Society for Phenomenology, 34:3, 309-326, DOI:
10.1080/00071773.2003.11007412

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 Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 34, No.3, October 2003

GADAMER NEEDS LACAN:

GADAMER'S APPROACH TO TRADITION
ANGELIKA RAUCH-RAPAPORT

Although much has been written on Jacques Lacan's structuralist

approaches to psychoanalysis, there has been little recognition of the fact
that Lacan also adopted a hermeneutical stance through his encounter with
Heideggerian thinking that is compatible with significant aspects of
Gadamer' s philosophical writings. As it happens, one of Gadamer' s
dissertation students, Hermann Lang, published a book in 1973, only
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recently translated into English as Language and the Unconscious, 1 in which

a hermeneutical approach to reading Lacan was undertaken. Oddly, however,
Lang did not situate Gadamer very much in relation to Lacan, and even
Gadamer, who himself wrote a brief appreciative afterword to Lang's book,
failed to take the hint that perhaps he and Lacan had more in common than
one might at first suppose. Still, Gadamer did manage to tepidly
acknowledge that in Lang's book, "One detects the philosophical horizon of
Truth and Method, the presence of Plato and Hegel, Husser! and
Heidegger." 2 What Gadamer (and Lang) fail to mention, however, is that
there is a sense in which Gadamer does not presuppose Lacan so much as he
really requires or needs Lacan in order to fulfill the conditions of his
hermeneutics, particularly as his is a philosophical hermeneutics that tries to
revise the premises of a transcendental hermeneutics by emphasizing the
historicity of consciousness and its dependence on the signifying effects of
communicative language.
But where history enters the picture the retroactive structure of experience
and meaning is also at stake. Memory and experience, we know from
psychoanalysis, are hardly ever within the full grasp of a self-conscious
subject and are determined by repression, phantasy, and unconscious
transformations of verbal representations and signs. Gadamer, after all, lacks
a theory of the unconscious and of semiotics, though he did develop a theory
of subjectivity that could address communication in terms of Anwendung
(application), the applicability of written language to horizons of readerly
reception. Inversely, whereas Lacan lacked a theory of sociality that could
explain how an experience and its meaning is transmitted from one person to
another (Uberlieferung), he developed a compelling theory of the
unconscious and its semiotic processes of communication. Naturally, it is for
this reason that Lacan also requires or needs Gadamer, since Gadamer
supplies such a theory that is, in essence, very compatible with Lacanian
psychoanalysis.

309
 What relates both thinkers is not only an awareness that the self in its
identity is shaped by an other, but also that the selfs subjectivity is radically
determined by the linguistic effects of any communication with an other. The
experience of the other in language, over which the self has no real power, is
treated by both Gadamer and Lacan as a "passion of the signifier", a suffering
of meaning (understanding as a happening) that is not intentionally produced
by the subject. At stake is a psychoanalytic model of intersubjectivity that
critiques the dialectical model of communication, a La Hegel and Habermas,
and that either originates in or always returns to the reflexivity of self-
consciousness. In light of this, it is interesting that Gadamer has indeed been
aware of Lac an's work as well as the idea that psychoanalysis is a
hermeneutical science insofar as it locates the unconscious in the linguistic
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horizons of communicating subjectivities. 3 Yet, he has always been reluctant

if not reticent to address the 'symbolic order' of an unconscious history of
experience as it transpires between a self and an other. This, of course, also
applies to the hermeneutical question-and-answer-game that develops
between a reader and a text, because it actually is the most radical encounter
with an (often alienating) other, both qua language (Lacan's Other) and in the
sense that ~his other also posits the selfs other, the (unconscious) addressee
of the questioning reader. This kind of hermeneutical reading is different from
interpretation because, rather than appropriating this other into a
narcissistically structured self-consciousness which would lead to Lacan's
meconnaissance and would corroborate Gadamer's "prejudice", this self-
consciousness should really be reintegrated into the realm of the Other, which
Gadamer seems to allude to in his phrase die Hingabe ans
Traditionsgeschehen (the surrendering to the process of transmission) through
which the reader-subject experiences an alteration of his consciousness. This
surrender to the transmission of something other than the self, something
previously unknown, initiates the actual hermeneutical experience.
In setting up a relationship between Gadamer and Lacan, I wish to explore
the consequences of taking the step that Gadamer resists. At the same time, I
want to explore why it might be of benefit to Lacanian psychoanalysis to
conceptualize itself in terms of a Gadamerian hermeneutic. It is in this sense
that I hope to amplify an epistemology of intersubjective and historical
transmission that goes far beyond the limits of psychoanalysis/hermeneutics
established so far by Lang but also by critics like Slavoj Zizek, Mikkel
Borch-Jacobsen, Ellie Ragland, and others.

I. Language, History, and the Subject

Not only has Gadamer been sensitive to the "linguistic turn" of
philosophy, but he has considered it in terms of Edmund Husserl' s
conception of horizonality. For Husserl a horizon refers to an interpretive

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 construction without which something cannot be known to consciousness as
some thing in particular. Whereas Husserl was largely concerned with
abolishing the Kantian notions of mental faculties and Bildung, Gadamer has
focused on how the construction of linguistic horizons is inseparable from
the acquisition of cultural tradition as transmitted by writing. In contrast to
the methodological acquisition of textual meaning in terms of Bildung, the
hermeneutical point of view thematizes the individual's own history and
agency in and as the process of understanding. This grasp of personal history
suggests that the subject operates within horizons or limits that conform to
those interpretive textual constructions that are meaningful to the subject. It
is in this sense that a historic text posits the horizonality where subject and
text overlap without collapsing into a singular entity. Essentially, the reader-
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subject is dealing with the text as alien or other before establishing a

common ground of meaning.
The recognition of a horizon of possible meanings delineates itself when
the reader becomes conscious of the fact that his own representations are
posited or situated in response to a text and that, far from being universal,
these representations are grounded in personal experience. It is when
personal constructions clash with textual constructions that the reader is
jolted into suspending or resisting judgment, perhaps in anticipation of the
construction of new meanings that will alter aspects of the reader's
intellectual formation. When the reader identifies with representations that
are brought to the text, assumptions about the self are naturally at stake,
since the linguistic dynamics of the text challenge preconceived horizons
within which the reader is already comfortably situated.
In affecting a subject's self-understanding (i.e. self-representation), a text
can affect the subject's linguistic expectations and may even cause the
subject as reader to experience himself or herself as other. In eliciting such
an interpretive horizon, the text encourages the subject to stand back from its
self-representations. Hence in the gap or rupture opened up by reading, a
historical consciousness can develop in the subject's acknowledgment of a
self-alienation that is experienced against the background of its own
representations. In being challenged by particular figurations of the text,
preconceived representations, or what Gadamer calls prejudices, the subject
experiences not only changeability but also susceptibility to the transforming
power of language. The rhetorical and syntactic structure of language thus
proves more powerful in affecting meanings than in maintaining static
representations. For it is through the temporal movement of language that the
subject's horizon of meaning is altered. This has the ontological consequence
that, insofar as consciousness is representational, the subject represents to
itself the desire to interpret the text in relation to a totality, experientially to
the wholeness of being and to human existence as such.

3ll
 Although Lacan does not speak in terms of horizons of receptivity, it is
the case that he, too, is very sensitive to interpretation as presupposing a
number of potential signifying constructions that are structurally latent
within the subject. Like Gadamer, Lacan places strong emphasis upon the
structure of language as a temporal or historical process that alters the
subject's horizons of meaning. Like Gadamer, Lacan thinks in terms of a
division or split between being and language that motivates the desire for an
original physical experience of being whole. This experience of wholeness
(existence experienced as the plenitude of Being), Lacan thinks, can never be
entirely represented in language and therefore cannot exist solely in
representation. Being belongs to that realm Lacan calls the "real," an elusive
dimension of psychology that falls outside of language and representation.
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If the subject is in search of a wholeness whose completion lies outside

language per se, the subject is nevertheless attempting to find the satisfaction
of wholeness through speech (parole pleine). However, as the horizons of
interpretation shift, the limits of understanding are not only transgressed, but
submitted to the literality of prior texts that reflects the position of an other
asymmetrical subject who dismantles pre-judgments. Insofar as such texts
are culturally transmitted (by means of literary writings), this other is the
carrier of transmission as a transpersonal communication known as tradition.
(In the psychoanalytic situation this transmission is the unconscious
transference of an unconscious affect to the analyst.) Indeed, tradition can be
experienced as an appeal that challenges the self's sense of being in
language. For not only is the subject incomplete with respect to an elusive
wholeness of Being, but the subject's sense of self is challenged by
statements and texts uttered or written by others. If prejudice, in Gadamer' s
sense, secures a false (i.e. narcissistic) sense of being whole in language, the
appeal or call of tradition contributes to the subject's awareness that it is
limited and incomplete with respect to others.
Yet, if the other reveals our limits, the other also holds out the possibility
for completion through an understanding of the existence of difference and
otherness. Completion takes place through an other (text, image, history,
person) that the subject consciously tries to know, and, perhaps, has
unconsciously already known in phantasy. This unconscious knowledge of
the other is already intimated by the power of the appeal or call that occurs
when the text addresses and captivates the reader as someone that belongs to
a textual inheritance or tradition-in psychoanalytical terms, the history of
his or her transference. The text, in this dynamic or activating sense, appears
to express a desire of its own when it takes hold of the reader. Expression of
the text's desire depends on the subject's reconstituting itself, his Umbildung
as Freud might have said\ through the linguistic effects of meaning. To put
this another way, knowledge of the text's desire must traverse the affective

312
 and conceptual history of the subject. By the mid 1960s, Lacan will speak of
this as a traversing of a person's phantasy.
For Gadamer, the motivation to formulate questions not only
demonstrates an appeal but also implies that there already exists an
interpellative relationship, a common ground, between self and other. Here,
of course, Gadamer differs from Lacan in that Lacanian psychoanalysis
questions the shareability of a common ground save that of Hegelian
"recognition:" the subject's recognition of whether the Other is more or less
powerful. For Lacan this concerns the subject's ability to survive in a world
where outwitting the Other is paramount. Gadamer is less of a social
Darwinist than Hegel when he considers the other as the other of the self
who participates in a "question and answer game" (the term is Gadamer's)
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that brings self and other into relation. Lacan sees this relation, though
necessary, as always a conflict. As continuous translation andre-translation
of historical texts, tradition exercises a powerful linguistic drive towards
verbal articulation of a common ground with which we can understand the
past as something that has to do with us in the present.
Gadamer differs from Lacan when he reminds us that a hermeneutical
understanding of history is based on dialogue (i.e., not a dialectics) and that
language plays out its signifying drive as a transferential structure wherein
elements of tradition are carried over from one subject to the next. Thus
Gadamer is opposed to those approaches of understanding which attempt
statically to reconstruct a merely factual historical frame of reference within
which the text is to be comprehended in the absence of interpretation. In
contrast, the hermeneutical condition for an understanding of the text of the
past incorporates one's present situation into the interpretation of the text
insofar as the present imposes certain conditions of receptivity that are in and
of themselves hermeneutically predicated on a personal history of
development. Interpretation advances itself by a displacement of the
meaning that affects our horizons of signification. Not only a movement
between heterogeneous realms, interpretation takes place within the
commonality of language. As a participant in this hermeneutical shift, the
subject, itself constituted by language, experiences itself both as dis-placed
(ver-standen) and understood. It is here, of course, that Gadamer and Lacan
are not so far apart insofar as Lacanian analysis also concerns the
interrelation between displacement and understanding: displacement of the
sujet compensated for by the logic of the unconscious signifier.
In the absence of such a theory of the unconscious, Gadamer argues that
the subject is displaced because it is in transit between places and, hence,
reflects what one might compare to the structure of metaphor, or meta-phora.
For what is transferred (iiberliefert) is actually not so much the content of a
text than an awareness of our position in relation to tradition. In this way,

313
 tradition, if contingent on the configuration of a text, already determines us
as potential readers who interpret or construct meanings. If the reader were
not always in another place than the tradition (here in the sense of history)
that is being transferred or handed over, the text would not be in a dialogical
relation and could not speak. It would not be, as Lacan puts it in the "Rome
Discourse", a parole pleine. To quote Gadamer:
Hermeneutics must depart from the assumption that he who wants to understand is [already]
connected with the matter which, with the work, comes to language through transmission
(Uberlieferung), and that he also connects or achieves a connection with the tradition from
which literature (die Oberlieferung) speaks. 5
According to Gadamer, tradition establishes itself as a sense of belonging
to the same ground of the subject matter. It happens in the historical-
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hermeneutical disposition towards the work. Hermeneutics evolves in the

space between the historically intended and distant objectivity of the other,
and the connectedness of the other to tradition. Despite his differences from
Lacan, Gadamer shares with Lacan the idea that language bridges gaps
between selves and others in that it is primarily in language that the
encounter of self and other takes place. Language as its "own matter"
occupies the place of the Other where tradition speaks in the form of
signifiers (referring only to one another) that are turned into signs (referring
to objects in the world) with the help of (historical) imagination. Imagination
must then relate to Gadamer's wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewuj3tsein, because
this attests to the fact that the past operates via language effects on
representation (Vorstellung). It is through this interaction of language and
imagination that a consciousness of one's historicity may be achieved. In
Lac an's work of the early 1960s, this historicity is achieved through
language in terms of what he called retroaction, the belated emergence of the
subject in the "signifying chains" of language. 6

II. Interpretation and Figuration

Having addressed the question of language, history, and the subject, I tum
to an exploration of figuration in language and how the trope binds
signification. If understanding acquires the nature and structure of language,
which is what Gadamer views as the hermeneutical understanding of the
historical transmission of language and what Lacan calls the "symbolic," the
unconscious structured like a language, then the materiality of language
(Sprachlichkeit) must determine understanding as a process of translating an
unconscious signifier (a semiotic element referring to other such elements
only) into a conscious signified (a determinate meaning that grounds the
signifiers). In Gadamer's elaboration of tradition as both transmission and
transformation of a message from the past into the linguistic horizon of the
present, a process of translating the subject's own past into the

314
 representational frame of the present is linked to the process of transmission
in interpretation. Gadamer, who has not outlined a theory of the subject,
implies a subject in hermeneutical understanding, which he posits as a
happening, a surprising event effected by an encounter with the language of
the text of the past (literature as Oberlieferung). In this encounter, he
neglects the fact that the language of the unconscious, created by the traces if
not tropes of the subject's past, is itself interpreted in the larger interpretation
of the past as a textual configuration.
At this point perhaps a brief clarification of Gadamer's use of the words
tradition and transmission is warranted. Gadamer calls the text an
Oberlieferung which is not transmitted (uberliefert) until the reader
interprets it. Thus his concept of tradition in the nominal use of referring to a
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concrete text differs from mine to the extent that I have tried to focus on the
process of transmitting tradition. In this process, effects of meaning occur in
language as a result of an unconscious transference of an emotion to the
signifiers in the text, hence creating cathexis. By not differentiating the
historic text(s) from the transmission of tradition, Gadamer opens himself to
criticism, since he gives the impression of being caught in circularity when
he argues that the content of tradition as well as the reader are in essence
linguistic. In this way, Gadamer runs the risk of equating all textuality to the
transmission of tradition. Problematic is that the subject in this interpretative
process would not have agency, since he or she would be merely a conduit or
transmitter rather than an agency of Bildung. The subject, however, forms
itself by way of interacting with tradition, that is by creating a meaning from
its language.
Psychoanalytic theory, which also deals with the process of understanding
from the viewpoint of the construction of history and the formation of the
subject, can correct those inconsistencies in Gadamer's project. The subject's
past experiences are preserved in unconscious memory in the form of
signifiers which, according to Lacan, behave like a language and thus pre-
structure our understanding in language along the synchronic and diachronic
axes of signification. On this temporal axis, Lacan reduces the signifying
process to the structures produced by metaphor and metonymy. His analysis
demonstrates that metaphor can even be collapsed into the overall signifying
structure of metonymy, as well. This is a point that has been demonstrated at
length by Lacan's well known colleague, Serge Leclaire. 7
If metaphor implies a movement of meaning from one signifier to another
without a relationship of resemblance at work, 8 it is possible only because of
the metonymic connection between signs in a text. But even more basically,
it is the grammatical relation between signifiers within a syntax that brings
different signs into association. By bringing such signs into contact with one
another, syntax may well annihilate the delimited signified of each word.

315
 This corresponds to a semiotic view held by Julia Kristeva, in her book The
Revolution of Poetic Language, wherein she discusses how the meaning of
each word can be sublated, enhanced, and transformed by the emergence of a
third and quite unexpected meaning or attribute to the original meanings of
the words. This attribute or new meaning is produced in the reader's
imagination by the clash of original verbal meanings. The signifying power
of syntax therefore can be said to override the semantic features of
conventional signs. Without syntax, the metaphoric process could not be
controlled by the representational structure of signs. Metaphora would run
amoc in the reader's phantasies and end up in a state of hallucination rather
than being directed and contained by the signifying process at work when
reading a text. Both Gadamer and Lacan agree on the prioritized signifying
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status of syntax in the text: syntax supplants the function of words as signs
and turns them into structural signifiers controlled by the grammatical
features of the text. These features participate in the construction of the text's
tropology which then superimposes its rhetorical structure-traditionally
analysed as style--onto the semantic context, transforming it in the process.
In contrast to Lacan, Gadamer argues for a traditional dichotomy between
subject and object: the subject vis-a-vis tradition in the object "text." This is
so despite the fact that he admits that both subject and object positions are
displaced in hermeneutical understanding. No doubt, Gadamer' s concept of
begreifen and Begrifflichkeit-understanding in language as grasping and
thus imagining something-is supposed to capture the essential nature of
interpretation; however, in comparison with Lacan's insistence on the
metonymical basis of meaning creation, Gadamer's begreifen seems to
employ a strict dichotomy between understanding (ver-stehen ) the text and
determining its content by referring to objects outside the text. What
underlies understanding is representational thinking in the sense of an active
conceptual thinking that is in opposition to passive referential apprehension.
In referring to Hegel, Gadamer asserts the following:
The motion of determining [the sense of the sentence) is not tied to the finn basis of the
subject 'in which it runs to and fro.' The subject is not determined as 'this' as well as 'that',
in one respect 'such' and in other respect 'such'. That would be the manner of
representational thought, not of the manner of conception (des Begriffes). In conceptual
thinking the natural move of determination to reach beyond the subject of the sentence is
inhibited and the movement of representation 'suffers a reverse blow. Starting with the
subject as if it stayed in its base position, thus grounding the sentence, the determining move
subsequently finds the subject transformed in the predicate and thus un-founded [sublated]
because the predicate is more likely the substance of the sentence .. .' 9
Gadamer is considering the nature of Hegel's speculative reasoning which
does not treat the sentence as the construction of propositional judgments.
Putting the sentence in suspense, Hegel suspends judgment and reclaims the
mobility of a subject who no longer has a firm ground outside of language.

316
 Understanding (Verstehen ) implies a mobility of standpoints and, in
semiotic terms, is tied to the possibility that the "signified" can slip or shift.
That is, the signified-as horizon and construction of meaning-
counterposes itself to the sign's literal reference within a sentence and hence
affects signification generally.
Gadamer' s hermeneutical terms can be misleading when they obscure the
interpretive-semiotic processes of a text's rhetorical features. It is therefore
important carefully to note the few passages that Gadamer devotes to an
unconscious process of signification, for it is in these passages that he tries to
approach a theory of the interpretation of tradition in and as language. The
decisive feature of language for a hermeneutical experience is the ability to
posit understanding as an event (Geschehenscharakter der Sprache):
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Not only is language use and the developmental formation of verbal means a process such as
no individual consciousness can knowingly and selectively correspond to it-in this respect
it is literally more correct to say that language speaks us than we speak it... 10
Gadamer starts from the thesis that, as language, tradition. determines our
understanding of the text when we try to interpret it. Meaning occurs as a
suddenly-becoming-conscious of a connection between previously
unassociated "things." By seeing how things relate (Sach-verhalt) or can
relate to one another, a new insight into the reality of the "subject matter"
can be made. The effect of a recognized relationship between "things" is
elaborated by Gadamer as the hermeneutical experience that has its
motivation in the effects of language on what he calls consciousness, even
though he qualifies this consciousness as a "consciousness of operative
effects" (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewuj3tsein).
It is the subject's imagination that puts its "own" history into a textual
mise-en-scene. By inserting the scene of imagination into the picture of
understanding, I will expand on Gadamer's point that "in the coming to
language of what is said in the text of tradition, language concludes
(ausmacht) the actual hermeneutical event which is at the same time
appropriation and interpretation." 11 The "actual hermeneutical event" takes
place in the scenarios of our representations. Gadamer continually asserts
that hermeneutical understanding of the language of tradition is an
understanding "for me" and not of tradition in itself, no Ding an sich. And he
underlines this property of "for me" with the notion of application: the
language of tradition has to be applied to my horizon. By this he means, "my
historical situation." But this concept of horizon also includes those
unconscious experiences of the past that left their traces as an emotional
structure of signifiers that are re-membered and therefore sutured in the
signifying connections of the text that is tradition. The figure of the text-
assembled by linking signifiers in reading-provides the reader with an
imaginary scene for his or her re-membered emotions. As we will see, this

317
 imaginary scene is analogous to that of phantasy in psychoanalysis where the
figure, once more, provides the kernel for an imaginary scene for the
subject's remembered emotions.
Gadamer, for his part, offers the term Sinnhorizont, or horizon of
"significance." This term distinguishes itself from Husserl's horizon of
signification 12 in that it includes an unconscious anticipation of sense in the
subject's language when it encounters the language of an other in, say, a text.
In the application of that text's language to my own, there is an unconscious
use of language that determines the hermeneutical experience of tradition. I
must be able to imagine a situation in which I would have a sensuous
experience of what is said in the text. This is necessarily a potential
experience, because it concerns a sensuous contingency, given the fact that it
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enacts a repetition of a concrete experience in my past. What differs is that

the scene of representation has changed even if the scenario (the structure of
the scene) is the same.
The truth of tradition (Uberlieferung ) is like (!) the present which lies
open to the senses. Tradition's mode of being is, of course, not an immediate
sensuous one. It is language; and our listening, which hears and also
understands it, includes its truth into an appropriated linguistic relationship
with the world by interpreting the texts. The linguistic communication
between the present and tradition (Uberlieferung) is, as we have shown, the
event (Geschehen ) which in every understanding rifts a trace. 13
That trace, I would like to suggest, is that of the Freudian unconscious.
After all, imagination appears to represent the link between two signifying
structures, I) the language in the text, and 2) the language of the
unconscious. Both structures are involved in reading the text of tradition,
especially when the text resists the reader's tendency to recognize objects in
the mirror of written or spoken words. When the recognition of meanings no
longer makes sense in the context of the text, then Gadamer' s approach to
hermeneutical understanding overlaps with a psychoanalytic theory of
reading that pays attention to the figural function of language.
In this context it is important to recall that Lacanian psychoanalysis
distinguishes between signs (terms with conventional social references) and
signifiers (markers for subjective and idiosyncratic meanings). The signifier
often applies to feelings and unworked-through experiences whose meaning is
only anticipated or deferred until signifiers have established a nodal relation
to other textual signifiers. This deferral is somewhat analogous to the
interpretation of dreams in which the psychoanalyst awaits the dreamer's
associations that are more akin to signifiers than signs proper. The signifying
relation takes place in the subject's unconscious where the signifiers of
experience are actualized and cathected in terms of the Freudian drives. These
signifiers, which the unconscious cathects, motivate the making of an image

318
 for that signifier in the mind. In dream narration this would concern those
associations that are related to concrete memories. Of course, this memory
already harbours a phantasy with a strong affect that has been staged in the
dream. And it is this unconscious phantasy-analogous to Gadamer's
Sinnhorizont-that the analyst tries to make conscious so that the patient can
understand the primary experience that constructed the scenario of the dream.
Indeed, such primary scenarios of experience might be the oedipal triangle,
the mother-child symbiosis in feeding, or the scene of castration, which, as
figures of experience (i.e. allegories)'\ structure the imaginary scenes that the
subject ultimately constructs in his or her mind when he or she reads the text
on the level of its rhetorical structure. This reading of the text's figurality
sidesteps the verbal appeal to positive representation (Darstellung) by taking,
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in its place, the route of an emotive appeal.

III. Interpretation and the Body

In thinking Gadamer together with Lacan, it is important to note that in
Gadamer's work little attention is paid to the significance of the body. This,
of course, is where Gadamer's philosophy differs markedly from French
phenomenology, and in particular, the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Lacan. Gadamer's philosophy is still largely
influenced by Wilhem Dilthey and German Idealism as well as Kant's theory
of taste upon which the notion of community is built. In paying attention to
the figurality of language, feminist psychoanalysts like Julia Kristeva and
Luce Irigaray have been especially sensitive to the fact that the substrate of
the figure may well be the body. When Lacan spoke of Ia langue, he was
making the point that the substrate of language is the physical embodiment
of language in the figure and body of the mother. In considering the
unconscious as language, it has to be said that the drive in the dynamic
unconscious does not refer to a physical instinct but rather exerts the
changing dynamics of investment (cathexis) itself. This includes the body in
signification, since it is the body's original satisfaction that gave the child the
feeling of being whole. It is only after the encounter with language that the
experience of wholeness is lost and satisfaction is broken down into the
functional units of needs which can only be articulated as demands for
objects. "Precisely because by and through language, needs are diversified
and reduced to a point at which their scope appears to be of a quite different
order, whether in relation to the subject or to politics" 15 can they be
manipulated into being satisfied in the realm of the imaginary to which the
signifying (literary) strategies of language cater. Because language inserts
itself and creates the difference between imaginary and physical experience,
it blocks the body's possession of itself because, as much as reference to
one's body wants to be a conscious effort, it is nonetheless dependent on a

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 mediation in representation. The subject thus responds to an image of his
body-self and not to the source of his need.
In the gap between bodily experience and language, desire emerges as a
mode of being frustrated by an encounter with an other who is not the
mother. On the significance of that symbolic Other, Lacan writes:
Demand in itself bears on something other than the satisfactions it calls for. It is demand of a
presence or of an absence-which is what is manifested in the primordial relation to the
mother, pregnant with that Other to be situated within the needs that it can satisfy. Demand
constitutes the Other as already possessing the 'privilege' of satisfying needs, that is to say,
the power of depriving them of that alone by which they are satisfied. The privilege of the
Other thus outlines the radical form of the gift which the Other does not have, namely, its
love. 16
What the Other offers is a false presence constituted by the signifiers of
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language that simulate the experience of an appeal for id_entification with the
(m)other. Identification requires the repression of otherness and as such the
subject has to repress the mother, because she alienates his needs at the
moment these needs are transformed into signified constructs. The capacity
for repressing that which originarily sustained the subject's life, the presence
of the mother, guarantees the subject's survival in language. This is what
constitutes the primal repression which can never be lifted, because it
supports the capacity of language to function in the place of the mother
where identification can take place via a representation. (Indeed, the very
fact of identification is prepared by the physical need for the mother when
the infant was not able to distinguish between its and the other's body.)
Unconsciously, the subject is still linked with the mother, a linkage which on
the conscious level is demonstrated by identification with an other. Lacan
attributes this capacity for identification to a meconnaissance which
constitutes the (conscious) Ego-function of the subject when it gives in to the
illusion of being that language offers. The syntactical structure built on the
copula "be" defines the subject: "I am that." 17
The nature of the demand that estranges the subject's needs-it abolishes
their particularity in its metaphor for love-is determined by language. Thus
linguistic "proofs of love" are only representations of not being. The
difference between language, the signifier, and being engenders desire for
being, hence splitting the subject into a conscious and an unconscious
signifying function. Lacan insists that the subject cannot know its desire but
can only mis-take the demand of love with reference to the Other on which
both are contingent. In the order of language, the sign is thus not a sign of
love but a signifier for desire, inscribed by Lacan in a theory of the
unconscious as:
'discours de /'Autre' (discourse of the Other), in which the de is to be understood in the
sense of the Latin de (objective determination): de Alia in oratione (completed by: tua res
agitur). 18

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 A non-linguistic example for the significance of a signifying relation
between desire and the unconscious is the transitional object, the security
blanket or the nappie, which relieves the anxiety of detaching from the
security of the mother-child symbiosis. This transitional object also serves as
a signifier for an unconscious phantasy of being loved, which Lacan
identifies as the condition of the unconscious because it means something
else than it represents: "The representative of representation in the absolute
condition is at home in the unconscious, where it causes desire according to
the structure of the phantasy ... "I9
This definition is comparable to Freud's drive that cannot have its own
representation but can only attach itself to one. Thus the representation
(perception) is only representative of the drive (memory), Vorstellungs-
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repriisentanz. The memory that the drive enacts in the place of the Other, as
the repetitive "force" of memory, endows the signifier with a representation
that unconsciously satisfies the drive in a vicarious way. The drive
experienced in the child's need to avoid anxiety enacts the remembrance of
the mother by way of the nappie that stands for the phantasy of being whole.
Thus the place of the Other, which is occupied by the pillow or blanket,
serviced by the drive, keeps the presence of the memory trace in the
unconscious mind.
Transposed into language where the subject operates on a double level, in
conscious and unconscious signification, the function of the signifier is "to
represent a subject for another signifier." 2° For Lacan, the subject is merely
an effect of language, and we might add, of language that makes sense to a
mind, or of a language that has the quality of affect, of an affect expressed.
Invested with the drive, the signifier acts merely as a metaphor for the
subject's demand for love, a demand that is addressed only to himself. Thus
the metaphor is read on another level as a displacement of desire because the
subject has to recognize that the proofs of love are his own investments in
the Other as opposed to merely himself. The displacement of the signifier of
the drive articulates another signifier that is read by the unconscious as a
"signifier of a lack in the Other." 21 Language cannot give love.
This displacement of the signifier of the drive takes place across the
whole signifying chain as a metonymic movement whose operation of
combining signifiers achieves the power of designing and designating a
figure that is recognized by the subject's unconscious as the original scenario
of desire. Since no one word in its object representation expresses the
experience that desire is after, it takes a series of words that, in their
contiguity, render at least a figure or a figurative context for that desire.
Hence the drive contributes to signification on the level of substitution by
attaching itself to a word other than the one that might cause the
representation of the desired "object." Meaning is then effected by a

321
 temporary satisfaction through an overdetermination of a sign while the
cathexis is transferred from the desired but censured representation to a
word-representation affected by the word's signified. Language becomes the
necessary psychological interface between desire and meaning.
Whereas desire aims at an imaginary, unrepresentable object, (and can
thus only be articulated but not satisfied in language precisely because it is
articulated there in the place of the Other) 22 the drive, on the contrary, can
invest a signifier and use it as an ersatz object of satisfaction in a metaphor-
like fashion. The drive can thus represent itself in a representation; this
means that the mental representation does not represent the drive but that it
functions as a signifier for a memory image that is repressed.
Of course the signifiers of representation can vary. The exchangeability
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of representations for the drive links drive with desire, and desire can never
be arrested in just one signifier. In relation to desire, the drive acts out its
temporal force (repetition) by cathecting various signifiers; this aids in
bringing words into contact with one another, thereby creating a signifying
chain that is not ordered by its individual signifieds but by the metonymy of
contiguity. In the unconscious, the movement of the drive likewise traces a
path in an unstructured field of simultaneous memory traces. The mobility
of the drive differentiates the memory traces along a diachronic line
drawing the outline of a figure. This process comes close to what Kant calls
"hypotyposis" activated in the encounter with a text. As a repetition of
(libidinal and semiotic) cathexis, this elaboration of the drive acts
rhythmically in spacing the signifiers and allowing a potentially significant
pattern or form to occur. It is through an imaginary figuration in the text
that the rhetoric of the unconscious comes to speak in the order of the
Other. Yet the rhetoric of unconscious signifiers is nonetheless not
established out of its own accord but through the fall of the subject into
language. Hence the scenario of being is not the subject's creation, but is
the creation by the Other, by the interaction of cathected signifiers in
language. The desire for being is thus also the desire of the Other, of that
which is radically other:
Man's desire is also the desir de /'Autre (the desire of the Other) in which the de provides
what grammarians call the 'subjective determination', namely that it is qua Other that he
desires (which provides for the true compass of human passion). 23

IV. Conclusion: Tradition as Translation

In returning to our Gadamerian theme of the text of tradition, we can now
say that tradition is necessarily associated with the unconscious Other of
language that speaks the subject. As language would not have meanings
without tradition, tradition would not be passed on in the desire for meaning
if the logos could not name being as desire in language. Thus logos is hardly

322
 impassionate, for it supports the human condition of suffering in history that
it asserts as both a linguistic and emotive signifier.
Gadamer' s notion of hermeneutical understanding is contingent on
language being conceptual-representational in that words do not refer to a
specific reality of determinable objects. Instead, they motivate us to transfer
their meanings on to a word used in the connection with another word
previously encountered in a text. The motivation indicates an unconscious
relation between the word as signifier for our unconscious (those not yet
meaningful experiences) and the context of the word (i.e., what is being said
in the text) which supplies a signifying structure that in the process of
understanding is read as a metaphor for our experience; this experience has
until now lacked a conscious image in response to a word. The metaphoric
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movement involved in this interpretation transfers the contextual meaning of

the word into a figure of our own speech which then engenders a
representation, an imaginative scenario, or a representational stage for our
feelings. We can therefore be made aware of our use of language, and its
historical or affective contingency can be judged. This enactment of the
representational scene via language in the figure of speech vis-a-vis the
historical text allows us to grasp the content that language has for us. When
Gadamer proclaims the unity of word and matter,-he does not say
"concept" or "thing" but Sache-, he intends this content in relation to the
fact that the word always already appeals to our realm of representations
which is constituted by our historical situation, our experiences.
Because the word belongs to a transmitted text and not to our own
personal context, it directs our imagination in a way that proves that the
meaning of our experiences is tied to and mediated by a cultural tradition
that can only find expression once it is passed on in language. What is
important, is that tradition works in language as a function of the subject's
imagination.
Tradition is neither language nor imagination, it is the relationship
between the two. Language as tradition is part of our unconscious where the
transference, the translation of the past into the meaning of the present, i.e.
the meaning for us, takes place. This unconscious translation is itself only
possible because the unconscious is constituted by marked signs that,
according to Lacan, interact with one another like a language. These signs
become meaningful and hence conscious for the subject once they are
interpreted by an other, the text or another person, in any case in a dialogue,
because it is there, in this intersubjectivity, that a translation of unconscious
and un-understood experience into meaning begins. What happens in this
translation embedded in the dialogue is that the existential desire for
meaning coincides with the desire for being, words take on the feeling of
being alive, of experiencing life that makes sense to the person. But the life

323
 force is a force towards expression, of cathecting what is commonly and
culturally available, i.e. language, with a sense of one's own.
The purposiveness or representability of tradition, we could now say, lies
in this translation of linguistic signifiers of the past into meanings,
historically meaningful signs, for and in the present. It performs this task
through the transference that the individual engages in language through
imagination. In this transference, the past is transmitted (iiberliefert) in the
subject's perception of a multitude of signs which gives him or her the sense
of a meaningful existence, an existence in history. The subject's relation to
the world in and as history is contingent on the structure of signs in which an
experience is repeated for the sake of its meaning. Its capability of building
the subject's horizon is reflected in a development of the conceptuality of
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language.
If we are spoken by language, in the sense that the logos speaks through
us, then the logos is a manifestation of tradition; logos is able to transform
words into historically determined representations of our imagination. What
speaks through us is not then a voice or a word but a power that is not
conscious of its effects because it presents itself in the form of ver-stehen, of
standing in another place than from which we speak when we traverse the
world in imagination.
London Metropolitan University

References
I. Lang, H. Language and the Unconscious. Jacques Lacan 's Hermeneutics of
Psychoanalysis, trans!. Th. Brockelman (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997).
2. Lang, p.l78.
3. See, "Replik zu Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik" in Gadamer, H.-G., Gesammelte Werke ,
vol. 2 (Tiibingen: Mohr, 1986), pp.257-261.
4. Freud did say that our memory is deposited in various kinds of signs and that "from time to
time the existing material of memory traces experiences a re-ordering [Umordnung]
according to new relations, a transcription [Umschrift]." Freud, S., Aus den Anfiingen der
Psychoanalyse. Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, Abhandlungen und Notizen aus den Jahren
1887-1902 (London: Imago, 1950), p.l85.
5. Gadamer, H.-G., Wahrheit und Methode (Tiibingen: Mohr, 1975), p. 279. (All
translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. In the following all Gadamer
quotations are from his Wahrheit und Methode). ["Die Hermeneutik muB davon
ausgehen, daB wer verstehen will, mit der Sache, die mit der Oberlieferung zur Sprache
kommt, verbunden ist und an die Tradition AnschluB hat oder AnschluB gewinnt, aus
der Oberlieferung spricht. "].
6. cf. Lacan, J., "Position de L'inconscient," Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p.838 f.
7. Leclaire, S., Ecrits pour La psychanalyse. Vol. I (Paris: Arcanes, 1996), p.I46.
8. Lacan points to the Surrealist school that has shown us "that any conjunction of two
signifiers would be equally sufficient to constitute a metaphor, except for the additional
requirement of the greatest possible disparity of the images signified, needed for the poetic
spark, or in other words for metaphoric creation to take place." 'The Agency of the letter
in the unconscious or reason since Freud," Ecrits. A Selection , trans!. Alan Sheridan (New
York, London: Norton, 1977), p.I56.

324
 9. Gadamer, p.442. ["Die Bewegung des Bestimmens ist hier nicht an die feste Basis des
Subjekts gekniipft, 'an der sie hin und wider lauft'. Das Subjekt wird nicht bestimmt als
dies und auch als das, in einer Hinsicht so und in anderer Hinsicht anders. Das ware die
Weise des vorstellenden Denkens, nicht die des Begriffes. Im begreifenden Denken wird
vielmehr das natiirliche Ausgreifen des Bestimmens tiber das Subjekt des Satzes hinaus
gehemmt und 'erleidet, es so vorzustellen, einen GegenstoB. Vom Subjekte anfangend, als
ob dieses zum Grunde liegen bliebe, findet es, indem das Pradikat vielmehr die Substanz
ist, das Subjekt zum Pradikat iibergegangen und hiermit aufgehoben ... "']
10. Gadamer, p.439. ["Nicht nur, daB der Sprachgebrauch und die Fortbildung der
sprachlichen Mittel ein solcher Vorgang ist, dem kein einzelnes BewuBtsein wissend und
wahlend gegeniibersteht-insoweit ist es buchstablich richtiger zu sagen, daB die Sprache
uns spricht, als daB wir sie sprechen ... "]
II. Ibid.
12. Husser!, E., Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy, Second Book, trans!. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht, London,
Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:30 21 June 2015

Boston: Kluwer, 1993), p.205 f.

13. Ibid. ["Die Wahrheit der Oberlieferung ist wie die Gegenwart, die den Sinnen unmittelbar
offenliegt. Die Seinsart der Oberlieferung ist freilich keine sinnlich unmittelbare. Sie ist
Sprache, und das Horen, das sie versteht, bezieht ihre W ahrheit in ein eigenes sprachliches
Weltverhalten ein, indem es die Texte auslegt. Diese sprachliche Kommunikation
zwischen Gegenwart und Oberlieferung war, wie wir gezeigt haben, das Geschehen, das in
allem Verstehen seine Bahn zieht."]
14. For an elaboration of reading allegorically as opposed to mimetically see the last chapters
of my book The Hieroglyph of Tradition. (London: Associated University Presses, 200 I).
15. Lacan, "The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian
unconscious," Ecrits, p.309.
16. Lacan, "The signification of the phallus," Ecrits, p.286. ["La demande en soi porte sur
autre chose que sur les satisfactions qu'elle appelle. Elle est demande d'une presence ou
d'une absence. Ce que Ia relation primordiale a Ia mere manifeste, d'etre grosse de cet
Autre a situer en defa des besoins qu'il peut combler. Elle constitue deja comme ayant le
'privilege' de satisfaire les besoins, c'est-a-dire le pouvoir de les priver de cela seul par
quoi ils soot satisfaits. Ce privilege de I' Autre dessine ainsi Ia forme radicale du don de ce
qu'il n'a pas, soit ce qu'on appelle son amour." Ecrits (French edition), p.691.]
17. cf. Lacan, "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I," Ecrits.
18. Lacan, 'The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire ... ," Ecrits , p.312.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., p.316.
21. Ibid.
22. The relation of the subject to the signifier in articulation is one that prevents a
representation of being because it "kills" the I of articulation: "Being of non-being, that is
how I as subject comes on the scene, conjugated with the double aporia of a true survival
that is abolished by knowledge of itself, and by a discourse in which it is death that
sustains existence." Lacan, "Subversion of the subject ... ", p.300.
23. Ibid., p.312.

Bibliography
Freud, S., Aus den Anfongen der Psychoanalyse. Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, Abhandlungen und
Notizen aus den Jahren 1887-1902 (London: Imago, 1950).
Gadamer, H.-G., "Replik zu Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik" in Gesammelte Werke , vol. 2
(Tiibingen: Mohr, 1986).
Husser!, E., Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy,
Second Book, trans!. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht, London, Boston: Kluwer, 1993).

325
 Gadamer, H.-G., Wahrheit und Methode (Tiibingen: Mohr, 1975).
Lacan, J., Ecrits. A Selection, trans!. A. Sheridan (New York, London: Norton, 1977).
Lang, H. Language and the Unconscious. Jacques Lacan 's Hermeneutics of Psychoanalysis,
trans!. Th. Brockelman (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997).
Leclaire, S., Ecrits pour Ia psychanalyse. Vol. I (Paris: Arcanes, 1996).
Rauch, A., The Hieroglyph of Tradition. (London: Associated University Presses, 2001).
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