LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 2
WITHDRAWALS FROM MEANING
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should be clear. Whereas structuralism characteristically refrains from questioning the existential status of meaning, aesthetic theory quite expressly judges meaning to be illusory or imaginary.
Obviously such a characterization of meaning puts aesthetic theory squarely at odds with hermeneutical phenomenology. This is certainly the case with Badiou. Interestingly, both Badiou and Heidegger privilege poetry over other forms of art. They both agree it is capable of truth, one held to be immanent to its artistic effect. But whereas Heidegger embraces artistic truth only insofar as it adequately articulates the meaning of being, Badiou argues that it belongs to art singularly and absolutely. It does not circulate among other domains of truth, like science. Accordingly, an account of its existence is possible by restricting interpretation to the specific procedures of art. Briefly, artistic truth is a subjective composition which proceeds along a precise path: in the beginning is the event, which is sustained by a subject who engages in finite artistic investigations in the name of that event; such fidelity results in a sequence of particular artworks; this composes an infinite truth, the artistic configuration, which operates as the pertinent unit for a thinking of art. If this methodology nevertheless seems scientifically inspired, it is with good reason. Badiouian understanding is one predicated on the fundamental axioms of set theory. In fact, accompanying the emergence of artistic truth is the void, the empty set of mathematics. Whether the void, truth, or the initiating event serves to interrupt the regime of meaning for Badiou, his lesson remains. Internal to the experience of art are elements which sever the subject’s relation to the meaning disclosed therein.
Other disruptions to the field of meaning have surfaced through recent developments in Kantian aesthetic theory. In simplified terms, a work of art is a product of artistic activity. It thus bears the mark of purposiveness. But Kant argued that it appears beautiful only insofar as it is experienced as serving no definite purpose. This is true of natural beauty as well. Despite being interrogated by teleological judgment, the attempt to discern hidden purposes at work in the mechanical laws of nature is in vain. Beauty can never proceed from a conscious plan. Whether adhering to artworks or products of nature, it must appear without reason or end. It is as if beauty spontaneously emerges from a void, or a gap in nature’s causal chain. Here lies the site of the sublime. Its notion indexes the discord between beauty and purpose, articulating their negative intersection. Kant accordingly characterized sublime phenomena as being neither beautiful nor purposive: nature at its most chaotic displays the very opposite of beauty’s harmonious form, while such inexpedient excess dispirits faith in nature’s hidden purposiveness. However, Kant did not work out a specific aesthetic theory of the sublime. He found the sublime only in crude nature of sufficient magnitude and might, never in artworks or banal natural objects. If St. Peter’s Basilica nevertheless did convey something of the sublime for Kant, this was due to its colossal size, not its aesthetics.
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