The Conflict of Interpretations Essays in - Paul Ricoeur

Paul Ricoeur
Edited by
The Conflict
of Interpretations
Essays in Hermeneutics
DON IHDE
THE ATHLONE PRESS

LONDON
First published in Great Britain 1989 by
THE ATHLONEPRESS
1 Park Drive, London NW11 7SG
Reprinted 2000
English translation © Northwestern University Press 1974

Originally published as Le Confit des interpretations: Essais
d'hermeneutique © Editions du Seuil 1969
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Contents
Editofs Introduction, by Don Ihde / ix
Existence and Hermeneutics, translated by

Kathleen McLaughlin / 3
I. H e r m e n e u t i c s a n d St r u c t u r a l i s m
Structure and Hermeneutics, translated by Kathleen

McLaughlin / 27
The Problem of Double Meaning as Hermeneutic Problem and as
Semantic Problem, translated by Kathleen McLaughlin / 62
Structure, Word, Event, translated by Robert Sweeney / 79
II. He r m e n e u t ic s a n d P s y c h o a n a l y s is
Consciousness and the Unconscious, translated by

Willis Domingo / 99
Psychoanalysis and the Movement of Contemporary Culture,
translated by WiUis Domingo / 121
A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud, translated by
Willis Domingo / 160
Technique and Nontechnique in Interpretation, translated by
Art and Freudian Systematics, translated by
III. He r m e n e u t ic s an d P h e n o m e n o l o g y
Nabert on Act and Sign, translated by Peter McCormick / 211

Heidegger and the Question of the Subject / 223
[vii]
The Question of the Subject：The Challenge of Semiology,
translated by Kathleen McLaughlin / 236
IV. T h e S y m b o l i s m o f E v i l I n t e r p r e t e d
"Original Sinw：A Study in Meaning, translated by

Peter McCormick / 26g
The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection：I,
translated by Denis Savage / 287
The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection：II,
translated by Charles Freilich / 315
The Demythization of Accusation, translated by
Peter McCormick / 335
Interpretation of the Myth of Punishment, translated by
Robert Sweeney / 354
V. R e l i g i o n a n d F a it h
Preface to Bultmann, translated by Peter McCormick / 381

Freedom in the Light of Hope, translated by
Guilt, Ethics, and Religion / 425
Religion, Atheism, and Faith, translated by
Charles Freilich / 440
Fatherhood：From Phantasm to Symbol, translated by
Bibliography / 499
Index / 507
Editor’s Introduction
T h e VECTORS AND LINES OF FORCE of Paul Ricoeur’s

thought stand out in bolder contrast in The Conflict of Inter-
pretations than in the more systematic works of the same period.
The twenty-two essays which appear here, most for the first time
in English translations, span the period 1960-69, during which
time The Symbolism of Evil (i960) and Freud and Philosophy
(1965) also appeared. But the shorter form of the theses elabo
rated here are often not only more concise statements of themes
also found in the systematic works but stand out in stronger and
more explicit terms. Moreover, the hints of new directions and
increasingly of problems which will appear in Ricoeur’s forth
coming Poetics of the WiH begin to surface.
At first this collection of essays is striking in its diversity：
structuralism and linguistic analysis, hermeneutics and phe
nomenology, psychoanalysis and the question of the subject, re
ligion and faith, are all discussed. This is more than a concrete
testimonial to Ricoeu^s cathcdlcity of interests. For, upon closer
reading, the same systematic and dialectically critical thinking
which has become Ricoeur’s hallmark in contemporary phi
losophy shows itself.1
The guiding thread which unites these diverse interests and
which holds the clue for the direction of Ricoeu^s thought is the
1. See Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology： The Philosophy of

Paul Ricoeur (Evanston, 111.： Northwestern University Press, 1971).
[ix]
X / C O N F L I C T OF I N T E R P R E T A T I O N S
question of hermeneutics, interpretation. The hermeneutic ques
tion, in very recent years, has come into its own as a philosophic
question linked both to what has been the overriding concern of
philosophers in the twentieth century— the philosophy of lan
guage一 but also to what is now emerging as a new interest in the
foundations of the human or social sciences.
Nor can these two questions be separated. Man is lan
guage, as both Ricoeur and Heidegger are fond of saying. Lan
guage as <<lnstitutionMis already a social phenomenon. Thus, even
though seemingly distant, the questions of the structure or logic
of language remain subterraneously linked to questions of so
ciality and human historicality. One could build a case that those
philosophies of language which have emerged in Anglo-Ameri
can circles have sometimes tended to txeat language as if it were
a kind of self-generating computing <<machine>, which contains a
certain series of finite laws which in turn produce proper sen
tences almost without the intervention of the human speaker.
On the other hand, expressing this argument in its most ex
treme form, Continental thinkers have sometimes tended to
think of language too exclusively as the act of a speaker, an ex
pression of a subject. This is particularly the case in the giving
of an implicit, if not explicit, privilege to the <cbringing-to-speechM
of novel discourse.
It is almost as if a certain “Cartesian” split had occurred at
the English Channel, with linguistic <<mechanists>, holding the
day on one side and linguistic “spiritualists” holding the day on
the other. That too gross characterization, of course, no longer
obtains today. In Germany there is a revival of interest in ana
lytic and even neopositivistic concerns, while in the United States
the impact of hermeneutics has begun to be felt, especially in
the philosophy of the social sciences.
But Ricoeur in his own way also seeks to span this set of
linked but unresolved tendencies in the philosophy of language.
And it is in the hermeneutic question that he finds a certain key
toward the resolution of the relation between ^speech actw and
the or structure of language. In The Conflict of Interpreta
tions it remains the case that the influences of linguistic analysis
remain on the fringes. His more recent studies of Wittgenstein,
particularly in relation to a certain parallelism with the develop
ment of phenomenology, are not included, nor are the even more
recent studies of metaphor. But nevertheless, there are back
ground references to Austin, Strawson, and Wittgenstein. What
can be noted here, though, is a deeper sympathy for ordinary-
Editor's Introduction / xi
language philosophies than for the formalistic approaches to
language. Austin's appreciation of the extraordinary wealth of
ordinary language, Strawson’s use of a “descriptive” metaphysics,
and Wittgenstein^ noting of the complicated flexibility of lan
guage in the notion of language games strike immediate re
sponse for phenomenological thought in its own nonreductive
tendencies.
But the stronger influence here is that of structuralism. In
part this is natural, for France has been the center of much of
the structuralist Interest and conflict. Ricoeur plays the role of a
rigorous but friendly critic to Levi-Strauss in the Parisian cli
mate. The success of the Esprit editions on structuralism, which
sold out and sold out again on reprinting, testify to this strong
current of structuralist thought in France (see, in this volume,
^Structure and Hermeneutics>, and ^Structure, Word, Evenr).
On one level, that of the dialectic of a phenomenological
focus with a body of “objectivist” theory as a counterfocus, Ri-
coeur’s debate with and use of structuralism follow a pattern of
thought already well established as a working habit. Structuralist
linguistics is questioned carefully and analyzed in terms of both
operational and foundational presuppositions. Ricoeur grants,
with a preliminary charity not often found in more polemical or
radical thinkers of the phenomenological tradition, that there is
a certain necessity to the “objectivism” of structuralism, pre
cisely in order to establish language as an “object” and structur-
alist analysis as a “science.”
But this idealization of language into a system operating ac
cording to structural laws pays a price. This price is that it can
deal with language only at a certain level and only within a
certain set of presuppositionally prescribed Kmfts. Tiius， as Ri
coeur contends in “Structure, Word, Event,” structural linguistics
begins with the supposition that language may be treated as a
corpus, a closed and already constituted system (synchrony
takes precedence over diachrony). Then, within this assumed
closure of language, structural linguistics may begin to establish
units (analysis of parts), note oppositions (binary relations),
and establish a calculus of elements and their possible relations.
Ricoeur points out that such a set of operational presupposi
tions is implicitly a reductionist move from the start. Not only
does It deliberately suppress the diachronic to the synchronic,
which is to subsume history to structure, but it deliberately reads
out of consideration the speaking subject. The act of speaking,
in one sense the fulfillment of language, is excluded from the
Xii / CONFLICT OF INTERPRETATIONS
start and, within the strictest confines of a structuralist analysis,

cannot be reintroduced. In this, structuralist linguistics is yet
another triumph of a “Cartesian” science. For it is only by exiling
the ‘"body” from the “soul,” ‘language’’ from “speech,” that a
<<Cartesian>,science is established. Language as a system of inter
related units is not only idealized under the presuppositions of
structuralism but operates as a kind of “idealism,” i.e., as a sys
tem of internal relations.
It is at this juncture, however, that Ricoeur differentiates his
basically phenomenological stance from that of both Merleau-
Ponty and Heidegger. Merleau-Ponty, before Ricoeur, entered
into the debate with structuralism. He, too, recognized the im-
plicit reductionism of a system of signs which reads the subject
out of the field of language. His response, too, was dialectical,
but, according to Ricoeur, too directly so (cf. M The Question of
the Subject：The Challenge of Semiology,>). At least in the Phe
nomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty^ response was that of
reinstating the primacy of the speaker. The embodied subject
is primordially an expressive subject. The chapter dealing with
language and speech there is titled 4The Body as Expression and
Speech/' And the privileged illustrations are those which point
up “first words,” a certain coming-into-speech of initial discourse
such as that of the “first man,” the child with first words, the
creative speaker, such as poet or artist. The countermovement
in Merleau-Ponty tends toward a phenomenology of speech in
contrast to a system of language.
Heidegger, according to Ricoeur, opts for an even more radi
cal ôntology of understanding,wwhich, in efFect, transforms the
whole question of speech and language (see Êxistence and
Hermeneutics”） . It is a route which forces, as Ricoeur says, a
choice between a fundamental ontology and contemporary epis
temology. And while Ricoeur does not close the door on the radi
cal Heideggerian strategy, his objection to both Merleau-Ponty
and Heidegger is that both, in effect, close off the possibility of
debate with and use of the linguistic sciences. Thus in a sense
Ricoeur’s more indirect, more cfialectical route is also more “con
servative.” It is only fferaugfe contemporary epistemology and a
theory of hermeneutics that one will be able to deal with struc
turalism or any of the current linguistic disciplines. Ricoeur's ap-
proach is one of attaining ontology by degrees, through method
ological considerations.
But the use of approximations hides another key to Ricoeur*®
Editor's Introduction / xiii
development of hermeneutic phenomenology. It is through the
development of a theory of the levels of language that structural
ism and the other linguistic disciplines are both located and
limited. A “higher” level locates and limits a ‘lower”-level in
vestigation. But what must be noted is that the “lower” level does
not in the process lose any of its claim to a proper domain of
validity or even of a certain “universality.”
Semiotics, the linguistic disciplines which operate at the
level of language as “objectified,” constitute the lowest, but also
the necessary, level of language as structure. The semiotic con
stitution of language is the finitude of language. Moreover, there
is a certain “universality” even here, for whatever is expressed is
expressed within the limits or structures of the system of signs.
This is the case whether one speaks a simple declarative state
ment or a primitive confession of evil, to which Ricoeur gives
privileged status in his own analysis of symbols as the location of
the fullness of language.
Yet, in spite of the necessity and universality of the finite
structure of language, there is also an infinite focus in the dialec
tic of levels. Language at its highest level is open. This is re
vealed in simple speech, which, while activating the “mech
anism” of the system, also says. Here is event, choice, the new,
the referential, the discursive. (That is why Chomskyan agen-
erative grammar” poses a challenge to structuralism. For the
simple fact that any normal speaker of a language can imme
diately understand a new sentence, one never uttered before,
must necessarily pose an enigma for any absolute structuralism
of pure difference or of pure “internal relations.”）
This dialectic of finite-infinite, closed-open, in relation to lan
guage and speech recalls a similar pattern of thought developed
earlier in Fallible Man. There the infinity of ^verb/* or word act,
was mediated and located through the finitude of perspective.
The significative situation of man is primordially both perception
and language, a seeing and a saying. Now, within language it
self, the finitude of structure mediates the infinity of event.
But just as in Fallible Man there was a wthird termw which
unites the foci of the dialectic, so now within the region of lan
guage there is a M third termwwhich is word itself. Word is both
system and act, structure and history. And in a sense this most
Obvious, most familiar phenomenon of language and speech
poses itself late only because it was too obvious to begin with.
Yet the obvious is not the simple. For word within itself is
Xiv / CONFLICT OF INTERPRETATIONS
already polysemic, as Ricoeur underlines. Within itself word

poses itself with a certain potential for opacity, which is also its
richness.
Moreover, although every word is already latently rich in
polysemy, for Ricoeur the hermeneutics of language centers
upon certain privileged words, those of the symbolic word. Her
meneutics becomes primarily, under Ricoeur's use, the interpre
tation and investigation of those words which have a certain type
of multiple sense.
The location of the hermeneutic problem for Ricoeur takes
its specific shape in words which have symbolic significance,
which have a ^metaphoricar structure. And although the for
mula varies from time to time, the form it takes in Existence
and Hermeneutics,w an article which Ricoeur claims is a very
important statement of his position, indicates the outline of the
hermeneutic problem. “I define ‘symbol’ as any structure of
meaning in which a direct，primary， literal sense designates in
addition another sense which is indirect, secondary, and figura
tive and which can be apprehended only through the firsts
In turn, the hermeneutic task is that of deciphering this mul
tiple significance. Înterpretation . . . is the work of thought
which consists in deciphering the hidden meaning in the ap
parent meaning, in unfolding the levels of meaning implied in
the literal meaning*9 Here hermeneutics makes contact with its
older exegetical traditions in the task of deciphering texts.
The text, in this case, is not, however, the simple narrative
or descriptive treatise but is a text in which there is some analog
ical or allegorical significance. Thus the surface meaning may
Tiide” or “conceal” or at least “contain” a less obvious deptii
meaning which is nevertheless dependent upon the surface lit
eral meaning. The work of the hermeneut is to discover and ex
plicate that significance.
But this textual model for the hermeneutic task becomes, in
Ricoeur^ thought, much more than a matter of textual inter
pretation or exegesis alone. It is the case, of course, that, before
becoming a philosophical problem as such, hermeneutics was a
religio-theological problem. The development of types of exegesis
and textual analysis which were interested in the symbolic in
Ricoeur^ sense has had a long history in biblical interpretation.
But Ricoeur^ aim is to graft hermeneutics to a phenomenological
philosophy. This is his version of a hermeneutic phenomenology.
There are three aspects to this M graftw of hermeneutic prob
lems and textual paradigms to a phenomenological methodology
Editor9s Introduction / xv
which are of interest in pointing up the development of Ricoeur's
hermeneutic phenomenology. First, in some of the earlier essays
in The Conflict of Interpretations, those surrounding the period
of the Symbolism of Evil, Ricoeur tends to stick much more
closely to the notion of a textual analysis of symbolic discourse.
In both parts of the ^Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical
Reflection,Ricoeur is concerned with working out the method
ological grounds for a theory of analogous meaning. Here phe
nomenology enters as a version of a comparativist strategy and
as a means of “recovering” the intentionalities of symbolic ex
pressions, i.e., of unlayering the experiential significations of
these expressions. Thus the constellation of meaning surround
ing the various confessions (fazû) of the experience of evil are
. At a higher level— the insertion of symbolic words into
a system of meanings is discerned and hermeneutics
also becomes the explication of the forms of the great cultural-
religious myths.
However, the second step in expanding the graft of herme
neutics to phenomenology toward a hermeneutic philosophy of
existence,” as Hicoeur cafis his project, begins to occur in a much
more radical form in the period which surrounds the time of
Freud and Philosophy. There remains a €<textuar element. The
Freudian interpretation of dreams, of art works, of jokes, is read
by Ricoeur as a type of hermeneutics. It is an interpretation
which deals with the expressions of the patient；thus its therapy
works within the domain of the verbal. The psychoanalyst must
interpret the dream “text” and the “text” of the joke or the slip of
the tongue. Freudian hermeneutics remains within the world of
language.
But, at the same time, the object of the analysis is no longer
a text as such but is the human subject. And it is precisely at
thiBjuncturethatRicoeur’sownradicalizatlonofphenom enol-
Ogy begins to emerge. The transference which occurs may be put
analogously：the subject becomes, under a hermeneutic analysis,
a text. But in Ricoeur's sense the subject as text is a text
that is symbolic and, therefore， calls for a work of deciphering.
It is at this juncture that the two figures who dominate the fore
ground of much of The Conflict of Interpretations become con
textually understandable. What is needed is a means of inter-
pretatlon which takes into account the hidden meaning of the
text-self.
These two figures are Freud and Hegel. Moreover, in Ri-
coeur*s treatment of these two dominant figures, each becomes a
XVl / C O N F L I C T OF I N T E R P R E T A T I O N S
kind of Inversion of the other. They belong together as founders
of related hermeneutics of suspicion. What they have in common
Is a mistrust and suspicion of (immediate) consciousness.
Through them an attack is made upon (immediate) subjectivity，
particularly in its direct or Cartesian form.
Ricoeur sees in both Freud and Hegel a hermeneutics which
deliberately displaces the immediacy of consciousness and which
in turn reveals a stratum of significance within the subject
which was hitherto unsuspected ( at least by the subject him
self). The functional similarity of the Freudian and Hegelian
hermeneutics lies in their respective strategies of the dispos
session of immediacy.
Freutfs detour from immediacy, justified by the vast and
complicated theory of the unconscious, provides a way into hid
den significances which the persistent narcissism of self-bewitch-
ment keeps from the subject. This detour, regressive toward the
childhood of the self, gradually unlayers the archaic sediments
of the constitution of the subject. Freuds psychoanalysis pro
vides an archaeology of the subject. Hegel's direction of inter
pretation is inverse to that of Freud. It is the progression of be-
coming aware which provides, according to Ricoeur, a teleology
of the spirit. But this teleology, too, displaces immediacy through
a dialectic of unfolding meanings. In the march of the “figures”
of the Spirit, the hidden truth of a previous meaning is revealed
only in and through the transcending of the previous meaning.
Thus the Hegelian teleology is a progressive interpretation. Pro
gression and recession are inversions of the same problematic.
This is not to say that Ricoeur repeats Freud and Hegel. To
the contrary, the phenomenological dialectic which he employs
also serves to demj/thofogize both Freud and Hegel. Ricoeur re
jects the “realism” of the Freudian unconscious, just as he re-
jects the “idealism” of the Absolute Idea in Hegel. In this sense
Ricoeur remains radically phenomenological in his rigorous re
jection of metaphysics, of reification, of closure.
What is accepted fits, however, under the notion of an analy
sis of the subject as text. The aunconscious,> and the configura
tion of future possibilities of ^spirir function as the hidden depth
meaning of a text which the hermeneutics of suspicion allows to
emerge. Thus the necessity of the wager of suspicion concerning
“false consciousness” appears only after the risic of suspicion has
been taken.
But now a question is raised concerning phenomenology It
Editor’s Introduction / xvii
self. At least there is a question which must confront phenome
nology interpreted as a method which deals with consciousness
directly and which continues any pretension to consciously con
trol its meanings. The hermeneutics of suspicion enters into the
dialectical pattern with that of phenomenology, and phenome
nology must stand “humiliated” in the confrontation. But at a
deeper level this chastisement is also a recovery from within
phenomenology itself. For in spite of HusserFs surface language
of egology, of transcendental idealism, of solipsism, the subject,
even in the Husserlian sense, does not know itself direcdy.
Rather, it knows itself only in correlation with and through the
mirror of the World. The other reveals me to myself in a way
which radically modifies any naive or direct self-knowledge.
Thus, out of a dialectic of phenomenology with an other
there comes a further radicalization of phenomenology. But, in
the process, phenomenology, under Ricoeufs use, takes on a
different significance. If the iconoclastic and suspicious her
meneutics of false consciousness are the counterparts of phe
nomenology, then phenomenology becomes in contrast an im-
pllcit hermeneutics of belief.
It is at this juncture that the third aspect of the graft of her
meneutics to phenomenology begins to take specific shape. Inso
far as the origin and model for hermeneutics come out of the
biblical tradition, its problem includes the question of faith. The
hermeneutics of belief in Ricoeu^s use of it is already latently
religious in intention. Hidden in the hermeneutic problem, now
linked to an understanding of phenomenology itself, is the ques
tion of faith.
With the question of faith in the background, the dialectic
of hermeneutics which emerges is one which counterplays those
Interpretations of meanings which demythize the existential cum
religious significations with those which seek a “recovery” of
M f 〇rgottenwsignifications. The counterpart of suspicion is a latent
belief in Ricoeufs version of a hermeneutic phenomenology.
But once phenomenology has passed through the chastise
ment of a suspicious hermeneutic, there is no recovery of simple
faith ；if faith is to survive, it must be an informed, critical faith.
Thus, once again, a type of “third term” is sought. Its model is
that of a type of demythologization. Demythologization is a proc-
i l f of interpretation which accepts the loss of all pretensions to
direct M rationalityMin symbolic discourse, but at the same time
this loss Is seen as the way toward a freeing, a recovery, of the
symbolic-existential dimension. Symbolic word li i word which
opens, wKich explores the possibilities of mankind In relation to
the sacred.
That is also why, ultimately, Hegel must take precedence
over Freud, why teleology surpasses archaeology in relation to
the subject. The displacement of immediacy does not become an
excuse for either a return to prephenomenological objectivism
or for a closure upon the subject. It becomes the radicalization
of belief itself.
It will not be missed that The Conflict of Interpretations con
tains Rlcoeur^ most explicitly religious themes and questions
to date. Moreover, the section on religion and faith carries the
most recently dated (1968-69) articles of this book. But, while
this is so, and may even be disappointing to philosophers more
interested in questions of language and culture, what Ricoeur
does with the question of faith needs to be looked at carefully.
For what happens with the question of faith is similar to
what happens with both psychoanalysis and the Hegelian dia
lectic. Even while Freud and Hegel dominate the foreground,
while they are taken into a dialogue with Ricoeur to the point of
being incorporated into the very Leart of a dialectical hermeneu
tic, the result for an “orthodox?’ Freudian or an “orthodox” He-
gelian cannot help but be disquieting. For, in the process, both
Freud and Hegel are seriously demythologized and transformed.
A Freud in effect without an unconsciousness or a Hegel without
an Absolute Idea is after all not the same as before. In fact, what
seemed to be either foundation or goal in the respective justify
ing metaphysics is now removed through hermeneutics.
Returning to the graft of the hermeneutic problem to a phe
nomenological methodology, we find that the question which
arises is one directed toward what is included in Ricoeur’s version
of a W new phenomenologywof which he speaks. The graft, in Ri-
coeu^s case, bears evidence of a previous graft, perhaps old
enough not always to be noticed：the graft of the question of
faith to the hermeneutic problem itself. This may be noted by
attending to three facets of the question of faith, which now
undergoes its own process of demythologization in a ttnew phe-
nomenology•”
First, there is and has been from the outset a certain suspi
cion and a use of phenomenology to demythologize theology. For
Ricoeur, theology begins too late. Already in the Symbolism of
Evil, what is taken as more fundamental, more primitive for
phenomenology are the primary expressions of evil. These pri
mary or archaic and metaphorical symbols are ^closer^ to the
things themselves than theology. Theology is at best a third-level
elaboration of such symbols (symbols are primary, myths are al
ready secondary, and theology is tertiary). Thus, methodologi
cally, what is needed prior to theology is the recovery of the
primitive intentionalities found in the expressions of the experi
ence of evil. But in addition to the udistance,> of theology from
these primary expressions, theology may also hide essential di
mensions of this experience in a pseudorationality, an implicit
gnosis. Thus for a second reason theology is methodologically
demythologized.
In the present essays there are some attempts to recover this
primary sense through a critique of theology (see Ôriginal Sin ：
A Study in Meaning” and “Interpretation of the Myth of Punish
ment”），but it remains the case that there is a negative tone re-
garding theology. But this critique is not simply due to Ricoeur；
It lies in the heart of phenomenology. Theology is to “religious”
phenomena what metaphysics is to “scientific” phenomena, and
to get to the phenomena calls for a radical undercutting of cur
rently taken-for-granted presuppositions encased in currently
sedimented theologies.
This is not to say that Ricoeur does this in the same way that
Husserl would. The Husserlian language of getting back to the
“things themselves” is considerably misleading in that it appears
to be a quest for some pure or simple “given.” But there is no
pure “given”一 although that is a second lesson and not the first
iesson of phenomenology in action. The language of “givenness”
or even of “pregivenness” is heuristic. It is a means of creating a
different perspective from which to view things, a deliberate
forcing of issues such that current sediments are stirred up in
order to discover other possibilities.
Ricoeur has recognized this from the beginning. In relation
to the archaic man who utters his confession of the experience
of evil, Ricoeur does not find some privileged romantic access to
the sacred but an already “fallen” situation in which the expres
sion is more an unfulfilled intention than an indication of access
to the sacred. But it is in the lack of fulfillment that the question
of possibility is raised.
A second step in the demythologization of faith itself through
hermeneutics occurs in the dialectic of the counterparts, a her
meneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of belief. Instruc
tive in this regard is the often repeated treatment of the father
figure (see ‘Tatherhood: From Phantasm to Symbol” ） . Ricoeur
applies the dialectic of a Freudian regressive and demythizlng
analysis to the father figure first. Thus the father figure must be
recognized as relating to both punishment and consolation in
terms of the desires and the immaturity of the subject, and this
deep-seated and archaic constellation undergoes a radical de
my thization and even rejection. But in a second interpretation,
progressive under the sign of Hegel, the father figure becomes
“identified” with the son in a play and coimterplay like that of
the master-slave relationship in the Phenomenology of Mind.
Here the fate of the father “becomes” that of the son. But the
“third term” is one which existentlalizes this dialectic. For what
the demythization of the father reveals when it is coupled to the
development of the identity of the father in the son is the ques
tion of being-toward-death. And although Ricoeur does not use
such explicitly Heideggerian language, the dialectic of approxi
mations leads to this same question.
It is in the unique way that Ricoeur answers the question of
facing death revealed through the demythologization of the sym
bol that he is differentiated from Heidegger. And it is here that
a third step is taken. From the demythologization of theology
through the demythologization of the symbol Ricoeur moves to
a more radical stage in respect to faith itself. Faith, too, must
undergo criticism (see “Religion, Atheism, and Faith” and “Free
dom in the Light of Hope”） . Although the Freud-Hegel dialectic
need not be followed in detail, faith is seen to conceal within
itself a dimension of primitive immaturity with respect to the
recalcitrant narcissism of the subject. Without acceptance of the
death of the father and, by extension, even ultimately without
some sense of the death of God, maturity cannot come to hu
mankind. Thus Ricoeur makes contact with the contemporary
strands of the “death of God” and “secular” theologies. Througii
a hermeneutic critique the question of faith itself is displaced.
This displacement now applies to the “second naivet6，”
spoken of earlier by Ricoeur. Contemporary man is not primarily
a man of faith, and the chastisement of the hermeneutics of be
lief by the hermeneutics of suspicion must be genuine. But the
“third term” which appears through the displacement is in keep
ing with the very early sense of an “ontology of affirmation” that
Ricoeur once sought. For what displaces faith is hope. Ricoeur
recognizes that hope has rarely been made central in theology一-
but ttiat is what he proposes.
The emergence of hope as a central religious notion echoes,
not the foreground figures of Freud and Hegel, though the open-
ended Hegel of Rlcoeur*s interpretation remains important, but
the background figure of Kant. Kant has always served as a
figure of limitation for Ricoeur；and it may now be recalled that
it was Kant who defined the religious question solely in terms of
<4What can I hope for?w Furthermore, it is the Kant of Religion
within the Limits of Reason Alone. This preference on Ricoeur's
part, however, does not stem from a mere preference for “ration
alism” but from the needs imposed by a demythologized, chas-
tised faith.
Faith is displaced from the center, and under the displace
ment a number of other shifts occur as well. Immediacy is dis
placed, and with it the pretension of the subject to self-deter-
mination. This has been a constant in Ricoeur's philosophy, but
now immediacy is also linked to the sense of the present which
is displaced for the sake of the future. Theologically, this is to
displace the God who is for the God who is to come. There is a
lateral displacement as well, in that emphasis upon the indi
vidual is displaced by an emphasis upon the social.
In his earlier works Ricoeur often began with and gave a
privileged weighting to what he called the "'ethical view of the
world/* For example, in the analysis of the cultural-religious
myths, the role of the Adam figure in the only truly anthropologi
cal myth was a role dominated by this "'ethical view/' With the
displacement of faith by hope, Ricoeur now speaks of a M new
ethics” in accordance with hope.
This • ■ . trait of freedom in the light of hope removes us . . .

from the existential interpretation that is too much centered on
the present decision；for the ethics of mission . . . a new ethics
[which] marks the linkage of freedom to hope . . . has com
munitarian, political, and even cosmic implications which the
existential decision, centered on the personal interiority, tends to
hide. A freedom open to the new creation is in fact less centered
on subjectivity, on personal authenticity, than on social and
political justice；it calls for a reconciliation which itself demands
to be inscribed in the recapitulation of all things.
The future, now clearly weighted under the sign of the prom
ise, is an eschatological response to the question of being-toward-
death. *lt is the meaning of my existence in the light of the
Resurrection . . . ; hermeneutics of religious freedom is an
interpretation of freedom in conformity with the Resurrection in
terms of promise and hope." This response to being-toward-death
is “in spite o f’ death.
This affirmation is not Justified, however, by ftny of the coun
terparts of hermeneutic phenomenology in Ricoeur's sense, for
its “logic,” which Ricoeur calls the ‘logic of superabundance:
does not rest on the precedence of structure over history but on
the precedence of the future, of history to come, over the present.
However, the hope that is central is a hope engendered through
the very opening provided by hermeneutic phenomenology in its
uncovering of possibilities：
We would call freedom in the light of hope the ^passion for the
possibleM ；this formula, in contrast to all wisdom of the present, to
all submission to necessity, underscores the imprint of the promise
of freedom. Freedom entrusted to the “God who comes” is open
to the radically new；it is the creative imagination of the possible.
There is in this displacement of faith from the center through

hope, which takes its place, an anticipation of what Ricoeur’s
Poetics of the Will must be. Hope is the <<answer>, to evU；and the
‘logic” of hope must be a renewal of contemporary eschatology
in which the symbols of hope are elicited from a progressive in
terpretation of polysemic word. Hidden in the present is the
promise of the future.
There are two extremely suggestive hints concerning the
shape and direction of faith demythologized and the task to
come which Ricoeur has lately termed a “post-Hegelian Kantian
ism.” The first regards a direction which arises out of Ricoeur’s
central theology of hope.
Faith justifies the man of the for whom, in the great
romance of culture, evil is a factor in the education of the human
race, rather than the puritan, who never succeeds in taking the
step from condemnation to mercy and who thus remains within
the ethical dimension and never enters into the perspective of
the Kingdom to come.
Eschatology takes precedence over ethics in the “new ethics.”

As for philosophy's task, its shape retains the constant echo
of Hegel, who gives to Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology its
open and ongoing dialectical character：
What [is demanded] of the philosopher is nothing else but this：
to undertake again, with renewed energy, the task assumed in the
last century by Hegel, of a dialecticsd philosophy which woiald
take up the diversity of the schemes of experience and reality into
a systematic unity. Now, it is indeed with renewed energy that
we must take up this task once again, if it is true that, on the one
hand, the unconscious ought to be assigned another place than
the categories of reflectivo pbiloiophy ind that, on the other hand,
hope li destined to open what aysttm tends to close up. That Is
the task. But who today could assume It?
To the contemporary ear these themes must indeed sound
strange. In contrast to tones of alienation, anomie, and despair,
Ricoeur proclaims a revival of hope even to the extent of echoing
the Enlightenment. In contrast to the increase in belief in the es
sential finitude of the earth and its life, Ricoeur announces that
hl8 thought will turn to a ‘logic of superabundance” which op»
crates “in spite o f’ the present outlook. For here is what may fie
called a new rationalism in its echo of progressivist thought, al
most forgotten.
Perhaps this is prophecy, the announcement of a turning of
the time. In Kazantzakis" Last Temptation of Christ, prophecy is
characterized as the wisdom which sees that things will return
to a forgotten way ；and to announce this at the right moment is
to be prophetic. But it must also be recalled that this observation
la made cynically by Judas. The prophecy which notes only a
return of eternal reaction and response is not historical but ahis-
torical, in that it takes place in a secret view of the Whole, a
totality which is ever the same.
Ricoeur struggles mightily against such a closure of history.
His philosophy, shaped by a version of a quasi-Hegelian dialec
tic, rejects any premature closure upon an Absolute Idea. In
stead, hope directed to the God to come functions as the unful-
fllled intention of the dialectic. But Hegel usually has his revenge
upon those who follow him. In this respect, Ricoeur, like Marx
before him, implicitly claims history to have a direction which
is fulfilled in a surplus.
What is unsaid, however, is that faith, hidden within hope,
remains. For if the hermeneutics of history was strictly the phe
nomenological discovery of the vastness of the possible, then
here there imist be a second step, which remains unjustified by
the passion for the possible. Were the phenomenological discov
ery of the possible the ‘last word” of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, the
conclusion would have to be that history is open and therefore
unpredictable by reason of the very essence of possibility. Thus
while the historical essence of sociality and human history does
Indeed hold the possibility of discontinuities, among those dis
continuities must also be the possibility of a *logic of scarcity>,
and an “economy of loss” unless the irruptions of genuine history
are subterraneously guided by a God not yet come but who re
mains the secret of the future.
XXiV / C O N F L I C T OF I N T E R P R E T A T I O N S
Faith thus remains hidden within hope, for it is not just any
possible which history may reveal, but certain possibilities, those
which respond to and fulfill hope. In this respect Ricoeur stands
a second time in contrast to the existential theories, which never
theless remain in the same register. There is a sense in which
the existential philosophies have also too soon believed a de
termination of the possible in terms of a secretly accepted meta-
physics. The “meaninglessness” of a universe untime2 to man’s
desires echoed in Camus and Sartre is an existential version of
the highly pervasive physicallst metaphysics of the twentieth
century. Ricoeur, in contrast, revives a historical theology which
sees the openness of the historical moving in a different direc
tion.
But a question remains：does a radical phenomenology of
history take yet a third direction, a direction which remains truer
to the “passion for the possible”？For Ricoeur the burden of proof
to be demonstrated in his promised Poetics must be one which
at one and the same time preserves the openness of genuine his
tory while making the case for hope.
II
R i c o e u r ’ s m a s s i v e b i b l i o g r a p h y — which now consists

of over three hundred items— combined with his regular ap
pearance in translation, has posed a continual problem. More
than most, Ricoeur has had to find English expression through
multiple translators whose tastes and abilities have varied
widely. In the present case we have utilized a small number of
extant translations and have used a team of Ricoeur readers for
the rest. This necessarily poses a problem for the consistent use
of terms. We have tried to attain as much consistency as possi
ble, using in some cases already established conventions from
earlier translations and in some cases a conformity with North
western University Press style for its phenomenology series. But
even simple words sometimes pose problems. For example, in
stance in Freudian contexts (reflecting Freuds term Instanz) is
translated as “agency,” while, in the context of structural lin
guistics, it is translated as “instance,” following Benveniste’s
translator. The same double context occurs in the use of parole,
which in its theological context means V o rd / connoting that
which conies to man, while In a linguistic context U li Nipeech9w
Editor's Introduction / xxv
which is an act of man speaking. Ricoeur^ use of multiple con

texts, from Hegel studies to structural linguistics to analytic phi
losophy, complicates the issue. In the main we have tried to let
the context decide and have explained the problems in footnotes.
A further difficulty was introduced by the fact that Ricoeur,
in preparing these collected essays一 in their French versions—
for his French publisher, made a number of revisions in essays
that had previously appeared in English translation. Discrep
ancies between the published versions of these essays and the
texts that appear here are thus due in part to Ricoeur's own re
visions and in part to our desire to achieve a consistent terminol
ogy throughout the book.
I t is o u r h o p e that this long process of minute decisions will

result in a further appreciation of the power of Ricoeur^s careful
thought as it probes crucial issues in twentieth-century philoso-
phy. In Ricoeur one finds a mind which is both open and fastid
ious, searching and reasoned. The crossroads of the contem
porary search for a deeper rationality meet in The Conflict of
Interpretations. And, if there is no closure or resolution of the
conflicting interpretations, that, too, is a reflection of the position
of the thinker in the present.
Don Ihd垮
State University of New York
Stony Brook
December, 1973
The Conflict
of Interpretations
To E nrico C a ste lli

Existence and Hermeneutics
My p u r p o s e h e r e is to explore the paths opened to con

temporary philosophy by what could be called the graft of the
hermeneutic problem onto the phenomenological method. I shall
limit myself to a brief historical reminder before undertaking
the investigation as such, an investigation which should, at least
at its close, give an acceptable sense to the notion of existence—
a sense which would express the renewal of phenomenology
through hermeneutics.
I. T h e O r i g i n o f H e r m e n e u t i c s
T h e h e r m e n e u t i c p r o b l e m arose long before Hus

serl’s phenomenology; this is why I speak of grafting and, prop-
erly, must even say a late grafting.
It is useful to recall that the hermeneutic problem was first
raised within the limits of exegesis, that is, within the framework
of a discipline which proposes to understand a text_ to under
stand it beginning with its intention, on the basis of what it at
tempts to say. If exegesis raised a hermeneutic problem, that is,
a problem of interpretation, it is because every reading of a text
always takes place within a community, a tradition, or a living
current of thought, all of which display presuppositions and
exigencies— regardless of how closely a reading may be tied to
the quid, to "'that in view of whichw the text was written. Thus,
based on philosophical principles in physics and in ethics, the
Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin.
[3]
reading of Greek myths in the Stoic school lmpllei a hermeneu
tics very different from the rabbinical interpretation of the Torah
in the kalakah or,the Haggadah. In its turn， the apostolic gen
eration’s interpretation of tLe Old Testament in the light of the
Christie event gives quite another reading of the events, institu
tions, and personages of the Bible than the rabbinical interpreta
tion.
In what way do these exegetic debates concern philosophy?
In this w ay ：that exegesis implies an entire theory of signs and
significations, as we see, for example, in Saint Augustine^ De
doctrina Christiana. More precisely, if a text can have several
meanings, for example a historical meaning and a spiritual
meaning, we must appeal to a notion of signification that is
much more complex flian the system of so-called univccal signs
required by the logic of argumentation. And finally, the very
work of interpretation reveals a profound intention, that of over
coming distance and cultural differences and of matching the
reader to a text which has become foreign, thereby incorporating
its meaning into the present comprehension a man is able to
have of himself.
Consequently, hermeneutics cannot remain a technique for
specialists一- the techne hermeneutikS of those who interpret
oracles and marvels；rather, hermeneutics involves the general
problem of comprehension. And, moreover, no noteworthy in
terpretation has been formulated which does not borrow from
the modes of comprehension available to a given epoch：myth,
allegory, metaphor, analogy, etc. This connection between in
terpretation and comprehension, the former taken in the sense
of textual exegesis and the latter in the broad sense of the clear
understanding of signs, is manifested in one of the traditional
senses of the word Tiermeneutics” 一 the one given in Aristotle's
Peri hermineias. It is indeed remarkable that, in Aristotle, her-
meneia is not limited to allegory but concerns every meaningful
discourse. In fact， meaningful discourse is herm泛7ieia, ‘Inter
prets” reality, precisely to the degree that it says “something of
something.>, Moreover, discourse is hermeneia because a dis
cursive statement is a grasp of the real by meaningful expres
sions, not a selection of so-called impressions coming from the
things themselves.
Such is the first and most primordial relation between the
concept of interpretation and that of comprehension；it relates
the technical problems of textual exegesis to the more general
problems of meaning and language.
But exegesis could lead to a general hermeneutics only by
means of a second development, the development of classical
philology and the historical sciences that took place at the end
Of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth century.
It is with Schleiermacher and Dilthey that the hermeneutic proi>
lem becomes a philosophic problem. The title of the present sec
tion, “The Origin of Hermeneutics,” is an explicit allusion to the
title of Dilthey’s famous essay of 1900. Dilthey’s problem, in the
age of positivistic philosophy, was to give to the Geisteswissen-
ichaften a validity comparable to that of the natural sciences.
Posed in these terms, the problem was epistemological；it was a
question of elaborating a critique of historical knowledge as solid
as the Kantian critique of the knowledge of nature and of sub
ordinating to this critique the diverse procedures of classical her
meneutics ： the laws of internal textual connection, of context,
of geographic, ethnic, and social environments, etc. But the
resolution of the problem exceeded the resources of mere epis
temology. An interpretation, like Dilthey*s, bound to informa
tion fixed by writing is only a province of the much vaster do
main of understanding, extending from one psychic life to
another psychic life. The hermeneutic problem is thus seen from
the perspective of psychology：to understand, for a finite being,
is to be transported into another life. Historical understanding
thus involves all the paradoxes of historicity：how can a his
torical being understand history historically? These paradoxes,
in turn, lead back to a much more fundamental question：in ex
pressing itself, how can life objectify itself, and, in objectifying
itself, how does it bring to light meanings capable of being taken
up and understood by another historical being, who overcomes
his own historical situation? A major problem, which we will
find again at the close of our investigation, is thus raised ：the
problem of the relationship between force and meaning, between
life as the bearer of meaning and the mind as capable of linking
meanings into a coherent series. If life is not originally meaning
ful, understanding is forever impossible；but, in order for this
understanding to be fixed, is it not necessary to carry back to life
itself the logic of immanent development which Hegel called the
concept? Do we not then surreptitiously provide ourselves with
all the resources of a philosophy of the spirit1 just when we are
1. [Throughout this book we have translated Ricoeur’s “esprit”
(Hegel’s “Geist” ） as “spirit” rather than “mind,” and in harmony with
this the title of Hegel's work will appear in the text as The Phenomenology
of the Spirit.一 E dito r .]
formulating a philosophy of life? Such is the major difficulty
which justifies our search for a favorable structure within the
domain of phenomenology or, to return to our initial image, for
the young plant onto which we can graft the hermeneutic slip.
II. G r a f t in g H e r m e n e u t ic s o n t o P h e n o m e n o l o g y
T h e r e a r e t w o w a y s to ground hermeneutics in phe

nomenology. There is the short route, which I shall consider
first, and the long route, the one I propose to travel. The short
route is the one taken by an ontology of understanding, after the
manner of Heidegger. I call such an •ontology of understanding
the “short route” because, breaking with any discussion of
method, it carries itself directly to the level of an ontology of
finite being in order there to recover understanding, no longer as
a mode of knowledge, but rather as a mode of being. One does
not enter this ontology of understanding little by little；one does
not reach it by degrees, deepening the methodological require
ments of exegesis, history, or psychoanalysis：one is transported
there by a sudden reversal of the question. Instead of asking ：On
what condition can a knowing subject understand a text or his
tory? one asks ：What kind of being is it whose being consists of
understanding? The hermeneutic problem thus becomes a prob
lem of the Analytic of this being, Dasein, which exists through
understanding.
Before saying why I propose to follow a more roundabout,
more arduous path, starting with linguistic and semantic con
siderations, I wish to give full credit to this ontology of under
standing. If I begin by giving due consideration to Heideggers
philosophy, it is because I do not hold it to be a contrary solution；
that is to say, his Analytic of Dasein is not an alternative which
would force us to choose between an ontology of understanding
and an epistemology of interpretation. The long route which I
propose also aspires to carry reflection to the levef of an ontology,
but it will do so by degrees, following successive investigations
into semantics (in part III of this essay) and reflection (part
IV). The doubt I express toward the end of this section is con
cerned only with the possibility of the making of a direct ontol
ogy, free at the outset from any methodological requirements and
consequently outside the circle of interpretation whose theory
this ontology formulates. But it is the desire for this ontology
which animates our enterprise and which keeps It ftom sinking
into either a linguistic philosophy like Wittgenstein's or a reflec
tive philosophy of the neo-Kantian sort. My problem will be ex
actly this ：what happens to an epistemology of interpretation,
bom of a reflection on exegesis, on the method of history, on
psychoanalysis, on the phenomenology of religion，etc” when it
It touched, animated, and, as we might say, inspired by an ontol
ogy of understanding?
Let us then take a look at the requirements of this ontology
of understanding.
In order to thoroughly understand the sense of the revolution
In thought that this ontology proposes, we must in one leap ar
rive at the end of the development running from HusserFs Logi
cal Investigations to Heideggefs Being and Time, prepared to
ask ourselves later what in Husserl's phenomenology seems sig
nificant in relation to this revolution in thought. What must thus
be considered in its full radicalness is the reversal of the question
itself, a reversal which, in place of an epistemology of interpreta-
tton, sets up an ontology of understanding.
It is a question of avoiding every way of formulating the
problem erkenntnistheoretisch and, consequendy, of giving up
the idea that hermeneutics is a method able to compete on an
equal basis with the method of the natural sciences. To assign a
method to understanding is to remain entangled in the presup
positions of objective knowledge and the prejudices of the Kant
ian theory of knowledge. One must deliberately move outside the
enchanted circle of the problematic of subject and object and
question oneself about being. But, in order to question oneself
about being in general, it is first necessary to question oneself
about that being which is the “there” of all being, about Dasein,
that is, about that being which exists in the mode of understand
ing being. Understanding is thus no longer a mode of knowledge
but a mode of being, the mode of that being which exists
through understanding.
I fully accept the movement toward this complete reversal of
the relationship between understanding and being；moreover, it
fulfills the deepest wish of Dilthey^ philosophy, because for him
life was the prime concept. In his own work, historical under
standing was not exactly the counterpart of the theory of nature；
the relationship between life and its expressions was rather the
common root of the double relationship of man to nature and of
man to history. If we follow this suggestion, the problem is not
to strengthen historical knowledge in the face of physical
knowledge but to burrow under scientific knowlttdgt, taken In all
its generality, in order to reach a relation betwoon historical being
and the whole of being that is more primordlul than the subject-
object relation in the theory of knowledge.
If the problem of hermeneutics is posed in these ontological
terms, of what help is HusserFs phenomenology? The question
invites us to move from Heidegger back to Husserl and to rein
terpret the latter in Heideggerian terms. What we first encounter
on the way back is, of course, the later Husserl, the Husserl of
the Crisis；it is in him first of all that we must seek the phe
nomenological foundation of this ontology. His contribution to
hermeneutics is twofold. On the one hand, it is in the last phase
of phenomenology that the critique of “objectivism” is carried to
its final consequences. This critique of objectivism concerns the
hermeneutic problem, not only indirectly, because it contests the
claim of the epistemology of the natural sciences to provide the
only valid methodological model for the human sciences, but also
directly, because it calls into question the Diltheyan attempt to
provide for the Geistesvnssenschaften a method as objective as
that of the natural sciences. On the other hand, HusserFs final
phenomenology joins its critique of objectivism to a positive
problematic which clears the way for an ontology of understand
ing. This new problematic has as its theme the Lebenswelt, the
wlife-world,wthat is, a level of experience anterior to the subject-
object relation, which provided the central theme for all the
various kinds of neo-Kantianism.
If, then, the later Husserl is enlisted in this subversive under
taking, which aims at substituting an ontology of understanding
for an epistemology of interpretation, the early Husserl, the Hus
serl who goes from the Logical Investigations to the Cartesian
Meditations, is held in grave suspicion. It is he, of course, who
cleared the way by designating the subject as an intentional pole,
directed outward,2 and by giving, as the correlate of this subject,
2. [The French term used here to describe the subject is porteur de
visiet which in turn renders the German die Meinung, employed fre
quently by Husserl. The French substantive (visSe) and verb (viser) are
often translated in English as “intention” and “to intend,” respectively.
When asked about his use of the term, Ricoeur himself stressed the out
ward directedness of intention, the fact that the subject points toward or
aims at its object. Indeed, in expressions such as visee intentionnelle he
makes it impossible to view visie and intention as completely equivalent
terms. In the present essay (and elsewhere in the book, as well一 E d .)
visee and viser have been rendered variously by ^directed outward/*
and “intention,” according to the context in which they appear.— T r a n s
la t o r .]
not a nature but a field of meanings. Considered retrospectively
from the point of view of the early Husserl and especially from
the point of view of Heidegger, the early phenomenology can ap
pear as the very first challenge to objectivism, since what it calls
phenomena are precisely the correlates of intentional life. It re
mains, nevertheless, that the early Husserl only reconstructed a
new idealism, close to the neo-Kantianism he fought：the reduc
tion of the thesis of the world is actually a reduction of the ques
tion of being to the question of the sense of being；the sense of
being, in turn, is reduced to a simple correlate of the subjective
modes of intention [visie].
It is thus finally against the early Husserl, against the al
ternately Platonizing and idealizing tendencies of his theory of
meaning and intentionality, that the theory of understanding has
been erected. And if the later Husserl points to this ontology, it
Is because his effort to reduce being failed and because, conse
quently, the ultimate result of phenomenology escaped the initial
project. It is in spite of itself that phenomenology discovers, in
place of an idealist subject locked within its system of meanings,
ft living being which from all time has, as the horizon of all its
Intentions, a world, the world.
In this way, we find delimited a field of meanings anterior to
the constitution of a mathematized nature, such as we have
represented it since Galileo, a field of meanings anterior to ob
jectivity for a knowing subject. Before objectivity, there is the
horizon of the world ；before the subject of the theory of knowl
edge, there is operative life, which Husserl sometimes calls
anonymous, not because he is returning by this detour to an im
personal Kantian subject, but because the subject which has ob
jects is itself derived from this operative life.
We see the degree of radicality to which the problem of un
derstanding and that of truth are carried. The question of his-
toricity is no longer the question of historical knowledge con
ceived as method. Now it designates the manner in which the
existent 'Is withMexistents. Understanding is no longer the re
sponse of the human sciences to the naturalistic explanation；it
involves a manner of being akin to being, prior to the encounter
with particular beings. At the same time, life’s ability to freely
stand at a distance in respect to itself, to transcend itself, be
comes a structure of finite being. If the historian can measure
himself against the thing itself, if he can compare himself to the
known, it is because both he and his object are historical. Making
this historical character explicit is thus prior to any methodology.
10 / C O N F L I C T OF I N T E R P R E T A T I O N S
What was a limit to science— namely, the historicity of being
— becomes a constituting element of being. What was a para
dox— namely, the relation of the interpreter to his object—
becomes an ontological trait.
Such is the revolution brought about by an ontology of under
standing. Understanding becomes an aspect of Dasein's M projectw
and of its “openness to being.” The question of truth is no longer
the question of method；it is the question of the manifestation of
being for a being whose existence consists in understanding be
ing.
However great may be the extraordinarily seductive power of
this fundamental ontology, I nevertheless propose to explore
another path, to join the hermeneutic problem to phenomenology
in a different manner. Why this retreat before the Analytic of
Dasein? For the following two reasons. With Heidegger's radical
manner of questioning, the problems that initiated our investiga
tion not only remain unresolved but are lost from sight. How, we
asked, can an organon be given to exegesis, to the clear compre
hension of texts? How can the historical sciences be founded in
the face of the natural sciences? How can the conflict of rival
interpretations be arbitrated? These problems are not properly
considered in a fundamental hermeneutics, and this by design：
this hermeneutics is intended not to resolve them but to dissolve
them. Moreover, Heidegger has not wanted to consider any par
ticular problem concerning the understanding of this or that be
ing. He wanted to retrain our eye and redirect our gaze；he
wanted us to subordinate historical knowledge to ontological un
derstanding, as the derived form of a primordial form. But he
gives us no way to show in what sense historical understanding,
properly speaking, is derived from this primordial understanding.
Is it not better, then, to begin with the derived forms of under
standing and to show in them the signs of their derivation? This
implies that the point of departure be taken on the same level on
which understanding operates, that is, on the level of language.
The first observation leads to the second：if the reversal
from epistemological understanding to the being who under
stands is to be possible, we must be able to describe directly—
without prior epistemological concern— the privileged being of
Dasein, such as it is constituted in itself, and thus be able to
recover understanding as one of these modes of being. The dif
ficulty in passing from understanding as a mode of knowledge
to understanding as a mode of being consists in the following：
the understanding which is the result of the Analytic of Daieln is
Existence and Hermeneutics / n
precisely the understanding through which and in which this
being understands itself as being. Is it not once again within
larûage itself that we must seek the indication that understand-
ing is a mode of being?
These two objections also contain a positive proposition：
that of substituting, for the short route of the Analytic of Dasein,
the long route which begins by analyses of language. In this way
we will continue to keep in contact with the disciplines which
seek to practice interpretation in a methodical manner, and we
will resist the temptation to separate truth, characteristic of
understanding, from the method put into operation by dis
ciplines which have sprung from exegesis. If, then, a new
problematic of existence is to be worked out, this must start
from and be based on the semantic elucidation of the concept of
Interpretation common to all the hermeneutic disciplines. This
•emantics will be organized around the central theme of mean
ings with multiple or multivocal senses or what we might call
•ymbolic senses (an equivalence we will justify in due time).
I will indicate immediately how I intend to reach the ques
tion of existence by the detour of this semantics. A purely
semantic elucidation remains suspended until one shows that
the understanding of multivocal or symbolic expressions is a
moment of self-understanding；the semantic approach thus en
tails a reflective approach. But the subject that interprets himself
While interpreting signs is no longer the cogita. rather, he is a
being who discovers, by the exegesis of his own life, that he is
placed in being before he places and possesses himself. In this
way, hermeneutics would discover a manner of existing which
Would remain from start to finish a being-interpreted. Reflection
ftlone, by suppressing itself as reflection, can reach the ontologi-
oal roots of understanding. Yet this is what always happens In
language, and it occurs through the movement of reflection,
fuch is the arduous route we are going to follow.
III. T he Level of Semantics
It is f i r s t o f a l l a n d a l w a y s in language that all

ORtlc or ontological understanding arrives at its expression. It is
thua not vain to look to semantics for an axis of reference for
Whole of the hermeneutic field. Exegesis has already ac-
OUltomed ui to the Idea that a text has several meanings, that
12 / CONFLICT OF INTERPRETATIONS
these meanings overlap, that the spiritual meaning is ^trans-

ferred” (Saint Augustine’s tnmsfata sigrza) from the historical
or literal meaning because of the latter’s surplus of meaning.
Schleiermacher and Dilthey have also taught us to consider
texts, documents, and manuscripts as expressions of life which
have become fixed through writing. The exegete follows the
reverse movement of this objectification of tiie life-forces in
psychical connections first and then in historical series. This
objectification and this fixation constitute another form of
meaning transfer. In Nietzsche, values must be interpreted be
cause they are expressions of the strength and the weakness of
the will to power. Moreover, in Nietzsche, life itself is interpreta
tion ：in this way, philosophy itself becomes the interpretation
of interpretations. Finally, Freud, under the heading of ^dream
work,” examined a series of procedures which are notable in
that they “transpose” ( E n t s t e l l u n g ) a hidden meaning, sub
mitting it to a distortion which both shows and conceals the
latent sense in the manifest meaning. He followed the ramifica
tions of this distortion in the cultural expressions of art, moral
ity, and religion and in this way constructed an exegesis of cul-
ture very similar to Nietzsche^. It is thus not senseless to try to
zero in on what could be called the sema?zfic node of every
hermeneutics, whether general or individual, fundamental or
particular. It appears that their common element, which is found
everywhere, from exegesis to psychoanalysis, is a certain archi
tecture of meaning, which can be termed “double meaning"’ or
^multiple meaning,wwhose role in every instance, although in a
different manner, is to show while concealing. It is thus within
the semantics of the shown-yet-concealed, within the semantics
of multivocal expressions, that this analysis of language seems
to me to be confined.
Having for my part explored a well-defined area of this
sem antics,thelanguageofavow al,w hichconstitutesthesym -
b o lis m o f e v il, I propose to call these multivocal expressions
“symbolic•” Thus, I give a narrower sense to the word “symbol”
than authors who, like Cassirer, call symbolic any apprehension
of reality by means of signs, from perception, myth, and art to
science；but I give it a broader sense than those authors who,
starting from Latin rhetoric or the neo-Platonic tradition, reduce
the symbol to analogy. I d e fin e us y m b 〇r a s a n y s tr u c t u r e o f
s ig n ific a tio n i n w h i c h a d ir e c t , p r im a r y , lite r a l m e a n in g d e s ig
n a te s , i n a d d itio n , a n o t h e r m e a n i n g w h i c h is in d ir e c t, s e c o n d a r y ,
a n d fig u r a tiv e a n d w h i c h c a n b e a p p r e h e n d e d o n ly through th e
Existence and Hermeneutics / 13
first.This circumscription of expressions with a double meaning
properly constitutes the hermeneutic field.
In its turn, the concept of interpretation also receives a
distinct meaning. I propose to give it the same extension I gave
to the symbol. I n te r p r e t a tio n , we will say, is t h e w o r k o f t h o u g h t
w h i c h c o n s is t s in d e c ip h e r in g t h e h id d e n m e a n in g i n th e ap
p a r e n t m e a n in g , i n u n f o ld in g th e le v e ls o f m e a n i n g i m p l i e d i n
t h e lite r a l m e a n in g . In this way I retain the initial reference to
exegesis, that is, to the interpretation of hidden meanings. Sym
bol and interpretation thus become correlative concepts；there is
interpretation wherever there is multiple meaning, and it is in
interpretation that the plurality of meanings is made manifest.
From this double delimitation of the semantic field— in
regard to symbols and in regard to interpretation— there results
a certain number of tasks, which I shall only briefly inventory.
In regard to symbolic expressions, the task of linguistic
analysis seems to me to be twofold. On the one hand, there is
the matter of beginning an enumeration of symbolic forms
which will be as full and as complete as possible. This inductive
path is the only one accessible at the start of the investigation,
since the question is precisely to determine the structure com
mon to these diverse modalities of symbolic expression. Putting
aside any concern for a hasty reduction to unity, this enumera
tion should include the cosmic symbols brought to light by a
phenomenology of religion— like those of Van der Leeuw,
Maurice Leenhardt, and Mircea Eliade；the dream symbolism
revealed by psychoanalysis一 with all its equivalents in folklore,
legends, proverbs, and myths；the verbal creations of the poet,
following the guideline of sensory, visual, acoustic, or other
images or following the symbolism of space and time. In spite
of their being grounded in different ways一 in the physiognomi
cal qualities of the cosmos, in sexual symbolism, in sensory
imagery— all these symbolisms find their expression in the ele
ment of language. There is no symbolism before man speaks,
even if the power of the symbol is grounded much deeper. It
is in language that the cosmos, desire, and the imaginary reach
expression；speech is always necessary if the world is to be re
covered and made hierophany. Likewise, dreams remain closed
to us until they have been carried to the level of language
through narration.
This enumeration of the modalities of symbolic expression
calls for a crlteriology as its complement, a criteriology which
would have the task of determining the semantic constitution of
14 / CONFLICT OF IN T E R P R E T A T IO N S
related forms, such as metaphor, allegory, and simile. What is

the function of analogy in “transfer of meaning” ？Are there ways
other than analogy of relating one meaning to another meaning?
How can the dream mechanisms discovered by Freud be in
tegrated into this symbolic meaning? Can they be superimposed
on known rhetorical forms like metaphor and metonymy? Do the
mechanisms of distortion， set in motion by what Freud terms
M dream work,w cover the same semantic field as the symbolic
operations attested to by the phenomenology of religion? Such
are the structural questions a criteriology would have to re
solve.
This criteriology is, in turn, inseparable from a study of the
operations of Interpretation. The field of symbolic expressions
and the field of the operations of interpretation have in fact
been defined here in terms of each other. The problems posed by
the symbol are consequently reflected in the methodology of
interpretation. It is indeed notable that interpretation gives rise
to very different, even opposing, methods. I have alluded to the
phenomenology of religion and to psychoanalysis. They are as
radlcallyopposedaspossible.Thereisnothingsurprisinginthis:
interpretation begins with the multiple determination of symbols
— with their overdetermination, as one says in psychoanalysis；
but each interpretation, by definition, reduces this richness, this
multivocity, and “translates” the symbol according to its own
frame of reference. It is the task of this criteriology to show that
the form of Interpretation is relative to the theoretical structure
of the hermeneutic system being considered. Thus, the phe
nomenology of religion deciphers the religious object in rites, in
myth, and in faith, but it does so on the basis of a problematic
of the sacred which defines its theoretical structure. Psycho
analysis, on the contrary, sees only one dimension of the symbol：
the dimension in which symbols are seen as derivatives of
repressed desires. Consequently, it considers only the network
of meanings constituted in the unconscious, beginning with the
initial repression and elaborated by subsequent secondary re
pressions. Psychoanalysis cannot be reproached for this nar
rowness；it is its raison ditre. Psychoanalytic theory, what
Freud called his metapsychology, confines the rules of decipher
ment to what could be called a semantics of desire. Psychoanaly
sis can find only what it seeks；what it seeks is the tteconomic>,
meaning of representations and affects operating in dreams,
neuroses, art, morality, and religion. Psychoanalysis will thus be
unable to find anything other than the disguised expreMioi^ of
representations and affects belonging to the most archaic of
man’s desires. This example well shows, on the single level of
semantics, the fullness of a philosophical hermeneutics. It be
gins by an expanding investigation into symbolic forms and by a
comprehensive analysis of symbolic structures. It proceeds by the
confrontation of hermeneutic styles and by the critique of sys
tems of interpretation, carrying the diversity of hermeneutic
methods back to the structure of the corresponding theories. In
this way it prepares itself to perform its highest task, which
would be a true arbitration among the absolutist claims of each
of the Interpretations. By showing in what way each method ex
presses the form of a theory, philosophical hermeneutics justifies
each method within the limits of its own theoretical circumscrip
tion. Such is the critical function of this hermeneutics taken at
its purely semantic level.
Its multiple advantages are apparent. First of all, the seman
tic approach keeps hermeneutics in contact with methodologies
as they are actually practiced and so does not run the risk of
separating its concept of truth from the concept of method.
Moreover， it assures the implantation of hermeneutics in phe_
nomenology at the level at which the latter is most sure of itself,
that is, at the level of the theory of meaning developed in the
L o g ic a l I n v e s t ig a tio n s . Of course, Husserl would not have ac
cepted the idea of meaning as irreducibly nonunivocal. He ex
plicitly excludes this possibility in the First Investigation, and
this is indeed why the phenomenology of the L o g ic a l I n v e s t ig a
tions cannot be hermeneutic. But, if we part from Husserl, we
do so within the framework of his theory of signifying expres
sions；it is here that the divergence begins and not at the un
certain level of the phenomenology of the L e b e n s w e lt . Finally,
by carrying the debate to the level of language, I have the feeling
of encountering other currently viable philosophies on a common
terrain. Of course, the semantics of multivocal expressions op
poses the theories of metalanguage which would hope to remake
existing languages according to ideal models. The opposition is
a丨sharp here as in regard to Husserl’s ideal of univocity. On the
Other hand, this semantics enters into a fruitful dialogue with
the doctrines arising from Wittgenstein^ P h ilo s o p h ic a l I n v e s t i
gations and from the analysis of ordinary language in the Anglo-
Saxon countries. It is likewise at this level that a general
hermeneutics rejoins the preoccupations of modern biblical
•xegesls descending from Bultmann and his school. I see this
general hermeneutics as a contribution to the grand philosophy
l6 / CONFLICT OF INTERPRETATIONS
of language which we lack today. We have at our disposal today

a symbolic logic, a science of exegesis, an anthropology, and a
psychoanalysis；and, for the first time perhaps, we are capable
of encompassing as a single question the reintegration of human
discourse. The progress of these dissimilar disciplines has at
once made manifest and worsened the dislocation of this dis
course. The unity of human speech is the problem today.
IV. T he L evel of Reflection
T h e p r e c e d i n g a n a l y s i s , dealing with the semantic

structure of expressions with double or multiple meanings, is
the narrow gate through which hermeneutic philosophy must
pass if it does not want to cut itself off from those disciplines
which, in their method, turn to interpretation: exegesis, history,
and psychoanalysis. But a semantics of expressions with multi
ple meanings is not enough to qualify hermeneutics as philoso
phy. A linguistic analysis which would treat these significations
as a whole closed in on itself would ineluctably set up language
as an absolute. This hypostasis of language, however, repudiates
the basic intention of a sign, which is to hold M for,w thus tran
scending itself and suppressing itself in what it intends. Lan
guage itself, as a signifying milieu, must be referred to existence.
By making this admission, we join Heidegger once again ：
what animates the movement of surpassing the linguistic level
is the desire for an ontology；it is the demand this ontology
makes on an analysis which would remain a prisoner of lan
guage.
Yet how can semantics be integrated with ontology without
becoming vulnerable to the objections we raised earlier against
an Analytic of Dasein? The intermediary step, in the direction of
existence, is reflection, that is, the link between the understand
ing of signs and self-understanding. It is in the self that we have
the opportunity to discover an existent.
In proposing to relate symbolic language to self-understand
ing, I think I fulfill the deepest wish of hermeneutics. The pur-
pose of all interpretation is to conquer a remoteness, a distance
between the past cultural epoch to which the text belongs and
the interpreter himself. By overcoming this distance, by making
himself contemporary with the text, the exegete can appropriate
its meaning to himself：foreign, he makes it familiar, that it, he
makes it his own. It is thus the growth of his own understanding
of himself that he pursues through his understanding of the
other. Every hermeneutics is thus, explicitly or implicitly, self
understanding by means of understanding others.
So I do not hesitate to say that hermeneutics must be grafted
onto phenomenology, not oniy at the level of the theory of mean-
ing expressed in the L o g ic a l I n v e s t ig a tio n s , but also at the level
of the problematic of the c o g ito as it unfolds from I d e e n I to
the C a r t e s ia n M e d ita t io n s . But neither do I hesitate to add that
the graft changes the wild stock! We have already seen how the
introduction of ambiguous meanings into the semantic field
forces us to abandon the ideal of univocity extolled in the L o g ic a l
I n v e s t ig a tio n s . It must now be understood that by joining these
multivocal meanings to self-knowledge we profoundly transform
the problematic of the co g ito . Let us say straight off that it is
this internal reform of reflective philosophy which will later
Justify our discovering there a new dimension of existence. But,
before saying how the c o g ito is exploded, let us say how it is en
riched and deepened by this recourse to hermeneutics.
Let us in fact reflect upon what the self of self-understanding
signifies, whether we appropriate the sense of a psychoanalytic
Interpretation or that of a textual exegesis. In truth, we do not
know beforehand, but only afterward, although our desire to
understand ourselves has alone guided this appropriation. Why
18 this so? Why is the self that guides the interpretation able to
recover itself only as a result of the interpretation?
There are two reasons for this ：it must be stated, first, that
the celebrated Cartesian co g ito , which grasps itself direcdy in
the experience of doubt, is a truth as vain as it is invincible. I do
not deny that it is a truth；it is a truth which posits itself, and
A8 such it can be neither verified nor deduced. It posits at once
A being and an act, an existence and an operation of thought：
I am, I think；to exist, for me, is to think；I exist in s o fa r a s I
think. But this truth is a vain truth；it is like a first step which
cannot be followed by any other, so long as the e g o of the e g o
cogito has not been recaptured in the mirror of its objects, of its
works, and, finally, of its acts. Reflection is blind intuition if it
il not mediated by what Dilthey called the expressions in which
life objectifies itself. Or, to use the language of Jean Nabert,
reflection is nothing other than the appropriation of our act of
existing by means of a critique applied to the works and the
acta which are the signs of this act of existing. Thus, reflection
II a critique, not in the Kantian sense of a Justification of science
l8 / CONFLICT OF INTERPRETATIONS
and duty, but in the sense that the cogito can be recovered only
by the detour of a decipherment of the documents of its life. Re
flection is the appropriation of our effort to exist and of our
desire to be by means of the works which testify to this effort and
this desire.
The cogito is not only a truth as vain as it is invincible ；we
must add, as well, that it is like an empty place which has, from
all time, been occupied by a false cogito. We have indeed learned,
from all the exegetic disciplines and from psychoanalysis in
particular, that so-called immediate consciousness is first of all
“false consciousness.” Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud have taught
us to unmask its tricks. Henceforth it becomes necessary to join
a critique of false consciousness to any rediscovery of the sub
ject of the cogito in the documents of its life ；a philosophy of
reflection must be just the opposite of a philosophy of conscious
ness.
A second reason can be added to the preceding one ：not only
is the “I” able to recapture itself only in the expressions of life
that objectify it, but the textual exegesis of consciousness col
lides with the initial “misinterpretation” of false consciousness.
Moreover, since Schleiermacher, we know that hermeneutics is
found wherever there was first misinterpretation.
Thus, reflection must be doubly indirect： first, because
existence is evinced only in the documents of life, but also be
cause consciousness is first of all false consciousness, and it is
always necessary to rise by means of a corrective critique from
misunderstanding to understanding.
At the end of this second stage, which we have termed the
reflective stage, I should like to show how the results of the first
stage, which we termed the semantic stage, are consolidated.
During the first stage, we took as a fact the existence of a
language Irreducible to univocal meanings. It is a fact that the
avowal of guilty consciousness passes through a symbolism of
the stain, of sin, or of guilt；it is a fact that repressed desire is
expressed in a symbolism which confirms its stability through
dreams, proverbs, legends, and myths；it is a fact that the sacred
is expressed in a symbolism of cosmic elements: sky, earth,
water, fire. The philosophical use of this language, however, re
mains open to the logician's objection that equivocal language
can provide only fallacious arguments. The justification of
hermeneutics can be radical only if one seeks in the very nature
of reflective thought the principle of a logic of double meaning.
This logic is then no longer a formal logic but a tramcendental
Existence and Hermeneutics / ig
logic. It is established at the level of conditions of possibility：not
the conditions of the objectivity of a nature, but the conditions
of the appropriation of our desire to be. It is in this sense that the
logic of the double meaning proper to hermeneutics can be called
transcendental. If the debate is not carried to this level, one will
quickly be driven into an untenable situation；in vain will one
attempt to maintain the debate at a purely semantic level and
to make room for equivocal meanings alongside univocal mean
ings, for the theoretical distinction between two kinds of
equivocalness— equivocalness through a surplus of meaning,
found in the exegetic sciences, and equivocalness through the
confusion of meanings, which logic chases away— cannot be
justified at the level of semantics alone. Two logics cannot exist
at the same level. Only a problematic of reflection justifies the
iemantics of double meaning.
V. T he Existential L evel
A t t h e e n d o f t h is i t i n e r a r y , which has led us from

A problematic of language to a problematic of reflection, I should
like to show how we can, by retracing our steps, join a prob
lematic of existence. The ontology of understanding which
Heidegger sets up directly by a sudden reversal of the problem,
lub8tituting the consideration of a mode of being for that of a
mode of knowing, can be, for us who proceed indirectly and by
degrees, only a horizon, an aim rather than a given fact. A
•fparate ontology is beyond our grasp ：it is only within the move
ment of interpretation that we apperceive the being we interpret.
The ontology of understanding is implied in the methodology of
Interpretation, following the ineluctable ^hermeneutic circle”
Which Heidegger himself taught us to delineate. Moreover, it is
Only In a con&ct of rival hermeneutics that we perceive some
thing of the being to be interpreted: a unified ontology is as in-
kCCOfifiible to our method as a separate ontology. Rather, in every
initance, each hermeneutics discovers the aspect of existence
Which founds it as method.
This double warning nevertheless must not deter us from
Olttrlng the ontological foundations of the semantic and reflec-
ttvt analysis which precedes it. An implied ontology, and even
ffi〇r« 10 a truncated ontology^ is still, is already, an ontology.
We will follow a track open to us, the one offered by a
philosophical reflection on psychoanalysis. What can we expect

from the latter in the way of a fundamental ontology? Two
things ：first, a true dismissal of the classical problematic of the
subject as consciousness；then, a restoration of the problematic
of existence as desire.
It is indeed through a critique of consciousness that psycho
analysis points to ontology. The interpretation it proposes to us
of dreams, fantasies, myths, and symbols always contests to
some extent the pretension of consciousness in setting itself up
as the origin of meaning. The struggle against narcissism_ the
Freudian equivalent of the false cogito leads to the discovery
一
that language is deeply rooted in desire, in the instinctual im

pulses of life. The philosopher who surrenders himself to this
strict schooling is led to practice a true ascesis of subjectivity,
allowing himself to be dispossessed of the origin of meaning.
This abandonment is of course yet another turn of reflection,
but it must become the real loss of the most archaic of all ob
jects ： the self. It must then be said of the subject of reflection
what the Gospel says of the soul：to be saved, it must be lost.
All of psychoanalysis speaks to me of lost objects to be found
again symbolically. Reflective philosophy must integrate this dis
covery with its own task；the self [le moi] must be lost in order
to find the T J [le je]. This is why psychoanalysis is, if not a
philosophical discipline, at least a discipline for the philosopher：
the unconscious forces the philosopher to deal with the arrange
ment of significations on a level which is set apart in relation
to the immediate subject. This is what Freudian topography
teaches: the most archaic significations are organized in a
^place^ of meaning that is separate from the place where im
mediate consciousness reigns. The realism of the unconscious,
the topographic and economic treatment of representations,
fantasies, symptoms, and symbols, appears finally as the condi
tion of a hermeneutics free from the prejudices of the ego.
Freud invites us, then, to ask anew the question of the rela
tionship between signification and desire, between meaning and
energy, that is, finally, between language and life. This was al
ready Leibniz, problem in the Monadology：how is representation
joined to appetite? It was equally Spinoza’s problem in the
Ethics, Book III ：how do the degrees of the adequation of ideas
express the degrees of the conatus, of the effort which constitutes
us? In its own way, psychoanalysis leads us back to the same
question ：how is the order of significations included within the
order of life? This regression from meaning to desire is the
indication of a possible transcendence of reflection in the direc
tion of existence. Now an expression we used above, but whose
meaning was only anticipated, is justified：by understanding
ourselves, we said, we appropriate to ourselves the meaning o至
our desire to be or of our effort to exist. Existence, we can now
say, is desire and effort. We term it effort in order to stress its
positive energy and its dynamism；we term it desire in order to
designate its lack and its poverty：Eros is the son of Poros and
Penia. Thus the c o g ito is no longer the pretentious act it was
Initially— I mean its pretension of positing itself；it appears as
a lr e a d y posited in being.
But if the problematic of reflection can and must surpass
itself in a problematic of existence, as a philosophical meditation
on psychoanalysis suggests, it is always in and through inter
pretation that this surpassing occurs：it is in deciphering the
tricks of desire that the desire at the root of meaning and reflec
tion is discovered. I cannot hypostasize this desire outside the
process of interpretation；it always remains a being-interpreted.
I have hints of it behind the enigmas of consciousness, but I
cannot grasp it in itself without the danger of creating a mythol
ogy of instinctual forces, as sometimes happens in coarse con
ceptions of pschoanalysis. It is behind itself that the c o g ito dis-
covers, through the work of interpretation, something like an
a r c h a e o lo g y o f t h e s u b je c t . Existence is glimpsed in this archae
ology, but it remains entangled in the movement of deciphering
to which it gives rise.
This decipherment, which psychoanalysis, understood as
hermeneutics, compels us to perform, other hermeneutic meth
ods force us to perform as well, although in different ways. The
existence that psychoanalysis discovers is that of desire；it is
existence as desire, and this existence is revealed principally in
an archaeology of the subject. Another hermeneutics— that of
the philosophy of the spirit, for example— suggests another man
ner of shifting the origin of sense, so that it is no longer behind
the subject but in front of it. I would be willing to say that there
lfl a hermeneutics of God*s coming, of the approach of his King
dom, a hermeneutics representing the prophecy of conscious
ness. In the final analysis, this is what animates HegeVs P h e -
n o m e n o lo g y o f th e S p ir it. I mention it here because its mode of
interpretation is diametrically opposed to Freud's. Psychoanaly
sis offered us a regression toward the archaic；the phenomenol
ogy of the spirit offers us a movement In which each figure
ftndi Its meaning, not In what precedes but In what follows.
Consciousness is thus drawn outside itself, in front of itself, to

ward a meaning in motion, where each stage is suppressed and
retained in the following stage. In this way, a teleology of the
subject opposes an archaeology of the subject. But what is im
portant for our intention is that this teleology, just like Freudian
archaeology, is constituted only in the movement of interpreta
tion, which understands one figure through another figure. The
spirit is realized only in this crossing from one figure to another；
the spirit is the very dialectic of these figures by means of which
the subject is drawn out of his infancy, tom from his archaeol
ogy. This is why philosophy remains a hermeneutics, that is, a
reading of the hidden meaning inside the text of the apparent
meaning. It is the task of this hermeneutics to show that exist
ence arrives at expression, at meaning, and at reflection only
through the continual exegesis of all the significations that come
to light in the world of culture. Existence becomes a self—
human and adult— only by appropriating this meaning, which
first resides <<outside,>, in works, institutions, and cultural monu
ments in which the life of the spirit is objectified.
It is within the same ontological horizon that the phenome
nology of religion— both Van der Leeuw*s and Mircea Eliade's一
would have to be Interrogated. As phenomenology it is simply a
description of rite, of myth, of belief, that is, of the forms of
behavior, language, and feeling by which man directs himself
toward something <csacred.wBut if phenomenology can remain at
this descriptive level, the reflective resumption of the work of
interpretation goes much further：by understanding himself in
and through the signs of the sacred, man performs the most
radical abandonment of himself that it is possible to imagine.
This dispossession exceeds that occasioned by psychoanalysis
and Hegelian phenomenology, whether they are considered in
dividually or whether their effects are combined. An archaeology
and a teleology still unveil an arche and a telos which the sub
ject, while understanding them, can command. It is not the same
in the case of the sacreJ, which manifests itself in a phenome
nology of religion. The latter symbolically designates the alpha
of all archaeology, the omega of all teleology；this alpha and
this omega the subject would be unable to command. The sacred
calls upon man and in this call manifests Itself as that which
commands his existence because it posits this existence ab
solutely, as effort and as desire to be.
Thus, the most opposite hermeneutics point, each in its own
way, to the ontological roots of comprehension. Each In its own
way affirms the dependence of the self upon existence. Pscho-
analysis shows this dependence in the archaeology of the sub
ject, the phenomenology of the spirit in the teleology of figures,
the phenomenology of religion in the signs of the sacred.
Such are the ontological implications of interpretation.
The ontology proposed here is in no way separable from in
terpretation；it is caught inside the circle formed by the conjunc
tion of the work of interpretation and the interpreted being. It
is thus not a triumphant ontology at all；it is not even a science,
since it is unable to avoid the risk of interpretation；it cannot
even entirely escape the internal warfare that the various her
meneutics indulge in among themselves.
Nevertheless, in spite of its precariousness, this militant a
truncated ontology is qualified to affirm that rival hermeneutics
are not mere ‘language games,” as would be the case if their
absolutist pretensions continued to oppose one another on the
•ole level of language. For a linguistic philosophy, all interpreta
tions are equally valid within the limits of the theory which
founds the given rules of reading. These equally valid interpreta
tions remain language games until it is shown that each inter
pretation is grounded in a particular existential function. Thus,
psychoanalysis has its foundation in an archaeology of the sub
ject, the phenomenology of the spirit in a teleology, and the
phenomenology of religion in an eschatology.
Can one proceed any further? Can these different existential
functions be joined in a unitary figure, as Heidegger tried to do
In the second part of Being and Time? This is the question the
pesent study leaves unresolved. But, if it remains unresolved, it
II not hopeless. In the dialectic of archaeology, teleology, and
•ichatology an ontological structure is manifested, one capable
Of reassembling the discordant interpretations on the linguistic
Uvel. But this coherent figure of the being which we ourselves
Are! In which rival interpretations are implanted, is given no
where but in this dialectic of interpretations. In this respect,
hermeneutics is unsurpassable. Only a hermeneutics instructed
by tymbolic figures can show that these different modalities of
•Xlltence belong to a single problematic, for it is finally through
the richest symbols that the unity of these multiple interpreta
tions Is assured. These symbols alone carry all the vectors, both
Ngreislve and progressive, that the various hermeneutics dis-
lOClate. True symbols contain all hermeneutics, those which
Art directed toward the emergence of new meanings and those
Which are directed toward the resurgence of archaic fantasies.
It is in this sense, beginning with our introduction, that we have

insisted that existence as it relates to a hermeneutic philosophy
always remains an interpreted existence. It is in the work of
interpretation that this philosophy discovers the multiple modali
ties of the dependence of the self— its dependence on desire
glimpsed in an archaeology of the subject, its dependence on
the spirit glimpsed in its teleology, its dependence on the sacred
glimpsed in its eschatology. It is by developing an archaeology,
a teleology, and an eschatology that reflection suppresses itself
as reflection.
In this way, ontology is indeed the promised land for a phi
losophy that begins with language and with reflection；but, like
Moses, the speaking and reflecting subject can only glimpse this
land before dying.
PART I
Hermeneutics and Structuralism

Structure and Hermeneutics
T h e s u b j e c t of the present conference1 is hermeneu

tics and tradition. It is notable that what comes into question
Under both headings is a certain manner in which time is lived
And used ：the time of transmission and the time of interpreta
tion.
We have the feeling— and it remains a feeling so long as
It has not been sufficiently established— that these two temporali
ties concern each other, mutually relate to each other. We feel
tibAt interpretation has a history and that this history is a seg
ment of tradition itself. Interpretation does not spring from
nowhere；rather, one interprets in order to make explicit, to
•Xtend, and so to keep alive the tradition itself, inside which
One always remains. It is in this sense that the time of interpreta
tion belongs in some way to the time of txadition. But tradition in
ntum , even understood as the transmission of a depositum, re
mains a dead tradition if it is not the continual interpretation
Of this deposit: our ‘"heritage” is not a sealed package we pass
lirom hand to hand, without ever opening, but rather a treasure
from which we draw by the handful and which by this very act is
Nplenlshed. Every tradition lives by grace of interpretation, and
It ll at this price that it continues, that is, remains living.
However, the inner connection of these two temporalities is
not visible. How does interpretation enter into the time of tradi
tion? Why does tradition live only in and through the time of
interpretation?
l . 【T h lieM a yw A torlg in a lltcipa p erprefien ted b eforeth eIn tem a-
Iftonal C ongm i of Philosophy (Rome, 1963).]
28 / STRUCTURALISM
I intend to look for a third temporality, a profound time

which would be inscribed in the fullness of meaning and which
would make the intersection of these two temporalities possible.
This time would be the time of meaning itself；it would be like a
temporal charge, initially carried by the advent of meaning. This
temporal charge would allow for both a sedimentation in a
deposit and a clarification in an interpretation；in short, it
would permit the struggle between these two temporalities, one
transmitting, the other renewing.
But where do we look for this time of meaning, and, in
particular, how do we reach it?
My working hypothesis is that this temporal charge has
something to do with the semantic constitution of what in my
two previous papers delivered before this body2 I have called
the symbol and which I have defined by the power of the double
meaning. The symbol, I said, is constituted from a semantic
perspective such that it provides a meaning by means of a
meaning. In it a primary, literal, worldly, often physical mean
ing refers back to a figurative, spiritual, often existential,
ontological meaning which is in no way given outside this in
direct designation. The symbol invites us to think, calls for an
interpretation, precisely because it says more than it says and
because it never ceases to speak to us. My problem today is to
elicit the temporal import of this semantic analysis. Between
the surplus of meaning and the temporal charge, there must be
an essential relation. It is this essential relation which is at
issue in the present paper.
One more particular：I have called this study the time of
symbols and not the time of myths.3 As I stated in a previous
study, the myth in no way exhausts the semantic constitution
of the symbol. I want to recall here the principal reasons why the
myth should be subordinated to the symbol. First of all, the
myth is a form of narration ；it recounts the events of the be
ginning and the end inside a fundamental time— “In those
times . . . This referential time adds a new dimension to the
historicity which charges the symbolic meaning and so must be
treated as a specific problem. Second, the relation of myth to
rite and to the complex of institutions of a particular society
places the myth in the social web and, up to a certain point,
masks the temporal potential of the symbols put into play. The
2. See MThe Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection,w
Parts I and II, below.
3. [Original title：MSymbollque et temporallt^.T
Structure and Hermeneutics / 29
importance of this distinction will be shown later；the deter
mined social function of the myth does not, to my mind, exhaust
the fullness of meaning of the symbolic base, which another
mythical constellation can use again in another social context.
Finally, the literary ordering of the myth implies a beginning
of rationalization which limits the signifying power of the sym
bolic base. Rhetoric and speculation already begin to fix the
•ymbolic base；there is no myth without a hint of mythology.
For all these reasons— the arrangement in narrative form, t±ie
relation to rite and to a determined social function, mythological
rationalization— the myth is no longer at the level of the sym
bolic base and of the hidden time which we are seeking to un-
•trth. For my part I have shown this in the symbolism of evil.
The symbols embraced by the avowal of evil appeared to me to
fall into three signifying levels ：the primary symbolic level of the
ItAln, of sin, of guilt；the mythical level of the great narratives
Of the Fall or the Exile ；and the level of the mythological dog
matisms of Gnosticism and original sin. It appeared to me, in
putting this dialectic of the symbol in motion— based solely, it
U true, on Semitic and Hellenic traditions— that the store of
meaning of primary symbols was richer than that of mythical
symbols and even more so than that of rationalizing mythologies.
n 〇m symbol to myth and to mythology, one goes from a hidden
time to an exhausted time. It seems, then, that tradition, to the
•Xtent to which it descends the slope from symbol to dogmatic
mythology, places itself on the trajectory of this exhausted time.
It it transformed into heritage and into sediment at the same
time that it is rationalized. This process is evident when one
Compares the great Hebraic symbols of sin to the fantastic
OOnitructions concerning original sin of Gnosticism and also
Chrlitlan anti-Gnosticism, which is only a reply to Gnosticism
〇H the same semantic level. A tradition exhausts itself by
mythologizing the symbol；a tradition is renewed by means of
interpretation, which reascends the slope from exhausted time
10 hidden time, that is, by soliciting from mythology the symbol
U)d Its store of meaning.
But what can be said about this fundamental time in regard
10 the double time of tradition and interpretation? And, in
particular, how can it be reached?
This study Intends to propose a means of indirect access, a
dttouri I will start with the structuralist notions of synchrony
Md diachrony, In particular as they appear in L^vi-Strauss's
•iructural Anthropology, It Is not at all my intention to oppose
3〇 / STRUCTURALISM
hermeneutics to structuralism, the historicity of the one to the

diachrony of the other. Structuralism is part of science, and I
do not at present see any more rigorous or more fruitful ap
proach than the structuralist method at the level of comprehen-
sion which is its own. The interpretation of symbols is worthy of
being called a hermeneutics only insofar as it is a part of self
understanding and of the understanding of being；outside this ef
fort of appropriating meaning, it is nothing. In this sense
hermeneutics is a philosophical discipline. To the extent to
which the aim of structuralism is to put at a distance, to ob
jectify, to separate out from the personal equation of the in
vestigator the structure of an institution, a myth, a rite, to the
same extent hermeneutics buries itself in what could be called
“the hermeneutic circle” of understanding and of believing,
which disqualifies it as science and qualifies it as meditating
thought. There is thus no reason to juxtapose two ways of
understanding；the question is rather to link them together as
the objective and the existential (or e o c is te n tie lll). If hermeneu
tics is a phase of the appropriation of meaning, a stage between
abstract and concrete reflection， if hermeneutics is 5 iought re
covering meaning suspended within a system of symbols, it can
encounter the work 〇全structural anthropology only as its sup
port and not as its contrast. One appropriates only what has
first been held at a distance and examined. It is this objective
examination, put to work in the concepts of synchrony and
diachrony, that I want to perform in the hope of leading her
meneutics, through the discipline of objectivity, from a naive to
a mature comprehension.
It does not seem expedient to start with T h e S a v a g e M i n d
but to proceed to it, for T h e S a v a g e M i n d represents the final
stage in a gradual process of generalization. Initially, structural-
ism made no claim of defining the entire constitution of
thought, even in its savage state, but rather of delineating a
well-defined group of problems which have, one might say, an
affinity for the structural treatment. T h e S a v a g e M i n d represents
the reaching of a kind of limit, a terminal systematization which
calls too hastily for the positing of a false alternative, the choice
between several ways of understanding, between several kinds
of intelligibility. I stated that this was absurd in p r in c ip l e ； to
avoid falling into the trap i n f a c t , structuralism must be treated
as an explanation which is at first limited and then extended by
degrees, following the guideline of the problems themselves.
The consciousness of the validity of a method is never separable
from the consciousness of its limits. It is in order to give full
measure to this method, and especially to allow myself to be
instructed by it, that I will seize hold of it in its movement of
expansion, starting with an indisputable core, rather than taking
It at its final stage, past a certain critical point where, perhaps,
It loses the sense of its limits.
T he L inguistic Model
As w e k n o w , structuralism proceeds by applying a

linguistic model to anthropology and to the human sciences in
general. In the beginnings of structuralism, we find first Ferdi
nand de Saussure and his Course in General Linguistics and
then the properly phonemic orientation of Trubetskoy, Jakob-
lon, and Martinet. With them we witness a reversal of the rela
tions between system and history. For historicism, understand
ing is finding the genesis, the previous form, the sources, and
the sense of the evolution. With structuralism, what is first
|tven as intelligible are the arrangements, the systematic or-
MUiizations in a given state. Ferdinand de Saussure begins to
tetroduce this reversal by making a distinction, within human
Unguage in general, between language and speech. If by ‘lan
guage” one understands the set of conventions adopted by a
•Odil body to allow individuals to exercise language, and by
^peech^ the very activity of speaking subjects, this principal
dlltlnction gives us access to three rules whose generalization
OUttlde the initial domain of linguistics we will follow later.
First of all, we must look at the very idea of system.
Itparated from speaking subjects, a language presents itself as
• system of signs. Of course Ferdinand de Saussure is not a
phonologlst；his concept of the linguistic sign as the relation
feitween the sonorous signifier and the conceptual signified is
more a semantic than a phonemic distinction. Nevertheless,
What seemed to him to constitute the object of a linguistic
Idence is the system of signs which arise from the mutual
dbtamoinatlon of the sonorous chain of the signifier and the
OOnceptual chain of the signified. In this mutual determination,
what counts are not the terms, considered individually, but the
differential variations；it is the differences of sound and mean
ing and the relations of the one to the other which constitute the
of signs of a language. One then understands that each
32 / STRUCTURALISM
sign is arbitrary, insofar as it represents an isolated relation of a

meaning and a sound, and that all the signs of a language form
a system: ‘‘• • • in language there are only differences.” 4
This governing idea commands the second theme which
specifically concerns the relation of diachrony to synchrony. In
deed, the system of differences appears only on the axis of
coexistences, which is wholly distinct from the axis of succes
sions. In this way a synchronic linguistics is born as a science
of states in their systematic aspects, distinct from a diachronic
linguistics or a science of evolutions applied to the system. As
one sees, history is secondary and figures as an alteration of the
system. Moreover, in linguistics these alterations are less in
telligible than the states of the system ：de Saussure writes that
4<never is the system modified directly. In itself it is unchange
able；only certain elements are altered without regard for the
solidarity that binds them to the whole'* (p. 84). History is
responsible for disorders rather than for meaningful changes.
De Saussure says it well ：“[synchrony] is a relation between
simultaneous elements, [diachrony is] an eventM(p. 91). From
this point on, linguistics is synchronic jBrst, and diachrony itself
is intelligible only as the comparison of states of anterior and
posterior systems；diachrony is comparative, and in this it de
pends on synchrony. Finally, events are apprehended only when
they have been realized in a system, that is, by receiving from
the system an aspect of regularity；the diachronic datum is the
innovation which arises from speech (whether from one or
several is of no matter) but which has become aa fact of lan-
guage” （p. 98).
It will be the central issue of our reflection to know how far
the linguistic model of the relations between synchrony and
diachrony leads us to a clear understanding of the historicity
proper to symbols. Let us say straight off that the critical point
will have been reached when we are confronting a true tradition,
that is, a series of interpreting recoveries which can no longer
be considered the intervention of disorder in a system state.
Please understand me well: I do not attribute to structural
ism, like some of its critics, a pure and simple opposition be-
tween diachrony and synchrony. L6vi-Strauss, in this respect, is
right to oppose to his detractors Jakobsorfs great article on the
4. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade

Baskin (New York, 1966), p. 120.
^Principles of Historical Phonetics,where the author explicitly
distinguishes between synchrony and statics.5 What is impor
tant is the subordination, not the opposition, of diachrony to
synchrony；it is this subordination which is questioned in her
meneutic comprehension, that diachrony is meaningful only
through its relation to synchrony and not the inverse.
But there is a third principle, which no less involves our
problem of interpretation and of the time of interpretation. It has
been pointed out in particular by phonologists, but it is already
present in the Saussurean opposition between language and
丨 peech. This third principle is that linguistic laws designate an
unconscious level and, in this sense, a nonreflective, nonhistori-
cal level of the mind. This unconscious is not the Freudian un
conscious of instinctual, erotic drives and its power of sym
bolization；it is more a Kantian than a Freudian unconscious,
a categorial, combinative unconscious. It is a finite order or the
flnltude of order, but such that it is unaware of itself. I call it a
Kantian unconscious, but only as regards its organization, since
We are here concerned with a categorial system without refer
ence to a thinking subject. This is why structuralism as phi-
lo sop h yw illd evelo p ak in d ofin tellectu alism w h id iisfu n d a-
mentally antireflective, anti-idealist, and antiphenomenological.
Moreover, this unconscious mind can be said to be homologous
to nature ；perhaps it even is nature. We will come back to this
when we study The Savage Mind. Yet, as early as 1956, referring
to the rule of economy in Jakobson’s explanation, L^vi-Strauss
wrote: “the assertion that the most parsimonious explanation
ftlso comes closest to the truth rests, in the final analysis, upon
the identity postulated between the laws of the universe and
those of the human mind.” 8
This third principle concerns us no less than the second, for
it establishes between the observer and the system a relationship
Which is itself nonhistorical. Understanding is not seen here as
the recovery of meaning. In contrast to what is stated by
Schleiermacher in Hermeneutik und Kritik (1828), by Dilthey
In his important article ‘Die Entstehung der liermeneutik”
(1900), and by Bultmann in Das Problem der Hermeneutik
(2950), there is no hermeneutic circlew；there is no historicity
15. Roman Jalcobson, ‘"Prlncipien der historischen Phonologie,”

tfti Cercle linguiatlque de Prague, IV (1931).
6. Claude L6vl-Strau88t Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson
And Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York, 1963), p. 89.
34 / STRUCTURALISM
to the relation of understanding. The relation is objective, in

dependent of the observer. This is why structural anthropology
is science and not philosophy.
II. T he T ransposition of the Linguistic Model in

S tr u c tu r a l A n th r o p o lo g y
O n e c a n f o l l o w this transposition in L^vi-Strauss^s

work by examining methodological articles published in Struc-
tunrf ilTit/iropatogy. Mauss had already said: “Sociology would
certainly have progressed much further if it had everywhere
followed the lead of the linguists/*7 But it is the phonemic
revolution in linguistics that L6vi-Strauss considers the true point
of departure:
Not only did it renew linguistic perspectives；a transformation
of this magnitude is not limited to a single discipline. Structural
linguistics will certainly play the same renovating role with re
spect to the social sciences that nuclear physics, for example, has
played for the physical sciences. In what does this revolution con
sist, as we try to assess its broadest implication? N. Trubetzkoy,
the illustrious founder of structural linguistics, himself furnished
the answer to this question. In one programmatic statement, he
reduced the structural method to four basic operations. First,
structural linguistics shifts from the study of c o n s c io u s linguistic
phenomena to the study of their u n c o n s c i o u s infrastructure；sec
ond, it does not treat te r m s as independent entities, taking Instead
as its basis of analysis the r e la tio n s between terms；third, it intro
duces the concept of s y s t e m —“Modem phonemics does not merely
proclaimtliatpiioiieinesareal\vayspartofasystem;itshozi； s9 〇ri-
Crete phonemic systems and elucidates their structurew— ；finally,
structural linguistics aims at discovering g e n e r a l la w s , either by
induction **or . . . by logical deduction, which would give them
an absolute character” （p. 33) .8
Kinship systems provide L^vi-Strauss with the first rigorous
analogue of phonemic systems. These are indeed systems es
tablished at the unconscious level of the mind；they are, more
over, systems in which oppositional pairs and differential ele-
ments in general are alone meaningful (father-son, the mater
7. In an article written in 1 9 4 5 ；cited by L6vi-Strauss, pp. 31-3^.
8. The quotations are from N. Trubetskoy, *Xa Phonologle aotuelle/'
Psychologic du langage (Paris, X9 3 3 )*
nal uncle and his sisters son, husband-wife, brother-sister).
Consequently, the system operates not on the level of the terms
but on that of the pairs of relations. (This brings to mind the
elegant and convincing solution to the problem of the maternal
uncle in Structural Anthropology；see esp. pp. 42-43, 46-47).
Finally, these are systems which are most readily intelligible from
a synchronic perspective：the systems are constructed without
regard to history, although they do include a diachronic dimen
sion, since the kinship structures connect a series of genera
tions.®
Now, what authorizes this initial transposition of the lin
guistic model? Essentially this ：kinship is itself a system of
communication；by virtue of this it is comparable to language.
The kinship system is a language；but it is not a universal lan
guage, and a society may prefer other modes of expression and ac
tion. From the viewpoint of the anthropologist this means that in
dealing with a specific culture we must always ask a preliminary
question ：Is the system systematic? Such a question, which seems
absurd at first, is absurd only in relation to language；for language
is the systematic system par excellence；it cannot but signify, and
exists only through signification. On the contrary, this question
must be rigorously examined as we move from the study of lan
guage to the consideration of other systems which also claim to
have semantic functions, but whose fulfillment remains partial,
fragmentary, or subjective, like, for example, social organization,
art, and so forth (pp. 47-48).
This text proposes, then, that we arrange social systems in
diminishing order, T)ut with an increasing rigor,w10 beginning
with the system of signification par excellence, language. If
kinship is the closest analogue, it is because, like language, it
Is M
an arbitrary system of representations, not the spontaneous
development of a real situation” （p. 50)• But this analogy ap
pears only if the organization is based on elements which form
9. See p. 47: **Kinship is not a static phenomenon；it exists only in
■ elf-pcrpetuatlon. Here we are not thinking of the fact that in most kin
ship Bystems the initial disequilibrium produced in one generation between
the group that gives the woman and the group that receives her can be
■ t纛bflized only by counter-prestations in following generations. Thus, even
the most elementary kinship structure exists both synchronlcally and
dl纛chronically." This remark must be compared to the one we made above
concerning diachrony in structural linguistics.
10. [While the English translation (p. 48) reads：**this question must
b i rigorously examined/' the actual French text is：**la question doit ^tre
•xaminê avec uno rlgueur crolsiante'* (Anthropologie structurale [Paris,
IP58], p. 5 8 ) .—TiUNi.]
36 / STRUCTURALISM
an alliance and not a biological modality：marriage rules repre

sent 4,so many different ways of insuring the circulation of
women within the social group or of substituting the mechanism
of a sociologically determined affinity for that of a biologically
determined consanguinity” (p. 60). Considered in this way,
these rules make kinship
. . . a kind of language, a set of processes permitting the es
tablishment, between individuals and groups, of a certain type of
communication. That the mediating factor, in this case, should be
the women of the group, who are circulated between clans, line
ages, or families, in place of the words of the group, which are
circulated between individuals, does not at all change the fact that
the essential aspect of the phenomenon is identical in both cases
(p. 61).
The entire program of The Savage Mind is contained here,

and the very principle of generalization is already postulated；
I will limit myself to citing the following text, which dates from
1945:
. . . the question must be raised whether the different aspects
of social life (including even art and religion) cannot only be
studied by the methods of, and with the help of concepts similar
to those employed in linguistics, but also whether they do not con
stitute phenomena whose inmost nature is the same as that of
language.. . .
How can this hypothesis be verified? It will be necessary to de
velop the analysis of the different features of social life, either
for a given society or for a complex of societies, so that a deep
enough level can be reached to make it possible to cross from one
to the other; or to express the specific structure of each In terms
of a sort of general [code] language, valid for each system sep
arately and for all of them taken together. It would thus be possi
ble to ascertain if one had reached their inner nature and to de-
termlne if this pertaiiiCa* to the same reality (p. 62).
It is indeed in the idea of a general language, or code,

understood in the sense of a formal correspondence between
specified structures, and so in the sense of structural homology,
that the essential element of this structural comprehension is
concentrated. This understanding of the symbolic function can
alone be said to be strictly independent of the observer：**We
thus find in language a social phenomenon that manifests both
independence of the observer and long statistical runs" (p. 57).
Our problem will be to know how an objective comprehenilon
which decodes can work with a hermeneutic comprehension
which deciphers, that is, which assumes the meaning as its own
at the same time that it grows from the sense it deciphers. A
remark by Levi-Strauss puts us, perhaps, on the trail；the
author notes that “the original impulse” （p. 62) to exchange
women perhaps reveals, by rebounding on the linguistic model,
something about the origin of ail language ：
As in the case of women, the original impulse which compelled
men to exchange words must be sought for in that split represen
tation that pertains to the symbolic function. For, since certain
terms are simultaneously perceived as having a value both for the
speaker and the listener, the only way to resolve this contradiction
is in the exchange of complementary values, to which all social
existence is reduced (ibid.).
Is this not to say that structuralism comes into play only
against the already existing background of **a split representa
tion that pertains to the symbolic function,7 Does this not call
for another kind of understanding, which aims at the split itself
and is the basis for any exchange? Wouldn't the objective sci
ence of exchange be an abstract segment in the full under
standing of the symbolic function, which basically would be
semantic understanding? For the philosopher, structuralism’s
raison d'etre would then be to rebuild this full understanding,
but only after having first stripped it, objectified it, and re
placed it with structural understanding. Thus mediated by the
structural form, the semantic base would become accessible to
an understanding which, although more indirect, would be more
certain.
Let us suspend this question until the end of this study, and
let us follow instead the thread of analogies and of generaliza
tion.
At first, L6vi-Strauss’s generalizations are most prudent
and are tempered by precautions (see, e.g., pp. 64-65). The
structural analogy between other social phenomena and lan
guage, considered in its phonemic structure, is actually very
complex. In what sense can one say that their ^nature is the
same as that of language” （p. 62)? Equivocalness is hardly a
consideration when the signs of exchange are not themselves
elements of discourse；thus one will say that men exchange
women as they exchange words. The formalization which
brought out the structural homology is not only legitimate but
very enlightening. Things become more complicated in art and
38 / STRUCTURALISM
religion; here we no longer have only “a kind of language,” as in

the case of marriage rules and kinship systems, but rather a
signifying discourse erected on the foundation of language, con
sidered as an instrument of communication. The analogy is
shifted inside language and from this moment on refers to the
structure of this or that particular discourse in relation to the
general structure of a language. It is thus not certain a priori
that the relation between diachrony and synchrony, valid in
general linguistics, rules the structure of particular discourses
in an equafiy dominant fashion. The things said do not neces
sarily have an architecture similar to that of language viewed
as a universal instrument of speaking. All that one can assert is
that the linguistic model directs the investigation toward articula
tions which are similar to its own, that is, toward a logic of op
positions and correlations, that is to say, finally, toward a system
of differences. After speaking about language as a diachronic
condition of culture, insofar as it is the vehicle of instruction or
education, Levi-Strauss states：
. . . from a much more theoretical point of view, language can
be said to be a condition of culture because the material out of
which language is built is of the same type as the material out of
which the whole culture is built： logical relations, oppositions,
correlations, and the like. Language, from this point of view, may
appear as laying a kind of foundation for the more complex struc
tures which correspond to the different aspects of cultiore (pp.
68-69).
But Levi-Strauss must grant that the correlation between culture
and language is not sufficiently justified by the universal role
of language in culture ：
But we have not been sufficiently aware of the fact that both lan
guage and culture are the products of activities which are basically
similar. I am now referring to this uninvited guest which has been
seated during this conference beside us and which is the human
mind (p. 71).
The third party called upon here occasions some serious prob
lems；for the mind comprehends the mind, not only by the
analogy of structure, but by recovering and continuing individ
ual discourses. Now, nothing guarantees that this understanding
arises from the same principles as those of structural linguistics.
The structuralist enterprise thus seems to me to be perfectly
legitimate and shielded from all criticism as long as it remains
conscious of its conditions of validity and thus of its limits. One
thing is certain under any hypothesis：the correlation must be
sought, not between 'language and behavior, but (between)
two parallel ways of categorizing the same dataM(p. 72). On this
condition, but on this condition alone, “anthropology will become
a general theory of relationships. Then it will be possible to
analyze societies In terms of the differential features character
istic of the systems of relationships which define themw (pp.
95-96).
My problem at this point becomes more precise：what is the
place of “a general theory of relationships” inside a general
theory of meaning?11 In questions of art and religion, what does
one understand when one understands the structure? And how
does structural comprehension instruct hermeneutic compre
hension, directed toward a recovery of signifying intention?
It is here that our problem of time can provide a good touch
stone. We are going to follow the course of the relationship be
tween diachrony and synchrony in this transposition of the
linguistic model and will confront it with what we know from
elsewhere about the historicity of sense in the case of symbols for
which we possess clear temporal sequences.
III. The Savage Mind
W i t h The Savage Mind,12Levi-Strauss proceeds to a bold

generalization of structuralism. Certainly, nothing authorizes us
to conclude that the author no longer envisages any collaboration
with other modes of understanding, nor can it be said that struc
turalism no longer recognizes any boundaries. It is not all thought
that falls under its grasp, but a level of thought, the level of
11. L6vi-Strauss can allow this question, since he poses it very well
himself: “So the conclusion which seems to me the most likely is that
some kind of correlation exists between certain things on certain levels,
and our main task is to determine what these things are and what these
levels are'* (p. 79). In an answer to Haudricourt and Granai, L^vl-Strauss
•eems to agree that there is a zone of optimal validity for a general theory
of communication：*This endeavor is possible on three levels, since the
rules of kinship and marriage serve to insure the circulation of women
between groups, just as economic rules serve to insure the circulation of
goods and services, and linguistic rules the circulation of messages**
(p. 83). The author's warnings against the excesses of American metalin-
guiitlci are also to be noted (pp. 73, 84-85).
Z2. English tram., Chicago ： Unlveriity of Chicago Press, 2966.
savage thought. Nevertheless, the reader who goes from Struc

tural Anthropology to The Savage Mind is struck by the change in
the approach and in the tone. One no longer proceeds by degrees,
from kinship to art or religion；what becomes the object of in
vestigation is rather an entire level of thought, considered
globally. Moreover, this level of thought is itself held to be the
nondomesticated form of thought, which is one. There are no
savages as opposed to civilized people, no primitive mentality,
no savage thought；there is no longer any absolute exoticism.
Beyond the “totemic illusion,” there is only a savage mind, and
this thought is not anterior to logic. It is not prelogical but
homologous to logical thought— homologous in the strong sense：
the ramifications of its classifications, the refinement of its
nomenclatures, are classifying thought itself, but operating, as
Levi-Strauss says, at another strategic level, at the sensory level.
Savage thought is thought which orders but which does not think
itself. In this it does indeed conform to the conditions of struc
turalism mentioned above ：an unconscious order— an order con
ceived as a system of differences— an order capable of being
treated objectively, independently of the observer. As a result,
arrangements at an unconscious level are alone intelligible；
understanding does not consist in taking up anew signifying
intentions, reviving them through a historical act of interpreta
tion which would itself be inscribed within a continuous tradition.
Intelligibility is attributed to the code of transformations which
assure correspondences and homology between arrangements
belonging to different levels of social reality (clan organization,
nomenclatures and classifications of animals and plants, myths
and arts, etc.). I will characterize the method in one word ：it is
the choice of syntax over semantics. To the extent to which it
is a wager made with coherence, this choice is perfectly legiti
mate. Unfortunately, it lacks reflection on its conditions of
validity, on the price to be paid for this type of comprehension,
in short, a reflection on limits, which did, however, appear from
time to time in previous works.
For my part, I find it striking that all the examples were taken
from the geographical area which was that of so-called totemic
thought and never from Semitic, pre-Hellenic, or Indo-European
thought；and I wonder what is implied in this initial limitation
of the ethnographic and human material. Hasn’t the author
stacked the deck by relating the state of the savage mind to a
cultural area— specifically, that of the “totemic illusion” 一 where
the arrangements are more important than the contents, where
thought is actually bricolage,12 working with a heterogeneous
material, with odds and ends of meaning? Never in this book is
the question raised concerning the unity of mythical thought. It
is taken for granted that the generalization includes all savage
thought. Now, I wonder whether the mythical base from which
we branch— with its Semitic (Egyptian, Babylonian, Aramaic,
Hebrew), proto-Hellenic, and Indo-European cores — lends itself
so easily to the same operation；or rather, and I insist on this
point, it surely lends itself to the operation, but does it lend
itself entirely? In the examples of The Savage Mind, the insig
nificance of the contents and the luxuriance of the arrangements
seem to me to constitute an extreme example much more than
a canonical form. It happens that a part of civilization, precisely
the part from which our culture does not proceed, lends itself
better than any other to the application of the structural method
transposed from linguistics. But that does not prove that struc
tural comprehension is just as enlightening elsewhere and, in
particular, just as self-sufficient. I spoke above of the price to be
paid ：this price— the insignificance of the contents is not a 一
high price with the totemists, the counterpart being so great,

that is, the great significance of the arrangements. Totemic
thought, it seems to me, is precisely the one that has the greatest
affinity to structuralism. I wonder whether its example is . . .
exemplary or whether it is not exceptional.13 14
13. [In The Savage Mind, L^vi-Strauss defines this term in the follow
ing manner：M In its old sense the verb <bricoler, applied to ball games and
billiards, to hunting, shooting and riding. It was however always used
with reference to some extraneous movement: a ball rebounding, a dog
straying or a horse swerving from its direct course to avoid an obstacle.
And in our own time the *bricoleur* is still someone who works with his
hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman^ (pp.
16 -17). Because this term has no precise equivalent in English, we shall
follow the lead of the English translation and use the Frencli word. —
T r a n s .]
14. We find some indications of this in The Savage Mind ： *4. . . few
civilizations seem to equal the Australians in their taste for erudition and
•peculation and what sometimes looks like intellectual dandyism, odd as
this expression may appear when it is applied to people with so rudi
mentary a level of material life. . . . Granting that Australia has been
turned in on itself for hundreds of thousands of years, that theorizing and
discussion was all the rage in this closed world and the influence of
fashion often paramount, it is easy to understand the emergence of a
sort of common philosophical and sociological style along with methodi
cally studied variations on it, even the most minor of which were pointed
out for favorable or adverse comment>, (pp. 89-90).
And toward the end of the book: 'There is a sort of fundamental
Antip纛thy botwoen history and 謬yUexn_ of claMificatioxi. This perhaps
•xplalnt what one i> tcmptad to call th« 'totemlo void/ for in the bounds
42 / STRUCTURALISM
There perhaps exists another pole of mythical thought where

syntactical organization is weaker, the connection to ritual less
marked, the relation to social classifications more tenuous, and
where, on the contrary, the semantic richness allows an in
definite number of historical recoveries in more varied social
contexts. At this other pole of mythical thought, concerning
which I shall later give examples taken from the Hebraic world,
structural comprehension is perhaps less important, in any case
less exclusive, and more explicitly requires being joined to a
hermeneutic comprehension, which endeavors to interpret the
contents themselves, so as to prolong their existence and thereby
to incorporate what in these contents is efficacious for philosophi
cal reflection.
It is here that I will take as touchstone the question of time,
which set our meditation in movement. TTze Sai;age Aftnd draws
all of its consequences from the linguistic concepts of synchrony
and diachrony and elicits from them a general conception of the
relationships between structure and event. The question is to
know whether this same relation is found to be identical through
the entire range of mythical thought.
L6vi-Strauss delights in repeating a statement of Boas ：
w. . . it would seem that mythological worlds have been built
up, only to be shattered again, and that new worlds were built
from the fragments” （p. 21).15 This statement had already served
as epigraph to one of the articles collected in Structural Anthro
pology (p. 206). It is this inverse relationship between the
synchronic solidity and the diachronic fragility of mythological
universes that L^vi-Strauss illuminates through the comparison
to bricolage.
The bricoleur, in contrast to the engineer, works with a
material he has not produced with its present use in mind；he
works with a limited and varied repertory which forces him to
work, as one says, with the means at hand. This repertory is
made up of the remains of previous constructions and destruc
tions；it represents the contingent state of instrumentality at a
of the great civilizations of Europe and Asia there is a remarkable absence

of anything which might have reference to totemism, even in the form
of remains. The reason is surely that the latter have elected to explain
themselves by history and that this undertaking is incompatible with
that of classifying things and beings (natural and social) by means of
finite groups" (p. 232).
15. This remark is taken from Boas' Introduction to James Teit,
'Tradition* of the Thompson River Indians of British Columbia/*
Memoiret of the American Folklore Society, VI (1898), 18.
given moment. The foricoiewr works with signs which have al-
ready been used and which thus act as a “preconstraint” in re
gard to new reorganizations. Like bricoZage, the myth “addresses
[it]self to a collection of oddments left over from human en
deavours, that is, only a sub-set of the culture^ {The Savage
Mind, p. ig ). In terms of event and structure, of diachrony
and synchrony, mythical thought forms a structure from the
remains and the debris of events. By building its palaces from
the odds and ends of anterior social discourse, it offers an in
verse model of science, which gives the form of a new event to
its structures：
Mythical thought， that “bricoleur,” builds up structures by fitting
together events, or rather the remains of events, while science, uin
operation” simply by virtue of coming into being, creates its means
and results in the form of events, thanks to the structures which
it is constantly elaborating and which are its hypotheses and
theories (p. 22).
Of course, L6vl-Strauss opposes myth and science only to

bring them back together, for, he says ：
Mythical thought for its part is imprisoned in the events and ex
periences which it never tires of ordering and re-ordering in its
search to find them a meaning. But it also acts as a liberator by
its protest against the idea that anything can be meaningless with
which science at first resigned itseif to a compromise (ibid.)•
But it remains that the sense is on the side of the current ar
rangement, of synchrony. This is why these societies are so
vulnerable to events. As in linguistics, the event is threatening,
or at least upsetting, and in any case is a purely contingent
interference (hence demographic upheavals— wars, epidemics—
which alter the established order) ：athe synchronic structures of
8〇-called totemic systems [are] extremely vulnerable to the effects
of diachrony. . . （p. 67). The myth’s instability thus becomes
a sign of the primacy of synchrony. This is why so-called
totemism is “a grammar fated to degenerate into a lexicon”
( p. 232).
The classification tends to be dismantled like a palace swept away
upon the flood, whose parts, through the effect of currents and
stagnant waters, obstacles and straits, come to be combined in a
manner other than that Intended by the architect. In totemism,
therefore, function Inevitably triumphs over structure. The prob-
lem it never ceased presenting to theorists Is that o! the
44 / STRUCTURALISM
relation between structure and event. And tht grtat lesson of to-
temism is that the form of tho itructuro can sometimes survive
when the structure Itself succumbv to ovanta (ibid.).
Mythical history is itself In tho service of the struggle of

structure against events and represents un ofTort of societies to
annul the disturbing action of historical factors；it represents a
tactic of annulling history, of deadening the effect of events.
Thus, by making history and its nontemporal model reciprocal
reflections, by situating the ancestor outside of history and by
making history a copy of the ancestor, “diachrony, in some sort
mastered, collaborates with synchrony without the risk of further
conflicts arising between themw (p. 236). It is the function of
ritual to join this past that is outside of time to the rhythm of
life and the seasons and to the chain of generations. Rites "pro
nounce on diachrony but they still do so in terms of synchrony
since the very fact of celebrating them is tantamount to chang
ing past into present^ (p. 237).
It is in this perspective that Levi-Strauss interprets the
churinga— objects in stone or in wood or pebbles representing
the ancestor’s body— as the confirmation of wthe diachronic es
sence of diachrony at the very heart of synchrony" (ibid.). He
finds in them the same savor of historicity that we find in our
archives：the being-incamate of eventfulness, pure history con
firmed at the heart of the classificatory mind. In this way
mythical history is itself enlisted in the work of rationality：
. . . so-called primitive peoples have managed to evolve not un

reasonable methods for inserting irrationality, in its dual aspect
of logical contingence and emotional turbulence, into rationality.
Classificatory systems thus allow the incorporation of history, even
and particularly that which might be thought to defy the sys
tem (p. 243).
IV. T he L im its of Structuralism ?
I HAVE INTENTIONALLY FOLLOWED in L6\d-StraUSS’S

work the series of transpositions from the linguistic model to
its ultimate generalization in The Savage Mind. The conscious
ness of the validity of a method, I stated in the beginning, is
inseparable from the consciousness of its limits. These limits
appear to me to be of two kinds ：on the one hand, It seems to me
that the passage to the savage mind is made by favor of an
example that is already too favorable, one which is perhaps an
exception rather than an example. On the other hand, the pas
sage from a structural science to a structuralist philosophy
seems to me to be not very satisfying and not even very coherent.
These two extreme passages, whose effects reinforce each other,
give the book a singular character, at once seductive and provok
ing, which distinguishes it from the preceding ones.
Is the example exemplary, I asked above. While I was read
ing The Savage Mind of L6vi-Strauss, I was also involved in
Gerhard von Rad^ remarkable book, Theology of the Historical
Traditions of Israel, the first volume of his Theology of the Old
Testament.16 Here we find ourselves confronting a theological
conception exactly the inverse of that of totemism and which,
because it is the inverse, suggests an inverse relationship be
tween diachrony and synchrony and raises more urgently the
problem of the relationship between structural comprehension
and hermeneutic comprehension.
What is decisive in understanding the core of meaning of
the Old Testament? Not nomenclatures or classifications, but
founding events. If we limit ourselves to the theology of the
Hexateuch, the signifying content is a kerygma, the sign of the
action of Jahweh, constituted by a complex of events. It is a
Heilgeschichte. The first sequence is given in the series：de
liverance from Egypt, crossing the Red Sea, the revelation 6n
Sinai, wandering in the desert, reaching the Promised Land, etc.
A second nucleus is formed around the theme of Israel as the
chosen people and the Davidic mission；finally, a third nucleus of
•ense is established after the catastrophe：the destruction ap
pears here as a fundamental event opening upon the unresolved
alternatives of the promise and the threat. The method of un
derstanding to be applied to this complex of events consists in
recreating the intellectual activity born of this historical faith
And unfolding within a confessional framework which is often
In the form of a hymn and always a cultural manifestation.
Carhard von Rad says it very well: “Historical investigation
•••rches for a critically assured minimum— the lcerygmatic pic
ture tends towards a theological maximum” （p. 108). Now, it
U indeed an intellectual activity which presided over this elabora
tion of traditions and led to what we now call Scripture. Gerhard
Id. G«rh丨rd von Rad, Theoio分y of the OW Testament, Vol. I:
Th$Pl〇〇y of the Hiatorical Tradition$ of Israel (London, 1962), trans-
llWd from the German by D. M. G. 8talker.
von Rad shows how, starting from a minimal oonfesilon, a
gravitational field was constituted for diverse tradition!, belong
ing to different sources, transmitted by different groups, tribes,
or clans. Thus Abraham's saga, that of Jacob, that of Joseph,
belonging to cycles of different origins, were in some sense taken
into and internalized by the primitive core of the confession of
faith celebrating the historical action of Yahweh. As we see, we
can speak here of a primacy of history, and this in multiple
senses：in a first sense, a basic sense, since all Yahweh^ rela
tions to Israel are signified through and in events without any
trace of speculative theology— but also in two other senses,
which we stated at the beginning. The theological work upon
these events is in effect itself an ordered history, an interpreting
tradition. The reinterpretation, for each generation, of the
foundation of traditions confers a historical character upon this
understanding of history and gives rise to a development possess
ing a signifying unity which cannot be projected into a system.
We axe confronting a historical interpretation of the historical；
the very fact that here sources are juxtaposed, schisms main
tained, and contradictions exposed has a profound sense ：the
tradition corrects itself through additions, and these additions
themselves constitute a theological dialectic.
It is remarkable, moreover, that through this work of re
interpreting its own traditions Israel assumed an identity which
is itself historical, because critical work shows that there was
probably no unity in Israel before the regrouping of the clans,
after settlement, in a kind of amphictyony. By interpreting its
history historically, by elaborating this history as a living tradi
tion, Israel projected itself into the past as a single people, to
whom occurred, as to an indivisible totality, the deliverance from
Egypt, the revelation on Sinai, the wandering in the desert, and
the gift of the Promised Land. The single theological principle
toward which the entire thought of Israel tends is then ：this was
Israel, the people of God, which always acts as a unit and which
God treats as a unit. But this identity is inseparable from an
endless search for a meaning to history and in history: “this
Israel, of which the Old Testament presentations of history have
so much to say, is the object of faith, and the object of a history
constructed by faith” （p. 118).
The three historicities are linked in the following way. After
the historicity of the founding events— or hidden time, after the
historicity of the living interpretation of sacred writers一 which
constitutes tradition, we now have the historicity of understand-
lng» the historicity of hermeneutlcB. Gerhard von Rad uses the
Word Entfaltung, ûnfolding0 or "development/* to designate the
ttlk of a theology of the Old Testament which respects
Ih6 threefold historical character of the heilige Geschichte (the
livel of the founding events), the Vberlieferungen (the level of
constituting traditions), and finally the identity of Israel (the
level of constituted tradition). This theology must respect the
precedence of event over system ：
Hebrew thinking is thinking in historical traditions；that is, its
main concern is with the proper combination of traditions and
their theological interpretation, and in the process historical group
ing always takes precedence over intellectual and theological
grouping (p. 116).
Gerhard von Rad concludes his methodological chapter in these
terms：
But it would be fatal to our understanding of Israel's witness if
we were to arrange it from the outset on the basis of theological
categories which, though current among ourselves, have absolutely
nothing to do with those on whose basis Israel herself allowed her
theological thinking to be ordered (p. 121).
From this moment on, M retel]ingM(wiedererzdhlen) remains the
most legitimate form of discourse on the Old Testament. The
Entfaltung of hermeneutics is the repetition of the Entfaltung
which presided over the elaboration of the traditions of the
biblical base.
What are the results of this for the relations between di
achrony and synchrony? One thing struck me concerning the
great symbols of Hebrew thought which I dealt with in The Sym
bolism of Evil, and concerning myths— for example, those of
the Creation and the Fall一 built on the primary symbolic level：
these symbols and these myths do not exhaust their meaning in
arrangements homologous to social arrangements. I do not
say that they do not lend themselves to the structural method；
I am even convinced of the contrary. I say that the structural
method does not exhaust their meaning, for their meaning is a
reservoir of meaning ready to be used again in other structures.
You might say this to me: it is precisely this revising which
constitutes hricolage. Not at all ：bricolage works with debris；in
bricolage the structure saves the event；the debris plays the role
of a preconstraint, of a message already transmitted. It has the
inertia of something presignified：the reuse of biblical symbols
48 / STRUCTURALISM
in our cultural domain rests, on the contrary, on a semantic

richness, on a surplus of what is signified, which opens toward
new interpretations. If one considers from this perspective the
series constituted by the Babylonian narrations of the Flood and
by the chain of rabbinical and Christological reinterpretations,
it is immediately evident that these renewals represent the
inverse of bricolage. One can no longer speak of utilizing re
mains in structures where syntax is of more weight than seman
tics；we must speak, rather, of utilizing a surplus, which itself
orders, as an initial giving of sense, the rectifying intentions of
a properly theological and philosophical character which are
applied to this symbolic base. In these ordered series, starting
from a network of. signifying events, it is the initial surplus of
meaning which motivates tradition and interpretation. This is
why, in this case, one must speak of semantic regulation by the
content and not simply of structural regulation, as in the case of
totemism. The structuralist explanation triumphs in synchrony
(*The system is given, synchronically . . [The Savage Mind,
p. 66]). This is why it is at ease with those societies where
synchrony is strong and diachrony disturbing, as in linguistics.
I recognize full well that structuralism does not confront
this problem empty-handed, and I admit that “if the structural
orientation survives the shock, it has, after each upheaval,
several means of re-establishing a system, which may not be
identical with the earlier one but is at least formally of the same
typeM(p. 68). In The Savage Mind one finds examples of such a
remodeling or perseverance of the system ：
If, for tlie sake of argument, we suppose an initial point at which

the set of systems was precisely adjusted, then this network of
systems will react to any change affecting one of its parts like a
motor with a feed-back device ：governed (in both senses of the
word) by its previous harmony, it will direct the discordant mech
anism towards an equilibrium which will be at any rate a compro-
mise between the old state of affairs and the confusion brought in
from outside (p. 68).
Thus the structural regulation is much closer to the phenomenon

of Inertia than to the living reinterpretation which seems to us to
characterize true tradition. It is because semantic regulation
proceeds from the excess of potential meaning over its use and
function inside the given synchronic system that the hidden
time of symbols can carry the twofold historicity— of tradition,
which transmits and sediments the interpretation, and of inter
pretation, which maintains and renews the tradition.
If our hypothesis is valid, the remodeling of structures and
the overdetermination of contents are two different conditions of
diachrony. One might ask if this is not the combination, in dif
ferent degrees and perhaps in inverse proportions, of those two
general conditions which allow individuai societies— according
to a remark of Levi-Strauss himself— to “work out a single
scheme which allowed them to combine the standpoint of struc
ture with that of event,' (p. 70). But when this combination is
built, as was stated above, on the model of a feedback mecha
nism, it is just a ^compromise between the old state of affairs
and the confusion brought in from outside,> (p. 68). Tradition
betrothed to duration and capable of being reincarnated in dif
ferent structures depends more, it seems to me, on the over
determination of the contents than on the remodeling of the
structures.
This discussion leads us to question the adequacy of the
linguistic model and the import of the ethnological submodel
borrowed from the system of denominations and classifications
commonly termed totemic. This ethnological submodel has a
privileged position in relation to totemism. The same require
ment of differential variation dwells in both of them. What struc
turalism elicits from both are wcodes suitable for conveying
messages which can be transposed into other codes, and for
expressing messages received by means of different codes in
terms of fiieir own system” （p. 75). But if it is true, as the au
thor sometimes admits, that “in tiie bounds of the great civiliza-
tions of Europe and Asia there is a remarkable absence of any
thing which might have reference to totemism, even in the form
of remainsM(p. 232), has one the right, at the risk of falling into
a “totemic illusion” of a new kind, to identify, with the savage
mind in general, a type which is perhaps exemplary only because
It occupies an extreme position in a chain of mythical types,
which would have to be understood by the other pole as well?
I would be willing to think that in the history of humanity the
exceptional survival of Jewish kerygma in constantly changing
sociocultural contexts represents the other pole, exemplary of
mythical thought as well because it is an extreme.
In this chain of types, thus bounded by their two poles, tem
porality— that of tradition and that of interpretation一 has a dif
ferent aspect according to whether synchrony takes the lead over
diachrony or the opposite. At one extreme, that of th« tOttmic
type, we have a broken temporality, which verifies Bo
tion rather well ：M it would seem that mythological worlds have
been built up, only to be shattered again, and that new worlds
were built from the fragmentsw (p. 2 1 ；cf. Structural Anthro
pology, p. 206). At the other extreme, where we find the
kerygmatlc type, we have a temporality governed by the con
tinual reappraisal of meaning inside an interpreting tradition.
If this is so, can one even continue to speak of myth without
the risk of equivocalness? One can indeed grant that in the
totemic model, where structures are more important than con-
tents, the myth tends to be identified with an “operator,” with a
^code^ which governs a system of transformation. This is how
Levi-Strauss defines it ：
The mythical system and the modes of representation it em
ploys serve to establish homologies between natural and social
conditions or, more accurately, it makes it possible to equate sig
nificant contrasts found on different planes：the geographies^,
meteorological, zoological, botanical, technical, economic, social,
ritual, religious, and philosophical (The Savage Mind, p. 93).
The myth's function, thus presented in terms of structure, ap

pears in synchrony；its synchronic solidity is indeed the inverse
of the diachronic fragility which Boas* statement recalled.
In the kerygmatic model the structuralist explanation is
doubtless enlightening, as I will attempt to show in my conclu
sion, but it represents a secondary level of expression, sub
ordinated to the surplus of meaning found in the symbolic
substratum. Thus the Adamic myth is second in relation to the
elaboration of the symbolic expressions of the pure and the im
pure, of wandering and exile，formed at the level of cultic and
penitential experience. The richness of this symbolic substratum
appears only in diachrony. The synchronic point of view reaches,
then, only the current social function of the myth, more or less
comparable to the totemic operator, which earlier assured the
convertibility of afferent messages at each level of cultural life
and assured the mediation between nature and culture. Struc
turalism is undoubtedly still valid (the proof of its fruitfulness
is respect to our cultural areas still remains to be given；to this
end, the example of the Oedipus myth in Structural Anthro
pology, pp. 213-19, is very promising). While the structuralist
explanation seems to encompass almost everything when syn
chrony takes the lead over diachrony, it provides us only a kind
of skeleton, whose abstract character Is apparent, when we are
faced with an overdetermined content, a content which does not
cease to set us thinking and which is made explicit only through
(he series of recoveries by which it is both interpreted and re
newed.
I should like now to say a few words about the second cross
ing of the limit we mentioned above, the passage from a struc
tural science to a structuralist philosophy. Structural anthro-
pology seems to me to be convincing as long as it understands
itself as the extension, by degrees, of an explanation which was
first successful in linguistics, then in systems of kinship, and
finally extending, little by little, by the play of affinities with the
linguistic model, to all forms of social life. By the same token,
it seems to me suspect when it sets itself up as a philosophy. An
order posited as unconscious can never, to my mind, be more
than a stage abstractly separated from an understanding of the
self by itself；order in itself is thought located outside itself. Of
course, uthe day may come when all the available documentation
on Australian tribes is transferred to punched cards, and with
the help of a computer their entire techno-economic, social, and
religious structures can be shown to be like a vast group of
transformations,> (The Savage Mind, p. 89). Indeed, this day
may come, but on the condition that thought does not become
alienated from itself in the objectivity of the codes. If the decod
ing is not the objective stage of the deciphering and the latter
an existential— or existentiell— episode of the comprehension
of self and of being, structural thought remains a thought which
does not think itself. In return, it is up to a reflective philosophy
to understand itself as a hermeneutics, so as to create the recep
tive structure for a structural anthropology. In this respect, it
is the function of hermeneutics to make the understanding of
the other— and of his signs in various cultures— coincide with
the understanding of the self and of being. Structural objectivity
can then appear as an abstract moment— and validly abstract—
of the appropriation and the recognition through which abstract
reflection becomes concrete reflection. At the limit, this appro
priation and this recognition would consist in a total recapitula
tion of all the signifying contents in a knowledge of self and of
being, as Hegel attempted— in a logic which would be that of
contents, not that of syntaxes. It goes without saying that we can
produce only fragments, known to be partial, of this exegesis of
self and of being. But structural comprehension is no less partial,
in the sense that it does not proceed from a recapitulation of the
52 / STRUCTURALISM
signified but only reaches its logical level . . . by semantic

impoverishment” （p. 105) •
Lacking this receptive structure, which for my part I con
ceive as the mutual joining of reflection and hermeneutics, struc
turalist philosophy seems to me to be condemned to oscillate
between several rough outlines of philosophies. It could be called
at times a Kantianism without a transcendental subject, even
an absolute formalism, which would found the very correlation
between nature and culture. This philosophy is motivated by the
consideration of the duality of “true models of concrete diversity:
one on the plane of nature, namely that of the diversity of
species, and the other on the cultural plane provided by the
diversity of functions,>(p. 124). The principle of the transforma
tions can then be sought in a combination, in a finite order or
in the finitude of order, more fundamental than each of the
models. All that is said of the “unconscious teleology, which,
although historical, completely eludes human history,* (p. 252)
corroborates this view. This philosophy would make the linguistic
model an absolute, following its gradual generalization. “For
language/' the author declares,
does not consist in the analytical reason of the old style gram
marians nor in the dialectic constituted by structural linguistics
nor in the constitutive dialectic of individual praxis facing the
practico-inert, since all three presuppose it. Linguistics thus pre
sents us with a dialectical and totalizing entity but one outside (or
beneath) consciousness and will. Language, an unreflecting to
talization, is human reason which has its reasons and of which
man knows nothing (p. 252).
But what is language if not an abstraction of the speaking being?
Here one objects that Tiis discourse never was and never will be
the result of a conscious totalization of linguistic lawsM(ibid.).
We answer by saying that linguistic laws are not what we at
tempt to totalize in order to understand ourselves；rather, we are
concerned with the meaning of the words, for which linguistic
laws serve as the instrumental mediation, forever unconscious.
I seek to understand myself by taking up anew the meaning of
the words of all men ；it is on this plane that hidden time be
comes the historicity of tradition and of interpretation.
But at other moments the author invites us to “recognize
the system of natural species and that of manufactured objects
as two mediating sets which man employs to overcome the op
position between nature and culture and think of them as a
whole” （p. 127). He holds that structures precede practices， but
he allows that praxis precedes structures. Henceforth, it ap
pears that the structures are the superstructures of this praxis,
which, for Levi-Strauss as for Sartre, ^constitutes the funda
mental totality for the sciences of man>, (p. 130).17 Besides the
outline of a transcendentalism without a subject, we thus find
in The Savage Mind the sketch of a philosophy in which struc
ture plays the role of mediator, placed between praxis and
practices” （p. 130). But it cannot stop there, under the penalty
of conceding to Sartre all that was refused him by refusing to
sociologize the cogito (p. 249). This sequence：praxis-structure-
practices allows one at least to be a structuralist in ethnology
and a Marxist in philosophy. But what kind of Marxism is this?
There is, in fact, in The Savage Mind the sketch of a very
different philosophy, where the order is the order of things and a
thing itself. A meditation on the notion of <<speciesw naturally
leads in this direction: isn’t the species— that of vegetable and
animal classifications— a “presumptive objectivity” ？ “[The]
diversity of species furnishes man with the most intuitive picture
at his disposal and constitutes the most direct manifestation he
can perceive of the ultimate discontinuity of reality. It is the
sensible expression of an objective coding,> (p. 137). It is in
deed the privilege of the notion of species to ^furnish a mode of
sensory apprehension of a combination objectively given in
nature, and that the activity of the mind, and social life itself,
do no more than borrow it to apply it to the creation of new
taxonomies” （ibid.).
Perhaps the consideration of the notion of structure alone
prevents us from going beyond a Reciprocity of perspectives, in
which man and the world mirror each otherw (p. 222). It seems,
then, to be by an unjustified coup de force that, after having
pushed the pendulum to the side of the primacy of praxis over
structural mediations, one stops it at the other pole and declares
17. See also pp. 130 -31： Marxism, if not Marx himself, has too
commonly reasoned as though practices followed directly from praxis.
Without questioning the undoubted primacy of infrastructures, I believe
that there is always a mediator between praxis and practices, namely the
conceptual scheme by the operation of which matter and form, neither
with any independent existence, are realized as structures, that is as
•ntltles which are both empirical and intelligible. It is to this theory of
superstructures, scarcely touched on by Maix, that I hope to make a
contribution. The development of the study of infrastructures proper is a
task which must be left to history一 with the aid of demography, technol
ogy, historical geography and ethnography. It is not principally the
•uinologlst's concernv for ethnology Is first of all psychology/'
54 / STRUCTURALISM
“the ultimate goal of the human sciences to be not to constitute

but to dissolve man . . . , [to be] the reintegration of culture
in nature and finally of life within the whole of its physico
chemical conditions” （p. 247). “As the mind too is a thing，the
functioning of this thing teaches us something about the nature
of things: even pure reflection is in the last analysis an inter
nalization of the cosmos” （p. 248 n.). The final pages of the book
would have us understand that we must look for the principle of
the mind’s functioning as a thing in “a universe of information
where the laws of savage thought reign once morew (p. 267).
Such are the structuralist philosophies among which struc
tural science does not allow us to choose. But would it not be
just as much in keeping with the teachings of linguistics if one
held that language, and all the mediations for which it serves as
a model, was the unconscious instrument by means of which a
speaking subject can attempt to understand being, beings, and
himself?
V. Hermeneutics and Structural A nthropology
In c o n c l u d i n g , I want to return to the initial question：

in what sense are structural considerations today a necessary
stage of any hermeneutic comprehension? More generally, how
are hermeneutics and structuralism joined, one to the other?
1. I would first like to dissipate a misunderstanding that
the previous discussion may occasion. By suggesting that myth
ical types form a chain in which the “totemic” type would form
one extreme and the <Tcerygmatic,> type another extreme, I ap
pear to have gone back on my initial statement, according to
which structural anthropology is a scientific discipline and
hermeneutics a philosophical discipline. This is not the case. To
distinguish two submodels is not to say that one is dependent on
structuralism and that the other would come under the direct
jurisdiction of a nonstructural hermeneutics. I only wish to
show that the totemic submodel better tolerates a structuralist
explanation which is all-inclusive because totemism is, among
all the mythical types, the one which has the greatest affinity
for the initial linguistic model. In the kerygmatic type, however,
the structuralist explanation一 which generally has not yet been
attempted— more clearly refers to another way of apprehending
meaning. But the two ways of understanding are not species,
opposing one another on the same level inside the common
genus of comprehension；this is why they require no methodolog
ical e c le c t ic i s m . I want, then, before attempting some exploratory
remarks concerning their connection, to stress one last time their
unevenness. The structuralist explanation bears ( 1 ) on an un
conscious system which (2) is constituted by differences and
oppositions (by signifying variations) (3) independently of the
observer. The interpretation of a transmitted sense consists in
( 1 ) the conscious recovery of (2) an overdetemiined symbolic
substratum by (3) an interpreter who places himself in the same
semantic field as the one he is understanding and thus enters
the ‘liermeneutic circle.”
This is why the two ways of revealing time are not on the
same level；it is only by reason of a provisional dialectic concern
that we spoke of the priority of diachrony over synchrony. Truly
speaking, the expressions “diachrony*， and “synchrony^ must be
reserved for the explanatory schema in which synchrony forms
a system and diachrony forms a problem. I will reserve the term
^historicity”一 historicity of tradition and historicity of interpreta
tion— for any understanding which implicitly or explicitly knows
itself to be on the road of the philosophical understanding of
self and of being. In this sense, the Oedipus myth arises from
hermeneutic understanding when the myth is understood and
taken up again— as was already the case for Sophocles— as a
primordial appeal for meaning, giving rise to a meditation on
self-recognition, the struggle for truth, and “tragic knowledge.”
2. The joining of these two comprehensions raises more
problems than their differentiation. The question is too new to
allow us to go beyond exploratory remarks. Can the structuralist
explanation, we might ask first, be separated from a ll hermeneu
tic comprehension? Doubtless it can be, insofar as the function
of myth is exhausted in the establishment of homologous rela
tions between the significant contrasts located on several levels
of nature and culture. But then doesn't hermeneutic comprehen-
•lon have recourse to the very constitution of the semantic field
where the homologous relations are operating? This brings to
mind L^vi-Strauss’s important remark concerning the “split
representation that pertains to the symbolic functlonM ( S t r u c
tu r a l A n t h r o p o lo g y , p. 62). The M
contradictionMof this sign can
be neutralized, he said, only uin the exchange of complementary
values, to which all social existence is reducedw ( i b i d . ) . In this
remark I see the indication of a path to follow, leading to the
union of hermeneutics and structuralism, which would in no
56 / STRUCTURALISM
way be an eclecticism. I know full well that the split at issue

here is the split that engenders the function of sign in general
and not the double meaning of the symbol as we understand it.
But what is true of the sign in its primary sense is even truer of
the double meaning of symbols. The comprehension of this
double meaning, an essentially hermeneutic comprehension, is
always presupposed by the comprehension of M the exchange of
complementary values” (ibid.) put into operation by struc
turalism. A careful examination of The Savage Mind suggests
that at the base of structural homologies one can always look for
semantic analogies which render comparable the different levels
of reality whose convertibility is assured by the “code.” The
“code” presupposes a correspondence, an affinity of the con
tents, tAat is, a cipher.18 Thus, in interpreting the rites of eagle-
hunting in the Hidatsa tribe (pp. 52-53), the constitution of the
high-low pair, from which are formed all the differences, includ
ing the maximum differences between the hunter and his game,
provides a mythological typology only on the condition of an
implicit comprehension of the surcharge of sense of the high
and the low. I grant that in the systems studied here this affinity
of the contents is in some sense residual residual, but not null.
一
This is why structural comprehension is never without a degree

of hermeneutic comprehension, even if the latter is not thema-
tized. A good example to consider is the homology between mar
riage rules and food prohibitions (pp. 100-108 )；the analogy
between eating and marrying, between fasting and chastity, con
stitutes a metaphorical relation anterior to the operation of
transformation. Here, too, structuralism is not at a loss ：it too
speaks of metaphor (p. 105), but in order to formalize it into a
18. The value of ciphers is first perceived in feelings. Reflecting on the
aspects of concrete logic, L6vi-Strauss shows that they ^can be observed
in the course of ethnographic enquiry. Both an affective and intellectual
aspect become apparent^ (The Savage Mind, p. 37). Taxonomy unfolds its
logic against the background of a feeling of kinship between men and
beings：^This disinterested, attentive, fond and affectionate lore acquired
and transmitted through the attachments of marriage and upbringing0
(ibid.) the author finds also in circus people and the employees of
zoolo^cal gardens (p. 38). If "taxonomy and warmest affection^ (ibid.)
are the common emblem of the so-called primitive and of the zoologist,
is it not necessary to distinguish this comprehension from feeling? More
over, the comparisons, correspondences, associations, blendings, and 53011-
bolizations which occupy the foUowing pages (pp. 38-44) and which the
author does not hesitate to compare to hermeticism and emblematiclsm,
places correspondences— the cipher一 at the origin of the homologies
between differential variations belonging to different levels, thus to the
origin of the code.
conjunction by complementarity. It nevertheless remains that
here the apprehension of similitude precedes formalization and
founds it. This is why this similitude must be reduced in order to
bring out the structural homology ：
The connection between them is not casual but metaphorical. Sex

ual and nutritional relations are at once associated even today.
. . . But how is this fact and its universality to be explained?
Here once again the logical level is reached by semantic impov
erishment：the lowest common denominator of the union of the
sexes and the union of the eater and eaten is that they both efFect
a conjunction by complementarity (pp. 105-6).
It is always at the price of such a semantic impoverishment that

the ‘logical subordination of resemblance to contrast” （p. 106)
is obtained. Here psychoanalysis, taking up the same problem,
will follow, instead, the thread of analogical cathexes and will
take sides with a semantics of contents and not with a syntax of
arrangements.19
3. The joining of a philosophically oriented interpretation
to the structural explanation must now be taken in the other
sense；I let it be understood from the beginning that the latter
was today the necessary detour, the stage of scientific objectivity
along the path of recovering meaning. In a statement which is
symmetrical to, and the inverse of, the preceding one, I assert
that there is no recovery of meaning without some structural
comprehension. Why? We can once more consider the example
19. A notable consequence follows the intolerance of the logic of

contrasts in regard to universality： totemism— although termed “so-
called totemism”— is resolutely preferred to the logic of sacrifice (pp. 223-
a8), whose “fundamental principle is that of substitution” （p. 296)， that
U, something foreign to the logic of totemism， which “consists in a net
work of differentiation between terms posited as discontinuous” （ibid.).
Sacrifice appears then as *'an absolute or extreme operation which relates
to an intermediary object/* the victim (p. 225). Why extreme? Because
the sacrifice breaks the relation between man and the divinity by destroy
ing It, in order to release the concession of grace which will fill the void.
Here the ethnologist no longer describes, he judges ： “The system of
sacrifice, on the other hand, makes a non-existent term, divinity, inter
vene； and it adopts a conception of the natural series which is false
from the objective point of view, for, as we have seen, it represents it as
continuous" (pp. 227-28). Between totemism and sacrifice, it must be
籲tld: “one is true, and die other is false. Rather, 印 put it precisely, the
olatilflcatory systems belong to the levels of language： they are codes
Which, however well or badly made, aim always to make sense. The
•yitem of sacrifice, on the other hand, represents a private discourse
wanting in good tense for all that it may be frequently pronounced" (p.
58 / STRUCTURALISM
of Judeo-Christian symbolism, this time no longer in its origin

but at its extreme point of development, that is, at a point where
it manifests both its greatest exuberance, its greatest intem
perance, and its highest organization— in the twelfth century；
of this century, so rich in explorations of every kind, Father
Chenu has given us an authoritative description in his work
Theologie au XIV siecle.20 This symbolism is expressed alike in
the Quest of the Grail, in the stone images and animal forms
worked into the porches and cornices, in the allegorizing exegesis
of Scripture, in rite and in speculations about liturgy and the
sacraments, in meditations on the Augustinian signum and the
Dionysian symbolum, and on the analogia and anagoge which
follow from them. Between the cathedral as a book of stone
images and the entire literature of the AJJegoriae and the Dis-
巴s (those rich storehouses of the relations among mean-
ings, grafted onto the words and the invocations of Scripture)
there is a unity of intention which constitutes what the author
himself calls a “symbolic mentality” （chap. VII) at the origin of
^symbolic theologyw (chap. VIII). Now, what holds together the
multiple and exuberant aspects of this mentality? The people of
the twelfth century “did not confuse,” the author says, “either
levels or objects; rather, they benefited on these diverse levels
from a common denominator in the subtle play of analogies, in
accordance with the mysterious relation of the physical world
to the sacred world” （p. 16o). This problem of tlie “common
denominator” is unavoidable if one considers that an isolated
symbol has no meaning；or rather, an isolated symbol has too
much meaning; polysemy is its law: “the fire warms, illuminates,
purifies, burns, regenerates, consumes；it signifies concupiscence
as well as the Holy Spiritw (p. 184). It is in an economy of the
whole that differential values are separated out and polysemy is
dammed up. It was in this search for a ^mystical coherence of
the economy>, (ibid.) that the symbolists of the Middle Ages were
involved. In nature everything is a symbol, certainly；but for the
man of the Middle Ages nature speaks only when revealed by a
historical typology instituted in the confrontation of the two
Testaments. The “mirror” ( speculum) of nature becomes a
^book” only in contact with the Book, that is， with an exegesis
instituted within an ordered community. Thus, the symbol
symbolizes only in an <<economy,>, a dispertsatio, an ordo. It is on
this condition that Hugues de Saint-Victor could define it thus：
ao. M.-D. Chenu, La Theologie au XIV sidcle (Paris, 1957), pp. 159-
azo.
^symbolum est collatio, id est coaptatio, visibilium formarum
ad demonstrationem rei invisibilis propositarumw (wa symbol is
a bringing together, that is, a harmonizing of visible forms for
the purpose of demonstrating things that have been stated about
what is invisible”） . We see that this “demonstration” is incom
patible with a logic of propositions, which supposes definite
concepts (concepts bounded by a notional and univocal contour),
notions that signify something because they signify one thing；
but this is not our concern here. What does concern us is the
fact that it is only in an economy of the whole that this collatto
et coaptatio— this bringing together and relating— can under
stand itself as a relation and can claim the rank of demonstratio.
Here I reiterate Edmond Ortigues^ thesis in Le Discours et le
symbole：<4A single term can be imaginary if one considers it
absolutely, and symbolic if one understands it as a differential
value, correlative to other terms which limit it reciprocally”
(p. 194). “As one approaches the material imagination, the
differential function diminishes, and one tends toward equiv
alences；as one approaches the formative elements of society,
the differential function diminishes, and one tends toward dis
tinctive valences>, (p. 197). In this respect the stone figures and
the animal forms of the Middle Ages are very close to images.
This is indeed why they join, by means of their imaginary pole,
images drawn from an undifferentiated substratum, imagery
which can be Cretan as easily as Assyrian and which appears in
turn exuberant in its variations and stereotyped in its concep
tion. But if this system of stone figures and animal forms be
longs to the same economy as allegorizing exegesis and specula-
tion on signs and symbols, it is because the unlimited potential
of the signification of images is differentiated by the operations
of language which in fact constitute its exegesis. What then takes
the place of polymorphic, naturalistic symboKsm and dams up
its wild proliferations is a typology of history exercised within
the framework of the ecclesiastical community, in connection
with a cult, a ritual, etc. It is by interpreting accounts, by de
ciphering a Heilgeschichte, that the exegete attributes to the
image-maker a principle of choice in the exuberances of the
imagery. It must then be said that the symbolic does not reside in
this or that symbol and even less so in their abstract repertory.
This repertory will always be too poor — for it is always the
same Images which return；and it will always be too rich— for
each symbol signifies potentially all the others. The symbolic is
rather between the symbols, as relation and as the economy of
their relating. This system of symbolics is nowhere more ap

parent than in Christianity, where the natural symbolism is at
once freed and ordered entirely in the light of the Word, made
explicit only in a Recitative. There is no natural symbolism, no
abstract or moralizing allegorism (the allegorism always being
the counterpart of the symbolism, not only its requital but its
fruit— to such an extent does the symbol consume its own physi
cal, sensible, visible basis) without a historical typology. The
symbolic resides, then, in this ordered play of natural symbolism,
of abstract allegorism, and of historical typology：signs of nature,
figures of virtues, Christ’s acts, are mutually interpreted in this
dialectic of the mirror and the book which is continued in every
creature.
These considerations constitute the exact counterpart of the
preceding remarks ：no structural analysis, we said, without a
hermeneutic comprehension of the transfer of sense (without
"m etaphorwithout translatio), without that indirect giving of
meaning which founds the semantic field, which in turn pro
vides the ground upon which structural homologies can be dis
cerned. In the language of our mediaeval symbolists— a language
coming from Augustine and Denis and adapted to the exigencies
of a transcendental object一 what is primary is the translation,
the transfer from the visible to the invisible by means of an
image borrowed from sensible realities；what is primary is the
semantic constitution under the form of the “similar-dissimilar”
at the root of symbols or figures. Starting from this, a syntax of
the arrangements of signs on multiple levels can be abstractly
elaborated.
But, in turn, neither is there any hermeneutic comprehen
sion without the support of an economy, of an order in which
the symbol signifies. Taken by themselves, symbols are threat
ened by their oscillation between sinking into the imaginary and
evaporating in allegorism；their richness, their exuberance, their
polysemy expose naive symbolists to intemperance and to com
placency. What Saint Augustine in the De doctrina Christiana
already called verborum translatorum ambiguitates,21 what we
call simply equivocalness in regard to the demand for univocity
in logical thought, makes symbols symbolize only within wholes
which limit and link their significations.
Henceforth, the understanding of structures is no longer
outside an understanding whose task would be to think by start-
az. Cited by Chenu, p. 17s.

ing from symbols；today this understanding of structures is the
necessary intermediary between symbolic naivete and hermeneu
tic comprehension.
It is with this remark, which leaves the last word to the
structuralist, that I should like to end, so that both our attention
and our expectation remain open in his behalf.
The Problem of Double Meaning
as Hermeneutic Problem
and as Semantic Problem
T h is p r e s e n t a t i o n is intended to be interdisciplinary
in scope. I will attempt to study several ways of approaching
a single problem, symbolism, and to reflect upon the significa
tion of the diversity of these approaches. I like to grant philoso
phy the role of arbitrator, and I have previously attempted to
arbitrate the conflict of several hermeneutics in modem culture ：
the hermeneutics which demystifies and the hermeneutics which
recovers meaning.1 This is not the problem that I intend to take
up again here；rather, I wish to consider a different problem,
occasioned by a different kind of split. The approaches to
symbolism which I propose to bring face to face represent
different strategic levels. I will consider two and even a third
strategic level and will take hermeneutics as a single strategic
level, that of texts. This level will be confronted with the
semantics of linguists, but this semantics itself includes two
different strategic levels. First is the level of lexical semantics,
which is often called simply “semantics” （ for example, by
Stephen Ullmann or P. Guiraud). It is maintained at the level of
words or, rather, as Ullmann proposes, of names, of the process
of nomination or denomination. But before our eyes a structural
semantics is being constituted as well, characterized, among
other things, by a change of level and a change of unit, by the
passage from molar units of communication, such as words and
i. See La Symbolique du nnal (Paris：Aubier, i960). English transla
tion by Emerson Buchanan, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston2 Beacon
Press, 1969).
The Problem of Double Meaning / 63
texts, to molecular units, considered to be the basic
a fo r tio r i
structures of signification.
I propose to examine what becomes of our problem of sym
bolism when it is transferred from one level of consideration
to the other. Certain problems which I had the opportunity to
discuss under the title “Structure and Hermeneutics” 2 will turn
up again, but perhaps under more favorable conditions；for the
risk of conflict that occurs at the same level between a p h ilo s o p h y
of interpretation and a structural s c i e n c e can be averted by a
method which places at different levels of realization the mean
ing effects being considered.
Broadly speaking, I want to show that the change of scale of
the problem causes the appearance of the atomic c o n s t it u t io n
which alone permits a scientific treatment of the problem；the
path of a n a ly s is , the decomposition into smaller units, is the very
path of science, as one sees in the use of the analytic process
in automatic translation. In turn, I would also like to show that
the reduction to simple elements sanctions the elimination of a
fundamental function of symbolism which can appear only at
the higher level of m a n ife s t a t io n and which places symbolism in
relation with reality, with experience, with the world, with
existence (I am intentionally leaving the choice open among
these terms). In short, I would like to establish that the way of
analysis and the way of synthesis do not coincide, are not equiv
alent：by way of analysis one discovers the e l e m e n t s of significa
tion, which no longer have any relation to the things said ；by
Way of synthesis is revealed the function of signification, which
lg to saj/ and finally to “show.”
I. T he Hermeneutic L evel
In order t o c a r r y o u t o u r in q u ir y , it is important
to be sure that it is the same problem which is treated on three
different levels. This problem I have termed the problem of
multiple m e a n in g . By this I designate a certain meaning effect,
ftccording to which one expression, of variable dimensions,
While signifying one thing at the same time signifies a n o th e r
thing without ceasing to signify the first. In the proper sense of
丨• 8«e, 瓢bove, “Structure and Hermeneutics.”
64 / STRUCTURALIIM
the word, it is the allegorical function of language (all-egoreo：

“while saying one thing to say another thing"〉 •
What defines hermeneutics, at lauMt In relation to the other
strategic levels which we are going to conildcr. Is first of all the
length of sequences with which it works and which I call texts. It
was first in the exegesis of biblical toxtii and then secular ones
that the idea of a hermeneutics, conceived as a science of the
rules of exegesis, was constituted. Here the notion of text has a
precise and limited meaning. Dilthoy, in his great article "Die
Entstehung der Hermeneutik/ said ：4,Wc call exegesis or inter
pretation the art of comprehending vital manifestations fixed in
a durable fashion”；and again: “The art of comprehending
gravitates around the interpretation of human testimonies pre
served by writing ；and yet again ：4,We call exegesis, interpreta
tion, the art of comprehending the written manifestations of
life.w Now, in addition to a certain length in relation to the
minimal sequences with which the linguist likes to work, the
text Includes the internal organization of a work, a Zusammen-
hang, an internal connection. The first achievement of modern
hermeneutics was to posit as a rule that one proceed from the
whole to the part and the details, to treat, for example, a biblical
pericope as a linking or to use Schleiermacher's terms— as the
一
relationship between an internal form and an external form.

For the interpreter, it is the text which has a multiple mean
ing ；the problem of multiple meaning is posed for him only if
what is being considered is a whole in which events, persons,
institutions， and natural or historical realities are articulated. It
is an entire êconom yan entire signifying whole, which lends
itself to the transfer of meaning from the historical to the
spiritual level. In the entire mediaeval tradition of the multiple
meanings of Scripture, it is through great wholes that the
quadruple meaning is articulated.3
Today this problem of multiple meaning is no longer simply
the problem of exegesis in the biblical or even in the secular
sense of the word；it is rather an interdisciplinary problem,
which I wish to consider first on a single strategic level, on a
homogeneous plane— that of the text. The phenomenology of
religion, after the fashion of Van der Leeuw and, to a certain
extent, after the fashion of Eliade, Freudian and Jungian psy
choanalysis (I am not distinguishing between them here),
literary criticism (^New” or not), allows us to generalize the
3. H. de Lubac, VEx^gdse m idiivale ： Les quatre sens de VEcriture,
4 vols. (Paris, 1953-65)-
notion of text to signifying wholes of a different degree of com
plexity than that of sentences. I will consider here only one
example, sufficiently removed from biblical exegesis so as to give
an idea of the fullness of the hermeneutic field. The dream is
treated by Freud-as a narration, which can be extremely brief
but which always has an internal multiplicity；accorcUng to
Freud, it is a question of substituting for this narration, unintel
ligible at the first hearing, a more meaningful text, which would
be to the first as the latent is to the patent. There is thus a vast
area of double meaning, whose internal connections clearly set
forth the diversity of hermeneutics.
Now, what causes the diversity of these various hermeneu
tics? For one thing, they reflect differences in technique：psy
chological decipherment is one thing, biblical exegesis is another.
The difference here depends on the internal rules of interpreta
tion；it is an epistemological difference. But these differences of
technique in turn refer back to different intents concerning the
function of interpretation ：it is one thing to use hermeneutics as
a weapon of suspicion against the “mystification，’ of false con
sciousness; it is another tSing to use it as a preparation for a bet-
ter understanding of what once made sense, of what once was
said.
Now, the very possibility of divergent and rival hermeneu
tics— on the level of technique and on the level of intent— is
related to a fundamental condition which, to my mind, char
acterizes the entire strategic level of the various hermeneutics,
and it is this fundamental condition which now holds our atten
tion. It consists in the following：that symbolics is the means of
expressing an extralinguistic reality. This is of the greatest
importance for the subsequent confrontation；anticipating an
expression which will take on its precise meaning only on an
other strategic level, I will say that in hermeneutics there is no
closed system of the universe of signs. While linguistics moves
inside the enclosure of a self-sufficient universe and encounters
only intrasignificant relations— relations of mutual interpreta
tion between signs (to use the vocabulary of Charles Sanders
Peirce)— hermeneutics is ruled by the open state of the universe
of signs.
My aim is to show that this rule of the open state is con
nected to the very scale on which interpretation, understood as
exegesis, operates and that the closing of the linguistic universe
Is accomplished only by a change of scale and by the considera
tion of small signifying units.
66 / STRUCTURALISM
What do we mean here by "open state*'? In each hermeneutic

discipline, interpretation is at the hinge between linguistics and
nontoguistics, between language and lived experience (of what
ever kind). What causes the specific character of various her
meneutics is precisely that this grip of language* on being and of
being on language takes place according to different modes.
Thus, dream symbolism can in no way be a simple play of mean
ings, referring back and forth among themselves；it is the milieu
of expression where desire is uttered. For my part, I have pro
posed the notion of a semantics of desire in order to designate
this interweaving of two kinds of relations：relations of force,
expressed in a dynamics, and relations of meaning, expressed
in an exegesis of meaning. Symbolism occurs because what is
symbolizable is found initially in nonlinguistic reality, which
Freud terms instinct, considered in its affective and representa
tive agents. It is these emissaries and their derivatives that are
revealed and hidden in the meaning effects we call symptoms,
dreams, myths, ideals, illusions. Far from moving in a closed
linguistic circle, we are ceaselessly at the juncture of the erotic
and the semantic. The power of the symbol is due to the fact that
double meaning is the mode in which the very ruse of desire is
expressed.
The same thing is true at the other end of the hermeneutic
scale ：if there is some sense in speaking of a hermeneutics of
the sacred, it lies in the degree to which the double meaning of
a text which, for example, in telling me about the Exodus, opens
onto a certain state of wandering which is lived existentially as
a movement from captivity to deliverance. Under the summons
of a word which gives what it ordains, the double meaning aims
here at deciphering an existential movement, a certain ontolog
ical condition of man, by means of the surplus of meaning
attached to the event which, in its literalness, is situated in the
observable historical world. Here, double meaning is the means
of detecting a condition of being.
In this way, symbolism, taken at the level of manifestation
in texts, marks the breakthrough of language toward something
other than itself一 what I call its opening. This breakthrough is
saying；and saying is showing. Rival hermeneutics conflict not
over the structure of double meaning but over the mode of its
opening, over the finality of showing. This is the strength and
the weakness of hermeneutics；its weakness because, taking
language at the moment when it escapes from its enclosure, it
takes it at the moment when It also escapes a scientific treat
ment, which can begin only by postulating the closed system of
the signifying universe. All other weaknesses flow from this one,
and first and foremost the conspicuous weakness of delivering
hermeneutics over to the warfare of rival philosophical projects.
But this weakness is also its strength, because the place where
language escapes from itself and escapes us is also the place
where language comes to itself, the place where language is
saying. Whether I understand the relation of showing-hiding as
a psychoanalyst or as a phenomenologlst of religion (and I think
that today these two possibilities must be assumed together), the
understanding is in each case like a force which discovers, which
manifests, which brings to light, a force which language utilizes
and becomes itself. Then language becomes silent before what
it says.
I will venture to summarize this in a few words: the sole
philosophical interest in symbolism is that it reveals, by its
structure of double meaning, the equivocalness of being: “Being
speaks in many ways/' Symbolism's raison (FStre is to open the
multiplicity of meaning to the equivocalness of being.
The remainder of this investigation aims at discovering why
this grip on being is related to the scale of discourse which we
have called the text and which is realized as dream or hymn.
This is something we do not know yet but will learn through
comparisons with other approaches to the problem of double
meaning, where the change of scale will be marked at once by
progress toward scientific rigor and by the disappearance of
this ontological function of language which we have called
saying.
II. L exical Semantics
T he first change of scale is the one which makes

us consider lexical units. Part of the Saussurean heritage is on
this level, but only part of it. Indeed, we shall later consider
the work that begins with the application of phonological analy
sis to semantics and which, to do this, requires a much more
radical change of scale, since the lexemes, as they are called,
are still on the level of the manifestation of discourse, as were
the large units we considered earlier. Nevertheless, a certain kind
of description and even a certain explanation of symbolism can
be carried out at this first level.
First, a description. The problem of multiple meaning can in
68 / STRUCTURALISM
fact be limited in lexical semantics to polysemy, that is, to the

possibility for a name (I am adopting S. Ullmann’s terminology )45
to have more than one meaning. It is possible to describe this
meaning effect in the Saussurean terms of “signifter” and
“signified” （Ullmann’s “name” and “sense”） . Thus, the relation
to the thing is already excluded, although Ullmann does not
make a final choice between the illustration in Ogden Richard’s
‘"basic triangle”一 symbol-referent-reference一 and the Saussurean
analysis into two levels. (Later we will see why ：the closed
system of the linguistic universe is not yet complete at this level.)
We will continue the description in Saussurean terms, distin
guishing a “synchronic” definition and a “diachronic” definition
of double meaning. The synchronic definition ：in a given state of
language, the same word has several meanings；strictly speak
ing, polysemy is a synchronic concept. In diachrony, multiple
meaning is called a change of meaning, a transfer of meaning.
Of course, the two approaches must be combined in order to
take a global view of the problem of polysemy at the lexical level；
for in polysemy, changes of meaning are considered in their
synchronic dimension, that is to say, the old and the new are
contemporaneous in the same system. Moreover, these changes
of meaning are to be taken as guides in disentangling the syn
chronic skein. A semantic change, in turn, always appears as an
alteration in a preceding system；if one does not know the
place of a meaning in a system state, one has no notion of the
nature of the change which affects the value of this meaning.
Finally, we can extend the description of polysemy further
along Saussurean lines by considering the sign no longer as the
internal relation between a signifier and a signified, between
a name and a meaning (this was necessary in order to formally
define polysemy), but in its relation to other signs. This recalls
the principle of the Course in General Linguistics：6 treat signs as
differences within a system. What becomes of polysemy if we
place it in this perspective, which is that of structural linguistics?
Some light is shed initially on what can be called the functional
character of polysemy. But this is only an initial clarification,
for we remain on the level of language [la langwe], while the
symbol is a function of speaking [la parole], that is, an expres
4. Stephen Ullmann, The Principles of Semantics (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1957).
5. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade
Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1 9 5 9 )*
sion in discourse. But, as Godel has shown in the Sources manu-
scrites du ^Cours de linguistique generate^ 6 as soon as one con
siders the 4<mechanism of language,Mone remains in an inter
mediate position between system and execution. It is at the level
of the mechanism of language that the rule of ordered polysemy,
which is that of ordinary language, is discovered. This phe
nomenon of ordered or limited polysemy is at the crossroads of
two processes：the first originates in the sign, considered as
“accumulative intention.” Left to itself, it is a process of expan
sion which continues to the point of a surplus charge of meaning
(overload), as we see in certain words which, because they
signify too many things, cease to signify anything, or in certain
traditional symbols which have taken on so many contradictory
values that they tend to neutralize one another (the fire that
bums and warms, the water that both quenches thirst and
drowns). In contrast, there is also a process of limitation exer
cised by the rest of the semantic field and first of all by the struc
turing of certain organized fields, like those studied by Jost Trier,
the author of the theory of semantic fields. Here we are still on
Saussurean ground, for a sign does not have, or is not, a fixed
signification but a value in opposition to other values；it results
from the relation between an identity and a difference. This
regulating, which arises from the conflict between the semantic
expansion of signs and the limiting action of the field, is similar
in its effects to the organization of a phonological system, al
though it differs profoundly from the latter in its mechanism. In
fact, the difference between the organization of a semantic field
and that of a phonological system is considerable. Far from hav
ing a merely differential, and hence oppositional, function, the
values are also cumulative；and this makes polysemy one of the
prime problems in semantics, perhaps the central one. Here we
touch upon what is specific to the semantic level and what allows
the phenomenon of double meaning. Urban has remarked that
what makes language an instrument of knowledge is precisely
the fact that a sign can indicate one thing without ceasing to
indicate another thing and thus that, in order to have an expres
sive value in regard to the second, it must be constituted as a
sign of the first. And he added this: “The ‘accumulated intention’
of words is the fruitful source of ambiguity, but it is also the
6. Robert Godel, Sources manuscrites du 4<Cours de linguistique
de SatiMure (Geneva and Paris: Droz-Minard,
1957).
7U / ■ *
source of that analogous predication through which ilont the

symbolic power of language comes into being/'7
Urban's penetrating remark gives us a glimpse of what could
be called the functionality of polysemy. What appeared to us at
the level of texts as a particular sector of discourse, namely, the
sector of plurivocity, now seems to us to be grounded in a general
property of lexical units, namely, to function as accumulators of
meaning, as a switch operating between the old and the new. It
is in this way that double meaning can take on an expressive
function with regard to realities signified in an indirect manner.
But how does this occur?
Here again Saussure can guide us by means of his distinction
between two axes of speech [langage] function (actually, here
he is no longer speaking of language [langue] as a system of
signs at a given moment but of the mechanism of language or
discourse, which goes along with speaking [la parole]). In the
spoken chain, he remarked, signs are in a double relation ：in
a syntagmatic relation, which links opposing signs in a relation
in praesentia, and in an associative relation, which compares
signs which are similar and thus have the capacity to be sub
stituted for one another, but compares them only in a relation
in absentia. This distinction, as we know, has been revived by
Roman Jakobson,8 who formulates it in similar terms: the “con
catenation relation” and the “selection relation.” This distinction
is of great importance for the investigation of the problem of
semantics In general and of symbolism in particular. Indeed,
it is the combined play of these two axes— concatenation and
selection— that makes up the relation between syntax and
semantics.
Now, with Jakobson, we have assured a linguistic status not
only for semantics but for symbolism as well. The axis of sub
stitutions is in fact the axis of similarities, while the axis of con
catenations is the axis of contiguities. It is thus possible to make
correspond to the Saussurean distinction a distinction formerly
confined to rhetoric, the distinction between metaphor and
metonymy；or, rather, it is possible to assign to the polarity of
metaphor and metonymy the more general functional sense of
a polarity between two processes and to speak of the metaphoric
process and the metonymic process.
7. Ullmann, Principles of Semantics, p. 117.
8. Romm Jakobson, E ssais de linguistique generate (Paris：Editions
d« Minuftt, i 〇〇3 ) i chap. 2.
Here we touch a root of the same process of symbolization
which earlier we reached directly as an effect of the text. Here
we grasp its mechanism in what we can now call an effect of
context. Let us look once more at the functioning of ordered
polysemy, which we considered earlier with field theory at the
level of language. Then it was a question of limited polysemy；
ordered polysemy is properly a meaning effect produced in
discourse. When I speak, I realize only a part of the potential
signified；the rest is erased by the total signification of the
sentence, which operates as the unit of speaking. But the rest of
the semantic possibilities are not canceled；they float around
the words as possibilities not completely eliminated. The context
thus plays the role of filter；when a single dimension of meaning
passes through by means of the play of affinities and reinforce
ments of all analogous dimensions of other lexical terms, a
meaning effect is created which can attain perfect univocity, as
in technical languages. It is in this way that we make univocal
statements with multivocal words by means of this sorting or
screening action of the context. It happens, however, that a
sentence is constructed so that it does not succeed in reducing
the potential meaning to a monosemic usage but maintains or
even creates a rivalry among several ranges of meaning. Dis-
course can, by various means, realize a7nfcigfwity, which thus ap
pears as the combination of a lexical fact — polysemy— and a
contextual fact 一 the possibility allowed to several distinct or
even opposed values of a single name to be realized in the same
sequence.
Let us take our bearings at the end of this second part. What
have we gained by transposing in this way onto the lexical level
problems encountered on the hermeneutic level? What have we
gained, and what have we lost?
We have certainly gained a more precise knowledge of sym
bolism ：it now appears to us to be a meaning effect, observable
on the level of discourse but constructed on the base of a more
elementary function of signs. This function was in turn traced
back to the existence of an axis of language other than the linear
axis, along which are found the successive and contiguous series
arising from syntax. Semantics and, in particular, the problems
of polysemy and metaphor assumed their rightful place in lin
guistics. By receiving a determined linguistic status, the process
considered receives a functional value. Polysemy is thus not in
itself a pathological phenomenon, nor is symbolism an ornament
72 / STRUCTURALISM
of language ；polysemy and symbolism are part of the constitu

tion and the functioning of all language.
Such are the achievements in the area of description and
function, but the inclusion of our problem on the linguistic level
has another side as well ：semantics can indeed be included in
linguistics, but at what price? At the price of keeping the analysis
within the enclosure of the linguistic universe. This we have not
made apparent, but we see it clearly if we include some traits of
Jakobson’s analysis omitted in the previous account. In order
to justify the intrinsically linguistic character of semantics,
Jakobson compares Saussure’s views on associative relations (in
his terms, the axis of substitutions) to the views of Charles
Sanders Peirce on the remarkable power of signs to be mutually
interpreted. This is a notion of interpretation that has nothing
in common with exegesis：every sign, according to Peirce, re
quires, in addition to two protagonists, an interpretant. The func
tion of the Interpretant is filled by another sign or group of signs
which develops the meaning of the first sign and which can be
substituted for the sign being considered. This notion of an inter
pretant, in Peirce^ sense, joins the Saussurean notion of a sub
stitutive group, but at the same time it reveals the place of this
notion inside an intralinguistic play of relations. Every sign, we
say, can be translated by another sign in which it is developed
more fully ；this includes definitions, equational predications,
circumlocutions, predicative relations, and symbols. But by say
ing this, what have we done? We have resolved a semantical
problem by means of the metalinguistic function, that is, accord
ing to another of Jakobson^ studies, which deals with the mul
tiple functions included in communication, by means of a func-
tion that relates a sequence of discourse to the code and not to
the referent. That this is the case is evident in the fact that when
Jakobson advocates the structural analysis of the metaphoric
process (which, we will remember, has been assimilated to the
group of operations which utilize resemblances on the axis of
substitutions), it is as a metalinguistic operation that he develops
his analysis of the metaphoric process. It is insofar as the signs
intersignify among themselves that they enter into relations of
substitution and so make the metaphoric process possible. In
this way, semantics and its problem of multiple meaning remain
inside the closed system of language. It is not by chance that the
linguist here invokes the logician ："Symbolic logic,wnotes Jakob
son, c<has not ceased to remind us that linguistic meanings con
stituted by the system of analytic relations of one oxprostlon to
other expressions does not presuppose the presence of things/19
There is no better way of stating that a more rigorous treatment
of the problem of double meaning has been paid for by abandon
ing its aim toward things. At the end of part I, we said that the
philosophical import of symbolism is that in symbolism the
equivocalness of being is conveyed by means of the multivocity
of our signs. We now know that the science of this multivocity—
the science of linguistics— requires that we remain within the
enclosure of the universe of signs. Does this not indicate a
particular relation between the philosophy of language and the
of language， between hermeneutics as philosophy and
semantics as science?
This is an articulation we will specify by a new change of
scale一 to structural semantics as it is practiced not only in ap
plied linguistics (for example, in automatic translation) but also
in theoretical linguistics, in all the work that is today included
under the heading of structural semantics.
III. Structural Semantics
T h r e e m e t h o d o l o g i c a l c h o i c e s , according to Grei-
mas,910direct structural semantics. From the outset this discipline
adopts the axiom of the closed state of the linguistic universe.
By virtue of this axiom, semantics is governed by the metalin
guistic operations of translating one order of signs into another
order of signs. But while in Jakobson the relation between the
structures of the language object and those constituted by
metalanguage is unclear, here the hierarchical levels of language
are very clearly articulated. First, there is the language object,
then the language in which the elementary structures of the
preceding level are described, next the language in which the
operant concepts of this description are elaborated, and finally
the language in which we state axioms and define the preceding
levels. By means of this clear view of the hierarchical levels
of language within the enclosure of linguistics, the postulate
of this science is better illustrated, namely, that the structures
built on the metalinguistic level are the same as the structures
which are immanent in language. The second postulate or
9. lbid.t p. 42.
10. A. J. Grelmaa, La SSmantigu$ ttructurelle (Paris ： Larousse, 1966).
74 / STRUCTURALISM
methodological choice concerns the change of strategic level of

the analysis；one takes as a reference not words (lexemes) but un
derlying structures, constituted wholly for the needs of analysis.
I can give here only a minimal idea of this enterprise；it is
a question of working with a new unit of value, the seme, which
is always found in a relation of binary opposition of the type
long-short, breadth-depth, etc., but at a more basic level than
lexical units. No seme, no semic category, even if its denomina
tion is borrowed from ordinary language, is identical to a lexeme
appearing in discourse. We are no longer dealing with object
terms but with relations of conjunction and disjunction：dis
junction into two semes (for example, masculine-feminine),
conjunction under a single trait (for example, gender). Semic
analysis consists in establishing for a group of lexemes the
hierarchical tree of conjunctions and disjunctions which con
stitute it entirely. We can see the advantage of this analysis for
applied linguistics：binary relations can be calculated in a sys
tem of base i (0,1), and the conjunctions-disjunctions lend
themselves to processing by machines of a cybernetic type (open
circuit, closed circuit).
But this analysis benefits theory as well, for semes are units
of meaning constructed from their relational structures alone.
The ideal is to reconstruct the whole lexical level from a much
smaller number of these elementary structures of meaning. If
it were successful— this is not a superhuman endeavor— the
object terms would be defined wholly, in an exhaustive analysis,
as a collection of semes containing only conjunctions-disjunc
tions and hierarchies of relations in short, as semic systems.
一
The third postulate is that the units which we know as

lexemes in descriptive linguistics and which we employ as
words in discourse belong to the level of the manifestation of
discourse and not to the level of immanence. Words— to use
ordinary language— have a mode of presence other than the
mode of existence of these structures. This point is of the great
est importance for our investigation, for what we considered as
multiple meaning and as symbolic function is a “meaning ef
fect” which is manifested in discourse but whose principle is
situated at a different level.
The entire effort of structural semantics will be to recon
struct, bit by bit, the relations that allow us to account for these
meaning effects, following an increasing complexity. I will re
tain here only two points of this reconstruction. First, it is pos-
sible to take up once more, with an unequaled degree of precision
and rigor, the problem of multiple meaning, taken as a lexical
property, and the problem of symbolic function in units greater
than words, let us say, in sentences. Structural semantics at
tempts to account for the semantic richness of words by means
of a highly original method which consists in matching the
variants of meaning to classes of contexts. The variants of
meaning can then be analyzed in a fixed nucleus, which is com
mon to all the contexts, and in contextual variables. If we place
this analysis inside the framework of operational language, by
reducing lexemes to a collection of semes, we can then define the
variable meaning effects of a word as derivatives of semes— or of
sememes— arising from the conjunction of a semic nucleus and
of one or several contextual semes, which are themselves semic
classes corresponding to contextual classes.
What was necessarily imprecise in our preceding analysis,
namely, the notion of semantic possibility, now takes on a pre
cise analytic character. We can transcribe every meaning effect
into formulas containing only conjunctions, disjunctions, and
hierarchical relations and can thus localize precisely the contex
tual variable which brings about the meaning effect. Likewise we
can account, with a much greater degree of precision and rigor,
for the role played by the context, which we first described in
rather vague terms as a screening action or as the play of af
finities between certain dimensions of meaning of the various
words in a sentence. We can now speak of a sorting among con
textual variables；to employ Greimas^ example, in "The dog
b arks,the contextual variable ânimar common to ^dog^ and to
‘"barks” allows us to eliminate the meanings of the word “dog”
that would refer not to an animal but to a thing11 and, likewise,
the meanings of the word ‘^barks’’ that might, for example, apply
to a man. The sorting action of the context thus consists in a re
inforcement of semes on the basis of reiteration.
As we see in this analysis of contextual function, we find
once more the same problems we dealt with in the second part,
but they are now approached with a precision that an analytical
instrument alone can provide. The theory of context is, in this
respect, quite striking；by making the stability of the meaning
in a sentence depend on the reiteration of the same semes,
we can rigorously define what can be termed the isotopy of a
11. [Here, Ricoeur’8 example is an idiomatic usage of the French word

chien In the exprc»*ion I# chien du fusil, M
the hammer of a gun.M
—
Trans]
76 / STRUCTURALISM
discourse, that is, its elaboration at a homogeneous level of

meaning; we can say that “The dog barks” is a statement about
an animal.
It is starting from this concept of the isotopy of discourse
that the problem of symbolism can also be studied with the same
analytical methods. What happens in the case of an equivocal
or plurivocal discourse? The following ：the isotopy of discourse
is not assured by the context；rather, the context, instead of fil
tering a series of isotopic sememes, allows the development of
several semantic series belonging to discordant isotopies.
It seems to me that the conquest of this deliberately and
radically analytic level allows us to better understand the rela
tions between the three strategic levels which we have succes
sively occupied. We worked first as exegetes with vast units of
discourse, with texts, then as lexical semanticians with the mean
ing of words, i.e., with names, and then as structural seman-
ticians with semic constellations. Our change of level has not
been in vain ；it marks an Increase in rigor and, if I may say so,
in scientific method. We have progressively approached the
Leibnizian ideal of a universal characteristic. It would be false to
say that we have eliminated symbolism；rather, it has ceased to
be an enigma, a fascinating and possibly mystifying reality, to
the extent that it invites a twofold explanation. It is first of all
situated in relation to multiple meaning, which is a question of
lexemes and thus of language. In this respect, symbolism in
itself possesses nothing remarkable；all words used in ordinary
language have more than one meaning. Bachelard’s “fire” is no
more extraordinary in this respect than any word in the dic
tionary. Thus the illusion that the symbol must be an enigma at
the level of words vanishes；instead, the possibility of symbolism
is rooted in a function common to all words, in a universal func
tion of language, namely, the ability of lexemes to develop con-
textual variations. But symbolism is related to discourse in an
other way as well: it is in discourse and nowhere else that
equivocalness exists. Discourse thus constitutes a particular
meaning effect ：planned ambiguity is the work of certain con
texts and, we can now say, of texts, which construct a certain
isotopy in order to suggest another isotopy. The transfer of mean
ing, the metaphor (in the etymological sense of the word), ap
pears again, but this time as a change of isotopy, as the play of
multiple, concurrent, superimposed isotopies. The notion of
isotopy has thus allowed us to assign the place of metaphor in
language with greater precision than did the notion of the axis
of substitutions, borrowed by Jakobson from Saussure.
But then, I ask you, does the philosopher not find his stake in
the question at the end of this journey? Can he not legitimately
ask why in certain cases discourse cultivates ambiguity? The
philosopher's question can be made more precise ：ambiguity, to
do what? Or rather, to say what? We are brought back to the es
sential point here ：the closed state of the linguistic universe. To
the extent that we delved into the density of language, moved
away from its level of manifestation, and progressed toward sub-
lexical units of meaning— to this very extent we realized the
closed state of language. The units of meaning elicited by struc
tural analysis signify nothing；they are only combinatory pos
sibilities. They say nothing；they conjoin and disjoin.
There are, then, two ways of accounting for symbolism:
by means of what constitutes it and by means of what it attempts
to say. What constitutes it demands a structural analysis, and
this structural analysis dissipates the “marvel” of symbolism.
That is its function and, I would venture to say, its mission；
symbolism works with the resources of all language, which in
themselves have no mystery.
As for what symbolism attempts to say, this cannot be taught
by a structural linguistics；in the coming and going between
analysis and synthesis, the going is not the same as the coming.
On the return path a problematic emerges which analysis has
progressively eliminated. Ruyer has termed it “expressivity,” not
in the sense of expressing emotion, that is, in the sense in which
the speaker expresses himself, but in the sense in which lan
guage expresses something, says something. The emergence of
expressivity is conveyed by the heterogeneity between the level of
discourse, or level of manifestation, and the level of language, or
level of immanence, which alone is accessible to analysis. Lex
ernes do not exist only for the analysis of semic constellations
but also for the synthesis of units of meaning which are under
stood immediately.
It is perhaps the emergence of expressivity which constitutes
the marvel of language. Greimas puts it very well ：'There is per
haps a mystery of language, and this is a question for philosophy；
there is no mystery in language/' I think we too can say that there
is no mystery in language; the most poetic, the most “sacred,”
symbolism works with the same semic variables as the most
banal word In the dictionary. But there is a mystery of language,
namely, that language speaks, says something, My• 藤 omethlng
about being. If there is an enigma of symbolism, it resides wholly
on the level of manifestation, where the equlvocalne丨 a of being is
spoken in the equivocalness of discourse.
Is not philosophy's task then to ceaselessly reopen, toward
the being which is expressed, this discourse which linguistics,
due to its method， never ceases to confine within the closed uni
verse of signs and within the purely internal play of their mutual
relations?
Structure, Word, Event
T he aim of this commentary is to return the current

discussion on structuralism to its place of origin— the science of
language or linguistics. There we will have an opportunity to
shed light on the debate and at the same time move beyond it.
For it is there that we can glimpse the validity of structural anal
ysis and the limits of this validity.
1. I wish to show that the type of intelligibility that is ex
pressed in structuralism prevails in every case in which one can ：
(a) work on a corpus already constituted, finished, closed, and,
in that sense, dead；( b ) establish inventories of elements and
units；(c) place these elements or units in relations of opposi
tion, preferably binary opposition； and (d) establish an algebra
or combinatory system of these elements and opposed pairs.
The aspect of language which lends itself to this inventory I
will designate a language [langue] ； the inventories and combina-
tions which this language yields I will term taxonomies; and the
model which governs the investigation I will call semiotics.
2. I next wish to show that the very success of this undertak
ing entails (as a counterpart) an elimination from structural
thinking of any understanding of the acts, operations, and proc
esses that constitute discourse. Structuralism leads to thinking in
an antinomic way about the relation between language and
speech. I will make the sentence or utterance [inonce] the pivot
of this second investigation. I will call semantics the model
which governs our understanding of the sentence.
Translated by Robert Sweeney. This translation appeared originally
In Philosophy Today, Volume XII, no. 2/4 (Summer, 1968), pages 114-
29, and is reproduced here by permission of Philosophy Today.
【79]
3- Lastly, I would like to make a survey of inquiries that
henceforth will escape the structuralist model— at least in the
form defined below in Part I— and which will proclaim a new
understanding of operations and processes； this new understand
ing will be situated beyond the antinomy between structure and
event, between system and act, to which our structuralist inves
tigation will have led us.
In this context I will have something to say about Chomsky^
linguistics, known as ''generative gram m ar,w hich signals the
end of structuralism conceived of as a science of taxonomies,
closed inventories, and already settled combinations.
But above all I would like to sketch out a reflection on the
word, which is the place in language where this exchange be
tween structure and event is constantly produced. Hence the
title of my exposition, in which the word has been placed as a
third term between the structure and the event.
Such an investigation presupposes a quite fundamental no
tion: that language is composed of a hierarchy of levels. All
linguists say this, but many weaken their affirmation by submit
ting all the levels to the same method, for example, to the
method which has succeeded on the phonological level, where
one is actually dealing with limited and closed entities, with en
tities defined by the single test of commutation, with relations
of binary opposition, and finally with rigorous combinations be
tween discrete units. The problem is to know whether all the
levels are homologous. My whole study will rest on the idea that
the passage to the new unit of discourse constituted by the sen
tence or utterance represents a break, a mutation, in the hier
archy of levels. Moreover, I shall not exhaust the question of
levels；I shall even suggest at the end that there are perhaps
other strategic levels, such as the text, whose internal linking re
quires anotiier sort of intelligibility than the sentence and the
word in sentence position. It is with these larger units of order of
the text that an ontology of the logos or of saying would find its
place； if language has some hold on being, it is on the level of
manifestation or efficiency, the laws of which are original with
respect to previous levels.
In short, the linking of methods, points of view, and models
is a consequence of the hierarchy of levels in the work of lan
guage.
I. T he Presuppositions of Structural Analysis
I will concern myself less with the results than with

the presuppositions which constitute linguistic theory, in the
epistemologically strong meaning of the word theory. Saussure,
the founder of modern linguistics, noted these presuppositions
but stated them in a language that often remained considerably
behind the new conceptualization that he introduced； it is Louis
Hjelmslev who theorized about these presuppositions in his Pro
legomena to a Theory of Language, published in 1943. He is the
first to have enunciated them in a treatment [discours] that is
entirely homogeneous with its object. Let us enumerate these
presuppositions ：
1. Language is an object for an empirical science； empirical
is taken here in the modem sense；it designates not solely the
role and primacy of observation but also the subordination of in
ductive operations to deduction and the calculus.
This possibility of constituting language as a specific object
of a science was introduced by Saussure himself in his famous
distinction between a language [la langue] and speech [la parole].
By relegating to speech the psychophysiological execution, the
individual performance, and the free combinations of discourse,
Saussure reserves to a language the rules constituting the code,
the institution that is valid for the linguistic community, the col
lection of entities among which the choice of the free combina
tions of discourse takes place. Thus, a homogeneous object is
isolated: everything which concerns a language falls, in effect,
within the same domain, while speech is dispersed among the
domains of psychophysiology, psychology, sociology and does
not seem to be able to constitute the unique object of a specific
discipline.
2. Within a language itself we must still distinguish between
a science of states of system, or synchronic linguistics, and a sci
ence of changes, or diachronic linguistics. Here again Saussure
led the way by declaring emphatically that the two approaches
cannot be conducted simultaneously and that, moreover, it is
necessary to subordinate the second to the first. Pushing Saus-
sure’s thesis to its most radical form, Hjelmslev says: “Behind
every process one should be able to find a system.” This second
presupposition opens up a new range of intelligibility: change，
considered as such, is unintelligible. We understand it only as
82 / STRUCTURALISM
the passage from one state of system to another, which is what

the word diachrony signifies； it is therefore to the system, that is,
to the arrangement of elements in a simultaneous grouping, that
we give priority in understanding.
3. In a state of system there are no absolute terms, only re
lations of mutual dependence. As Saussure expressed it, ^lan-
guage is not a substance but a form.” 1 And, if the intelligible
form par excellence is opposition, then, again with Saussure, uin
language there are only differences” （ p. i2 〇). This means that
we need not consider the meanings attached to isolated signs as
labels in a heteroclite nomenclature； what we are to consider are
only the relative, negative, oppositive values of signs with respect
to each other.
4. The collection of signs must be maintained as a closed
system in order to submit it to analysis. This is evident on the
level of phonology, which establishes the finite inventory of
phonemes of a given language； but it is true also on the lexical
level, which, as we can see in a unilingual dictionary, is im
mense but not infinite. But we can understand it better if we suc
ceed in substituting, for this practically innumerable list, the
finite inventory of subsigns that underlie our lexicon and begin
ning from which one could reconstitute the immense richness of
real lexicons. Finally, it is useful to recall that syntax is consti
tuted by a finite system of forms and rules. If we add that, on a
still higher level, linguistics always operates on a finite corpus of
texts, we can formulate in a general fashion the axiom of closure
that governs the work of analysis. Working thus at the interior
of a closed system of signs, linguistics can consider that the sys
tem that it analyzes has no outside but only internal relations. It
is in this way that Hjelmslev defines structure ：an autonomous
entity of internal dependencies.
5. The definition of the sign which satisfies these four pre
suppositions breaks entirely with the naive idea that the sign is
made to stand for a thing. If we have correctly separated lan
guage from speech, the states of system from the history of
changes, the form from the substance, and the closed system
of signs from all references to a world, we must define the sign
not only by its relation of opposition to all other signs of the
same level but also in itself as a purely internal or immanent
difference. It is in this sense that Saussure distinguishes the sig
1. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trana. Wade

Baskin (New York： Phlloiophical Library, 1959). P
Structure, Word, Event / 83
nifying and the signified, and Hjelmslev, expression and content.
This presupposition could be placed first, as Saussure does in his
Course in General Linguistics； but, in the logical order of presup
positions, this definition of the sign serves only to sanction the
set of anterior axioms. Under the rule of the closure of the uni
verse of signs， the sign is either a difference between signs or a
difference, internal to each sign, between expression and content.
This two-sided reality falls entirely within the linguistic closure.
Structuralism can thus be defined as the complete awareness
of the exigencies contained in this series of presuppositions. Of
course, Saussure does not use the word “structure” Sut the word
“system,” The word “structure” appeared only in 1928 at the First
International Congress of Linguists at the Hague, in the form
“structure of a system.” The word “structure” would appear then
as a specification of the system and would designate the restric
tive combinations, highlighted against the whole field of the pos
sibilities of articulation and combination, which create the indi-
vidual configuration of a language. But in the form of the
adjective “structural,” the wor5 has become synonymous with
system. The structural point of view is thus globally opposed to
the genetic point of view. It gathers together at the same time
the idea of synchrony (the priority of the state of a language
over its history), the idea of organism (a language as a unity of
wholes enveloping parts), and finally the idea of combination or
of the combinatory (a language as a finite order of discrete
units). Thus, from the expression ^structure of a system,w we
have passed to the adjective “structural,” to define tie point of
view which contains these diverse ideas, and finally to “struc
turalism,” to designate the investigations which take the struc-
turalist point of view as a working hypothesis, indeed as ideology
and polemic.
II. Speech as Discourse
T he triumph of the structural point of view is at the

same time a triumph of the scientific enterprise. By constituting
the linguistic object as an autonomous object, linguistics consti
tutes itself as science. But at what cost? Each of the axioms we
have listed is both a gain and a loss.
The act of speaking is excluded not only as exterior execu
tion, as individual performance^ but as free combination, as
84 / STRUCTURALISM
producing new utterances. Now this is the essential aspect of

language properly speaking, its goal.
一
At the same time, history is excluded, and not simply the

change from one state of system to another but the production
of culture and of man in the production of his language. What
Humboldt called production and what he opposed to the finished
work is not solely diachrony, that is, the change and passage
from one state of system to another, but rather the generation, in
its profound dynamism, of the work of speech in each and every
case.
The structural point of view also excludes, along with free
combination and generation, the primary intention of language,
which is to say something about something； speaker and hearer
understand this intention immediately. For them language aims
at something, or, more exactly, it has a double direction： an ideal
direction (to say something) and a real reference (to say about
something). In this movement, language leaps across two thresh
olds: the threshold of ideality of meaning and, beyond this
meaning, the threshold of reference. Across this double threshold
and by means of this movement of transcendence, language
^means'9[veut dire] ； it has taken hold of reality and expresses the
hold of reality on thought. Meillet already spoke of this ：in lan
guage we must consider two things, its immanence and its tran
scendence. Today we would say ： its immanent structure and the
level of manifestation, where its effects of meaning are offered
to the bite of the real. It is necessary then to balance the axiom
of the closure of the universe of signs by attention to the primary
function of language, which is to say. In contrast to the closure
of the universe of signs, this function constitutes its openness or
its opening.
These considerations一still general and unanalyzed— lead us
to question the whole first supposition of the science of language,
namely, that language is an object for an empirical science. That
language is an object goes without saying, so long as we main
tain the critical awareness that this object is entirely defined by
the procedures, methods, presuppositions, and finally the struc
ture of the theory which governs its constitution. But if we lose
sight of this subordination of object to method and to theory, we
take for an absolute what is only a phenomenon. Now the ex
perience which the speaker and listener have of language comes
along to limit the claim to absolutize this object. The experience
we have of language reveals something of Un mode of being
which resists this reduction. For us who «pruk, language is not
an object but a mediation. Language is that through which, by
means of which, we express ourselves and express things. Speak
ing is the act by which the speaker overcomes the closure of the
universe of signs, in the intention of saying something about
something to someone；speaking is the act by which language
moves beyond itself as sign toward its reference and toward
what it encounters. Language seeks to disappear； it seeks to die
as an object.
An antinomy begins to show itself here ：on the one hand,
structural linguistics starts from a decision of an epistemological
character, viz., to remain inside the closure of the universe of
signs. By virtue of this decision, the system has no outside； it is
an autonomous entity of internal dependencies. But this is a
methodological decision which does violence to linguistic ex
perience. The task is then, on the other hand, to reclaim for the
understanding of language what the structural model excluded
and what perhaps is language itself as act of speech, as saying.
It is necessary here to resist any intimidation, the veritable ter
rorism, which some nonlinguists impose, on the basis of a model
naively extrapolated from the conditions of its functioning. The
appearance of a ‘literature” which takes its own operations as its
theme introduces the illusion that the structural model exhausts
the understanding of language. But a ‘literature” thus conceived
is itself an exception in the field of language；it includes neither
science nor poetry, which in different ways take up the vocation
of language as saying. The conjunction of structural linguistics
and of a ‘literature” of the same name should itself be considered
as a quite contingent event and as having very limited impor
tance. The claim of some to demystify, as they put it, speech and
saying ought itself to be demystified, as being noncritical and
naive.
Our task appears to me to be rather to go all the way with
the antinomy, the clear conception of which is precisely the ulti
mate result of structural understanding. The formulation of this
antinomy is today the condition for the return to an integral un
derstanding of language；to think language should be to think
the unity of that very reality which Saussure has disjoined, the
unity of language and speech.
But how? The danger here is to set up a phenomenology of
speech in opposition to a science of language, at the risk of fall
ing again into psychologism or mentalism, from which structural
linguistics has rescued us. To think correctly the antinomy be
tween language and speech, it would be necessary to be able to
86 / STRUCTURALISM
produce the act of speech in the very midst of language, in the

全ashion of a setting-forth of meaning， of a dialectical production,
which makes the system occur as an act and the structure as an
event.
And this promotion, this production, this advance can be
thought, if we undertake a precise understanding of the hierar
chical levels of language.
We have said nothing about this hierarchy so long as we
have simply superimposed two levels of articulation：phonologi
cal articulation and lexical articulation (indeed three levels, if
we add syntactical articulation). We have not yet got beyond the
point of view according to which a language is a taxonomy, a
body of already emitted texts, a repertory of signs, an inventory
of units, and a combinatory system of elements. The hierarchy
of the levels of language includes something more than a series
of articulated systems：phonological, lexical, and syntactic. We
actually change levels when we pass from the units of a lan
guage to the new unit constituted by the sentence or the utter
ance. This is no longer the unit of a language, but of speech or
discourse. By changing the unit, one also changes the function,
or rather, one passes from structure to function. We then have
the opportunity of encountering language as saying.
The new unit which we shall now consider is in no way
semiological— if by this we understand everything concerning
the relations of internal dependence between signs or com
ponents of signs. This large unit is properly semantic, if we take
this word in its strong sense, which is not solely to signify in gen
eral but to say something, to refer the sign to the thing.
The utterance or sentence includes all the traits that underlie
the antinomy between structure and event. By its own charac
teristics, the sentence attests that this antinomy does not oppose
language to something other than itself but traverses it at its
center, at the heart of its own accomplishment.
i. For discourse has an act as its mode of presence— the
instance of discourse (Benveniste),2 which, as such, is of the
nature of an event. To speak is a present event, a transitory, van
ishing act. The system, in contrast, is atemporal because it is
simply potential.
a. we shall call ‘instances of discourse’ . . . the discrete and

always unique acts by which a language is actualized in speech by a
speakerM(Emile Benveniste, Problems in General LinguiBtic», trans. Mary
E. Meek, Miami Linguiitlcs Series, no. 8 [Coral Gablet t University of
Miami Preif, 1971], p. 2x7).
2. Discourse consists in a series of choices by which certain
meanings are selected and others excluded. This choice is the
counterpart of a corresponding trait of the system constraint.
一
3. These choices produce new combinations：to emit new

sentences, to understand such sentences— such is the essence of
the act of speaking and of comprehending speech. This produc
tion of new sentences in virtually infinite number has as its
counterpart the finite and closed collection of signs.
4. It is in the instance of discourse that language has a refer
ence. To speak is to say something about something. It is here
that we again encounter Frege and Husserl. In his famous article
“tfber Sinn und Bedeutung” （ expressions which Peter Geach and
Max Black have translated as “sense” and “reference”）， Frege
showed precisely that the aim of language is double ：the aim of
an ideal sense or meaning (that is, not belonging to the physical
or psychic world) and the aim of reference. If the meaning can
be called inexistent, insofar as it is a pure object of thought, it is
the reference Bedeutung which roots our words and sen
一 —
tences in reality. 4<We expect a reference of the proposition itself ：

it is the exigency of truth (das Streben nach Wahrheit) which
drives (treibt') us to advance (vordringen) toward the refer-
ence/>This advance of (ideal) meaning toward the (real) ref
erence is the very soul of language. Husserl does not say anything
different in his Logical Investigations： the ideal meaning is a
void and an absence which demand to be fulfilled. By such ful
filling, language comes into its own, that is to say, dies to itself.
Whether we distinguish, with Frege, between Sinn and Bedeu
tung or, with Husserl, between Bedeutung and Erfiillung, what
we thus articulate is a signifying intention that breaks the
closure of the sign, which opens the sign onto the other, in brief,
which constitutes language as a saying, a saying something
about something. The moment when the turning from the ideal
ity of meaning to the reality of things is produced is the moment
of the transcendence of the sign. This moment is contemporane
ous with the sentence. It is on the level of the sentence that lan
guage says something； short of it, it says nothing at all. In fact,
the Souble articulation of Frege is the source of predication, inso
far as “to say something"’ designates the ideality of meaning and
“to say about something” designates the movement of meaning
to the reference.
It is not necessary, therefore, to oppose two definitions of the
sign, the one as internal difference of the signifying and the sig
nified, the other as external reference of sign to thing. There is
88 / STRUCTURALISM
no need to choose between these two definitions. One relates to

the structure of the sign in the system, the other to its function in
the sentence.
5. The last trait of the instance of discourse：the event,
choice, innovation, reference also imply a specific manner of
designating the subject of discourse. Someone speaks to someone
— that is the essence of the act of communication. By this trait,
the act of speech is opposed to the anonymity of the system.
There is speech wherever a subject can take up in an act, in a
single instance of discourse, the system of signs which a lan
guage puts at his disposal. This system remains potential as long
as it is not actualized, realized, operated by someone who, at the
same time, addresses himself to another. The subjectivity of the
act of speech is from the beginning the intersubjectivity of an
allocution.
Thus it is at the same level and in the same instance of dis
course that language has a reference and a subject,8 a world and
an audience. It is not surprising, then, that reference to the
world and self-reference are excluded together by structural lin
guistics as not constitutive of the system as such. But this exclu
sion is only the presupposition that must be set up in order to
constitute a science of articulations. It no longer operates when
it is a matter of attaining the level of effecting speech, where a
speaker realizes his signifying intention relative to a situation
and to an audience. Allocution and reference merge with act,
event, choice, innovation.
III. S t r u c t u r e and Event
Having arrived at this point, we might be tempted

to let ourselves be split apart by the antinomy. Doubtless struc
turalism leads to that. But this journey by way of antinomy is not
in vain: it constitutes the first level一the properly dialectical
level一of a constituting thought. That is why, in a first phase,
nothing else can be done than to reinforce this antinomy of the
systematic and the historical and to oppose, term for term, the
“event-ual” to the potential, choice to constraint, innovation to
institution, reference to closure, allocution to anonymity.
3. The subjective implications of the instance of discourse are de
veloped further in *The Question of the Subject： The Challenge of
ScmiologyM; see below, pp. 236 ff.
But in a second phase it is necessary to explore new ways, to
try to find new models of intelligibility, where the synthesis of
the two points of view would be thinkable once again. It is a mat-
ter then of finding instruments of thought capable of mastering
the phenomenon of language, which is neither structure nor
event but the incessant conversion of one into the other in dis
course.
This problem concerns language as syntax and as semantics.
I will speak only briefly to the first point, reserving a return to it
for a later study, and nothing of the second； for it is with it that
I reach the problem aimed at by the title of this study ：structure,
word, event.
r: It is in the order of syntax that poststructuralist linguis
tics is now making spectacular progress. The Chomsky school in
the United States is currently working on the notion of ''genera-
tive grammar.MTurning its back on the taxonomies of the origi
nal structuralism, this new linguistics concerns itself from the
beginning with the sentence and the problem posed by the pro
duction of new sentences. At the beginning of Current Issues in
Linguistic Theory Chomsky writes ：
The central fact to which any significant linguistic theory must
address itself is this： a mature speaker can produce a new sen
tence of his language on the appropriate occasion, and other
speakers can understand it immediately, though it is equally new
to them. Most of our linguistic experience, both as speakers and
hearers, is with new sentences; once we have mastered a lan
guage, the class of sentences with which we can operate fluently
and without difficulty or hesitation is so vast that for all practicsd
purposes (and, obviously, for theoretical purposes), we can regard
it as infinite. Normal mastery of a language involves not only the
ability to understand immediately an indefinite number of entirely
new sentences, but also the ability to identify deviant sentences
and, on occasion, to impose an interpretation on them . . . ； it is
clear that a theory of language that neglects this “creative” aspect
of language is of only marginal interest.4
A new concept of structure is thus required to take into ac

count what Chomsky calls the grammar of a language. He de
fines it in these terms ：^Grammar is a device which specifies the
infinite set of well-formed sentences and assigns to each of these
one or more structural descriptions^ (ibid., p. 9). Thus the
4. Noam Chomsky, Current Inue$ in Linguistic Theory (New York：

Humanities Press, 1964), pp. 7-8.
traditional structural description, which is concerned with dead

inventories, is the result of the assignment of a dynamic rule of
generation which undergirds the competence of the reader [lee-
teur]. Chomsky continually opposes a generative grammar to the
inventories of elements characteristic of the taxonomies favored
by the structuralists. And we are led back to the Cartesians
(Chomsky^ latest book is titled Cartesian Linguistics) and to
Humboldt, for whom language is not a product but production,
generation.
In my understanding, this new conception of structure as a
regulated dynamism will overcome the original structuralism. It
will overcome it by integrating it, by situating it exactly at its
own level of validity. I will return to this problem in st- later
study. But I wish to speak now of someone who has a real kin
ship with this new development in linguistics. I have in mind the
great but too little recognized French linguist, Gustave Guil
laume. Guillaume^ theory of morphological systems that is, the
一
parts of speech— is a kind of generative grammar. His studies on

the article and on the tenses of the verb show how the task of
discourse is to put words in a sentence position. What we call
parts of speech— the categories of noun, verb, etc.— have as
their function to complete, to terminate, to close the word in
such a way as to insert it into the sentence, into discourse. By
placing the word in a sentence position, the system of categories
allows our words and our discourse to be applied to reality. More
particularly, the noun and the verb are parts of speech thanks to
which our signs are in a certain sense “returned to the universe”
under the aspect of space and of time. By completing the word
as noun and verb, these categories render our signs capable of
grasping the real and keep them from closing up in the finite,
closed order of a semiology.
But morphology fulfills this function only because the sci
ence of discourse and of systems such as those of the article, the
verb, etc., is a science of operations and not a science of ele
ments. And let no one raise the charge of mentalism. This ac
cusation, which inhibits too many investigators, is valid against
a psychologism of the image and of the concept, against the
claim of psychic contents accessible to introspection alone. It is
foolish when directed against operations. Here, too, it is neces
sary to know how to escape more or less terroristic prohibitions.
More than anything else, recourse to Guillaume at this point
in our investigation helps break down a prejudice and bridge a
lacuna. The prejudice is this：we readily think of syntax as the
most interior form of language, as the completion of the self-
sufficiency of language. Nothing is more false. Syntax does not
assure the division of language, which has already been ac
complished by the constitution of the sign in the closed and taxo
nomic system. Because it relates to discourse and not to lan-
guage, syntax is on the path of the return of the sign toward
reality. That is why the parts of speech, such as the noun and
the verb, mark the endeavor of language to apprehend reality
under its spatial and temporal aspects: what Gustave Guillaume
calls “returning the sign to the universe.” This shows that a phi
losophy of language must not simply account for the distance
and the absence of the sign from reality (Levi-Strauss). One can
hold to this point of view as long as one considers the closed sys
tem of discrete units which compose a language；it no longer
suffices when one approaches discourse in act, it would appear
then that the sign is not only that which is lacking to things, it is
not simply absent from things and other than them；it is what
wishes to be applied, in order to express, grasp, apprehend, and
finally to show, to manifest.
That is why a philosophy of language need not be limited to
the conditions of possibility of a semiology：to account for the
absence of the sign from things, the reduction of relations of
nature and their mutation into signifying relations suffices. It is
necessary in addition to satisfy conditions of possibility of dis
course insofar as it is an endeavor, renewed ceaselessly, to ex
press integrally the thinkable and the sayable in our experience.
Reduction— or any act comparable to it by reason of its negativ
ity— no longer suffices. Reduction is only the inverse, the nega
tive side, of a wanting-to-say which aspires to become a wanting-
to-show.
Whatever may be the fate of Chomsky’s work in France and
of the assistance that Gustave Guillaume can offer toward its
assimilation, the philosophical interest of this new phase of lin
guistic theory is evident： a new relation, of a nonantinomic char
acter, is in process of being instituted between structure and
event, between rule and invention, between constraint and
choice, thanks to dynamic concepts of the type structuring opera
tion and no longer structured inventory.
I hope that anthropology and the other human sciences will
know how to draw the consequences of this, as they are doing
now with the original structuralism at the moment when its de
cline is beginning in linguistics.
2. I would like to sketch n parallel overcoming of the
92 / STRUCTURALISM
antinomy of structure and event in the semantic order. It is here

that I again meet my problem of the word.
The word is much more and much less than the sentence. It
is much less, because there is not yet any word before the sen
tence. What is there before the sentence》Signs, that is, differ-
ences in the system, values in the lexicon. But there is not yet
any meaning, any semantic entity. Insofar as it is a difference in
the system, the sign says nothing. That is why it is necessary to
say that in semiology there is no word but only relative, differ
ential, oppositive values. In this respect, Hjelmslev is right ：if
we remove from semiology the substance of sounds and of mean
ings, such as they are, each of them, accessible to the feeling of
speakers, it is necessary to say that phonetics and semantics do
not belong to semiology. Each of them relates to usage or use,
not to the schema. Now the schema alone is essential to a lan
guage. Usage or use is at the intersection of language and
speech. We must conclude that the word names at the same time
that the sentence says. It names in sentence position. In the dic
tionary, there is only the endless round of terms which are de
fined circularly, which revolve in the closure of the lexicon. But
then someone speaks, someone says something. The word leaves
the dictionary； it becomes word at the moment when man be
comes speech, when speech becomes discourse and discourse a
sentence. It is not by chance that, in German, Wort— “word” 一
is also Wort, ^speech^ (even if Wort and Wort do not have the
same plural). Words are signs in speech position. Words are the
point of articulation between semiology and semantics, in every
speech event.
Thus the word is, as it were, a trader between the system and
the act, between the structure and the event. On the one hand,
it relates to structure, as a differential value, but it is then only a
semantic potentiality； on the other hand, it relates to the act and
to the event in the fact that its semantic actuality is contempora
neous with the ephemeral actuality of the utterance.
But it is here also that the situation is reversed. The word, I
have said, is less than the sentence in that its actuality of mean
ing is subject to that of the sentence. But it is more than the sen-
tence from another point of view. The sentence, we have seen,
is an event；as such, its actuality is transitory, passing, ephem
eral. But the word survives the sentence. As a displaceable entity,
it survives the transitory instance of discourse and holds itself
available for new uses. Thus, heavy with a new use-value一as
minute as this may be一it returns to the system. And, in return
ing to the system, it gives it a history.
To explain this process， I shall again take up the analysis of
the problem of polysemy that I have elsewhere5 attempted to un
derstand directly, but without yet making use of the distinction
that I now perceive between a semiology, or science of signs in
systems, and a semantics， or a science of usage, of the use of
signs in sentence position. The phenomenon of polysemy is in
comprehensible if we do not introduce a dialectic between sign
and use, between structure and event. In purely synchronic
terms, polysemy signifies that at a given moment a word has
more than one meaning, that its multiple meanings belong to the
same state of system. But this definition lacks the essential point,
which concerns not the structure but the process. There is a
process of naming, a history of usage, which has its synchronic
projection in the form of polysemy. Now this process of the
transfer of meaning of metaphor— supposes that the word is a
一
cumulative entity, capable of acquiring new dimensions of mean

ing without losing the old ones. It is this cumulative metaphori
cal process which is projected over the surface of the system as
polysemy.
Now what I here call projection is only one case of the return
of the event to the system. It is the most interesting and perhaps
the most fundamental case, if it is true, as has been said, that
polysemy is the pivot of semantics. It is the most interesting be
cause we there come marvelously upon what I have called the
exchanges between the structure and the event. In fact this proc
ess presents itself as a convergence of two distinct factors, a fac
tor of expansion and, at the limit, of surcharge. By virtue of the
cumulative process which I was speaking of, the word tends to be
charged with new use-values, but the projection of this cumula
tive process into the system of signs implies that the new mean
ing finds its place within the system. The expansion— and, if the
case obtains, the surcharge一is arrested by die mutual limitation
of signs within the system. In this sense we can speak of a limit
ing action of the field, opposed to the tendency to expansion,
which results from the cumulative process of the word. Thus is
explained what one could call a regulated polysemy, which is the
law of our language. Words have more than one meaning, but
they do not have an infinity of meanings.
5. See above, *The Problem of Double Meaning/'

94 / STRUCTURALISM
This example shows how semantic systems differ from

semiological systems. The latter can be treated without any
reference to history； they are atemporal systems because they are
potential. Phonology gives the best illustration of this. Only the
binary oppositions between distinct units play a role. In seman
tics, in contrast, the differentiation of meanings results from the
equilibrium between two processes, a process of expansion and
a process of limitation, which force words to shape themselves
a place amid others, to hierarchize their use-values. This process
of differentiation is irreducible to a simple taxonomy. Regulated
polysemy is of the panchronic order, that is, both synchronic and
diachronic to the degree that a history projects itself into states
of systems, which henceforth are only instantaneous cross-
sections in the process of meaning, in the process of nomination.
We then understand what happens when the word reaches
discourse along with its semantic richness. All our words being
polysemic to some degree, the univocity or plurivocity of our dis
course is not the accomplishment of words but of contexts. In
the case of univocal discourse, that is, of discourse which toler
ates only one meaning, it is the task of the context to hide the
semantic richness of words, to reduce it by establishing what
Greimas calls an isotopy, that is, a frame of reference, a theme,
an identical topic for all the words of the sentence (for example,
if I develop a geometrical “theme,” the word “volume” will be
interpreted as a body in space； if the theme concerns the library,
the word <<volume>, will be interpreted as designating a book). If
the context tolerates or even preserves several isotopies at the
same time, we will be dealing with an actually symbolic lan
guage, which, in saying one thing, says something else. Instead
of sifting out one dimension of meaning, the context allows sev
eral to pass, indeed, consolidates several of them, which run to
gether in the manner of the superimposed texts of a palimpsest.
The polysemy of our words is then liberated. Thus the poem al
lows all the semantic values to be mutually reinforced. More
than one Interpretation is then justified by the structure of a dis
course which permits multiple dimensions of meaning to be re
alized at the same time. In short, language is in celebration [en
fete]. It is indeed in a structure that this abundance is ordered
and deployed, but the structure of the sentence does not, strictly
speaking, create anything. It collaborates with the polysemy of
our words to produce this effect of meaning that we call symbolic
discourse, and the polysemy of our words itself results from the
concurrence of the metaphorical process with the limiting action
of the semantic field.
Thus the exchanges between structure and event, between
system and act, do not cease to be complicated and renewed. It is
clear that the installation of one or several isotopies is the work
of sequences much longer than the sentence and that it would be
necessary, to pursue this analysis, to change once more the level
of reference, to consider the linking of a text： dream, poem, or
myth. It is at this level that I would again encounter my problem
of hermeneutics. But it is in the complex unit of the word, it
seems to me, that everything is played out. It is there that the ex
change between genesis and structure is read clearly. But to in
terpret correctly this work of language, it is necessary to learn
again to think like Humboldt in terms of process rather than sys
tem, of structuration rather than structure.
The word has appeared to me to be the point of crystalliza
tion, the tying-together of all the exchanges between structure
and function. If it has this virtue of forcing us to create new
models of intelligibility, it is because it is itself at the intersection
of language and speech, of synchrony and diachrony, of system
and process. In rising from system to event, in the instance of
discourse, it brings structure to the act of speech. In returning
from the event to the system, it brings to the system the con
tingency and disequilibrium without which it could neither
change nor endure； in short, it gives a M traditionMto the struc
ture, which, in itself, is outside of time.
I will stop here. But I would not wish to leave the impression
that the phenomenon of language has been exhausted； other ap
proaches remain possible. I have just made an allusion to the
level of the text and to the strategy of exegesis which corre
sponds to this further level of organization. By going further in
the same direction, one would meet the problems posed by Hei
degger concerning the ontology of language. But these problems
would demand not only a change of level but a change of ap
proach. Heidegger does not proceed according to the ascending
order that we have followed, which is a progressive order from
elements to structures, then from structures to process. He fol
lows another order 一perfectly legitimate in itself— which con
sists in beginning from spoken being, from the ontological
weight of established languages such as that of the thinker, the
poet, the prophet. Thus involved with the language which thinks,
he is on the way toward speaking：Unterwegs zur Sprache.
g6 / STRUCTURALISM
For perhaps we are always on the way toward language, al

though language itself may the way. I will not take this Hei-
deggerian way toward language, but let me say in conclusion
that I have not closed it, even if I have not explicitly opened it.
I have not closed it, in that our own progress has consisted in
passing from the closure of the universe of signs to the openness
of discourse. There would then be new scope for a meditation on
the “word.” For there are great words, powerful words— Mikel
Dufrenne speaks magnificently of them in his Po^tique： by
means of the process of naming, these words capture some as
pect of being, by a kind of violence that delimits the very thing
that the word opens up and uncovers. These are the great words
of the poet, of the thinker. They point out, they let be, that which
surrounds their enclosure. But if this ontology of language can
not become our theme, by reason of the procedure of this study,
at least it can be glimpsed as the horizon of this investigation.
Considered against this horizon, our investigation would appear
to be prompted and guided by a conviction, namely, that the es
sential aspect of language begins beyond the closure of signs. We
restrict ourselves within the closure of signs whenever we de
scend toward the elements, inventories, and nomenclatures and
reach the underlying combinatory functions. In effect, the more
we distance ourselves from the level of manifestation, in order
to immerse ourselves in the thickness of language in the direc
tion of sublexical units, the more we realize the closure of lan
guage. The units that we uncover by analysis signify nothing,
th ey are simply combinatory possibilities. They say nothing，
they are limited to conjoining and disjoining. But in the move
ment of going and coming between analysis and synthesis, the
return is not equivalent to going. On the return, in ascending
from the elements toward the entire text and poem, there
emerges, at the juncture of the sentence and the word, a new
problematic which tends to eliminate structural analysis. This
problematic, proper to the level of discourse, is that of saying.
The upsurge of saying into our speaking is the very mystery of
language. Saying is what I call the openness, or better, the
opening-out, of language.
You have fathomed that the greatest opening-out belongs to
language in celebration.
PART II
Hermeneutics and Psychoanalysis

Consciousness and
the Unconscious
F o r s o m e o n e t r a in e d in phenomenology, existential
philosophy, linguistic or semiological methods, and the revival
of Hegel studies, the encounter with psychoanalysis constitutes a
considerable shock, for this discipline affects and questions anew
not simply some particular theme within philosophical reflection
but the philosophical project as a whole. The contemporary phi
losopher meets Freud on die same ground as Nietzsche and Marx.
All three rise before him as protagonists of suspicion who rip
away masks and pose the novel problem of the lie of conscious
ness and consciousness as a lie. This problem cannot remain just
one among many, for what all three generally and radically put
into question is something that appears to any good phenome-
nologist as the field, foundation, and very origin of any meaning
at a ll ：consciousness itself. What in one sense is a foundation
must appear to us in a different sense as a prejudice, the preju
dice of consciousness. This situation is comparable to Plato^ in
The Sophist, where he begins as a follower of Parmenides and an
advocate of the immutability of being but is eventually com
pelled by the enigma of error and false opinion not only to give
nonbeing the rights to the city as one of uthe most all-embracing
o f genera” but even to admit that “the question of being is just
as obscure as that of nonbeing•” We must be reduced to a sinilar
admission：The question of consciousness is just as obscure as
that of the unconscious.
It is in this mood of suspicion as to consciousness* claim to
original self-knowledge that a philosopher may enter into the
Translated by WlUls Domingo.
[Ml
100 / P S Y C H O A N A L Y S IS
company of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. Anyone who ar

rives at the correlation between consciousness and the uncon
scious must first have crossed the arid zone of a double confes-
sion ：M I cannot understand the unconscious from what I know
about consciousness or even preconsciousness，” and “I no longer
even understand what consciousness is/' This is the essential
benefit of what is most antiphilosophical, antiphenomenological,
about Freud, namely, the topographical and economic point of
view as it is applied to the psychic apparatus as a whole, such as
we find in the famous metapsychological article devoted to "The
Unconscious.” 1 Only from this phenomenological distress will
we become aware of questions such as might become phenome-
nologlcal once again, as, for example: How must I reîink and
reground the concept of consciousness in such a way that the un
conscious can be its other and consciousness can be fit for the
sort of other that we call the unconscious?
A second question might be ：How can we also bring to bear
a critique (in the Kantian sense of the term as a reflection on
the conditions and limits of somethings validity) on those ttmod-
els,>which the psychoanalyst who wishes to take account of the
unconscious must constitute? It is an urgent task to find such an
epistemology for psychoanalysis. Unlike twenty years ago, we
can no longer rest content to distinguish method and doctrine.
Now we know that in the humane sciences “theory” is not a
contingent addition but in fact constitutes their very object. It is
“constitutive.” The unconscious as something real is inseparable
from the topographic, dynamic, and economic models by which
psychoanalytic theory is organized. M Metapsychology,w to use
Freud^ own term, is Indeed the doctrine of psychoanalysis, but
it is so only in that it makes the constitution of the object possi
ble. In this case doctrine is method.
And a third ：Following the revision of the concept of con
sciousness imposed by the science of the unconscious, and after
the critique of the <<models,>of the unconscious, what is at stake
is the possibility of a philosophical anthropology which can take
up the dialectic between consciousness and the unconscious.
What world view and vision of man will make this possible?
What must man be to assume the responsibility of sound thought
and yet be susceptible of falling into insanity, to be obligated by
his humanity to strive for greater and greater consciousness and
i. SE, Vol. XIV. [SE will be used throughout to refer to the Standard
Edition of Freud^s works ：The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, ed. James Strachey (London, 1927-31) ]
Consciousness and the Unconscious / ioi
yet remain a product of topographic or economic models insofar

as “the id speaks through him” ？What new vision of human
fragility— and, even more radically, of the paradox of responsi
bility vs. fragility is required by the sort of thought which has
一
allowed itself to be decentered from consciousness through re

flecting on the unconscious?
I. T h e C r i s i s o f t h e N o t io n o f C o n s c i o u s n e s s
T h e s u b s t a n c e o f m y f i r s t p o in t can be summarized
in two propositions ：( i ) Immediate consciousness does involve
a type of certainty, but this certainty does not constitute true
self-knowledge. (2) All reflection points back to the unreflected
with the intention of escaping from itself, but the unreflected is
no longer able to constitute a true knowledge of the unconscious.
These two propositions constitute what I have just called the
admission of phenomenological distress before the problem
posed by the unconscious. Even the simple advance from the first
to the second leads to a threshold of failure ：the threshold of re
flective noncomprehension of the unconscious.
1. There is indeed an immediate certainty to consciousness,
and this certainty is impregnable. It is the type articulated by
Descartes in Part I, art. 9, of the Philosophical Writings：
By the term conscious experience (cogitationis) I understand
everything that takes place within ourselves so that we are aware
of it (nobis consciis'). • • . And so not only acts of understand
ing, will, and imagination, but even sensations are here to be
taken as experience (cogitare).2
Although this certainty is unquestionable as certainty, it can

be doubted as truth. We have come to realize that the profound-
est depths of the life of intentionality can possess other mean
ings besides this immediate one. The most distant, general, and,
we must admit, the most abstract of possibilities, that of the un
conscious, is written into the initial gap between the certainty
and the true knowledge of consciousness. This knowledge is not
given ；it must be sought and found. The self-adequation which
we could call self-consciousness in the strong sense of the word
conies not at the beginning but at the end. It is a limit-idea— a
2. (Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe and Peter Geach (London：
Nelson, z〇66).]
102 / PSYC H O A N A L YSIS
limit-idea which Hegel called absolute knowledge. Whether or

not we believe that absolute knowledge can be spoken of and
articulated, we can in any event agree with the assertion that it
is the terminal and not the initial situation of consciousness. It
is, moreover, the conclusion of a philosophy of spirit,anot of con
sciousness. Whatever may be thought of Hegelianism and the
chances for its success, Hegel does show that an individual con
sciousness cannot be equated with its own content. Idealism is
impossible for individualized consciousness, and in this sense
Hegel’s critique of individualized consciousness and its claims to
be equated with its own content is in exact symmetry with the
Freudian critique of consciousness based on experience with
analysis. For inverse and yet coinciding reasons, Hegel and
Freud say the same thing. For both, consciousness is what can
not totalize itself, and this is why a philosophy of consciousness
is impossible.
2. This first negative consideration calls forth a second. Hus-
serlian phenomenology also began with a critique of reflective
consciousness and introduced the theme, which has since be
come well known, of the prereflective and unreflected. It is the
inestimable value, however negative in the long run, of Hus-
serlian phenomenology as a whole to have established the fact
that any investigation into <<constitutionMrefers to something pre
given or preconstituted. But Husserl's phenomenology is incapa
ble of taking the failure of consciousness all the way. It remains
within the circle of correlations between noesis and noema and
can make room for the notion of the unconscious only by way of
the theme of “passive genesis.”
The failure of the reflective approach to consciousness must
be brought to a conclusion. The unconscious which is involved
in the phenomenological method's theme of the unreflected re
mains ^capable of becoming conscious.>, It is reciprocal to con
sciousness as a field of inattention or as an implicit conscious-
ness in relation to explicit consciousness. This is the theorem of
ldeen l. It belongs to the essence of consciousness to never be
entirely explicit, but always related to implicit consciousness. All
the facts which made the elaboration of the concept of con
sciousness necessary, however, are not included in this theorem.
That is our threshold. That is why it is necessary to take account
of “models” which must necessarily appear as “naturalistic” to3
3. [Here, as elsewhere in this book, the Hegelian Geist is translated as

“spirit.” 一 T r a n s .】
Consciousness and the Unconscious / 103
phenomenology. It is at this point that Freudian realism is the
necessary stage to bring the failure of reflective consciousness to
its completion. As we shall see at the end, this failure is neither
fruitless nor utterly negative. For, aside from its pedagogical or
didactic value and its potentiality for preparing us to understand
the lessons of Freudianism, this failure begins a process of con
verting consciousness in such a way as to understand the neces
sity of letting go all avarice with regard to itself, including that
subtle self-concupiscence which may be what is narcissistic in
the immediate consciousness of life. Through this failure, con
sciousness discovers that its immediate self-certainty was mere
presumption and thus gains access to thought, which is no
longer the attention consciousness pays to itself so much as to
Baying, or rather to what is said in the saying.
II. C r it iq u e of F r e u d ia n C o n c e p t s
F or t h e s e r e a s o n s a critique of the realist concepts in

Freud s metapsychology must be completely nonphenomenologi-
cal. No phenomenology of consciousness can provide the rules
for this critique, since tiiat would be regressive. The “topography”
in the famous article entitled ‘"The Unconscious” is remarkable
In that it disqualifies from the start any phenomenological refer
ence and thus represents a necessary and necessarily corrective
蠢 tage for any form of thought which will allow itself to be dis
lodged from self-certainty. Politzer’s critique, for example, went
wrong in remaining imprisoned in an idealism of sense. A cri
tique of Freudian realism must be epistemological in the Kantian
藤 ense of a “transcendental deduction” whose task is to justify the
use of a concept through its ability to organize a new field of
objectivity and intelligibility. It seems to me that if more atten
tion had been paid to that irreducible difference between an
epistemological critique and a phenomenology of immediate con
sciousness, we would have been spared a good many scholastic
discussions on the nature of the unconscious. Kant teaches us to
Join empirical realism with transcendental (which does not im
ply subjective or psychological) idealism in the realm of the con
cepts of physics.
First, empirical realism ：This means that metapsychology is
not a mere additional or optional construction but rather belongs
to what Kant would cull determinant judgments of experience.
X〇 4 / P SYC H O A N A LYSIS
Hence psychoanalytic method and doctrine cannot be distin

guished. The topographic model is a valuable discovery, since it
is the condition for the possibility of a real decipherment, which
(as Levi-Strauss reminds us in Structural Anthropology) attains
a reality by the same right as the stratigraphy and archaeology.
This is how I understand Laplanche's assertion— in many re
spects so disturbing that the unconscious is finite. I take it to
一
mean that, once finished, an analysis ends up with certain signi-

fiers and not with others. That is the condition for a ^terminable
analysis/' and in this sense a realism of the unconscious is the
correlate of terminable analysis. The analysis of Philip’s dream,
for example, finishes with the facticity of this particular linguis
tic chain and no other. Let me state clearly at this point, how
ever, that the reality of this realism is one which can be known.
It is not unknowable. Freud is very helpful in this respect. For
him, the knowable is not an instinct (Trieby in its being as
instinct；it is rather the representation by which instincts are
represented.
Even in the unconscious . . . an instinct cannot be represented
otherwise than by an idea. If the instinct did not attach itself to an
idea or manifest itself as an affective state, we could know nothing
about it. When we nevertheless speak of an unconscious in
stinctual impulse or of a repressed instinctual impulse, the loose
ness of phraseology is a harmless one. We can only mean an
instinctual impulse the ideational representative of which is un
conscious, for nothing else comes into consideration.5
Psychoanalysis has nothing to do with something unknowable,

for it can know the unconscious precisely on account of its em
pirical realism, although it does so only through M
ideational rep
resentatives/' In this sense we must point out that Freuds em-
pirical realism is one of unconscious representation, in relation
to which the instincts themselves remain an unknowable x fac
tor.
4. [Originally the Freudian term TViei? was rendered as “instinct” in
French as well as in English. Because Freud does use Instinkt, however,
in a distincdy different sense from Trieb, recent French writers in the
fields of psychoanalysis and philosophy have begun to translate Trieh as
pulsion, which is closer to the original German sense of 4*drive>, or M im-
pulse.” Although the SE translation as “instinct” will be retained here,
it should be remembered that the French term is pulsion in every case.
Cf. Laplanche and Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris：
Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), s.v. “Pulsion.” 一 T r a n s .]
5. Papers on Metapsychology, SE, XIV, 177.
The transition from the “topographic” to the “economic”
viewpoint in the rest of the article (ibid., pp. 178 ff.) brings
about no radical change. The whole theory of cathexis, anti-
cathexis, and withdrawal of cathexis by which M the system Pcs.
protects itself from the pressure upon it of the unconscious idea”
(p. 181) unfolds on the level of this representational realism.
^Repression is essentially a process affecting ideas on the border
between the system Ucs. and Pcs. (C s.),> (p. 180).6
It is because Freud’s analytical investigation foregoes any
attempt to attain the being of instincts and remains within the
limits of their conscious or unconscious representation that it
does not get trapped in a realism of the unknowable. As opposed
to that of the Romantics, the Freudian unconscious can in es
sence be known because the instinct’s “ideational representa
tives” remain on the level of the signified and are permissibly
homogeneous with the empire of speech. That is why Freud can
write this surprising text ：
Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what
it appears to us to be. We shall be glad to learn, however, that the
correction of internal perception will turn out not to offer such
great difficulties as the correction of external perception— that in
ternal objects are less knowable than the external world (p. 171).
Such is Freud’s empirical realism. Its nature is fundamentally
the same as the empirical realism of physics. It designates the
înternal objectwas something knowable.
By the same token, however, we can see how this empirical
realism is directly related to a transcendental idealism in a
purely epistemological and in no way subjectivist sense of the
term. This transcendental idealism means that the <<realityw of
the unconscious exists only as a reality which has been diag
nosed. The unconscious can be defined only in terms of its rela
tions with the Cs.-Pcs. system (pp. 190 fF.)：
The Ucs. is alive and capable of development and maintains a

number of other relations with the Pcs., amongst them that of
cooperation. In brief, it must be said that the Ucs. is continued
into what are known as derivatives, that it is accessible to the im
pressions of life, that it constantly influences the Pcs. and is even,
for its part, subjected to influences from the Pcs. (p. 190).
6 . [C*. = conaciou丨
nes«; U c i = the unconscious; Pcs. = preconscious-
nets.]
I〇 6 / PSYC H OA N A LYSIS
We might say that psychoanalysis is ^the study of the derivatives

of the Ucs.” (p. 190). Freud describes these “derivatives” as
qualitatively [belonging] to the system Pcs., but factually to the
Ucs. Their origin is what decides their fatew (p. 191). We must
thus conclude that the unconscious exists and is just as real as
physical objects and yet that its existence is merely relative to
the “derivatives” which represent it and make it appear in the
field of consciousness.
What, then, is the meaning of this relativity which allows us
to speak of transcendental idealism and empirical realism at the
same time? In the first sense, one can say that the unconscious
is relative to the system by which it is deciphered or decoded.
But this meaning should be correctly understood. It does not
mean that the unconscious is something projected by the her-
meneut, in a vulgarly psychologistic sense. We should rather say
that the reality of the unconscious is constituted in and by her
meneutics in an epistemological and transcendental sense. It is
in the very movement by wiiich the “derivative” re ascends to its
unconscious “origin” that the concept of Ucs. and its empirical
reality are constituted. We are not asserting a relativity to con
sciousness or a subjective relativity, therefore, but rather the
purely epistemological relativity between the psychic object
which has been discovered and the hermeneutic constellation
composed of symptoms, interpretative models, and the analytical
method. From the first relativity, which will be called “objective”
because it involves a relation to the rules of analysis and not to
the personality of the analyst, we can derive a second type,
which can be called Intersubjective relativity” and whose de
cisive trait is that the facts which the analysis attributes to the
unconscious are meaningful for another. The role of the witness-
consciousness, i.e., the psychoanalyst’s own, has not received
enough attention in the constitution of the unconscious as a re
ality. The unconscious has generally been defined within the
limits of its relationship to the consciousness in which it is ^con
tained The role of the other consciousness is considered to be
accidental rather than essential and is reduced to a relationship
of therapy. But it is essential to the unconscious to be an object
elaborated by someone other through a hermeneutics which its
own consciousness cannot perform alone. In other words, the
relationship which the unconscious and its witness-conscious
ness maintain is not merely therapeutic；it is also a diagnostic
relationship. It was in this sense that I said that the unconscious
is a diagnosed reality. That assertion is essential In determining
the objective significance of assertions about the unconscious.
First, it is only for someone other that I even possess an uncon
scious. In the end, of course, that makes no sense unless I can
reaffirm the meanings which the other elaborates about and for
me. Yet that stage of the search for meaning in which I dis
possess myself of my own consciousness for the benefit of an
other person is fundamental for the constitution of that psychic
region that we call the unconscious. We define both the validity
and the limits of all assertions about the reality of the uncon
scious by referring it from the start, and on essential and non
accidental grounds, first to the hermeneutic method and then
to a different hermeneutic witness-consciousness. In short, we
exercise a critigue of the cqncept of the unconscious, in the wide
sense of the term critique, i.e.， as a justification of the concept’s
meaningful significance and a rejection of all claims to extend
the concept beyond the limits of its validity. We can say, there
fore, that the unconscious is an object in the sense that it is M
con-
stituted” by the totality of hermeneutic procedures by which it is
deciphered. Its being is not absolute but only relative to herme
neutics as method and dialogue. This is why we should not see
in the unconscious some fanciful reality with the extraordinary
ability of thinking in place of consciousness. The unconscious
must be made relative, but in this way it is no different from the
physical object whose reality is relative to the set of scientific
procedures by which it is constituted. Psychoanalysis depends
upon the same "rationalistic approachw as the natural sciences.
Only with respect to these first two meanings of the term can we
speak of it in a third sense, of a relativity to the analyst's own
personality. But this third sense no longer defines the epistemo
logical constitution of the notion of the unconscious so much as
the specific circumstances surrounding each case of decipher
ment and its irrevocable imprint from the language of transfer
ence. What is manifested here is the precarious position and
even the failure of analysis rather than its intention and true
meanings. For the opponents of psychoanalysis this is the only
relativity. They consider the unconscious as no more than a pro
jection on the part of the analyst with the complicity of his pa
tient. Only therapeutic success can guarantee to us that the
unconscious is not an invention of psychoanalysis in this purely
subjective sense.
These reflections on the relativity of the notion of the uncon
scious seem to me to be necessary in order to rid Freudian real-
lim of the sort of naYvc realism which would project back into
I〇 8 / PSYC H O A N A L YSIS
the unconscious a fully elaborated meaning such as had been

progressively constituted in the course of the hermeneutic rela
tionship as opposed to empirical realism in the sense in which I
have used the term, namely, as an assertion of the reality of the
instincts as something which can be known by way of their
ideational representations. Against this naive realism we
must continually emphasize that the unconscious does not
think. Freud himself never makes the unconscious think, and
in this respect the discovery of the term Es or id was a stroke
of genius. Ucs. is the id and nothing but the id. Freudian realism
is a realism of the id in its ideational representations and not
a naive realism of unconscious meaning. By a strange reversal,
naive realism would end up by giving consciousness to the
unconscious and would thus produce the monster of an idealism
of unconscious consciousness. This fanciful idealism would
never be anything more than an idealism of meaning as projected
into a thinking tJiirzg.
Hence a sort of continual alternation is necessary between
empirical realism and transcendental idealism. The first must be
maintained against all the claims of immediate consciousness
to true self-knowledge, the second against all fanciful metaphys
ics which would attribute self-consciousness to this unconscious
which is always “constituted” by the set of hermeneutic processes
by which it is deciphered.
III. C o n s c i o u s n e s s a s a T a s k
A t t h e b e g in n in g o f t h is d is c u s s io n I spoke of the
phenomenologisfs distress before the unconscious and pointed
out that consciousness is just as obscure as the unconscious.
Should we then conclude that nothing further can be said about
consciousness? Not at all. Everything that can be said about
consciousness after Freud seems to me to be contained in the
following formula ：Consciousness is not a given but a task. What
meaning can we give to this task at the present state of our
knowledge about the unconscious? By posing such a question
we acquire a knowledge of the unconscious which is no longer
realist so much as it is dialectical, not so much a type of knowl
edge which belongs to analysis as something which belongs to
the layman and the philosopher. Our question is the following：
What is the meaning of the unconscious for a being whose task
is consciousness? This question is related to a second：What is
consciousness as a task for a being who is somehow bound to
those factors, such as repetition and even regression, which the
unconscious represents for the most part?
It is to this dialectical inquiry that I would now like to turn,
without in any way attenuating its painful alternations, which
seem to me to be inevitable and even necessary. Even in the
immediately preceding analysis we could not avoid this alterna
tion between consciousness and unconscious. What led us to the
threshold of the unconscious was the discovery of the unreflected
element in the reflected. But the realism of the unconscious is
what disabused us of the prejudice of consciousness and forced
us to put it, not at the origin, but at the end.
I will now resume at the pole of consciousness. Since Freud,
it has become necessary to speak of consciousness only in terms
of epigenesis. That is, the question of consciousness seems to me
to be bound to the other question of how a man leaves his
childhood behind and becomes an adult. While strictly recipro
cal, this other question reverses the question asked by the
analyst, who shows man as subject to his childhood. The bleak
vision which he proposes of consciousness as subject to the
three masters of the Id, the Superego, and Reality defines the
task of consciousness in an obverse sense and the route of
epigenesis as a negative.
Yet we run the risk of falling back into an introspective psy
chology by simply uttering the phrase ^consciousness as epigene-
sis.,> Thus I think we should at this point reject entirely any
psychology of consciousness whatsoever. Frail attempts to
elaborate the notion of consciousness on the basis of a ^conflict-
free sphere/' such as those of Hartmann and his followers, seem
to me to belong to just such a psychology of consciousness. I be
lieve that we should, rather, deliberately confront Freudian
psychoanalysis with a method related to Hegel's in the Phe-
nomenology of Spirit. Such a method is not a refined form of
introspection, for Hegel does not present his succession of
spiritual <<figures>, as a mere extension of immediate conscious
ness. His genesis is not a genesis of or in consciousness but a
genesis of the spirit in discourse. The only forms which would
be irreducible to Freud's key signifiers— the Father, the Phallus,
Death, the Mother— in which, psychoanalysis teaches us, all
other chains of signifiers are anchored, must be similar to those
marked out in the Phenomenology of Spirit. I will argue, there
fore, that man becomes an adult only by becoming capable of
1 10 / P SYC H O A N A L YSIS
new key signifiers which are similar to the moments of the spirit
in Hegelian phenomenology and regulate spheres of meaning
which are absolutely irreducible to Freudian hermeneutics.
Consider the well-known and much discussed example of
the master-slave relationship in Hegel. This is not at all a
dialectic of consciousness. What is at stake here is the birth of
the Self or, in Hegelian terms, the passage out of desire as de
sire for another into Anerkennung or mutual recognition. What
happens in this process? Nothing less than the birth of the Self
through a dlremption of consciousness. There had been no Self
before this dialectic (and even, as de Waehlens has pointed out,
nothing like death, in the sense of human death, before the Self).
The stages of this mutual recognition bring us across “re
gions” of human meaning which are essentia% nonsexual. I
emphasize “essentially” ；and, although I will deal with the
secondary libidinal cathexis of these interhuman relationships
when I alternate back to the unconscious, these spheres of mean
ing, on a primary level and in their essential constitution, are
not constituted by this libidinal cathexis. Let me distinguish
three spheres of meaning, therefore, which can briefly be sub
sumed into the trilogy of possession, power, and value [avoir,
pouvoir, et valoir].
By relations of possession I understand those interhuman
relations which are involved with work and appropriation in a
situation of “scarcity”一which, so far, is the only situation we
have known in human conditions involving possession. When
such relations occur, we see the birth of new, purely human, and
nonbiological feelings. These feelings originate not from biologi
cal life but from reflection within human afFectivity upon a new
realm of objects and a specifically “economic” objectivity where
man appears as capable of an “economics. By tie same token
he becomes capable of feelings relative to possession and capable
also of a new type of alienation, essentially nonlibidinal, of the
sort described by the young Marx and which in Capital will be
come the ^fetish'' of merchandise converted into money. This is
the economic alienation which, as he shows, is able to generate
“false consciousness” and “ideological” thought. It is in this way
that, in the same movement, man becomes adult and capable of
adult alienation. But, more important, we note that the source
of the proliferation of these feelings, passions, and alienation is
in new and different objects, such as exchange values, monetary
signs, and structures and institutions. We can claim» therefore,
that man becomes self-conscious to the degree that he lives this
Consciousness and the Unconscious / hi
economic objectivity as a new modality of subjectivity and enters

into specifically human “feelings” which are relative to the
availability of goods as products of labor and appropriation,
while he turns himself into their expropriated appropriator. It is
this new objectivity which generates instincts, representations,
and affects. This is why the claim cannot be made, for example,
that the mother is an economic reality；for not only is she not
edible (as has already been pointed out), but also, even if she
were, she would still not figure into relations of economic ob
jectivity, which are bound to work, exchange, and appropriation.
We should also examine the sphere of power in terms of ob
jectivity and the feelings and forms of alienation it engenders,
for this sphere is also constituted in an objective structure. In
fact, here is where Hegel begins to use the term objective spirit
in order to describe the appropriate structures and institutions
for the inscription and generation of the relationship of ordering
and obeying which is essential to political power. As we see at
the beginning of HegeFs Philosophy of Right, any specific ^con-
sciousnessMwhich corresponds to this political sphere does so to
the degree that man generates himself as a specifically spiritual
will [vouloir] by entering into the relationship of ordering and
obeying. Here also consciousness increases reciprocally to an in
crease in “objectivity.” Ambition, intrigue, submission, and
responsibility are the appropriate human “feelings” which are
organized around the “object,” power. They are also its specific
types of alienation and as such have already been provisionally
described by the ancients in the figure of the “tyrant.” Plato
shows quite well how the illnesses of the soul manifested in the
figure of the tyrant proliferate from a center which he calls
dynamis or power [puissance] and spread as far as the region of
language in the form of “flattery.” This is why the “tyrant” calls
upon tiie “sophist.” We can conclude from all this that man
possesses consciousness insofar as he is capable of entering into
the political problematic of power and begins to have feelings
which gravitate around it and to run the risk of its accompanying
pitfalls. In this way a genuinely adult sphere of guilt is born, for
power leads to madness, as both Plato and Alain have pointed
out. Power is a good example of how a psychology of conscious
ness does no more than trail behind in subjective reflection as a
shadow of the series of figures man passes through as he
generates economic and then political objectivity.
The same can be said of the third specifically human sphere
of meaning, the sphere of value, whose movement can be
understood in the following way. The constitution of the Self is

not limited to the economic or political sphere but continues in
the region of culture. Here also, “psychology” grasps only a
shadow or outline， which is present in all men， of what it means
to be esteemed, approved, and recognized as a person. My exist
ence for myself depends utterly on this self-constitution in the
opinion of others. My Self_ if I dare say so— is received from the
opinions of others, who consecrate it. This mutual constitution of
individual subjects is guided, however, by new figures, which we
might call “objective” in a different sense. Institutions do not al
ways correspond to these human figures, and yet they can be
sought out in works of axt and literature. It is in this new sort of
objectivity that the search for human possibilities is pursued.
Even when Van Gogh, for example, paints a chair, he portrays
man and projects a figure or image of man as the owner of the
world represented. Cultural background is what gives these
“images” of man the density of “things,” makes them exist be
tween and among men and incarnates them in “works.” By the
mediation of works and cultural monuments such as diese,
human dignity and self-esteem are constituted. Finally, this is
also the level at which man is capable of alienation, self-degrada-
tion, ridicule, and self-annihilation.
Such, it seems to me, is the exegesis of “consciousness” that
might be devised by rejecting a psychology of consciousness and
turning to a reflective method whose point of departure is in the
objective movement of the figures of man. It is this objective
movement which Hegel calls spirit, and subjectivity can be de
rived from it precisely through reflection in such a way that the
self-constitution of subjectivity and the generation of objectivity
are simultaneous.
As we can see, this indirect and mediate approach on the
part of consciousness has nothing to do with immediate self
presence or self-certainty.
The question toward which this entire essay has been head
ing is now ripe. What happens to the Freudian unconscious
when a different counterpart than a transparent, immediately
self-certain consciousness is given to it? What happens to the
realism of the unconscious when it is put into a dialectical rela
tionship with the mediate apperception of self-consciousness?
We might distinguish two moments in this dialectic. First, we
can understand it as a relation of opposition and can contrast the
regressive procedure of Freudian analysis with the progressive
procedure of Hegelian synthesis. As we shall seep however, this
point of view remains abstract and needs to be surpassed, al
though it is, of course, necessary to spend enough time within
such a dialectic before earning the right to surpass it. But
toward what? We will speak about this later and in an admit
tedly very rudimentary way, for I admit that I find it extremely
difficult to see clearly the second moment which will concretize
the dialectic.
Hence, my comparison of the procedure of analysis toward
the unconscious with that of synthesis toward consciousness will
be only provisional.
I will begin with the following formula. Consciousness is a
movement which continually annihilates its starting point and
can guarantee itself only at the end. In other words, it is some
thing that has meaning only in later figures, since the meaning
of a given figure is deferred until the appearance of a new figure.
Thus the fundamental meaning of the moment of consciousness
called stoicism in the Phenomenology of Spirit is not revealed
until the arrival of skepticism, since it itself reveals the absolute
unimportance of the relative positions held by Master and Slave
before the abstract thought of freedom. The same is true for all
the spiritual figures. We can say in a very general way that an
understanding of consciousness always moves backwards. Is this
not the key to the dialectic between consciousness and the un
conscious? The fundamental meaning of the unconscious is in
fact that an understanding always comes out of preceding
figures, whether one understands this priority in a purely
temporal and factual or symbolic sense. Man is the only being
who is subject to his childhood. He is that being whose child
hood constantly draws him backwards. The unconscious is thus
the principle of all regressions and all stagnations. Even if we
underplay the much too historical character of this interpretation
and interpret the unconscious as a set of key meanings which are
always already there, we remain faced with a symbolic anteced
ence. The fact that primary repression precedes secondary re
pression and that key meanings precede any temporally inter-
preted events brings us back to a more symbolic sense of ante
cedence but one which continues to provide to the inverse order
of consciousness the guarantee we have been looking for. We can
say, therefore, in very general terms that consciousness is the
order of the terminal, the unconscious that of the primordial.
The above formula allows us to return to a point which I
mentioned earlier and left hanging, namely, that of the inter
action of two ways of explaining a single experience. I alluded
to the possibility of interpreting political relationships, for

example, both by the figures of a phenomenology of spirit and
by the libidlnal cathexis spoken of by Freud in his Group Psy
chology and the Analysis of the Ego. The two explanations are
so far from being mutually exclusive that they can even be
superimposed on each other. On the one hand, we can say, as we
did above, that political relationships are not constituted from
primordial instinctual relationships but from the objectivity of
power and the feelings and passions which come out of it. On
the other hand, however, we must admit that none of the figures
of a phenomenology of spirit escape libidinal cathexis and thus
the regressive attraction of the instincts. In this way the Freud
ian interpretation of the leader as someone whose charisma
comes from a homosexual libidinal cathexis is fundamentally
true. Although that does not mean that politics is sexual, it does
imply that such politics is inauthentically political because it is
a transfer to the political sphere of human relations which have
been generated in the libidinal sphere. In this sense, analysis will
always be correct in mistrusting political passion and seeing in
it an escape or disguise. An integral genesis of political relation
ships from the sphere of instinct, however, will never succeed.
The most we can say is that if the so-called political vocation
were a mere libidinal cathexis of the figure of A e chief， it would
be destroyed by a psychoanalysis of the political militant. At the
same time, however, the way would be opened for authentic
political vocations, which would resist any libidinal reduction
and show themselves to be genuinely inspired by the specifically
political problems. This is tiie meaning of Plato’s observation in
the Republic that wthe true magistrate一the philosopher一
governs without passion.” We can reconsider in a similar way
the relations of possession, which can then be read either from
the viewpoint of the anal stage of development and man's rela
tion to his body, etc., or from that of work. These two geneses,
however, do not operate on the same level. While one explains
only a play of masks and substitutes and in the end is limited to
“false consciousness, the other is constitutive. Let us pause for
a moment with an example borrowed from the domain of cul
turally created symbols and use this example in an attempt to
outline the dialectical opposition of the two types of hermeneu
tics of symbols, the one oriented toward the discovery of figures
to come (i.e., the hermeneutics of consciousness) and the other
toward preceding forms (i.e., the hermeneutics of the un
conscious).
Sophocles, Oedipws Rex gives us the opportunity to grasp the
interaction of the two different types of hermeneutics. How can
we understand this tragedy? It can be interpreted in two ways,
first, as Freud did, in The Interpretation of Dreams, by regres
sion to an original complex, which would, of course, be the
Oedipus complex, and second by a progressive synthesis toward
a problematic which ceases to have anything in common with
the Oedipus complex. According to Freud, the play^ hold over
the spectator does not come from the conflict between destiny
and liberty, which is the interpretation of classical aesthetics,
but from the nature of this particular destiny which unawares
we recognize as our own. Freud writes, uHis destiny moves us
only because it might have been ours— because the oracle laid
the same curse upon all of us before our birth as upon him”;7
and, later on, MKing Oedipus . . . merely shows us the fulfill
ment of our own childhood wishes^ (ibid.) Our pity and terror,
the famous tragic phobos, is merely an expression of the violence
of our own repression before this manifestation of our impulses.
This reading is possible, illuminating, and necessary, but
there is a second possible reading which is not so much con
cerned with the drama of incest and patricide which actually
took place as with the tragedy of truth. It deals, not with Oedipus*
relation to the Sphinx, but with his relation to the seer. The ob
jection will be made that the latter relationship is the analytic
relationship itself. Did Freud himself not say,
The action of the play consists in nothing other than the process
of revealing, with cunning delays and ever-mounting excitement—
a process that can be likened to the work of a psychoanalysis—
that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Lalus, but further that he
is the son of the murdered man and of Jocasta (ibid., pp. 261-62).
But we must not stop here. Sophocles， creation is not some sort
of machine for reliving the Oedipus complex by the two proces
ses of a fictional realization of compromise to satisfy the id and
an exemplary punishment to satisfy the superego. Through the
repetition and anamnesis of what took place the tragic poet
creates a second problematic ：the tragedy of self-consciousness.
A second-degree drama, which points toward Oedipus at
Colonus, is intertwined with the first, while Oedipus himself
takes on a second and specifically adult guilt, namely, that of
his own justice. When, in the beginning of the tragedy, he
7. The Interpretation of Dreami, SE, IV, 261.

Il6 / P SYC H O A N A L YSIS
pronounces a curse upon the unknown bearer of pollution who is

the cause of the plague, he utterly ignores the fact that he could
also be that individual and thus condemns himself. What follows
is merely the progress toward destruction of that presumptuous
consciousness which had assumed its own innocence. Thus
Oedipus’ pride must be broken through suffering. In a sense,
this second-degree drama remains part of the primary tragedy,
since the punishment of the guilty party completes the crime；
but the process of crime and punishment develops a secondary
drama which is the tragedy itself. Oedipus* zeal for the truth,
which sets the search for the guilty party into motion, is impure.
It is the presumption of the king. Oedipus* zeal belongs to the
greatness of the king. It is the presumption of a man who con
siders himself unaffected by the truth and is related to that of
Prometheus. His is the zeal of ignorance. Tiresias alone repre
sents the power of truth. Oedipus is still only the hybris of truth,
and this hybris is what is really the minister of its own condem
nation. The guilt of this hybris is expressed in Oedipus' outburst
of anger against Tiresias. This is not sexual guilt but the anger
of ignorance. Admittedly, Oedipus' anger is expressed through
his effort to clear himself of a primary crime of which he is not
guilty. But the specific guilt, which is internal to the drama of
truth, requires a specific unveiling, which is represented by the
figure of the “seer.” Thus Tiresias and not Oedipus is the center
from which the truth proceeds. Oedipus is only the king, and
this is why the tragedy is that of Oedipus Rex and not Oedipus
the incestuous patricide. In this respect Oedipus represents hu
man greatness. His vanity must be revealed by a figure who, in
a sense, possesses the view of the whole. This figure, related to
that of the fool in Elizabethan tragedy, is not tragic in himself
but rather expresses the irruption of comedy in the midst of
tragedy. This figure of the seer is called by Sophocles himself
uthe power of truth,w a power which Oedipus will eventually ac
quire through suffering. The connection between Oedipus* anger
and the power of truth is the core of the real Oedipus tragedy,
and it expresses the problem of light, whose symbol is Apollo,
and not that of sex. We might say that it is the same Apollo who
calls upon Oedipus to know himself and urges Socrates to
examine himself and other men and to say that an unexamined
life is not worth living. If that is the case, Oedipus* self
punishment also belongs to the two intertwined dramas. Oedi
pus' act of putting out his eyes is a perfect example of self-
punishment, self-cruelty, and the extreme point of maROchistic
conduct. In one sense that is true, and the chorus will not hesi
tate to interpret it as such. Later even the aged Oedipus will
repent of that new violence as his ultimate guilt. But just as the
tragedy of truth belongs to and yet escapes the sexual tragedy,
the meaning of Oedipus* punishment turns out to be twofold as
well. It belongs equa% to the drama of self-knowledge and takes
its meaning from the relationship between Oedipus and Tiresias.
Tiresias is the seer, but blind. Oedipus sees with his eyes, but
his understanding is blind. When he loses his sight, he receives
vision. Punishment as masochistic conduct has become the night
of meaning, understanding, and will. M Stop wanting to be always
the master,wcries Creon, afor all that your former victories have
brought you has not always been of use to you•” External destiny
has been internalized, and the condemned man has become, like
Tiresias, the blind seer. The inferno of truth is the blessing of
vision. This is the ultimate meaning of the tragedy, but it is not
yet uncovered in Oedipus Rex. It will remain hidden until
Oedipus has completely internalized not only the meaning of his
birth but also that of his anger and self-punishment. But at that
moment he will pass beyond even death, for death remains the
curse of life and the supreme threat for an unpurified existence.
Thus there are indeed two types of hermeneutics. One is
oriented toward the resurgence of archaic symbols and the other
toward the emergence of new symbols and ascending figures, all
absorbed into the final stage, which, as in the Phenomenology of
Spirit, is no longer a figure but knowledge. We are told that the
second type consists in filling in the lacunae in a discontinuous
text and that the first is concerned less with reestablishing a
mutilated text than with forming new thoughts on the basis of
the archaic symbol. The duality in hermeneutic methods thus
brings to light a corresponding duality In the symbols them
selves. In a sense, a single symbol possesses two vectors. On the
one hand, it is a repetition (in all the temporal and atemporal
meanings of this term) of our childhood. On the other, it ex-
plores our adult life. “O my prophetic soul,” as Hamlet says. In
this second form the symbol is an indirect discourse on our most
radical possibilities, and in relation to these possibilities it is
prospective. Culture is nothing else than this epigenesis or
orthogenesis of the “images” of man’s becoming adult. The
creation of “works,” ‘"monuments,” and cultural “institutions” is
not something projected by a human symbolizing power which
is brought to light by regressive analysis. It is the emergence of
a Bildung. As a way of denoting tibiese symbolic emergences
Il8 / P SYC H O A N A LYSIS
which mark out the promotion of self-consciousness, I will speak

not only of their “projective” function but of what might be
called their “formative” function, whereby symbols express by
promoting what they express. This is how they are paideia,
education, eruditio, or Bildung. They are open to what they have
disclosed. It is in this sense that culture or Bildung is not a
dream. Dreams disguise, while the work of culture uncovers and
reveals.
What is the effect of this dialectic of two hermeneutics and
two ways of symbolizing upon the dialectic between the con
scious and the unconscious that we are aiming at? As long as
we remain within the perspective of an opposition between the
two, consciousness and the unconscious will answer to two in
verse interpretations, progressive and regressive. We might say
that consciousness is history, while the unconscious is fate. It
is the hinterside fate of childhood and of symbols already there
and reiterated, the fate of the repetition of the same themes on
different helices of a spiral. And yet man has a responsibility to
grow out of his childhood and shatter the process of repetition
by constituting ahead of himself a contrasting history of hither-
side forms through eschatology. The unconscious is the origin or
genesis, while consciousness is the end of time or apocalypse.
But we remain In an abstract opposition. We must therefore
understand that, although opposed, the system of hitherside
figures and that of figures which always refer to a previously
given symbolism are the same. This is not easy to understand,
and I myself do so only with difficulty. We can at least say, how
ever, that, at the point we have reached, the great temptation
would be to declare that the unconscious explains the lower,
inferior, and nocturnal part of man and is the Passion of the
Night, while consciousness expresses the higher, superior, day
light part of man and is the Law of the Day. The danger would
thus be in taking comfort in an easy eclecticism in which con
sciousness and the unconscious would be vaguely complemen
tary. This sort of compromise is a caricature of the dialectic, but
it will not be entirely exorcised unless we can understand that
the two types of hermeneutics, that of the Day and that of the
Night, are the same. We cannot simply add up Hegel and Freud
and give to each a half of man. Just as we must say that every
thing about man is equally physiological and sociological, so we
must also say that the two readings in question cover exactly
the same field. For a Hegelian everything U In the 丨 erles of
spiritual flgures, including what Hegel calls the dUcourM of the
spirit, which each of us interiorizes as consciousness. And I also
admit that, for a Freudian, everything, including the Master-
Slave dialectic, is in the overdetermination of fundamental sym
bols. The relation between the analyst and his patient is a perfect
realization of this dialectic, and treatment can be interpreted as
a struggle for recognition based on a nonreciprocal and in
egalitarian situation. Are <fbemg” and “having” spoken of in
analysis? Of course ：having and not having the phallus, losing
it by agreeing not to have it in fact, is the very model of having,
etc. In this sense, Hegel's and Freud's two imperialisms are com
plete and without compromise. The best proof of this is that
everything that can be said about the one can also be said about
the other. Do not both the Phenomenology of Spirit and analyt
ical anamnesis finish with a return to the immediate? Con
versely, is not psychoanalysis, regression to the archaic a new
march to the future? Is not the therapeutic situation in itself a
prophecy of freedom? This is why the Freudian can always say
that the interpretation of Oedipus Rex in other than psycho-
analytic terms expresses no more than the resistance of the self-
proclaimed hermeneut to analysis itself. For this reason we must
enter into the most complete opposition between consciousness
as history and the unconscious as fate if we wish to acquire the
right to overcome this opposition and understand the identity
of the two opposed systematics, one of which is a synthesis of
consciousness, the other an analysis of the unconscious. But
neither their opposition nor their identity gives us the right to
eclecticism. Three cups of the unconscious, two tablespoons of
preconsciousness, and a pinch of consciousness is not our recipe
at any price. Eclecticism is always the enemy of the dialectic.
Consider the path we have taken. We began from the failure
of a phenomenology of consciousness and argued that immediate
consciousness possesses certainty but not truth. The unreflected
field to which reflection points is not the unconscious. Such a
failure led us to examine the validity of a realism of the un
conscious； this appeared M well grounded,>and related to a trans
cendental idealism which would prevent us from making the
unconscious think. Then we were forced to surpass this realism
of the unconscious, according to which consciousness is merely
one M areaw in the Freudian topography. Next we attempted to
conceive consciousness by way of and against the unconscious
and conversely, according to Kant's opposition of negative
magnitudes. We remained at this stage the longest. In order to
sustain our enterprise, we entirely rejected a psychology of
consciousness which would have led us back to a pre-Freudian

as well as a pre-Husserlian position. We were guided rather by a
phenomenology of spirit in the Hegelian sense of the term. The
<<consciousness,> to which the unconscious is other is not self
presence or the apperception of some content but the ability to
retravel the journey of the figures of the spirit. The hermeneu
tics of these figures by way of the symbols in which they were
born appears to us as the real partner of regressive hermeneu
tics, whose meaning is revealed when in its turn it finds its own
other in the progressive hermeneutics of the phenomenology of
spirit. Now we discover the unconscious as the other of its other,
as a destiny, opposed to any progressive history oriented toward
the future totality of the spirit. Finally, we have left unanswered
the question of the fundamental identity of these two herme
neutics— an identity which leads us to say that a phenomenology
of spirit and an archaeology of the unconscious speak not of two
halves of man but each one of the whole of man.
If all this is true, finite consciousness is perhaps no more
than the way, open to a limited and mortal destiny, of living the
identity between spirit, considered in its essential figures, and
the unconscious, grasped in its key meanings. When we under
stand this identity between the progression of figures of the
spirit and the regression toward the key meanings of the un
conscious, we will also understand Freuds well-known saying
‘*Wo es war, soil ich werden” 一<<Where id was, there ego shall
be•”
Psychoanalysis and the Movement
of Contemporary Culture
A q u e s t io n a s im p o r t a n t as that which concerns the

place of psychoanalysis in the movement of contemporary cul
ture demands that we be limited in our approach and yet try
to reveal what is essential. Our exposition must be limited if it
is going to allow for discussion and verification, but revelatory
in order to give an idea of the scope of the cultural phenomenon
which psychoanalysis represents for us. Such an approach might
be a rereading of Freuds texts on culture, and indeed these es
says attest to the fact that psychoanalysis does not concern it
self with culture for merely accessory or indirect reasons. Far
from being a mere explanation of the refuse of human existence
and the darker side of man, it shows its real intentions when it
breaks out of the limited framework of the therapeutic relation
ship between the analyst and his patient and rises to the level of
a hermeneutics of culture. This first part of our demonstration
Is essential to the argument we eventually want to establish,
namely, that psychoanalysis takes part in the contemporary cul
tural movement by acting as a hermeneutics of culture. In
other words, psychoanalysis marks a change of culture because
its interpretation of man bears in a central and direct way on
culture as a whole. It makes interpretation into a moment of
culture； it changes the world by interpreting it.
First of all, therefore, we should demonstrate that psycho
analysis is an interpretation of culture as a whole. We are not
•aylng that it is an exhaustive explanation；later we will say
that its viewpoint is limited and even that it has not yet found
Tr 龜mUted by Willi> Domingo.
Iiax]
122 / PSYC H O A N A LYSIS
its proper place among all the various interpretations of culture

一 which implies that the meaning of psychoanalysis remains in
suspense and its place undecided. This interpretation, however,
is not limited on the side of its object, man, which it tries to
grasp as a totality. It is limited only by its point of view ；and it
is this point of view which we must understand and locate. I
would even say, as Spinoza does when he speaks of divine at
tributes as 'Infinite in one genus/' that psychoanalysis is a total
interpretation in one genus and in this way is itself an event in
our culture.
Now we miss this unity of viewpoint on the part of psycho
analysis when we consider it to be a branch of psychiatry which
has been progressively extended from individual to social psy
chology and then to art, morality, and religion. It was, of course,
toward the end of Freuds life that his great texts on culture
began to appear. The Future of an Illusion dates from 1927,
Civilization and Its Discontents from 1930, Moses and Monothe
ism from the period 1937-39. These, however, do not represent
simply a belated extension of individual psychology to a sociol
ogy of culture. By 1908 Freud had written ^Creative Writers and
Daydreaming.” “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva”
dates from 1907, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Child
hood from 1910, Totem and Taboo from 1913, th ou ghts for
the Times on War and Death” from 1915, “The Uncanny” from
1919, f<A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung und Wahrheif
from 1917, “The Moses of Michelangelo” from 1914, Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego from 1921, A Seven
teenth-Century Demonological Neurosis” from 1923, and
“Dostoevsky and Parricide” from 1928. The great “invasions”
into the domains of aesthetics, sociology, ethics, and religion are
therefore strictly concurrent with texts as important as Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id, and, above all, the
great Papers on Metapsychology. The truth is that psychoanalysis
disrupts traditional divisions, however justified these may be by
methodologies belonging to other disciplines. It applies the
single viewpoint of its topographic, economic, and genetic
^models^ (the unconscious) to these separate domains. This
unified viewpoint is what makes psychoanalytic interpretation
both universal and limited. It is universal because it can legiti
mately be applied to humanity as a whole, but limited because it
does not extend beyond the validity of its model or models. For
example, Freud always objected to the distinction between psy-
chologlcal and sociological domains and con興 tantly aMerted the
Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Culture / 123
fundamental analogy between individual and group— an analogy
which he never trie3 to prove by speculating abbut the ‘"being”
of the psychism or the ‘"being” of the group. He simply let it be
assumed by applying the same genetic and topographic-economic
models to all cases. Yet Freud never claimed to give exhaustive
explanations. He merely carried explanation by way of origins
and the economy of instincts to its most extreme consequences.
“I cannot speak of everything at the same time,” he insists; “my
contribution is modest, partial， and limited.” Such reservations
are not mere stylistic parries but express the conviction of an
investigator who realizes that his explanation gives him a view
which is limited as a result of his angle of vision but which
gives onto the totality of the human phenomenon.
I A H e r m e n e u t ic s of C ulture
A p u r e l y h is t o r ic a l s t u d y of the evolution of Freud，s

thought on culture should begin with The Interpretation of
Dreams, for here is where Freud, in an interpretation of Sopho-
cles, Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare^ Hamlet, posited once and
for all the unity of literary creation, myths, and dream distor
tion. All succeeding developments are contained in this seed. In
“Creative Writers and Daytireaming” Freud states his basic argu
ment that the barely perceptible transitions from the noctuma】
dream to play and then to humor, fantasy, the daydream, and
finally to folklore, legends, and genuine works of art leads us to
suspect that creativity results from the same dynamism and in-
volves the same economic structure as the phenomena of com-
promise and substitutive satisfaction which he had already
developed for the interpretation of dreams and the theory of
neurosis. But he cannot go further in this essay because he
lacks a clear vision of a topography of the various agencies of
the psychic apparatus and an economy of cathexes and anti-
cathexes which would allow him to relocate aesthetic pleasure in
the dynamics of culture as a whole. For this reason we will, in
the space of this brief article, turn to an interpretation that is
more systematic than historical and go straight to the texts
which give a synthetic definition of culture. It is from this
central problematic that a general theory of “illusion” can be
developed and a place be found for Freud’s previous aesthetic
writings, whoso meaning remains in suspense as long as the
special domain of the phenomenon of culture is not perceived.

Aesthetic “seduction” and religious ‘Illusion” are to be taken to
gether as the opposite poles of an investigation into compensa-
tion, itself one of the tasks of culture.
The same is true of Freud's richer writings, such as Totem
and Taboo, in which he reinterprets by means of psychoanalysis
the results of early twentieth-century ethnography on the totemic
origins of religion and the sources of our ethical imperative in
archaic taboos. These gerzettc studies can also be reconsidered in
the wider framework of a topographic-economic interpretation.
Similarly, in The Future of an Illusion and Moses and Mono
theism Freud himself points out that such an explanation deals
only with a partial phenomenon, i.e., an archaic form of religion,
and not with religion as such. The key to a rereading of Freud's
work which would be more systematic than historical lies in
subordinating all partial and “genetic” interpretations to a
topographic-economic interpretation, since this alone confers
unity of perspective. This second preliminary remark confirms
our first one. What anchors the genetic explanation in the
topographic-economic explanation is the theory of illusion, for
here is where we find the repetition of the archaic as a ^return
of the repressed.” If this is the case— a point which can be
verified only in practice— the following systematic order becomes
necessary. We must descend from the whole to the parts, from
the central economic function of culture to the particular func-
tions of religious ‘Illusion” and aesthetic “seduction”一and from
economic to genetic explanation.
i. An Economic Model of the Phenomenon of Culture
What, then, is culture as such? We can define it first of

all in a negative way by saying that Freud does not distinguish
between civilization and culture. This refusal to accept an almost
classical distinction is in itself very illuminating. There is no
separation between the utilitarian enterprise of dominating the
forces of nature (civilization) and the disinterested, idealist task
of realizing values (culture). This distinction, which might have
meaning from a viewpoint which differs from that of psycho
analysis, has none as soon as we decide to treat culture from the
viewpoint of a balance sheet of libidinal cathexes and anti-
cathexes.
This economic interpretation is what dominates all of Freud’s
reflections on culture.
The first phenomenon we should consider from this point of
view is that of coercion, because of the instinctual renunciation
which it implies. This is the phenomenon which opens The
Future of an Illusion. Culture, as Freud points out, began with
the prohibition of man^ most ancient desires— incest, canni
balism, and murder. And yet coercion does not constitute all of
culture. The illusion whose future Freud calculates is involved
in a wider task, of which prohibition is merely the rough outer
shell. Freud gets to the kernel of this problem by posing three
questions: To what extent can the burden of the instinctual
sacrifices imposed on men be lessened? How can men be recon
ciled with those sacrifices which must necessarily remain? More
over, how can satisfying compensations be offered to individuals
for these sacrifices? These questions are not, as one might at
first believe, interrogations formulated by the author about cul
ture； rather, they constitute culture itself. What is in question in
the conflict between prohibition and instinct is the triple prob
lematic of lessening the burden of instinctual renunciation,
reconciliation with the inescapable, and compensation for
sacrifice.
What, then, are these interrogations if they do not belong
to an economic interpretation? With this question we come to
an understanding of the single viewpoint which not only binds
together all of Freud’s essays on art, morality, and religion but
also connects “individual” and “group” psychology and anchors
them both in “metapsychology.”
This economic interpretation of culture is itself elaborated
in two steps, and Civilization and Its Discontents shows clearly
how these two moments interact ：first comes all that can be said
without resorting to the death instinct and then what cannot be
said without its intervention. The essay had developed with a
calculated mildness prior to this inflection, which turns it toward
the culturally tragic. The economics of culture seemed to coin-
cide with wiiat might be called a general “erotics” ：the ends
pursued by the individual and those which animate culture ap
pear as sometimes convergent and sometimes divergent forms of
the same Eros ：
[The] process of civDizatlon is a modification which the vital proc

ess experiences under the Influence of a task that Is set it by Eros
and instigated by Ananke一by the exigencies of reality；and . . .

this task is one of uniting separate individuals into a community
bound together by libidinal ties.1
It is the same “erotics,” therefore, which is responsible for the
internal bonds within groups and which makes the individual
seek pleasure and flee suffering一the threefold suffering in
flicted by the world, his body, and other men. The development
of culture is, like the growth of the individual from childhood
to adulthood, the fruit of Eros and Ananke, love and work. We
should even say ：more of love than of work, for the necessity of
uniting in work for the exploitation of nature is a poor second to
the libidinal bonds which unite individuals into a single social
body. It seems, therefore, that the same Eros which animates
the search for individual happiness also seeks to unite men in
ever larger groups. But then the paradox appears：as an organ
ized struggle against nature, culture gives to man the power
previously conferred upon the gods, and yet his resemblance to
the gods leaves him unsatisfied the discontent of civilization.
一
Why? We can, of course, solely on the basis of this general

“erotics,” account for certain tensions between the individual
and society, but not for the serious conflict which creates the
tragedy of culture. For example, we can easily explain that
family ties resist extension to wider groups. For each adolescent
the passage from one group to another necessarily appears as a
rupture of his oldest and most intimate bond. We also under
stand that something peculiar to feminine sexuality resists the
transfer from private sexuality to the libidinal energies of social
bonds. We can go much further in the direction of situations of
conflict without, however, encountering radical contradictions.
Culture, we know, imposes sacrifices on all sexual enjoyment—
the prohibition of incest, the censorship of infantile sexuality,
the strict regulation of sexuality into the narrow pathways of
legitimacy and monogamy, the imposition of the imperative of
procreation, etc. But however painful these sacrifices may be,
and however unavoidable these conflicts, they do not reach the
point of constituting a genuine antagonism. The most we can
say is, first, that the libido resists with all the strength of its
inertia the task, imposed on it by culture, of abandoning its
earliest positions, and, second, that societyfs libidinal ties feed on
the energy drained off from sexuality to the point of threatening
i. Civilization and Its Diacontenta, SEt XXI, 134. [Sub*equent page
numbers in parentheses refer to thH work.]
it with atrophy. All of this is so ûntragic/' however, that we can
even imagine a sort of armistice or compromise between the in
dividual libido and the social bond.
And so the question reappears：why does man fail to be
happy, and why he is unsatisfied as a cultural being?
This is the turning point of Freud’s analysis. It is here
that man is faced with an absurd commandment (Love thy
neighbor as thyself) 一an impossible requirement (Love your
enemies) and a dangerous order, which squanders love, aids
and abets the wicked, and betrays the imprudent one who tries
to apply it. But the truth which is hidden behind the folly of the
imperative is the folly of an instinct which escapes the limits of
any erotic explanation ：
The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to
disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be
loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are at
tacked； they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinc
tual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressive-
ness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential
helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to
satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for
work without compensation, to use him sexually without his con
sent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain,
to torture and kill him. Homo homini lupus (p. 111).
The instinct which thus disrupts interhuman relationships

and forces society to set itself up as the implacable agent of
justice is, as we know, the death instinct— man’s primordial
hostility toward man.
The entire economy of Freud's essay is altered by the intro
duction of the death instinct. Although ^social eroticsw might,
strictly speaking, appear as an extension of sexual erotics, as
a displacement of its object or a sublimation of its goal, the
division between Eros and death on the cultural level can no
longer appear as the extension of a conflict which has already
been analyzed on the individual level. On the contrary, the tragic
in culture is privileged to reveal an antagonism which on the
level of life and the individual psychism remains silent and
ambiguous. Freud had, of course, already forged his doctrine of
the death instinct by 1920 {Beyond the Pleasure Principle),
but he did so within an apparently biological framework and
without emphasizing the social aspect of aggressiveness. How
ever, in spite of experimental support for his theory (repetition
neurosis, infantile play, the tendency to relive painful episodes,

etc.), it retained a quality of adventurous speculation. By 1930
Freud saw more clearly that the death instinct remains a silent
instinct “within” the living organism and that it becomes mani-
fest only in its social expression as aggressiveness and destruc
tion. This is the sense of our earlier statement that the interpre
tation of culture possesses the unique privilege of revealing the
antagonism of the instincts.
Thus, in the second part of Freud’s essay we witness a sort
of rereading of the theory of instincts in terms of their cultural
expression. We can better understand why, on the psycho
logical level, the death instinct is both an inescapable inference
and an experience, difficult to locate. It is never grasped except in
the shadow of Eros, for Eros is what uses it by diverting it upon
something other than the living organism. In this way the death
instinct becomes blended with Eros when it takes the form of
sadism, and we find it at work against the living organism itself
through masochistic satisfaction. In short, the death instinct
reveals itself only in conjunction with Eros, either by doubling
the object libido or by overloading the narcissistic libido. It is
unmasked and unveiled only as anticulture. A progressive revela
tion of the death instinct takes place across the three levels of
the biological, the psychological, and the cultural. Its antagonism
grows louder and louder as Eros progressively registers its
effects of uniting first the living organism with itself, then the
ego with its object, and finally individuals in ever larger groups.
In repeating itself from level to level, the struggle between Eros
and Death becomes more and more manifest and attains its
full meaning only on the level of culture：
This aggressive instinct is the derivation and the main representa
tive of the death instinct which we have found alongside of Eros
and which shares world dominion with it. And now, I think, the
meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us.
It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the
instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself
out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essenrially
consists of, and the evolution of civilization may therefore be
simply described as the struggle for the life of the human species.
And it is this battle of the giants that our nurse-maids try to ap
pease with their lullaby about Heaven：Eiapopeia vom Himmell
(p. 122).
But this is not the end. In the final chapter* of Civilization
and Its Discontents the relationships between piyohology and the
theory of culture are completely reversed. At the beginning of
this essay it was the economy of the libido, a term borrowed
from the metapsychology, which served as a guide in the
elucidation of the phenomenon of culture. Then, with the intro
duction of the death instinct, the interpretation of culture and
the dialectic of the instincts begin to rebound upon each other
in a circular movement. With the introduction of the feeling of
guilt the theory of culture takes over as that which by rebound
supports psychology. The feeling of guilt is in fact introduced
as a rtmeansMused by civilization to tame aggressiveness. The
cultural interpretation is pushed so far that Freud can assert
that the express intent of his essay is 4<to represent the sense
of guilt as the most important problem in the development of
civilization” （p. 134) and to explain why the progress of civili
zation should exact a loss of happiness due to {ke reinforcement
of this sense. He quotes Hamlefs famous line in support of this
conception：*Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.w
If, therefore, the feeling of guilt is the specific means used
by civilization to tame aggressiveness, it is not surprising that
Civilization and Its Discontents contains the most developed
interpretation of this feeling. Although its fabric is funda
mentally psychological, the psychology of this feeling is possible
only as the result of an “economic” interpretation of culture.
From the viewpoint of individual psychology, in fact, the feeling
of guilt appears to be no more than the effect of the internalized
and introjected aggressiveness which the supergo takes over in
the name of moral consciousness and then returns against the
ego. Its entire “economy,” however, appears only when the need
for punishment is relocated within a cultural perspective：
“Civilization，therefore, obtains mastery over the individual^
dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it
and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a
garrison in a conquered city” （ pp. 123-24).
Hence the economic and， one might say, structural interpre
tation of guilt feelings can be constructed only from withiii a
cultural perspective. It is only within the framework of this
structural interpretation that the various partial genetic inter
pretations concerning the murder of the primitive father and
the institution of remorse which Freud elaborated at different
stages of his thought can be understood and put into place. Con
sidered alone, this explanation remains problematic because of
the contingency it introduces into the history of a feeling which
is otherwise represented with features of "fatal inevitabilityM
I3〇 / P S Y C H O A N A L Y S IS
(p. 132). The contingent character of the process reconstructed

by genetic explanation is attenuated as soon as genetic explana
tion itself is subordinated to a structural-economic one ：
Whether one has killed one's father or has abstained from doing
so is not really the decisive thing. One is bound to feel guilty in
either case, for the sense of guilt is an expression of the conflict
due to ambivalence, of the eternal struggle between Eros and the
instinct of destruction and death. This conflict is set going as soon
as men are faced with the task of living together. So long as the
community assumes no other form than that of the family, the
conflict is bound to express itself in the Oedipus complex, to es
tablish the conscience, and to create the first sense of guilt. When
an attempt is made to widen the community, the same conflict is
continued in forms which are dependent on the past；and it is
strengthened and results in a further intensification of the sense
of guilt. Since civilization obeys an internal erotic impulsion which
causes human beings to unite in a closely knit group, it can only
achieve this aim through an ever-increasing reinforcement of the
sense of guilt. What began in relation to the father is completed in
relation to the group. If civilization is a necessary course of de
velopment from the family to humanity as a whole, then— as a
result of the inborn conftict arising from ambivalence, of the
eternal struggle between the trends of love and death— there is
inextricably bound up with it an increase of the sense of guilt,
which will perhaps reach heights that the individual finds hard to
tolerate (pp. 132—33).
By the end of these various analyses we come to believe that

the economic viewpoint is what reveals the meaning of culture.
But conversely, we must say that the supremacy of the economic
viewpoint over all others, including the genetic viewpoint, will
be complete only when psychoanalysis takes the risk of placing
its instinctual dynamic in the much larger framework of a theory
of culture.
2. Illusion and the Turn to the <cGeneticy, Model
It is within the cultural sphere, defined in terms of the topo

graphic-economic model borrowed from the Papers on Metapsy
chology, that Freud can relocate art, morality, and religion. But
he takes up these topics by way of their “economic” function
instead of their presumed object. This is the prlco for assuring
a unity of Interpretation.
Religion^ role in such an economic model is that of

sion.” We must not protest. Even if Freud the rationalist recog
nizes only the observable and verifiable as real, it is not as a
sort of “rationalism” or “unbelief” that this theory of “illusion”
is important. Both Epicurus and Lucretius had said, long before,
that it is primarily fear which produces gods. What is new in
Freuds theory is an economic theory of illusion. The question
Freud poses is not that of God as such but that of the god of
men and his economic function in the balance sheet of the
instinctual renunciations, substitutive satisfactions, and compen
sations by which men try to make life tolerable.
The key to illusion is the harshness of life, which is barely
tolerable for man, since he not only understands and feels pain
but yearns for consolation as a result of his innate narcissism.
As we have seen, culture’s task is not only to reduce human
desire but also to defend man against the crushing superiority of
nature. Illusion is the reserve method used by culture when the
effective struggle against the evils of existence either has not
begun or has not yet succeeded, or has failed, whether temporar
ily or definitively. It creates gods to exorcise fear, to reconcile
man to the cruelty of his lot, and to compensate for the suffering
of culture.
What new element does illusion introduce into the economy
of the instincts? Essentially an ideational or representational
core— the gods— about which it makes assertions— dogma—
and these assertions are supposed to grasp a reality. It is this
stage of belief in some reality which is responsible for the
specificity of illusion in the balance of satisfactions and dis
contents. The religion forged by man satisfies him only through
the medium of assertions that are unverifiable by proofs or ra
tional observations. The question arises, therefore, of the source
of this representational core of illusion.
Here is where global interpretation along the lines of the
economic model takes in all partial interpretations in terms of
some <<genetic>, model. The rivet which holds together explana
tions by origin with explanations by function is illusion, i.e.,
the enigma proposed by a representation without an object.
Freud concludes that this can make sense only by means of a
genesis of the irrational. Such a genesis, however, remains homo
geneous with economic explanation. The essential characteristic
of “illusion,” he repeats, is that it arises from human desire.
Where does a doctrine without object get its efficacy if not from
the force of the most tenacious desire of humanity, the desire
for security, which among all others is the desire most foreign
to reality?
Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism provide the
genetic schema which is indispensable for an economic explana
tion. They reconstitute the historical memories which form not
only the true content, which is at the source of ideational dis
tortion, but also (as we shall see when the quasi-neurotic aspect
of religion is introduced) the *latenr content, which gives rise
to the return of the repressed.
Let us provisionally distinguish the following two aspects：
true content, which is dissimulated in distortion, and repressed
memories, which later come back in disguised form in religious
consciousness.
The first aspect merits attention, first because it conditions
the second, but also because it gives us the opportunity to em
phasize a curious feature of Freudianism. As opposed to the
schools of “demythologization” and even more strongly against
those which treat religion as a Mmyth,>disguised as history, Freud
insists on the historical core which constitutes the phylogenetic
origin of religion. This is not surprising, for Freuds genetic
explanation requires a realism of origins. Hence the depth and
care of his research into the beginnings of civilization, as well
as those of Jewish monotheism. A series of real fathers who are
really massacred by real sons is needed to nourish the return of
the repressed. M After this discussion I have no hesitation in
declaring that men have always known (in this special way)
that they once possessed a primal father and killed him.” 2
The four chapters of Totem and Taboo constitute in their
author’s eyes “the first attempt • • • at applying the point of
view and the findings of psychoanalysis to some unsolved prob
lems of social psychology.,>8The genetic viewpoint prevails over
the economic viewpoint, which has not yet been clearly elabo
rated as a model. Freud wants to understand moral constraint,
including Kan^s categorical imperative (ibid., p. xiv), as a sur
vival of old totemic taboos. On a suggestion by Charles Darwin,
he argues that in former times men lived in small hordes, each
of which was governed by a vigorous male who had unlimited
and brutal power at his disposal, kept all the women to himself,
and castrated or massacred any rebellious sons. Then, according
to a hypothesis borrowed from Atkinson, he speculates that the
sons banded together against the fatheT, killed him, and de-
2. Motet and Monotheitm, SEt XXIII, i o i .
3. Pnfftca to Totem and Taboo, SEt Vol. XIII,
voured him, not only to take vengeance upon him but to identify
with him. Finally, following the theory of Robertson Smith,
Freud argues that the totemic clan of brothers succeeded the
fathers horde. So that they would not destroy one another in use
less struggles, the brothers arrived at a sort of social contract
and instituted the taboo of incest and the rule of exogamy. At
the same time, they remained under the influence of filial devo
tion and restored the image of the father in the substitutive
form of the animal taboo. The totemic meal thus had the mean
ing of a solemn repetition of the murder of the father. Religion
was born, and the figure of the father, long ago killed, was made
its center. It is this same figure who will reemerge in the form
of gods, or rather in one omnipotent god. The circle will be
complete in the death of Christ and the eucharistic communion.
Here is the common ground between Moses and Monotheism
and Totem and Taboo, the point where they share a mutual
project as well as a mutual content. Freud writes at the begin
ning of the two essays published in Imago (Vol. XXIII, nos. 1
and 3) that 4<we shall even be led on to important considerations
regarding the origin of monotheist religions in general.” 4For this
purpose he must reconstruct with some claim to authenticity the
event of the murder of the father which will be to monotheism
what the murder of the primitive father had been to totemism.
Hence his attempt to give credence to the hypothesis of an
Êgyptian Moses/' votary of the cult of Aten, the ethical, uni
versal, and tolerant god, who is himself constructed on the model
of a peaceful prince, such as the Pharaoh Akhenaten could have
been and such as Moses could have imposed on the Semitic
tribes. It is this ‘"hero”一in the sense of Otto Rank, whose in
fluence on this theory is considerable— who was killed by the
people. Then the cult of the god of Moses was founded on that
of Yahweh, the god of volcanoes, in which it dissimulated its
true origin and attempted to forget the murder of the hero. It
is thus that the prophets would have been the artisans of a re
turn of the god of Moses and the traumatic-event return in the
form of an ethical god. The return 切 the god of Moses would
at the same time be the return of the repressed trauma. Thus we
are faced with the explanation of a resurgence on the level of
representation and a return of the repressed on the emotional
level as well. The Jewish people furnished Western culture with
4 . Moses and Monotheism, p. 4 . [Subsequent page numbers in paren

theses refer to this work.]
134 / P S YC H OA N A L YS IS
the model of self-accusation with which we are familiar because

its sense of guilt is nourished on the memory of a murder which
it nevertheless spared no effort to dissimulate.
Freud has no intention of minimizing the historical reality
of this chain of traumatic events. He points out that “in the
group too an impression of the past is retained in unconscious
memory-traces” （ p. 94). He considers the universality of lin
guistic symbolism much more as a proof of memory traces of
the great traumas of humanity, in terms of the genetic model,
than as an incitement to explore other dimensions of language,
the imaginary, and myth. The distortion of this memory is the
only function of the imaginary to be explored. The hereditary
transmission itself, which is irreducible to any direct communi
cation, is of course an embarrassment to Freud, but it must be
postulated if we want to cross “the abyss which separates in
dividual and group psychology” and “deal with peoples as we do
with an individual neurotic. . . . If this is not so, we shall not
advance a step further along the path we entered on, either in
analysis or in group psychology. The audacity cannot be avoided”
(p. ioo). Thus we cannot call this an accessory hypothesis.
Freud sees in it one of the principles of the cohesion of his
system. “A tradition that was based only on communication
could not lead to the compulsive character that attaches to
religious phenomena” （ p. i o i ). There can be a return of the
repressed only if a traumatic event actually took place.
At this point we would be tempted to say that Freud's hy
potheses concerning origins are mere subordinate interpretations
and have no bearing on the “economic” interpretation, the only
fundamental interpretation of “illusion.” Quite the contrary is
true, however, for in reality it is the genetic interpretation that
perfects and completes the economic theory of “illusion.” The
economic theory integrates the results of these investigations
concerning origins, and these investigations in turn emphasize
a characteristic which had not before been brought to light,
namely, the role played by the return of the repressed in the
genesis of illusion. It is this characteristic which makes religion
the ûniversal obsessional neurosis of humanity.MBut this char
acteristic could not appear before genetic explanation had sug
gested the existence of an analogy between the religious prob-
lematic and the childhood situation. The child, as Freud recalls,
reaches maturity only through a more or less distinct phase of
obsessional neurosis which usually is spontaneously liquidated
but which sometimes requires the intervention of analysis. In
the same way, mankind is forced during its own adolescence— a

stage which we have not yet left behind一into an instinctual re
nunciation by way of a neurosis which arises from the same
ambivalent position of the instincts with respect to the father.
A number of texts written by Freud and also Theodore Reik
develop this analogy between religion and obsessional neurosis.
Totem and Taboo, for example, had already seen the neurotic
character of taboos, in that an analogous delirium of touching
can be discerned in both taboo and neurosis, having the same
mixture of desire and horror. Customs, taboos, and symptoms of
obsessional neurosis have in common the same absence of moti
vation, the same laws of fixation, displacement, and contagious
ness, and the same ceremonial procedures which spring from
prohibitions.5 In both cases the fact that the repressed has been
forgotten confers on the prohibition the same character of
strangeness and unintelligibility, feeds the same desires for
transgression, provokes the same symbolic satisfactions, the
same phenomena of substitution and compromise and expiatory
renunciations, and, finally, nourishes the same ambivalent at-
titudes with respect to prohibition (pp. 100 ff.). During the
period when Freud had not yet elaborated his theory of the
superego, and especially his theory of the death instinct, “moral”
consciousness or conscience (which he still interpreted as the
internal perception of the repudiation of certain desires) was
treated as a derivative of the taboo sense of guilt (p. 68). M In
fact, one may venture to say that if we cannot trace the origin of
the sense of guilt in obsessional neurotics, there can be no hope
of ever tracing it” （pp. 68-69). The ambivalence of this attrac
tion and repulsion is at the center of all his comparisons during
this period.
Freud, of course, was struck by certain differences between
taboos and neuroses. ^Taboos are not neuroses but social forma-
tions,whe says (p. 85). But he sought to reduce the gap by ex
plaining the social aspect of the taboo by means of the organiza-
tion of punishment and this organization by fear of the contagion
of the taboo (p. 86). He added that social tendencies themselves
contain a mixture of egotistical and erotic elements (p. 88). This
theme is also developed in Group Psychology and the Analysis
of the Ego (and particularly in chapter V, *The Church and the
Armyw). In this essay, which dates from 1921, Freud proposed
5 . T otem and Taboo, p. 7 2 . [Subsequent page numbers in parentheses

refer to this work.]
an entirely “libidinal” or “erotic” interpretation of the attach

ment to the leader and the cohesion of groups on an authoritarian
base and hierarchical structure.
Moses and Monotheism emphasizes as much as possible the
neurotic nature of religion, and its principal occasion for doing
so lies in the “phenomenon of latency” in the history of Judaism
— that delay in the resurgence of the religion of Moses which had
been repressed in the cult of Yahweh. Here we come across the
intersection between the genetic and the economic models. Be
tween ^traumatic neurosis and Jewish monotheism there is one
point of agreement: namely, in the characteristic that might be
described as ‘latency.’ ” 6 “This analogy is so close that one can
almost speak of an identity” （ p. 72 》 Once the schema of the
evolution of neurosis is admitted (early trauma defense— 一
latency— outbreak of neurotic illness— partial return of the re

pressed) the rapprochement of the history of the human race
with that of the individual does the rest ：
Something occurred in the life of the human species similar to

what occurs in the life of individuals：of supposing, that is, that
there too events occurred of a sexually aggressive nature, which
left behind them permanent consequences but were for the most
part fended off and forgotten, and which after a long latency came
into effect and created phenomena similar to systems in their
structure and purpose (p. 80).
Jewish monotheism thus takes over from totemism in Freud’s

history of the return of the repressed. The Jewish people re
newed the primitive contract in the personage of Moses, an
eminent substitute for the father. The murder of Christ is an
other reinforcement of the memory of origins, while Passover
and Easter are the resurrection of Moses. Finally, the religion of
Saint Paul completes the return of the repressed by leading it
back to its prehistoric source, which is named original sin. A
crime had been committed against God, according to this theory,
and only death can redeem it. Freud passes quickly over the
“phantasm” of expiation, which is at the center of the Christian
kerygma (p, 86), and suggests that the Redeemer had to be the
most guilty one, the chief of the fraternal clan, the parallel to
the rebellious tragic hero in Greek tragedy (pp. 87 ff.): behind
him [is hidden] the returned primal father of the primitive
6. M oses and M on o th eism , p. 68. [Subsequent page numbers refer to

this work.]
horde, transfigured, and, as the son, put in the place of the

father” （p. 90) •
This analogy with traumatic neurosis confirms our interpre
tation of the reciprocal action in Freuds work between the eti
ology of neuroses and the hermeneutics of culture. Religion
presents an occasion for a rereading of neurosis, just as the
analogous sense of guilt plunges it back into the dialectic of
death andlife instincts. The “topographic” model (in which the
id, the ego, and the superego are differentiated), the “genetic”
model (the role of childhood and phylogenesis), and the “eco
nomic” model (cathexis and anticathexis) converge in the
ultimate interpretation of the return of the repressed (p. 97).
士 Religious “Illusion” and Aesthetic “Seduction”
Freud's economic interpretation of illusion finally allows us

to locate aesthetic seduction with respect to religious illusion. As
is well known, Freuds severity toward religion is in sharp con
trast to his sympathy for the arts. This difference of tone is not
fortuitous. The reason can be found in the general economy of
cultural phenomena. For Freud, art is the nonobsessional,
nonneurotic form of substitutive satisfaction. The charm of
aesthetic creation does not arise from the return of the repressed.
At the beginning of this study we alluded to the article in the
review fmago which, as early as 1908, Freud devoted to “Crea
tive Writers and Daydreaming*’ and to the analogical method
which he set into operation. A general theory of fantasy already
underlay his method here, and an opening can be glimpsed lead
ing toward the later theory of culture. Freud poses the question
of whether, if poetry is so close to daydreaming, the artist's
technique aims at hiding the fantasy as much as communicating
it. Does he not seek to overcome by the seduction of purely formal
pleasure the repulsion that would arise from an overly direct
evocation of what has been prohibited? The ars poetica thus
evoked7 now appears as the other pole of illusion. The artist
seduces us， Freud writes， by a ‘"yield of pleasure which he offers
us in the presentation of his fantasies•” The whole interpretation
of culture from the years 1929-39 is contained in nuce in the
following lines ：
^'Creative Writer® ftnd Daydreaming,M SE, IX, 153. [Subsequent

numbers refer to thli work.]
We give the name of an incentive bonus, or a fore-pleasure} to a

yield of pleasure such as this, which is offered to us so as to make
possible the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper
psychical sources. In my opinion, all the aesthetic pleasure which
a creative writer affords us has the character of a fore-pleasure of
this kind, and our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work pro
ceeds from a liberation of tension in our minds. It may even be
that not a little of this effect is due to the writer’s enabling us
thenceforward to enjoy our own daydreams without self-reproach
or shame (p. 153).
Freud’s eventual articulation of aesthetics into a general
theory of culture can perhaps best be seen in 4The Moses of
Michelangelo.” Nowhere else can we better understand how
many apparently immovable obstacles this interpretation will
upset. Tfiis essay is the fruit of a long familiarity with the master
piece and of many drawings by which Freud attempted to recon-
stitute the successive positions which are condensed in Moses'
actual gesture; and Freud’s interpretation indeed proceeds, just
as in the interpretation of dreams, from the details. This ap
propriately analytical method allows Freud to superimpose
dream work on creative work and an interpretation of dreams
on interpretation of the work of art. Therefore, rather than seek
ing to interpret the nature of the satisfaction which is generated
by works of art on the level of the widest generalities (a task
in which too many psychoanalysts have gone astray), the psy
choanalyst attempts to resolve the general enigma of aesthetics
by turning first to a single work and the meanings created by
that work. We are acquainted with the patience and detail of
this interpretation. Here, as in a dream analysis, it is the precise
and apparently minor fact which counts and not the impression
of the whole ：the position of the prophet’s right index finger
(the only finger which touches his beard, while the rest of the
hand holds back), the unstable position of the Tablets, about to
escape from the pressure of his arms. Freuds interpretation re
constitutes, in the filigree of this momentary posture, which Is
in a sense frozen in the stone, the series of opposing movements
which found a sort of unstable compromise in this arrested move
ment. Moses must first of all have brought his hand to his beard
in a gesture of anger— at the risk of allowing the Tablets to fall
— while his eyes were violently attracted to one side by the
spectacle of his idolatrous people. An opposing movement, how
ever, checks the first and, arising from the strong consciousness
of his religious mission, brings his hand back. Whnt la before our
eyes is the residue of a movement which had taken place and

which Freud took upon himself to reconstruct in the same way
that he reconstructs the opposing representations which generate
compromise formations in dreams, neuroses, errors, and jokes.
Freud digs beneath this compromise formation and discovers in
the depths of apparent meaning, in addition to the exemplary
expression of a triumph over inner conflict which is worthy of
guarding a pope's tomb, a secret reproach to the violence of the
dead pope and, in a sense, a warning to itself.
The exegesis of “The Moses of Michelangelo” is thus not a
mere sidelight. It is situated on a single trajectory, which begins
with The Interpretation of Dreams and passes through The Psy
chopathology of Everyday Life and Jokes and Their Relation to
the Unconscious.
This unity of purpose allows us to question Freud’s right to
submit the work of art to the same treatment. For the art work
is, as they say, a lasting and, in the widest sense of the term,
a memorable creation of the day, while the dream is, as we know,
a fugitive and sterile production of the night. Does not the work
of art last and remain for the simple reason that it possesses
undying meanings which enrich our patrimony of cultural
values? This objection cannot be ignored, for it gives us the
occasion to grasp the range of what we have hesitantly called a
hermeneutics of culture. The psychoanalysis of culture is valua
ble not in spite of the fact that it is unaware of the value dif
ference between dream productions and works of art but because
it knows this difference and attempts to take account of it from
an economic viewpoint. The whole problem of sublimation comes
from this decision to place a fully recognized value opposition
within the unitary viewpoint of a genesis and economics of the
libido.
The value contrast between the “creative” and the “sterile” 一
an opposition which a descriptive phenomenology would hold as
an originary given— poses a problem for an êconomics.w Freud
so little ignores this value contrast that he feels compelled to
carry the unitary dynamics further (or backwards, if you will)
and to understand what allocation of cathexes and anticathexes
is capable of generating the contrasting production of symptoms,
on the level of dreams and neuroses, and of expression, on the
level of the arts and of culture in general. This is why the analyst
must take into account all the arguments that might be brought
against a naive assimilation of phenomena of cultural expres
sivity to a hastily plagiarized symptomatology, which really
I4〇 / P S YCHOANALYSIS
belongs to the theory of dreams and neuroses. He must recapitu

late afi the themes which emphasize the contrast between the two
orders of production, themes which he can find in the aesthetics
of Kant, Schelling, Hegel, or Alain. On this condition alone does
his interpretation not suppress but retain and contain the duality
of symptom and expression. Even after his interpretation, it re
mains true that the dream is a private expression, lost in the
solitude of sleep, an expression which lacks the mediation of
work, the incorporation of a meaning into an unyielding sub-
stance, and the communication of this meaning to a public— in
short, the power of advancing consciousness toward a new com
prehension of itself. The force of psychoanalytic explanation is
precisely that of relating the contrasting cultural values of the
creation of a work and neurosis to a single scale of creativity and
a unified economics. By the same token it unites Plato’s views on
the fundamental unity of poetics and erptics, those of Aristotle
on the continuity between purgation and purification, and those
of Goethe on demonism.
Perhaps we must go even further. What analysis claims to
overcome is not only the phenomenological contrast between
dreams and culture but also a contrast internal to the economic
model itself. A second objection will help us to formulate this
theme.
One might object to the interpretation of Michelangelo’s
Moses, and even 印ore to that of Sophocles’ Oedipus Bex and
Shakespeare^ Hamlet, by pointing out that, if these works are
creations, it is because they are not simple projections of the
artists' conflicts but are outlines of their solutions. The argument
will be that the dream looks backward' toward childhood and
the past, while the art work is an advance on the artist himself.
It is a prospective symbol of personal synthesis and of the future
of man rather than a regressive symbol of his unresolved con
flicts. This is why the art lovers understanding is not a simple
reliving of his personal conflicts, a fictive realization of the
desires awakened in him by the drama, but a participation in
the work of truth which is realized in the soul of the tragic hero.
Thus Sophocles* creation of the character of Oedipus is not the
simple manifestation of the childhood drama which bears his
name but the invention of a new symbol of the pain of self-
consciousness. This symbol does not repeat our childhood；it
explores our adult life.
At first sight this objection comes directly into conflict with
certain of Freud's own declarations, In M On Dreftm*^ about
Sophocles’ Oedipus fiejc or Shakespeare’s But the objec-

tion is decisive, perhaps, only against a still naive formulation
of the hermeneutics that results from analysis, and perhaps it
arises from a conception, itself naive, of creation as a promotion
of meanings for a supposedly pure consciousness. Thus, like the
preceding objection, this one is less to be refuted than surpassed
and integrated, at the same time as the thesis to which it is
opposed, in a larger and more penetrating view of the dynamics
which commands the two processes. “Hegression” and “progres
sion” would be not so much two diametrically opposed processes
as two aspects of the same creativity. Kris, Loewenstein, and
Hartmann proposed an all-encompassing and synthetic expres
sion in their formula “regressive progression” (Organization
and Pathology of Thought)8 for designating the complex process
by which the psychism elaborates new conscious meanings and
revivifies surpassed unconscious formations. Regression and
progression would designate abstract terms deduced from a
single concrete process whose two extreme limits they designate
(pure regression and pure progression) instead of two processes
which are actually opposed to each other. Is there, indeed, a
single dream which does not have an exploratory function and
does not “prophetically” outline a conclusion to our conflicts?
Conversely, is there a single great symbol, created by art and
literature, which does not plunge over and over again into the
archaism of the conflicts and dramas of individual or collective
childhood? Is not the genuine meaning of sublimation the pro
motion of new meanings by mobilizing old energies which had
first been cathected into archaic figures? Do not the most in-
novative forms an artist, writer, or thinker can generate not
have the twofold power of concealing and revealing, of dissimu
lating the old, in the same way as dream symptoms or neuroses,
and of revealing the most incomplete and unrealized possibilities
as symbols of the man of the future?
This is the direction in which psychoanalysis can realize its
wdsh to rejoin an integral hermeneutics of culture. To reach this
end it must surpass the necessary but abstract opposition be
tween an interpretation )vhich would do no more than extrapolate
the symptomatology of dreams and neuroses and an interpreta
tion which would claim to find the domain of creativity in
consciousness. Further, it must first reach the level of this opposi
tion and bring it to maturity before it can attain to a concrete
8. Ed. David Hapaport (New York ：Columbia University Press, 1951).

142 / P S YC H O A N A L YS IS
dialectic, in which the provisional and finally deceptive alterna

tive between regression and progression will be surpassed.
II. T h e P l a c e of F r e u d ia n H e r m e n e u t i c s
W e s a id a t t h e b e g in n in g that psychoanalysis be

comes part of culture by interpreting it. How will our culture
come to understand itself by means of the representation given
to it by psychoanalysis?
We should understand from the start that this interpretation
is biased and incomplete and even systematically unjust toward
other approaches to the phenomenon of culture. But this criti
cism is not very important, because Freudian interpretation
touches on the essential precisely as a result of its narrowness.
The only reason that we must first outline the limits of this
hermeneutics of culture, therefore, is so that we may eventually
better locate ourselves in the center of what it circumscribes an^l
there adopt its position of force. However legitimate criticisms
may be, they must yield to a willingness to be taught and to
submit such criticism itself to the interrogation to which psy
choanalysis subjects all rationalizations and justifications. For
this reason, as opposed to the usual procedure, we will base
ourselves on the criticism (Part II) in order to allow to reverber
ate in us, in the mode of free reflection (Part III), the deliberately
didactic account that we have been developing up till now
(P arti). "
i. Limits of Principle in the Freudian Interpretation

of Culture
Every comparison of Freudianism with other theories of cul

ture is made difficult by the fact that its creator himself never
proposed a reflection on the limits of his interpretation. He ad
mits that there are other instincts than the one he studies, but
he never proposes a complete list. He speaks of work, of social
bonds, of necessity, and of reality, but he is never clear as to
how psychoanalysis might be coordinated with sciences or inter
pretations other than its own. This is fortunate. Freud's robust
partiality leaves us usefully perplexed. Everyone bears the re
sponsibility of situating psychoanalysis in his own vision of

things.
Yet how can we orient ourselves at the outset? One of our
initial remarks can serve as a guide, namely, that Freud grasps
the whole of the phenomenon of culture— and even of human
reality一but grasps it only from a single point of view. We must
therefore seek the limits of the principles of the Freudian inter
pretation of culture in terms of the ^models^— topographic-
economic and genetic— instead of in terms of the interpreted
content.
What do these models not allow to be grasped?
The explanation of culture by its affective cost in pleasure
and pain and its phylogenetic and ontogenetic origins is cer
tainly quite illuminating. We will point out later the consider
able importance of such an effort (essentially related to that of
Marx and Nietzsche) for the unmasking of “false” consciousness.
We should not, however, expect from this enterprise anything
more than a critique of authenticity. Above all, we must not ask
of it what could be called a critique of foundations. That is the
task of another method, which is not so much the hermeneutics
of psychic expressions— dreams, art works, symptoms, and even
religious dogmas— as a reflective method applied to human
activity as a whole, i.e., to the effort to exist, to the desire to be,
and to the various mediations by which man strives to appro
priate for himself the most originary assertion which inhabits
his efforts and desires. The interweaving of a reflective philoso
phy and a hermeneutics of meaning is currently the most urgent
task of a philosophical anthropology. But almost the entirety of
the ^structure of assimilationw in which Freudian metapsychol
ogy might be articulated, along with other types of hermeneutics
which are foreign to psychoanalysis, is waiting to be constructed.
This is not the place to attempt such a construction, but it is
at least possible to point out certain border zones within that
vast field, and we can take as our touchstone the theory of illu
sion, whose central meaning in Freud we have seen.
The interest of Freuds concept of illusion is that it demon
strates how representations which <<consoleMus and make suffer
ing tolerable are built not only on instinctual renunciation but
also from this renunciation. The desires and their dynamism
of cathexis and anticathexis are what constitute the entire sub
stance of illusion. In this sense we were able to say that the
theory of illusion is itself thoroughly economic. But to recognize
144 / P S YCHOANALYSIS
it as such means that we must also give up seeking in it an

exhaustive interpretation of the phenomenon of value, for this
can be understood only by a more fundamental reflection on the
dynamics of action.
Just as we do not resolve the enigma of political power by
saying that the bonds to the chief mobilize an entire libidinal
cathexis of a homosexual nature, we do not resolve the enigma
of the “authority of values” by discerning in the filigree of the
moral and social phenomenon the figure of the father and the
partly real, partly fantasied, identification with this figure. The
foundation of a phenomenon such *as power or value is one thing,
and the affective cost of our experience of it, the balance sheet
of human lived experience in pleasure and pain, is another.
Such a distinction between problems of foundation and prob
lems of instinctual economy is surely one of principle. At least
it marks the limit of an interpretation in terms of an economic
model. Can it be argued that this distinction remains too theoreti
cal and at no point afFects the concepts of psychoanalysis, much
less the work of the psychoanalyst? I do not believe so. It seems
to me that this limit actually appears very concretely in the
Freudian notion of sublimation, which is in reality an impure,
mixed notion which combines an economic and an axiological
point of view without formulating principles. In sublimation an
instinct works at a ahigh€rf, level, although it can be said that
the energy cathected in new objects is the same as that which
before had been cathected in a sexual object. The economic point
of view takes account pnly of that relationship of energy and
not of the novelty of value promoted by this renunciation and
transfer. The difficulty is modestly hidden by speaking of socially
acceptable ends and objects. But social utility is a cloak of
ignorance which is thrown over the problem of value introduced
by sublimation.
The very meaning of religious “illusion” is thus once again
at issue. As we pointed but above, Freud does not speak of God
but of the god of men. Psychoanalysis has no means of radically
resolving the problem of what Leibniz called “the radical origin
of things.” It is quite prepared, however， to unmask the infantile
and archaic representations through which we live this problem.
This distinction is not simply one of principle, for it also con
cerns the work of the psychoanalyst, who is neither a theologian
nor an anti theologian. As an analyst he is an agnostic, i.e., in
competent. As a psychoanalyst he cannot say whether God is
merely a phantasm of god, but he can help his pationt surpass
the infantile and neurotic forms of religious belief and decide, or

recognize, whether or not his religion is only an infantile and
neurotic belief whose true mainspring the psychoanalyst has dis
covered. If the patients belief does not survive this critical
process, the only reason can be that it was not worthy to survive.
But in that case nothing has been said either for or against faith
in God. In another language I might say that, if faith must dif
fer from religion, then religion must die in order that faith may
be bom.
The fact that Freud personally objects to this sort of distinc
tion is of little importance. Freud is an Aufklarer, a man of the
Enlightenment. His rationaKsm and, as he says himself, his lack
of belief are not the fruit but the presupposition of his interpreta
tion of religious illusion, and he considers his interpretation to
be exhaustive. It is unquestionable that the discovery of religion
as illusion profoundly changes the conditions of every process
of becoming conscious, and we shall argue strongly for that in
what follows. But psychoanalysis has no access to problems of
radical origin because its point of view is economic and only
economic.
I will attempt to make a bit, more specific what I consider
to be wrong with the Freudian interpretation of the cultural phe
nomenon as a whole and of illusion in particular. For Freud an
illusion is a representation to which no reality corresponds.
His definition is positivist. Is there not, however, a function of
the imagination which escapes the positivist alternative of the
real and the illusory? A lesson that we have learned, which is
parallel to Freudianism but independent of it, is that myths and
symbols are carriers of a meaning which escapes this alterna
tive. A different hermeneutics, distinct from psychoanalysis and
closer to the phenomenology of religion, teaches us that myths
are not fables, i.e•，“false” 孕 nd “imreal” stories. As opposed to
all positivism, this hermeneutics presupposes that the “true” and
the M rear cannot be reduced to what can be verified by mathe
matical and experimental methods but has to do with our rela
tionship to the world, to other beings, and to being as well. It is
this relationship which in an imaginative mode the myth begins
to explore. Freud is both very close to and very far from recogniz
ing this function of the imagination, with which, in different
ways, Spinoza, Schelling, and Hegel were all acquainted. What
brings him close to it is his practice of “Interpretation,” but what
separates him from it is his M metapsychologicalw theorizing, i.e.,
the implicit philosophy of the economic model itself. In one sense
14 6 / P S YCHOANALYSIS
F re u d in d e e d co n stru c te d h is w h o le th eo ry o f in te rp re ta tio n , b y
th e tim e o f th e The Interpretation of Dreams, a g a in s t th e p h ysi-
c a lism a n d b io lo g ism r e ig n in g in p sy c h o lo g y . In te rp re ta tio n
m e a n s g o in g fro m a m a n ife s t to a la te n t m e a n in g . I t m o v e s e n
tire ly in re la tio n s o f m e a n in g a n d in c lu d e s re la tio n s o f fo rc e
(re p re ssio n , r e tu rn o f th e r e p re s s e d ) o n ly as re la tio n s o f m e a n
in g (c e n so rs h ip , d isg u ise , co n d e n sa tio n , d is p la c e m e n t). N o one
s in c e h a s co n trib u te d a s m u ch a s F re u d to b r e a k in g th e c h a rm
o f facts an d o p e n in g u p the em p ire o f meaning. Y e t F re u d c o n
tin u e s to in c lu d e a ll o f h is d isco v e rie s in th e s a m e p o sitiv istic
fra m e w o r k w h ic h th ey d estro y. In th is r e s p e c t the “e c o n o m ic ”
m o d e l p la y s a n e x tr e m e ly a m b ig u o u s role. It is h e u r is tic in its
e x p lo ra tio n o f the d ep th s it re v e a ls b u t c o n s e rv a tiv e in the
te n d e n c y w h ic h it e n c o u ra g e s to tra n scrib e a ll re la tio n s h ip s o f
“m e a n in g ” in to th e la n g u a g e o f a m e n ta l fcydrawJics. B y th e first
a sp e ct, th a t o f d isc o v e ry , F reu d b re a k s th ro u g h th e p o sitiv ist
fr a m e w o r k o f e x p la n a tio n ； by th e seco n d , th a t o f th eo rizin g , h e
s tre n g th e n s th is fra m e w o r k a n d a u th o rize s th e n a iv e d o ctrin e o f
“m e n ta l d y n a m ic s ” w h ic h too o fte n r a g e s in th e sch o o l.
It w ill b e th e ta sk o f a p h ilo so p h ica l a n th ro p o lo g y to u n d o
th ese e q u iv o c a tio n s a t the v e ry h e a r t o f F r e u d ia n m e ta p s y ch o lo g y
a n d co o rd in a te the d iv erse sty le s o f c o n te m p o ra ry h e rm e n e u tic s,
in p a rtic u la r th a t o f F re u d w ith the p h e n o m e n o lo g y o f m y th s a n d
sym b o ls. B u t th e se d iverse sty le s c a n n o t b e co o rd in a te d u n le ss
th ey are su b o rd in a te d to th a t fu n d a m e n ta l re fle c tio n w h ic h w e
a llu d e d to ab o ve.
T h is lim it o f th e p rin cip le s o f th e “e c o n o m ic ” m o d e l g o vern s
th e g e n e tic m o d e l as w e ll. A s w e h a v e seen , F re u d e x p la in s
g e n e tic a lly w h a te v e r does n o t p ossess p o sitiv e tru th . T h e ^his-
t o r ic a r o rig in ( in th e p h y lo g e n e tic a n d o n to g e n e tic s e n s e ) ta k es
th e p la c e o f an a x io lo g ic a l or r a d ic a l o rig in . T h is b lin d n e ss to
a ll fu n c tio n s o f illu s io n w h ic h are n o t m e re d isto rtio n s o f p o si
tive r e a lity e x p la in s F r e u d s u tte r la c k o f in te re st fo r w h a te v e r is
n o t a sim p le re p e titio n o f a n a rc h a ic or in fa n tile fo rm a n d , in
th e en d , a sim p le “r e tu r n o f th e re p re sse d .” T h is is s trik in g in
the c a s e o f re lig io n . A ll th a t co u ld h a v e b een ad d ed to p rim itiv e
c o n so la tio n , c o n fe rre d b y god s c o n c e iv e d in th e im a g e o f the
fa th e r , is w ith o u t im p o rta n c e . W h o c a n settle th e q u estio n , th en ,
o f w h e th e r re lig io n lies in th e return o f m em o rie s b o u n d to the
m u rd e r o f th e fa th e r o f th e h o rd e ra th e r th a n in th e in n o v a tio n s
b y w h ic h re lig io n m o v e s a w a y fro m its p rim itiv e model? Is mean
in g in g en esis or in e p ig e n e sis ? In the retu rn of tho repressed o r
1
in th e r e ctifica tio n o f th e old b y the n e w ?9 A g e n e tic e x p la n a tio n

c a n n o t d ecid e th is q u estio n , fo r it req u ires a r a d ic a l e x p la n a tio n ,
s u c h as, fo r e x a m p le , H egel's in The Philosophy of Religion. It
re q u ire s a r e fle c tio n w h ic h tu rn s to th e p ro gress o f re lig io u s
re p re se n ta tio n a n d n o t to its rep etitio n .
O u r dou bts c o n c e r n in g th e le g itim a c y o f the g en etic m o d el
a re d ire c tly lin k e d to ou r p revio u s q u estio n o f th e lim its o f the
e c o n o m ic m odel. I t co u ld in d eed b e th e c a se th a t in its fu n c tio n
o f o n to lo g ic a l e x p lo ra tio n th e m y th o p o e tic im a g in a tio n is the
in s tr u m e n t o f th is in n o v a tiv e co rrectio n , w h ic h m o ves in a
d ire ctio n op p o site to a rc h a iz in g rep etitio n . T h e re is a p ro g ressiv e
h isto r y o f th e sy m b o lic fu n c tio n , o f im a g in a tio n , w h ic h does
n o t co in cid e w ith th e re g re s s iv e h isto ry o f illu sio n in th e fo rm
o f a sim p le “re tu rn o f th e re p re sse d .” B u t are w e in a p o sition
to d istin g u ish b e tw e e n th ese tw o h isto ries, th is m o v e m e n t fo r
w a r d a n d th is re g re ssio n , th is cre a tio n a n d th is re p e titio n ?
O u r s e lf-a s su r a n c e fa ils u s at th is p o in t, w e k n o w th a t h o w
e v e r w e ll-fo u n d e d a n d le g itim a te ou r d is c e rn m e n t o f lim its m a y
b e, it is in d is tin g u is h a b le fro m th e ju s tific a tio n s an d r a tio n a liz a
tion s u n m a s k e d b y p s y c h o a n a ly sis . T h is is w h y w e m u s t le a v e
ou r c ritiq u e in su sp e n se a n d tu rn w ith o u t d e fe n s e to th e in te r
ro g a tio n o f s e lf-c o n sc io u sn e ss b y p s y c h o a n a ly sis .
It m a y e v e n a p p e a r a t th e en d o 全 th is su rv e y th a t th e “p la c e ”
o f p s y c h o a n a ly sis a t th e h e a r t o f c o n te m p o ra ry c u ltu re re m a in s
a n d sh o u ld re m a in in d e te rm in a te a s lo n g as w h a t it h a s to te a ch
h a s n o t y e t been a ssim ila te d . T h is is so in sp ite o f a n d p e rh a p s
9. Freud ran into the limits of his theory on a number of occasions.

Where, he asks in Moses and Monotheismy is the origin of the later ad
vancement of the idea of God which begins with the prohibition to adore
Him in visible form? Belief in thought as all-powerful (ibid., p. 170),
which accompanies man’s estimation of the development of language,
seems to operate on a different level from that ordered by the genetic and
topographic-economic models. Freud, however, does not develop this theme
any further. In the same way, the shift of emphasis away from mother
hood (which is perceived) to fatherhood (which is conjectured) suggests
that not everything is said when the ambivalence of love and fear is dis
cussed. Furthermore, is the happiness of renunciation fully explained by
turning first to the idea of a surplus of love, by which the superego, the
heir of the father, responds to renunciation of instinctual satisfaction,
and second to the idea of an increasing narcissism which accompanies the
consciousness of a worthy act (pp. 174-78)? And why must the meaning
of religion be sought only in “instinctual renunciation”？Why does it not
support the pact of the brothers as well and the recognition of the
equality of rights for all the members of the fraternal clan? Not every
thing here is the perpetuation of the will of the father or the return of
the repressed. There is also the emergence of a new order.
because of its limits. Comparing it with other interpretations of

culture, no longer opposed but concurrent, will help us take this
new step.
2. Marx, Nietzsche, Freud
Freuds work is clearly as important for the heightened con

sciousness of modern man as the work of Marx or Nietzsche.
The relatedness of these three critiques of “false” consciousness
is striking. But we are still far from assimilating these three
interrogations of self-consciousness and integrating these three
exercises in suspicion within ourselves. We still pay too much
attention to their differences, i.e” to the limitations which the
prejudices of their time imposed on these three thinkers；and we
are, above all, still victims of the scholasticism in which their
epigones have enclosed them. Marx is thus relegated to Marxist
economism and to the absurd theory of consciousness as reflex,
while Nietzsche is associated with biologism if not with an
apology for violence, and Freud is confined within psychiatry
and dressed up in a simplistic pansexualism.
I hold that the meaning for our time of these three exegetes
of modem man can be rectified only if they are considered
jointly.
First of all, they all attack the same illusion, that illusion
which bears the hallowed name of self-consciousness. This illu
sion is the fruit of a preceding victory, which conquered the
previous illusion of the thing. The philosopher trained in the
school of Descartes knows that things are doubtful, that they
are not what they appear to be. But he never doubts that con
sciousness is at it appears to itself. In consciousness, meaning
and the consciousness of meaning coincide. Since Marx, Nie
tzsche, and Freud, however, we doubt even this. After doubting
the thing, we have begun to doubt consciousness.
These three masters of suspicion, however, are not three
masters of skepticism. They are surely three great “destroyers,”
but even that should not distract us. Destruction, as Heidegger
says in Being and Time, is a moment in every new foundation.
The €<destructi(m9y of hidden worlds is a positive task, and this
includes the destruction of religion insofar as it is, as Nietzsche
says, “a Platonism for the people.” Only after such a “destruc
tion” is the question posed of knowing what thought, reason,
and even faith still mean.
All three free our horizon for a more authentic speaking, a

new reign of truth, not only by means of a “destructive” critique
but by the invention of an art of interpreting. Descartes triumphs
over his doubts about things through the evidence of conscious
ness, while Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud triumph over their doubt
about consciousness through an exegesis of meanings. For the
first time comprehension is hermeneutics. Henceforth, seeking
meaning no longer means spelling out the consciousness of
meaning but, rather, deciphering its expressions. We are there
fore faced not with three types of suspicion but with three types
of deception. If consciousness is not what it believes itself to be,
a new relationship must be established between the apparent
and the latent. It would correspond to the relationship which
consciousness had previously instituted between the things
appearance and its reality. The fundamental category of con
sciousness for all three thinkers is the relationship ^concealed-
revealed”一or， if you will, the relationship “coimterfeit-manifest•”
That Marxists stubbornly insist on their theory of the Reflex/'
that Nietzsche contradicts himself by dogmatizing over the wper-
spectivism” of the will to power, or that Freud mythologizes with
his “censor,” “doorkeeper，” and “disguises”一these obstacles and
dead ends are not what is essential. What is essential is that all
three create with the means they possess一i.e., with and against
the prejudices of their epoch— a mediating science of meaning
which is irreducible to the immediate consciousness of meaning.
What all three attempted in different ways was to make their
“conscious” methods of decoding coincide with the “unconscious”
worfc of establishing a code which they attributed to the will to
power, to the social being, or to the unconscious psyche. They do
it through guile— and guile and a half. In Freuds case it is the
admirable discovery of “On Dreams.” The analyst deliberately
takes in the opposite direction the path that the dreamer took,
without willing it or knowing it, in his wdream work.w Conse
quently, what distinguishes Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche is both
their method of decoding and their representations of the process
of coding which they attribute to unconscious being. It could
not be otherwise, since method and representation are coexten
sive and verify each other. Thus for Freud the meaning of the
dream more generally, the meaning of symptoms and com
一
promise formations and, even more generally, the meaning of

psychic expressions as a whole— is inseparable from “analysis”
as a tactic of decoding. One can even say, in a nonskeptical
sense, that this meaning is proposed and even created by analysis
and is therefore relative to the procedures which instituted it.
This can be said, but only on the condition of saying the op
posite：that the method is verified by the coherence of the dis
covered meaning and, moreover, that the method is justified by
the fact that the discovered meaning not only satisfies the under
standing through an intelligibility greater than the disorder of
apparent consciousness but that it liberates the dreamer or the
patient when he comes to recognize it and make it his own— in
short, when the carrier of meaning consciously becomes this
rweaning， which up till now existed only outside him, “in” his
unconscious and afterwards <<inwthe consciousness of his analyst.
That this meaning which had been only for another should
become conscious for itself, that is precisely what the analyst
wants for his patient. By the same token, an even deeper relation
ship is discovered between Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. All
three, as we said, begin with suspicions about the illusions of
consciousness and operate by the guile of decipherment. All
three, finally, far from being detractors of “consciousness,” aim
at extending it. What Marx wants is to liberate praxis by the
awareness of necessity. This liberation, however, is inseparable
from a becoming conscious^ which victoriously opposes the
mystifications of false consciousness. What Nietzsche wants is to
augment man's power and restore his force, but what the will
to power means must be regained by the mediation of the code
of the “overman,” the “eternal return,” and “Dionysus，” without
which this power would be no more than the violence of the
immanent. What Freud wants is for the patient to make the
meaning which was foreign to him his own and thus enlarge
his field of consciousness, live better, and, finally, be a bit freer
and, if possible, a bit happier. One of the most important
homages rendered to psychoanalysis speaks of the wcure through
consciousness.” Correct— as long as we realize that analysis
wants to substitute a mediating consciousness under the tutelage
of the reality principle for immediate and deceptive conscious
ness. Thus the same doubter who depicts the ego as a “poor
wretchw dominated by three masters (the id, the superego, and
reality or necessity) is also the exegete who rediscovers the
logic of the illogical kingdom and dares, with a modesty and
discretion without parallel, to end his essay on The Future of an
Illusion by invoking the god Logos, whose voice is weak but in
defatigable, a God who is not all-powerful but simply efficacious
in the long run.
III. T h e R e p e r c u s s i o n s of F r e u d ia n H e r m e n e u t i c s
in C ulture
T h i s , t h e n , is w h a t t h e s e t h r e e e x e g e t e s wanted to
do for modern man. But we are far from having assimilated
their discoveries and from understanding ourselves fully through
the means of interpretation of ourselves which they offer us. We
must admit that their interpretations still float at a distance from
us and that they have not yet found their proper place. The gap
between their interpretation and our comprehension remains
immense. Moreover, we are not faced with a unified interpreta
tion i 〇be assimilated as a whole but with three distinct inter
pretations, whose discordances are more manifest than their
similarities. There as yet exists no structure of assimilation, no
coherent discourse, no philosophical anthropology which is
capable of integrating our hermeneutic consciousness of Marx,
Nietzsche, and Freud into a whole. Their traumatizing effects
accumulate and their powers of destruction add up, but their
exegeses have not been coordinated in the unity of a new con
sciousness. This is why we must admit that the meaning of
psychoanalysis as an event within modem culture remains in
suspense and its place undetermined.
1. Resistance to the Truth
It is remarkable that psychoanalysis itself takes account of

this delay and suspension in becoming conscious of the event
which it represents for culture， and it does so through its own
interpretative schemata. Consciousness <<resists>, self-comprehen
sion, just as Oedipus <<resisted,> the truth known by everyone
else. He refused to recognize himself in the man he had con
demned. Self-recognition is the true tragedy, a tragedy on a
second level. What is tragic in consciousness— the tragic quality
of refusal and anger— doubles the primary tragedy, the tragedy
of such a being, of incest and parricide. Freud spoke magnifi
cently of this “resistance” to the truth in a famous and often
quoted text, “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis”（ 1917) .10
10. SE, Vol. XVII.

152 / PSYC HOANALYSIS
Psychoanalysis, he says, is chronologically the most recent of the

^severe blowswwhich M the universal narcissism of men, their self-
love, has up to the present suffered • • • from the researches of
science” （ p. 139). First there was the cosmological humiliation
inflicted upon man by Copernicus, who destroyed the narcissistic
illusion by which the home of man remained at rest in the center
of the universe. Then there came biological humiliation, when
Darwin put an end to man's claim to be unconnected with the
animal kingdom. Finally came psychological humiliation. Man,
who already knew that he was lord of neither the cosmos nor
all living things, discovers that he is not even lord of his own
psyche. Psychoanalysis thus addresses itself to the ego ：
You feel sure that you are informed of all that goes on in your
mind if it is of any importance at all, because in that case, you
believe, your consciousness gives you news of it. And if you have
had no information of something in your mind you confidently
assume that it does not exist there. Indeed, you go so far as to
regard what is “mental” as identical with wliat is “conscious” 一
that is, with what is known to you— in spite of the most obvious
evidence that a great deal more must constantly be going on in
your mind than can be known to your consciousness. Come, let
yourself be taught something on this point! . . . You behave like
an absolute ruler who is content with the information supplied
him by his highest officials and never goes among the people to
hear their voice. Turn your eyes inward, look into your own
depths, learn first to know yourself! Then you will understand why
you were bound to fall ill；and perhaps you will avoid falling ill
in the future (pp. 142-43).
"Come, let yourself be taught something on this poi nt ! . . .

Turn your eyes inward, look into your own depths, learn first to
know yourself IwIt is 11* this way that psychoanalysis understands
its own insertion into community consciousness by way of in
struction and clarity. Such instruction, however, encounters the
resistance of a primitive and persistent narcissism, that is, of a
libido which is never cathected completely in objects but is re
tained by the ego for itself. This is why the instruction of the
ego is necessarily lived as a humiliation, a wound in the libido
of the ego.
The theme of narcissistic humiliation greatly clarifies all
that we have just said about suspicion, guile, and the extension
of the field of consciousness. We now know that It li not con
sciousness which is humiliated but the protontlon of conscious
ness, the libido of the ego. We also know that what does the
humiliating is precisely a higher consciousness, a M clarity,Msci
entific knowledge, as Freud the good rationalist says. In a
larger sense we can say that it is a consciousness which is de-
centered from itself, unpreoccupied, and “displaced” toward
the immensity of the cosmos by Copernicus, toward the mobile
genius of life by Darwin, and toward the shadowy depths of
the psyche by Freud. Consciousness nourishes itself by recenter
ing itself around its Other：cosmos, bios, or psyche. It finds itself
by losing itself. It finds itself instructed and clarified after losing
itself and its narcissism.
2. The Îmmediate9* Reactions of Community Consciousness
The gap between the interpretation of culture introduced by

psychoanalysis and its comprehension by community conscious
ness explains, if not totally at least partially, the perplexity of
community consciousness. As we said above, psychoanalysis
finds its place in culture only with difficulty. We now know that
we become conscious of its meaning only across the truncated
representations which arise from the resistance of our narcis
sism.
These truncated representations are what we encounter on
the level of short-term influences and immediate reactions. The
level of M short-termMinfluences is one of vulgarization, and that
of <<immediatew reactions is one of small talk. Still, it is not
without interest to pause a moment on this level. Psychoanalysis
has taken the risk of being judged, praised, and condemned on
such an everyday level. From the moment that Freud began giv
ing lectures and publishing books he addressed himself to non
analysts and nonanalysands and brought psychoanalysis into the
public domain. In any case, his words fell outside the precise
intersubjective relation between the doctor and his patient from
the very beginning. This diffusion of psychoanalysis out of the
therapeutic context is a considerable cultural event, which social
psychology has in its turn made into a subject of scientific in
quiry, measure, and explanation.
It is first of all as a global phenomenon of demystification
that psychoanalysis has penetrated the public. A hidden and
silent part of man became public. #Theyw speak of sexuality,
M theyMspeak of perversions, repression, the superego, and cen
sorship. In this respect psychoanalysis is an event of the “they,”
154 / PSYC HOANALYSIS
a theme for “small talk.” But the conspiracy of silence is also an

event of the “they,” and hypocrisy is no less small talk than the
public exhibition and ridicule of every individual’s secret.
No one knows what to do with this demystification, for it is
the starting point of the most complete misunderstanding. On
the level of “short-term” influences, “they” want to draw an im-
mediate ethics from psychoanalysis. Thus ^they^ use psychoanal
ysis as a system of justification for moral positions whose pro
fundity has not itself undergone psychoanalytic interrogation.
Yet psychoanalysis was supposed to have been a tactic for un
masking all justifications. Hence, some ask psychoanalysis to
ratify permissive education— since neurosis comes from repres
sion— and find in Freud the discreet and unavowed apologist for
a new Epicureanism. Others, placing their emphasis on the
theory of stages of maturation and integration and the theory of
perversions and regressions, mobilize psychoanalysis in the
service of traditional morality. Did Freud not define culture by
instinctual sacrifice?
It is true that on a first approximation one might hesitate as
to what Freud really wanted. The temptation is to a "wild^ psy
choanalysis of psychoanalysis. Did Freud not make a public and
bourgeois defense of the institution of monogamy while making
a secret and revolutionary defense of the orgasm? But the con
sciousness which poses this question and attempts to enclose
Freud within this ethical alternative is one which has not ex
perienced the psychoanalytical critique.
The Freudian revolution is that of diagnosis, lucid coldness,
and hard-won truths. In an immediate sense, Freud preaches no
morality. <4I bring no consolation,w he says at the end of The
Future of an Illusion. But men want to convert his science into
dogma. When he speaks of perversion and regression, they
wonder whether or not it is the scientist who describes and ex
plains or the Viennese bourgeois justifying himself. When he
says that man is led by the pleasure principle, they suspect him
— for praise or for blame— of slipping approval of an unan
nounced Epicureanism into his diagnosis, although he looks at
the crafty behavior of the moral individual with the unemotional
eye of science. This is the misunderstanding：Freud is hearkened
to as a prophet, while he speaks as an unprophetic thinker. He
does not herald a new ethic but rather changes the consciousness
of those for whom the question of ethics remains open. He
changes consciousness by changing our knowledge of conscious
ness and by giving it the key to some of its deception!. Freud
can change our ethic in the long run because he is not a moralist
for the immediate future.
3. Is Freud a Tragic Thinker?
Only by rectifying these superficial reactions will community

consciousness feel in depth the Influence of psychoanalysis. As
we have seen, the short term leads only to misunderstandings
and contradictions, which result from attempting to draw an
immediate ethic from psychoanalysis. The long-term way will be
by way of a transformation of self-consciousness through the
mediate comprehension of human signs. But where will the long
road lead us? We do not know yet. Psychoanalysis is an indirect
revolution. It will change our customs only by changing the
quality of our outlook and the tenor of man’s way of speaking
about himself. It is first of all the work of truth and enters into
the ethical sphere only through the task of truth which it
proposes.
We can already recognize some lines of force along which
can be discerned the influence on the consciousness of modem
men of what I just now called the mediate comprehension of
human signs.
By placing ourselves once more in the attempt to carry for
ward the general effort of demystification exercised by psycho
analysis on the most elementary, unsophisticated level, we can
say that psychoanalysis focuses attention on what Freud himself
calls the harshness of life. We can say that it is difficult to be a
man. If psychoanalysis appears to plead both for the diminution
of instinctual sacrifice by means of a relaxation of social prohibi
tions and for an acceptance of this sacrifice as a result of the
submission of the pleasure principle to the reality principle, it
is not because it believes in an immediate “diplomatic” action
between opposing agencies [instances]. Rather, it puts all its
emphasis on the change in consciousness which will come out
of a wider and subtler comprehension of the tragic in humanity,
without rushing too quickly to draw the ethical conclusions.
Unlike Nietzsche, Freud does not say that man is a “sick
animal.” Rather, he makes it clear that conflict is inescapable
in human interaction. Why? First, man is the only being who
possesses so long a childhood and who, as a result, remains for
an incomparably long time in a condition of dependence. He
Is "historical/" as has been said in many ways. Freud says,
however, that as a result of his childhood fate, man is first pre-

historical and remains so for a long time. The great figures—
whether real or fantasied— of the father, the mother, brothers
and sisters, the Oedipal crisis, the fear of castration none of
一
this would be meaningful for a being who was not fundamentally

subject to his childhood and marked by the difficulty of becom
ing adult. Are we acquainted with what would be an adult feel
ing of guilt?
The tragedy of childhood fate, and also the tragedy of “repeti
tion” ：It is this tragedy of repetition which is Sehind all the
genetic explanations the limits of whose principles we spoke of
above. It is not by methodological caprice but by respect for the
truth that Freud leads us ceaselessly back to the beginning.
Childhood would not be a fate if something did not constantly
pull man backwards. No one has been more sensitive than Freud
to the tragedy of this backward drift and its various forms, such
as the return of the repressed, the libido*s tendency to return to
surpassed positions, the difficulty of the work of mourning, and
in general the decathexis of censored energy and the absence of
libidinal mobility. We should not forget that his reflections on
the death instinct are for a large part bom from this reflection
on the tendency to repetition, which Freud did not hesitate to
compare to the tendency in the organic world to return to an
inorganic state. Thanatos forms a conspiracy with the archaizing
spirit in Psyche.
The tragedy of libidinal contradictions: From the Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality we know that the energy of
the libido is not simple, that it has neither a single object nor a
single end, and that it can always disintegrate and take the
path of perversions and regressions. The growing complexity
of the Freudian schema of instincts— the distinction between the
libido of the ego and the object libido, the reinterpretation of
sadism and masochism after the introduction of the death in
stinct一cannot but reinforce this feeling of a wandering nature
of human desire. The difficulty of living is thus also— and per
haps above all— the difficulty of loving and of succeeding in
a life of love.
This is not all. All these motivations presuppose that psycho
analysis did no more than demystify the sexual. If, over and
above exploring the instinctual basis of man, however, it pro
poses to recognize the “resistance” of consciousness to this
demystification and to unmask the justificatloni and rationaliza
tions by which this Resistance*9 is expressed, and if it Is true
that this “resistance” belongs to the same network as the prohibi

tions and identifications which are the themes of the superego,
then we would not be exaggerating to say that the tragedy has
two foci, the id and the superego, and not just one. This is why,
in addition to the difficulty of becoming adult and the difficulty
of loving, there is the difficulty of self-knowledge and of honestly
judging oneself. Thus the task of truthfulness is posed for us at
the central point of the difficulty of living. In the Oedipus story
the true tragedy is not in his having unwittingly killed his father
and married his mother. That took place long ago. It is a destiny
behind him. The tragedy taking place now is that the man he has
condemned for this crime is himself and that such a fact must
be recognized. Wisdom would be in recognizing oneself and in
refraining from self-condemnation：but when the aged Sopho
cles wrote Oedipus at Colonus, he knew that Oedipus, even in
his old age, had not come to the end of his “rage” against himself.
We can thus understand why it is useless to demand an im
mediate ethic from psychoanalysis without first having changed
human consciousness. Man is an unjustly accused being.
It is perhaps here that Freud is closest to Nietzsche. Accusa
tion is what must be accused. Hegel as well, in criticizing the
<€moral world view^ in the Phenomenology of Spirit, had said
long before Nietzsche that the judging consciousness is disparag
ing and hypocritical. Its own finitude and equality with the con
sciousness being judged must be recognized in order that the
"remission of sins^ can be possible as a reconciling self-knowl
edge. But Freud does not accuse accusation. He understands it
and thus renders public its structure and stratagems. The pos
sibility of an authentic ethic, where the cruelty of the superego
would yield to the severity of love, lies in this direction. But we
must first spend time in learning that the catharsis of desire is
nothing without the catharsis of the judging consciousness.
This is not all we must learn before coming to an ethic. We
have not yet exhausted the instruction which precedes an ethic.
It is indeed possible to reinterpret all that we have said
above about culture in the light of t岔ese remarks on the twofold
tragedy of the id and the superego.
We have seen the place of the notions of ‘"illusion,” “sub
stitutive satisfaction,” and “seduction” in culture. These notions
also belong to the tragic cycle whose foci of proliferation we
have Just pointed out• 亡ulture is indeed made up of all the pro
cedures by which man escapes in the imaginary mode from the
unresolvable situation where desires can be neither suppressed
nor satisfied. Between satisfaction and suppression the way of.

sublimation opens up, but this way is also difficult. Yet it is be-
cause man can no longer be an animal and is not divine that he
enters into this situation from which he cannot extricate himself.
Hence he creates ^delusions and dreams,w as does the hero of
Jensen^ Gradiva. He also creates works of art and gods. The
great storytelling function which Bergson found in closed so
cieties Freud attributes to the tactic of evasion and illusion
elaborated by man not simply above his renunciations but with
their very flesh. This is an idea with an extraordinary profundity.
Since the reality principle bars the way of the pleasure principle,
it remains the case that man must “cultivate” the art of
stitutive enjoyment. Man, as we hear again and again, is a being
who can sublimate. But sublimation brings back the tragic in
stead of resolving it. Consolation in its turn, i.e., the reconcilia
tion with inevitable sacrifices and the art of supporting the suf-
fering inflicted upon us by our body, the world, and other men,
is never harmless. The relationship between religious “illusion”
and obsessional neurosis is there to provide evidence that man
leaves the sphere of instincts and “rises”一sublimates— only to
rediscover in a more insidious form and more twisted disguises
the very tragedy of childhood, where we recognized the first
tragedy. Only art seems to be without danger, or at least Freud
would lead us to believe so. Clearly, all he was acquainted with
in art was its idealizing form, its ability to muffle the forces of
darkness through sweet incantation. Freud seems to have had no
suspicion of its vehemence, power of opposition, exploration,
excavation, and scandalous explosion. Tliis is why art seems
to be the only power which Freud spared from his suspicion. In
reality, “sublimation’’ opens up a new cycle of contradictions
and dangers, but is it not the fundamental ambiguity of the
imagination to serve two masters at once, Lie and Reality? It
serves the lie because it deceives Eros with its fantasies (as we
say that hunger is deceived) and reality because it accustoms the
eye to Necessity.
Finally, it is the lucid awareness of the necessary character
of conflicts which is, if not the last word, at least the first of a
wisdom which would incorporate psychoanalytic instruction. In
this way Freud renewed not only the sources of the tragic but
“tragic knowledge” itself, insofar as it is the reconciliation with
the inevitable. It is not by chance that Freud一the naturalist,
determinlst, scientist, heir to the Enlightenment一always turned
to the language of tragic myth to say the emndalt Oedipus,
Narcissus, Eros, Ananke, and Thanatos. It is this tragic knowl
edge which must be assimilated in order to reach the threshold
of a new ethic which we must no longer attempt to extract from
Freud's work by immediate inference. It will be slowly prepared
by the fundamentally nonethical teachings of psychoanalysis.
The conscious emergence offered by psychoanalysis to modern
man is difficult and painful because of the narcissistic humilia
tion it inflicts. But at this price it is related to the reconciliation
whose law was stated by Aeschylus: Trd沒 €i ；
zd0〇s, “Understand
ing comes through suffering” (Agamemnon，1. 177).
Before such a reconciliation, the critique first outlined and
the internal repetition which we spoke of above must be con
ducted jointly and on a single front. A reflection on the limits
of Freudian interpretation remains in suspense, as does the
profound meaning of that great subversion of self-consciousness
inaugurated by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.
A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud
E x p o s it io n
It is im p o r t a n t to distinguish two attitudes a phi

losopher may adopt toward Freud's written work. These are a
“reading*’ or a “philosophical interpretation.” The reading of
Freud is the work of a historian of philosophy. It does not pose
problems which differ from those we would encounter in a read
ing of Plato, Descartes, or Kant, and it makes a claim to the same
sort of objectivity. A philosophical interpretation is the work of a
philosopher. It presupposes the sort of reading which makes a
claim to objectivity but goes on to take a position toward the
work. It adds a relocation in a different discourse to the archi
tectonic reconstitution of the work. The new discourse is that
of the philosopher who thinks from Freud— that is, after, with,
and against him, I propose “one” philosophical interpretation of
Freud.
i. The reading I presuppose considers Freudian discourse to
be a mixed discourse. It intermingles questions of meaning (the
meaning of dreams, symptoms, culture, etc.) and questions of
force (cathexis, economic accounting, conflict, repression, etc.).
I allow here that this mixed discourse is not equivocal but is
appropriate to the reality which it wishes to take into account,
namely, the binding of force and meaning in a semantics of
desire. This reading does justice to the most realistic and nat
uralistic aspects of Freudian theory, while it never neglects to
TramUted by Willlt Domingo.
[160]
A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud / 161
treat “instincts，” the “unconscious,” and the “id” as significations

to be deciphered in their effects of meaning.
2. The question which gives birth to the present interpreta
tion is the following ：Can a reflective philosophy make sense of
analytical experience and theory? I will assume here that the
Ego cogito and the Ego sum are the foundation of all legitimate
propositions about man. If that is true, one can understand Freud
by formulating the concept of the archaeology of the subject.
This concept defines the philosophical position of analytical dis
course. It is not Freuds concept. I formulate it in order to under
stand myself in my understanding of Freud. It is in and for
reflection that psychoanalysis is an archaeology.
But of what subject?
The reading of Freud is also the crisis of the philosophy of
the subject. It imposes the dispossession of the subject such as it
appears primarily to itself in the form of consciousness. It makes
consciousness not a given but a problem and a task. The genuine
cogito must be gained through the false cogitos which mask it.
It is thus that the reading of Freud becomes an adventure of
reflection.
3. The question which follows is ：Can a subject have an
archaeology without having a teleology? This question does not
exist without the preceding one. It is not posed by Freud but by
reflective thought, which says that only a subject with a telos
can have an arche. The appropriation of a meaning constituted
in the past presupposes the movement of a subject drawn ahead
of itself by a succession of ^figures^ (such as in HegeFs Phe-
womenotogy of Spirit) each of which finds its meaning in those
to follow.
This dialectic of archaeology and teleology allows us to re
interpret some Freudian concepts, such as sublimation and iden
tification, which do not, in my opinion, have a satisfactory status
In Freud’s own systematlcs.
Finally, this dialectic is the philosophical ground on which
the complementarity of rival hermeneutics of art, morality, and
religion can be established. Outside it, these interpretations either
confront one another without any possible arbitration or else are
thrown together in idle eclecticisms which are the caricature of
thought.
D evelopm ent
I w i l l n o t a c t a s c o u n s e l for a book in this lecture

but will rather devote myself to a free reflection on its difficulties.
Two questions immediately come to mind:
1. Can we, as I have just done, distinguish between the read
ing and a philosophical interpretation of Freud?
2. Do we have the right to construct a philosophical inter
pretation which consists, as I said in my exposition, in relocating
the work in a different discourse, especially if this discourse is
reflective philosophy?
I will answer the first question both generally and specifically.
I can answer generally that philosophy (or, as is awkwardly said,
general philosophy) and the history of philosophy are two dis
tinct philosophical activities. A tacit and distinct consensus
among historians of philosophy concerning the objectivity that
can be attained in their discipline has, I believe, been established.
It is possible to understand an author in himself without neces
sarily deforming or repeating him. I used a term devised by
Gu6roult in speaking of the “architectonic reconstitution” of a
work. But I believe that all other Mstorians— even if they speak
in a more Bergsonian sense of philosophical intuition— admit
that it is impossible to duplicate a work. The most one can do
is grasp it anew from a constellation of themes which have been
produced by intuition and especially from a network of articula
tions which in a sense constitute its substructure and underlying
framework. This is why one does not repeat but reconstructs.
From a different viewpoint, however, the historian does not
falsify the work he studies if he manages to produce, if not a
copy of the work (which would be useless), its homologue in the
strict sense of a vicarious object which presents the same arrange
ment as the work. This is how I understand objectivity, because
— in a negative sense, of nonsubjectivity— the philosopher brack
ets his own convictions, positions, and above all his manner of
beginning, attacking, and strategically handling his thought, and
because— in a positive sense— he submits his reading to what
the work itself— which remains the quid which guides his read
ing— wants and means.
And so I say that Freud can be read just as our colleagues
and teachers read Plato, Descartes, and Kant. This is what I
claim; it Is my first wager and has not yet noc〇 i_arHy been won.
A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud / 16 3
The reference of doctrine to an experience which requires ap

prenticeship and competence, which is a craft and even a
technique— does this reference not completely separate Freud
from the thinkers and philosophers cited above? I still think that
such an objection is not invincible and that the reading of Freud
poses no different problem from the reading of Plato, Descartes,
and Kant and can claim the same type of objectivity. Why?
First, because Freud wrote works which were not addressed
simply to his students, colleagues, and patients but to all of us.
By giving lectures and publishing books, he agreed to occupy in
the minds of his readers and listeners the same field of discourse
as do philosophers. He is the one who took the risk, not me. But
my argument is still too contingent and too bound to the hazards
of communication. I claim that what appears in the analytical
relationship is not radically different from what someone who
has not been analyzed can understand. I say “understand” and
not ‘live/’ for no comprehension gained from books will ever be
a substitute for the factual experience of psychoanalysis. How
ever, the meaning of what is thus lived is essentially communica
ble. Because it is communicable, the analytical experience can be
transposed through doctrine to the level of theory with the aid of
descriptive concepts which result from a second level of con
ceptuality. Just as in the theater I can understand situations,
feelings, and conduct which I have not experienced myself, so
I can understand in a mode of reflective empathy the meaning
of an analytical experience I have not undergone. This is why,
in spite of serious misunderstandings which I do not under
estimate, a philosopher, as a philosopher, is capable of under
standing psychoanalytic theory and even in part the psychoana-
lytic experience. Should I add an even more decisive argument?
It is Freud who came onto our territory. How? Because the object
of his investigation is not, as is too hastily assumed, human de
sire, the wish, libido, instincts, Eros (all of these words having a
precise sexual context), but rather desire in a more or less con
flicting relationship with a world of culture, a father and mother,
authorities, imperatives, prohibitions, works of art, social ends,
and idols. This is why Freud does not, when he writes about art,
morality, and religion, transpose to cultural reality a science and
practice which found their definite place in human biology or
psychophysiology. From the beginning his science and practice
are held at the point of interaction between desire and culture.
Take The Interpretation of Dreams or Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality, just to consider two of the major works,
16 4 / P S YC H O A N A L YS IS
where the instinctual level is taken in its relationship with “cen

sorship,” ‘^repression,” “prohibitions,” and “ideals•” The nuclear
figure of the father in the Oedipal episode is merely this system’s
center of gravity. This is why in the first and then in the second
topography we are faced from the beginning with a plurality of
“places” and “roles” in which the unconscious is diametrically
opposed to consciousness and preconsciousness and where the
id is at once in a dialectical relationship with the ego and the
superego. This dialectic is that of the very situation explored by
psychoanalysis, namely, the interlacing of desire and culture.
This is why I said that Freud came onto our ground；for, even
when he speaks to us of instincts, he speaks of them in and from
the level of expression, that is, in and from certain effects of
meaning which give themselves to be deciphered and can be
treated as texts ：dream texts or symptomatic texts一yes, texts
which occur in the network of communications, of exchanges
of signs. It is precisely in this milieu of signs that the analytical
experience (as the work of speech, an encounter between
speaking and listening, a complicity between speech and silence)
takes place. The fact that the analytical experience belongs, as
much as Freudian doctrine, to the order of signs is what funda
mentally justifies not only the communicability of analytical
experience but also its fundamentally homogeneous character
with the totality of human experience which philosophy under
takes to reflect upon and understand.
These, then, are the presuppositions which guided my de
cision to read Freud as I read other philosophers.
I will say very litde about this reading here because I have
chosen to speak, before the Soci6t6 de Philosophie, about the
philosophical interpretation which I propose. I will simply com
ment upon what I called architectonic reconstitution and will
intentionally give my development a more systematic presenta
tion than I did In my book.1
Freud's work seems to me to be divided into three great
masses, each of which has its own architecture and can be con
sidered as a conceptual level. These three levels find their full
est expression in different states of system, which can be charted
diachronically. The first network is constituted with the interpre
tation of dreams and neurotic symptoms and ends up, in the
writings of The Papers on Metapsychologyyin a state of system
i. Paul Ricocur, Freud and PhHosophy: Aw Ewdf on

trans. Denis 8avage (New Haven ： Yale University m t s , z 〇7 〇).
which is known by the name of the first topography ( the series

ego, id, superego constituting rather, in Lagache^ terms, a M per-
sonologyM). The next great mass of facts and notions, which con
stitutes the second theoretical network, contains the interpreta
tion of culture ：works of art, ideals, and idols. This second
network comes out of the former one, in that the first already
contained the dialectic of desire and culture. But, by applying
the dream model of wish-fulfillment to all the meaning effects
which we may encounter in the life of culture, we are led to
profoundly alter the equilibrium attained in Papers on
Metapsychology. The result of this alteration is a second state of
system which is expressed in the sequence ego, id, superego. It
does not replace the first system but is superimposed on it. The
final great mass of facts and notions, which constitutes the third
theoretical network, arises from the alteration imposed by the
introduction of the death instinct into the preceding edifice. This
alteration reaches the very foundations of existence, for it in
volves a redistribution of forces in terms of the polarity Eros-
Thanatos. As the relation between instinct and culture remains
the principal leading thread, however, this basic alteration also
affects every aspect of culture. Indeed, the entry of the death
instinct implies the most important reinterpretation of culture,
that which is expressed in Civilization and Its Discontents. It is
in guilt, in the discontent of the civilized individual, and in the
clamor of war that the mute instinct begins to cry out.
This, in broad terms, is the architecture of Freudianism.
As we can see, there is a development, but it is comprehensi
ble only if we move from one state of system to another. We can
thus pick out a sensible continuum which goes from a mechanis
tic representation of the psychic mechanism to a romantic dram
aturgy of life and death. But this development is not incoherent.
It proceeds by successive alterations of structures. This parade
of alterations is produced within a homogeneous milieu, namely,
the desire's effects on meaning. It is the homogeneous milieu of
all the restructuring of Freudian doctrine which I called the
semantics of desire.
Let us return to the principal object of this lecture, however,
which is a philosophical interpretation of Freud. We might begin
to consider it by the second objection that could be brought
against such an undertaking. Can one not legitimately challenge
all attempts to relocate a work like Freuds in a different dis
course? It will be argued that Freud's work is a totality sufficient
unto Itself and that we tre falsifying it if we place It in another
16 6 / PSYC HOA NA L YS IS
field of thought from that which it generates. This argument has

considerable force. It would work for any other thinker, but it
has a particular force in Freud's case. It is always possible to
consider the philosophical enterprise which would claim to
integrate it as the supreme denial and the craftiest of resistances.
That is probably true. Still, my opinion is that, even though
victorious, the objection does not affect the problem of a phi
losophical interpretation of Freud.
Two arguments can be brought against the fanatic exclusiv
ity of certain Freudians. The first is that it is false that Freud and
psychoanalysis furnish us with a totality. Need we recall all the
texts where Freud declares, without any ambiguity whatsoever,
that he has clarified only a single group of instincts, those which
were accessible to his practice, and that the realm of the ego, in
particular, is only partly explored by the specific ego instincts
which belong to the same cycle as the object libido? Psychoanal
ysis is only one beam among others projected upon human ex
perience. But above all— and this argument is drawn from
analytical practice itself— we must consider the doctrine as an
ordering of a very specific experience by the use of concepts
which have been constructed and coherently linked together.
This is the analytical experience, and we must hold strictly to
the point that, in the end, Freudian concepts come into play
(that is, mimic and confirm one another) within its circum
ference. There are more things in heaven and on earth than
in all our psychoanalysis. I just said that this experience can
be understood and is homogeneous with human experience as
a totality, but it is so precisely as one part in a whole. The voca
tion of philosophy is to arbitrate between not only the plurality
of interpretations but, as I will try to say in conclusion, the
plurality of experiences as well.
That is not all. Not only are analytical doctrine and experi
ence partial； both also involve a dissonance and a breach which
calls for philosophical interpretation. I am thinking here of the
shift which occurs between Freud’s discovery and the concepts
at work in his system. This is, of course, true of all works. Eugen
Fink recently pointed it out about Husserl. The concepts with
which a theory operates are not all objectivized in the field which
that theory thematizes. Thus a new philosophy expresses itself
partly in the language of preceding philosophies, which is the
source of doubtless Inevitable misunderstandings. In Freud’s
case the shift is manifest. His discovery operates on the level
of effects of meaning, but he continues to express it In the
language and through the concepts of energetics of his masters

in Vienna and Berlin. It could be argued that this dissonance
calls, not for a philosophical reconsideration, but for a clarifica
tion of the grammar of our language— as the English say, a
recognition of the rules of this language game. But this anomaly
on the part of Freudian discourse requires a more radical treat
ment. It is not simply a matter of a shift between the discovery
and the available vocabulary, for this anomaly in Freudian dis
course goes to the very nature of things. If it is true that psy
choanalysis applies to the inflection between desire and culture,
we can expect that it operates with notions which belong to two
different levels of coherence and two universes of discourse, that
of force and that of meaning. The language of force is all the
vocabulary which designates the conflictual dynamics whose re
sult, repression, is the best known and most studied of these
mechanisms, but it is also the entire economic vocabulary, such
as cathexis, decathexis, overcathexis, etc.
Thus, all the vocabulary about the absurdity or significance
of symptoms and dream thoughts, about their overdetermination
and the word plays which take place there, is the language of
meaning. It is this sort of relation between meanings which is
disentangled in interpretation. Between the apparent and the
hidden meaning there is the relation between an intelligible and
an unintelligible text. These meaning relations are thus entan
gled with force relations. Everything in ^dream workMis stated
in this mixed discourse. Force relations are enunciated and dis
simulated in meaning relations at the same time that meaning
relations express and represent force relations. This mixed dis
course is not, in my opinion, equivocal in the sense of simply
lacking clarity. It is not a “category mistake.” It comes close to
the very reality which our reading of Freud revealed and which
we called the semantics of desire. All the philosophers who have
reflected on the relations between desire and meaning have come
across this problem. Plato, for example, balances the hierarchy
of ideas by a hierarchy of love, and Spinoza binds the degrees of
clarity of the idea to those of the assertion and action of the
conatus, while Leibniz relates the monads degrees of appetition
and perception. “The action of the internal principle which
brings about the change or passage from one perception to an
other may be called appetition . . (Monadology, ^ 1^). Fieud
can thus be relocated on a well-known trajectory. By the same
token, however, an interpretation is imposed. The reading leads
us to a critical point, “where one sees that the energetics implies
16 8 / P S YCHOANALYSIS
a hermeneutics and the hermeneutics discloses an energetics.

That point is where the positing or emergence of desire mani
fests itself in and through a process of symbolization.” 2
That is, moreover, what distinguishes the psychological con
cept of drive (Trieb) from the psychophysiological concept of
instinct. Drives are accessible only in their psychic derivatives,
their effects of meaning, and, more precisely, their distortions of
meaning. Because drives occur in language in its psychic repre
senting, one can interpret desire, although it may remain un
speakable as such. But if this mixed discourse prevents psycho-
analysis from swinging toward the natural sciences, it prevents
it from swinging toward semiology as well. The laws of mean
ing in psychoanalysis cannot be reduced to those of linguistics
as inherited from Ferdinand de Saussure, Hjelmslev, or Jakob-
son. The ambiguity of the relation sustained by desire with
language is irreducible to such an extent that, as Emile Ben-
veniste has clearly shown, the symbolism of the unconscious is
not a linguistic phenomenon stricto sensu. It is common to many
cultures without a common language. It presents phenomena,
such as displacement and condensation, which operate on the
level of the image and not that of phonematic or semantic
articulation. In Benveniste^ terminology, dream mechanisms
will appear sometimes as infra- and sometimes as supralinguistic.
For our purposes, they manifest the confusion of the infra- and
the supralinguistic. They are on an infralinguistic level in the
sense that they mark the distortion of the distinctive function of
language. They are on a supralinguistic level if we consider the
dream, as Freud himself says, as finding its true relations in the
great unities of discourse such as proverbs, maxims, folklore,
and myths. From this point of view it is rather on the level of
rhetoric, with its metaphors, metonymy, synecdoche, euphe
misms, allusions, antiphrases, and litotes that a comparison
should be made. Rhetoric concerns not the phenomena of lan
guage but the procedures of subjectivity as manifested in dis
course.3Furthermore, Freud always used the word Vorstellung 一
“representation”一to designate the effect of meaning to which

drives are assigned. For him it is Dirzgfi/orsteHwngen— “thing rep
resentations”— which serve as models for Wortvorstellungen or
“word representations.” It is words that are treated as things and
a. Ibid., p. 65.
3. Ibid., p. 395.
not the opposite. I included in Freud and Philosophy* Freuds

important texts in this respect.
The representing of instincts (Trieben) is thus at the center
of our problem. It is neither biological nor semantic. It is dele
gated by the instincts and promised to language and reveals
instincts only in their derivatives while gaining access to lan
guage only by the twisted combinations of object cathexes which
precede verbal representation. We must invoke an irreducible
type of relationship between signifiers and signifieds. These signs
and meaning effects have a linguistic vocation but are not, in
their specific texture, of the order of language. This is what
Freud indicates by the word Vorstellung or representation, and it
is what keeps the level of fantasy distinct from that of speech.
Leibniz said as much in the text from which I just quoted a short
passage ： 'The action of the internal principle which brings about
the change or passage from one perception to another may be
called appetition. It is true that appetite may not always entirely
attain the whole perception toward which it tends, but it always
obtains something of it and arrives at new perceptionsw (Mon-
adology, § 15).
And so， there we are— with Leibniz* transposition of the
Freudian problem of libido and symbol— at the direshold of the
philosophical problem.
I am not saying that a single philosophy is capable of fur
nishing the vehicle in which relations between force and mean
ing can be explained. I believe that the correct reading of Freud
is possible, while only a correct philosophical interpretation is
possible. The one I propose is connected with reflective philoso
phy and is related to the work of Jean Nabert, to whom I long
ago dedicated my Symbolism of Evil. It is in Nabert that I
found the best formulation of the close relationship between the
desire to be and the signs in which desire is expressed, projected,
and explained. I stand fast with Nabert in saying that under
standing is inseparable from self-understanding and that the
symbolic universe is the milieu of self-explanation. This means
that there is no longer a problem of meaning unless signs are the
means, the milieu, and the medium thanks to which a human
existent seeks to situate, project, and understand himself. In con
trast, however, there is no direct apprehension of the self by the
self, no internal apperception or appropriation of the seifs desire
4. Footnote 6〇, p. 306.

I7〇 / PSYC HOA NA LYSIS
to exist through the short cut of consciousness but only by the

long road of the interpretation of signs. In short, my philosophi
cal working hypothesis is concrete reflection, i.e., the cogito as
mediated by the whole universe of signs.
I do not deny that this working hypothesis does not come
from the reading of Freud. The reading of Freud encounters it
only as something problematic. It encounters it exactly at the
point where Freud also poses the question of the subject. Indeed,
how can the sequence Unc., Pcs., Cs. and the sequence ego, id,
superego even be stated without posing the question of the sub
ject? And how can the question of desire and meaning be posed
without at the same time asking ‘Whose desire?” and ‘Whose
meaning?” But if the question of the subject is implied prob
lematically by psychoanalysis, it is not posed thematically. Even
less is the subject posed apodictically. The act by which the sub
ject is posited can be generated only out of itself. It is Fichte^
thetic judgment. In this judgment, existence is posited as
thought and thought as existence. I think, I am. With respect to
this position and this apodictic proposition, all the “places” of the
first topography and the M rolesMof the second Freudian sequence
are objectivizations. The entire question will be one of justifying
and legitimizing these objectivizations as the privileged path to
ward a less abstract cogito and as the necessary way of concrete
reflection.
I would like to emphasize, therefore, that there is a gap be
tween the problematic implications of the question of the subject
in psychoanalysis and its apodictic position in reflective philoso
phy. It is this gap which is responsible for the distance between
the reading and a philosophical interpretation of Freud.
It was necessary to clearly recognize this gap in order to clear
away two types of misunderstanding, both of which arise from a
confusion between reading and philosophical interpretation.
I cannot be accused of confusing Freud with reflective phi
losophy, because I am developing the reading of psychoanalysis
without presupposing the cogito. The reading of Freud rests on
a Platonic hypotheton which we have called the relation between
desire and meaning, the semantics of desire. For psychoanalysts,
it is a tr hikanon, ^something sufficient,win the sense of sufficient
for an understanding of all that takes place in the field of ex
perience and theory. In constituting the question of the subject
from the position UI think, I am,Mphilosophy asks for the condi'
tion of the condition and turns toward the anhypotheton of this
hypotheton. We must not, therefore, confuse the objections that
can be made to the reading of Freud and those that can be

brought against my philosophical interpretation.
A second misunderstanding occurs if we leap over this phil
osophical moment, omit the initial philosophical act, and bring
ourselves directly to the furthest consequences of such a philo
sophical choice. This is what happens when one grabs hold of
reflective conclusions on faith and religion and short-circuits
them into the Freudian critique of religion. There is a necessary
progression in the succession of steps which I posit ：the positing
of the subject, the renewal of psychoanalysis as an archaeology
of the subject, the dialectical positioning of archaeology and
teleology, and the vertical irruption of the Wholly Other, as the
alpha and the omega in the twofold question of archaeology and
teleology. We can, of course, separate these theses, which have
indeed appeared in different orders and different places in other
philosophies. But philosophy is not a puzzle of ideas or a heap
of scattered themes which can be arranged in just any order. The
way that philosophy proceeds and makes connections is all that
is pertinent. Its architecture commands its theses. This is why
my M ideasMon religion and faith are less important philosophi
cally than the way in which they interact with the dialectic of
archaeology and teleology. This dialectic in turn is of value only
insofar as it articulates concrete reflection internally. And, finally,
this concrete reflection makes sense only insofar as it succeeds
in asking anew the Freudian question of the unconscious, the id,
of instincts and meaning, in the promotion of the subject of re
flection.
We must hold onto this, for it is the bolt which keeps every
thin g together and by which this interpretation stands or falls.
I w o u l d l ik e t o e x p l a in now this r 穸
flective renewal of
Freudian concepts. My question is the following ：What happens
to a philosophy of reflection when it allows itself to be instructed
by Freud?
This question has two sides. First, it means, how can Freud’s
mixed discourse on desire and meaning be taken into reflective
philosophy? But it also means, what happens to the subject of
reflection when the guile of consciousness is taken seriously and
consciousness is discovered as false consciousness, which says
something other than it says or believes it says? These two sides
of the question are as Inseparable as those of a coin or a cloth.
For at the same time that I say that the philosophical location of
analytical dlscoumo is defined by the concept of the archaeology
of the subject, I also followed Freud to say that one can no

longer establish the philosophy of the subject as a philosophy of
consciousness. Reflection and consciousness no longer coincide.
Consciousness must be lost in order that the subject may be
found. The subject is not what we think it is. There can be evi
dence for the apodicticity of the cogito only if the inadequation
of consciousness is recognized at the same time. Like the mean
ing of the thing, the meaning of my own existence is itself either
presumed or presumptive, although the reasons for this are dif
ferent. It is thus possible to repeat Freudianism, make a reflec
tive repetition of it, which will also be an adventure of reflection.
I called dispossession or disappropriation this movement to
which I am constiained by Freudian systematics. It is the neces
sity of this dispossession which justifies Freudian naturalism. I
would adopt what is more shocking, more philosophically insup-
portable in the Freudian realism of psychic ^places/* I would
adopt its decided antiphenomenology and its dynamics and eco
nomics as the instruments of a suit which is filed against the
illusory cogito which first occupies the place of the founding act
of the I think, I am. In short, I make use of psychoanalysis just
as Descartes made use of skeptical arguments against the dog
matism of the thing； but this time it is against the cogito itself
一
or rather at the heart of the cogito— that psychoanalysis splits

the ego^ claims to apodicticity and the illusions of conscious
ness. In an essay written in 1917 Freud speaks of psychoanaly
sis as a wound and humiliation to narcissism analogous to the
discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin when in their own way
they decentered the world and life with respect to the claims of
consciousness. Psychoanalysis decenters in the same way the
constitution of the world of fantasy with respect to conscious
ness. At the end of this dispossession, consciousness has
switched philosophical signs. It is no longer a given. There are
no longer “immediate givens of consciousness.” There is, rather,
a task, the task of becoming-consciousness. Where there had
been Bewusstsein, or being-consciousness, there is now Bewusst-
werden, or becoming-consciousness. Thus the dynamic and eco
nomic side of Freudianism was asserted twice. First, in the read
ing of Freud, against all semiological reduction and in order to
rescue the very specificity of psychoanalysis and hold it at the
junction between force and meaning, and second, in the philo
sophical interpretation, in order to guarantee the authenticity of
the ascesis and deprivation through which reflection must pass
in order to remain authentic. At the same time, what Is the
enigma of Freudian discourse— an enigma at least for a pure

epistemological consideration— becomes a paradox of reflection.
As you will remember, the enigma of Freudian discourse was the
intertwining of dynamic and hermeneutic language. Transcribed
into reflective language, that gives the reality of the id and the
ideality of meaning ：reality of the id in the act of disappropria
tion and the regression of effects of meaning, appearing on the
conscious level, to the point of instinct on the level of the uncon
scious； ideality of meaning in reappropriating and in the move
ment of interpretation which initiates the movement of becom-
ing-conscious. It is thus that our reading of Freud itself becomes
an adventure of reflection. What emerges from this reflection is
a wounded cogito, which posits but does not possess itself, which
understands its originary truth only in and by the confession of
the inadequation, the illusion, and the lie of existing conscious
ness.
T h e s e c o n d s t a g e of the philosophical interpretation

which I propose is characterized by the dialectic between archae
ology and teleology. This advance in reflection indeed represents
something new, a polarity between the reflective arche and telos.
I reach this stage by a reappropriation of the temporal aspects of
Freudianism which are precisely bound to the Freudian realism
of the unconscious and the id. Furthermore, they pertain to
Freudian economics rather than Freudian topography. There is
indeed in the positing of desire an anteriority which is both phy
logenetic and ontogenetic, historical and symbolic. Desire is in
every respect prior；it is anticipatory. The theme of anteriority
pervades Freudianism. I would defend it against all the cultural-
isms which have tried to extract its fangs and pull its claws by
reducing to defects of our current relationship to the environ
ment the savage side of our instinctual existence, this prior de
sire, which pulls us backwards and insinuates the whole back-
ward drift of affectivity on the level of family relationships,
fantasies and works of art, ethics and guilt, religion and the fear
of punishment and the infantile wish for consolation. Freud is on
secure ground when he speaks of the unconscious as timeless,
i.e., as rebellious to the temporalization which is linked to
becoming-conscious. This is what I call archaeology, the re
strained archaeology of instincts and narcissism, the generalized
archaeology of the superego and idols, the hyperbolic archaeology
of the war of the giants Eros and Thanatos. But we must see
that the concept of archaeology is itself a reflective concept.
Archaeology is the archaeology of the subject. This is what

Merleau-Ponty saw and said clearly in his introduction to the
work of Dr. Hesnard, UOeuvre de Freud.
Because the concept of archaeology is a philosophical con
cept— a concept of reflective philosophy一the articulation be
tween archaeology and teleology is also an articulation of and in
reflection. It is reflective thought which says that only a subject
which has an arche has a tdos; for the appropriation of a mean
ing constituted prior to me presupposes the movement of a sub-
ject drawn ahead of itself a succession of “figures,” each of
which finds its meaning in the ones which follow it.
This new advance on the part of thought surely constitutes a
problem；this is why I propose to comment upon it by a few re
marks of a more problematic nature. First, it is quite true that
psychoanalysis is analysis, i.e., in Freud's own rigorous terms, a
regressive decomposition. According to Freud, there is no psycho
synthesis, or, at least, psychoanalysis as such need not propose
any synthesis. This is why the teleology of the subject is not a
Freucfian idea but rather a philosophical notion which the reader
of Freud forms at his own risk. Still, this notion of the teleology
of the subject is not without support in Freud himself, who
hinted at its equivalent or its beginning in a certain number of
experiences and theoretical concepts set into motion by the prac
tice of analysis. But these experiences and concepts do not find
their place in the Freudian schema of the psychic apparatus.
This is why they remain in the air, as I tried to show for the con
cepts of identification and sublimation, for which Freud said ex
pressly that he had found no satisfactory explanation.
Second remark ：I attached the idea of a teleology of the sub
ject to HegeFs Phenomenology of Spirit. This example is not
restrictive, only illuminating, in that teleology— or, to cite Jean
Hyppolite exactly, “dialectical teleology” is the only law for
一
the construction of the figures of the spirit. It is illuminating also

in that the dialectic of the figures gives philosophical sense to all
psychological maturation and to man's growth out of childhood.
Psychology asks how man leaves his childhood. Indeed, he does
so by becoming capable of a certain meaningful itinerary which
has been illustrated by a certain number of cultural configura
tions which themselves draw their sense from their prospective
arrangement. The example of Hegel is again illuminating in the
sense that it allows us to dissociate teleology and finality, at least
in the sense of final causes criticized by Spinoza and Bergson.
Teleology is not finality. The figures in a dialectical Mteology are
not final causes but meanings which draw their sense from the
movement of totalization which carries them along and pushes
them ahead of themselves. The Hegelian example is illuminat
ing, last of all, in that it allows us to give content to the empty
idea of an existential project which would continually remain its
own project and determine itself only in contingency, despair, or
simply the flattest conformism.
If the Hegelian example is indeed exemplary, however, it is
not restrictive. For my part I tried to outline the sequence of cul
tural spheres, from economic possession (avoir) to political
power (pouvoir) and personal values (valoir), all of whose con
tents are quite different, even though their general orientation is
the same. In all of this our problem is the passage, not to con
sciousness, but from consciousness to self-consciousness. What
is at stake is the Self or Spirit.
It is not unimportant to discover that consciousness* preten
sions are no less humiliated in the ascending dialectic of figures
of the spirit than they are in the regressive decomposition of
fantasies of desire. Concrete reflection consists in this twofold
self-dispossession and decentering of meaning. But reflection is
still what holds together regression and progression. It is in re
flection that the relationship between what Freud calls the un
conscious and Hegel Spirit, between the primordial and the
terminal, fate and history, functions.
You will allow me to stop here and not delve into the final
circle of concrete reflection. I say in my synopsis, "This dialectic
is the philosophical ground on which the complementarity of
rival hermeneutics of art, morality, and religion can be estab
lished/* I intentionally did not consecrate a special paragraph to
this question of rival hermeneutics. The dialectical solution
which I attempt to apply to this problem has no autonomy what
soever with respect to what I called the dialectic of progression
and regression, teleology and archaeology. I wish to apply a
determinate philosophical method to a determinate problem, tfiat
of the constitution of the symbol, which I described as an ex
pression with a double meaning. I had already applied this
method to the symbols of art and the ethics of religion. But the
reason behind it is neither in the domains considered nor in the
objects which are proper to them. It resides in the overdetermi
nation of the symbol, which cannot be understood outside the
dialecticity of the reflection which I propose. This is why all dis
cussion which treats my double interpretation of religious sym
bols as an Isolated theme necessarily retrogresses to a philosophy
176 / PSYC HOA NA L YS IS
of compromise from which the incentive for struggle has been

withdrawn. In this terrible battle for meaning, nothing and no
one comes out unscathed. The “timid” hope must cross the desert
of the path of mourning. This is why I will stop on the threshold
of the struggle of interpretations and do so by giving myself this
warning ：outside the dialectic of archaeology and teleology,
these interpretations confront one another without possible arbi
tration or are juxtaposed in lazy eclecticisms which are the cari
cature of thought.
Technique and Nontechnique
in Interpretation
M y t h s p o s s e s s a t e c h n i q u e ,1 as Professor Castelli has

pointed out,2 and this technique is the ultimate aspect of the
process of demythization. I have wondered to what degree such
a judgment can be applied to psychoanalysis, for Professor Cas
telli seems to include psychoanalysis in the îconoclasm of the
intimate” （ in his remarks on daytime and nighttime technique).
I will answer the following two questions ：( i ) In what sense
is psychoanalysis a technique of the night? (2) To what degree
is it an iconoclasm of the intimate?
I. P s y c h o a n a l y s i s a s a T e c h n i q u e o f t h e N ig h t
O u r q u e s t io n is p e r f e c t l y l e g i t i m a t e . Psychoanaly
sis is indeed a technique, one of many in the modern world. We
do not yet know its exact place, which it is undoubtedly still in
Translated by Willis Domingo.

1 • [While English distinguishes between “technique” and “technology,”
the German word TecJmife means both; and, although techwoiopie does
exist in French, technique can also be used in this sense by French
writers. Thus the present essay follows Heideggers lead (cf. ^ i e Frage
nach dem TechnikM in Vortrage und Aufsdtze) by playing on this
ambiguity. Since this is an analysis of Freud's Papers on Technique, our
translation will be generally “technique，” except where the context
dictate， “technology•” 一 T r a n s .】
2. In hie opening remarks to the International Colloquium on *Tech-
and Casuistry/* Professor Castelli connected the central theme 〇
nlauee ai £ the
Colloquiilum to the question which had occupied former annual meetings
in Romie, namely, demythization as an Mpect of modernity.
178 / PSYC HOA NA L YS IS
search of. But one thing is certain ：it is a technique. It arises

from a therapeutical maneuver which is constituted as a pro
fession. It is a profession which is studied and taught, which re
quires a didactics and a deontology. The philosopher learns this
at his own cost if he attempts to reconstruct the entire structure
of psychoanalysis from another experience, such as Husserlian
phenomenology. He can, of course, approach the mountain
range of psychoanalysis and climb its foothills with concepts
such as the phenomenological reduction, sense and nonsense,
temporality, and intersubjectivity；but there is a point at which
this approximation of psychoanalysis through phenomenology
fails, and this point is, precisely, all that is discovered in the
analytical situation itself. It is within the specific field of the
analytical relationship that psychoanalysis operates as a tech
nique.
In what sense is it a technique? Let us begin with the word
itself. In a text of methodological importance,3 Freud distin
guishes three terms in order to bind them inseparably together：
method of investigation, technique of treatment, and the elabora
tion of a body of theory. Technique is understood here in the
strict sense of a therapeutics leading to a cure. The word is thus
distinguished from the art of interpretation, or hermeneutics,
and from the explanation of mechanisms, or metapsychology.
But for our purposes it is important to show how psychoanalysis
is praxis through and through and contains within itself both
the art of interpretation and a speculative theory. In order to
pose Professor Castelli^ question in all its force, I will therefore
understand technique, not as one of the three aspects which I
have just listed, but as the benchmark and point of reference of
the analytic maneuver as a whole.
So that this will be understood, I will introduce an inter
mediary concept一the fundamental concept of work. Indeed, the
analytic maneuver is a form of work, to which another form of
work corresponds on the part of the patient, the work of becom
ing conscious. In turn, these two forms of work, that of analysis
and that of the patient, reveal the psychism as a whole as a form
of work ：dream work, mourning work, and, we might say, the
work of neurosis. Metapsychology as a whole— its topography
and its economics一is destined to take account of this function
of work by means of dynamic metaphors.
With this schema we are in a position to show how the
3. MTsychoanalytis* and Xlbido Theory/ M Sff« XVIII, ^35.

Technique and Nontechnique / 179
method of investigation and the metapsychological theory are

aspects of psychoanalysis considered as praxis.
Let us begin with the work of the analyst. Why is analysis
work? Freuds unvarying answer is the following：because it is a
struggle against resistances. The key idea, therefore, is that the
resistances which block analysis are the same as those which lie
at the origin of the neurosis. The idea that analysis is a struggle
against resistances is so important that in retrospect Freud will
cite it as the reason for his break with Breuer. He rejected all
forms of cathartic method which continued to use hypnosis be
cause that procedure claims to obtain anamnesis without work.
Moreover, it was his growing comprehension of the role of ana
lytic strategy which led to the later adjustments of analytic prac
tice, during the period from 1905 to 1907. Thus Freud writes
that the goal of analytic exploration is less to restore the instinc
tual base and bring about the resurgence of the abolished than
to circumscribe and liquidate resistances.
What is the result for the relation between technique and
hermeneutics? Two things. First, the art of interpretation should
itself be considered as part of the art of handling resistances.
This art of interpretation— which Freud compares, with some
what less than total satisfaction, to an art of translation and
which, in any event, is a sort of comprehension, understanding,
or production of intelligibility— is, considered from the point of
view of the analytic maneuver, only the intellectual side of a
handling, of a praxis. In this respect the important article from
1912 entitled *The Handling of Dream-Interpretation in Psycho-
Analysis” should be consulted. It shows how the concern for
realizing an exhaustive interpretation of the dream can be used
by resistance as a sort of trap into which the analyst is attracted
for the sake of delaying the progress of the cure. This is why
Freud continually repeats that the struggle against resistance is
arduous and costs the patient sincerity, time, and money, while
it demands from the doctor ability and a command over his own
afFects if he wants to be able to enter into the transference as the
opponent of the patient's demands, as someone who does not
respond but rather leads his adversary into the dead-ends of
frustration.
But this subordination of interpretation, in the precise sense
of an intellectual comprehension, to techne or the analytic ma
neuver bears a second aspect, which leads us from the work of
the analyst to the work of the person being analyzed. To cure the
patient, it Is not enough to communicate to him the content of
l8〇 / PSY CH O AN AL Y SIS
an exact interpretation because, from the side of the analyst,

comprehension is only a part of his own work. Freud writes, in
“ W ild’ Psychoanalysis”（1910 ):
Informing the patient of what he does not know because he has

repressed it is only one of the necessary preliminaries to the treat
ment. If knowledge about the unconscious were as important for
the patient as people inexperienced in psychoanalysis imagine,
listening to lectures or reading books would be enough to cure
him. Such measures, however, have as much influence on the
symptoms of nervous illness as distribution of menu-cards in a
time of famine has upon hunger. The analogy goes even further
than its immediate application, for informing the patient of his
unconscious regularly results in an intensification of the conflict
in him and an exacerbation of his troubles.4
Thus analysis does not consist in replacing ignorance by knowl

edge but in provoking a work of consciousness by means of work
on resistances. In 1913 Freud came back to the same problem in
an article “On Beginning the Treatment,” in which he takes ex
ception to the excessive importance attached to the fact of know-
ing at the beginning of psychoanalysis ：
After this there was no choice but to cease attributing to the fact
of knowing, in itself, the importance that had previously been
given to it and to place the emphasis on the resistances which had
in the past brought about the state of not knowing and which were
still ready to defend that state. Conscious knowledge, even if it
was not subsequently driven out again, was powerless against
those resistances.5
Moreover, it often happens that the early communication of a

purely intellectual interpretation reinforces resistances. Hence
the art of psychoanalysis consists in relocating knowledge and
the communication of the knowledge in this strategy of resist-
ance.
What, then, does the work of analysis consist in? It begins
with the application of the fundamental rule that one must com
municate in analysis all that comes to mind, whatever the cost.
This is work and not observation ；it is a work of face-to-face en
counter. In ^Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through”
Freud writes:
4. SE, XI, 225.

5. SE, XII, 14a.
The patient must find the courage to direct his attention to the
phenomena of his illness. His illness must no longer seem to him
contemptible, but must become an enemy worthy of his mettle, a
piece of his personality which has solid ground for its existence
and out of which things of value for his future life have to be
derived.6
8
7
It is face-to-face work. Freud often states, it is impossible

to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigy^ 7
Thus we arrive at the following idea ：there is an economic
problem in becoming conscious, or Bewusstwerden, which com
pletely distinguishes psychoanalysis from any phenomenology of
becoming conscious, of dialogue, or of intersubjectivity. It is this
economics of becoming conscious which Freud calls Durchar-
beiten, or working-through ：
This working-through of the resistances may in practice turn out
to be an arduous task for the subject of the analysis and a trial
of patience for the analyst. Nevertheless it is a part of the work
which effects the greatest changes in the patient and which dis
tinguishes analytic treatment from any kind of treatment by sug
gestion.8
We can hardly go further in this direction without incorpo

rating into our analysis Freuds reflections on transference. We
will speak of transference here only in its relationship to the con
cept of work. It is indeed the heart of the analytic maneuver and
the domain of its autonomy. In **On Beginning the Treatment,w
cited above, Freud shows how the handling of transference is
involved with <4the play of forces which is set in motion by the
treatment” （p. 143). ‘TThe primary motive force in the therapy
is the patients suffering and the wish to be cured which arises
from it.” But these are powerful forces:
It supplies the amounts of energy that are needed for overcoming
the resistances by making mobile the energies which lie ready for
the transference ；and, by giving the patient information at the
right time, it shows him the paths along which he should direct
those energies (ibid.).
It is thus that transference rallies the excessively weak forces of

suffering and of the wish to be cured. This involvement is so im
6. SEt XII, 152.

7. Dynamics of Transference,” SE, XII, 108•
8. 'Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through/* SEt XII, 155-
56 .
1 82 / PSY CH O AN AL Y SIS
portant that Freud writes, a little further on, wIt only deserves
the name of psychoanalysis if the intensity of the transference
has been utilized for the overcoming of resistances.” The ‘"han
dling” of transference gives the most convincing evidence of the
technical character of psychoanalysis. In ^Remembering, Re
peating, and Working-ThroughM Freud analyzes in detail this
major constellation of every analytical maneuver ：the struggle
against resistances, the handling of transference, and the pa
tients tendency to substitute repetition for remembering. This
is why, in his address to beginning analysts ( “Observations on
Transference-Love” [1915])， he will say:
Every beginner in psycho-analysis probably feels alarmed at first
at the difficulties in store for him when he comes to interpret the
patient's associations and to deal with the reproduction of the re
pressed. When the time comes, however, he soon learns to look
upon these difficulties as insignificant, and instead becomes con
vinced that the only really serious difficulties he has to meet lie
in the management of the transference.9
The critical moment thus seems to me to be this ：the disci
pline of analysis is essentially a discipline of satisfaction ；the
entire maneuver consists in using transference love without
satisfying it. Freud even came to the point of writing ( KLines of
Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy” [1918]) that this “funda
mental principle” is obviously calle 岔 upon to govern the entire
domain of the new technique. He propounds this fundamental
principle in the following w a y ：Ânalytic treatment should be
carried through as far as possible under privation in a state
一
of abstinence.” 10 This rule relates essentially to “the dynamics

of falling ill and recoveringw (ibid.). How? We must return to
the economic meaning of symptoms as substitutive satisfaction.
To leave the patient’s demand without response is to prevent the
premature spending of Mthe instinctual force impelling the pa
tient towards recovery,* (ibid., p. 163). Freud adds ：
Cruel though it may sound, we must see to it that the patlenfs
suffering, to a degree that is in some way or other effective, does
not come to an end prematurely. If, owing to the symptoms having
been taken apart and having lost their value, his suffering be
comes mitigated, we must re-instate it elsewhere in the form of
some appreciable privation；otherwise we run the danger of never
achieving any improvements except quite insignificant and transi-
9. Ôbservations on Transference-Love/' SE, XII, 159.
10. g<Llne8 of Advance In Piycho-Analytlc T h e r a p y SE, XVIIt z6a,
tory ones . . . ; activity on the part of the physician must take
the form of energetic opposition to premature substitutive satis-
factions . . . . As far as his relations with the physician are con
cerned, the patient must be left with unfulfilled wishes in abun
dance (ibid., pp. 163-64).
I consider these texts to be of an exemplary clarity. They suffice

to open an abyss between everything that reflection can draw out
of itself and that which only a craft can teach. I would willingly
see in Freud's observations on the handling of transference the
ultimate and irreducible difference between phenomenology 一
even the most existential sort一 and psychoanalysis. It is a work-

to-work relation— the work of the analyst and that of the analy-
sand 一 which is responsible for the specificity of psychoanalysis
and constitutes it as technique.
Allow me to finish this reflection on the work of analysis with
the quotation from Hamlet which Freud uses ：w^blood, do you
think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what
instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play
upon me.” 11
“Play upon the psychic instrument •••”：It seems to me
that this expression leads us to a fundamental aspect of analytic
technique, namely, that the theory which corresponds to it, and
which Freud calls its metapsychology, is itself a function of
praxis.
Let us again take the concept of work for our guide, this
time in the metapsychological apparatus of psychoanalysis. As
we know, this concept of work is at the center of The Interpreta
tion of Dreams. If dreams can be considered as wish fulfillments
(Wunscherfullungen), it is because unconscious thoughts are
M distortedJ, in dreams. Such distortion (Einstellung) is inter
preted by Freud as work. Dream work (Traumarbeit) and all
the procedures which go along with it 一 such as condensation
work ( Verdichtungsarbeit) or displacement work (Verschie-
bungsarbeit)— are ways of working. Thus the work which makes
up analysis (in the double form of the analyst's and the analy-
sand^ work) reveals psychic functioning itself as work. Freudian
dynamics is, of course, metaphorical, but it is a metaphor which
protects the specificity of metapsychology with respect to any
sort of phenomenology of intentionality, meaning, or motiva
tion. This is why, in his important preface to Hesnard^ UOeuvre
de Freud, Merleau-Ponty, after noting his reservations as to the
xi. M
On Psychotherapy/' SEt VII^ 225.
184 / PSY CH O AN AL Y SIS
place of psychoanalysis’ conceptual apparatus，admits, “At least

the dynamic and mechanistic metaphors guard, against any
idealization, the threshold of an intuition which is one of the
most precious in Freudianism” （p. 9). Vergote says, in a similar
fashion, iaThe Freudian unconscious cannot but be haunted by
praxis.” It is precisely the psychism as work which pervades psy
choanalytic work. Up to a certain point we can use this remark
to justify Freud's topography in its most naive form, that of the
double inscription (Niederschrift) of the same representations
in two distinct "'psychic localitiesw (as when one becomes con
scious in a purely intellectual way of a memory without uproot
ing it from its archaic soil). This topography is the discourse—
philosophically barely comprehensible— which is proper to the
concept of the psychism as work. The areas of the topography
expressly account for the M remotenessw(Entfem ung) and the dis
tortion (EntsteUung) which separate (Ent-) and make unrecog
nizable that other discourse which comes to light in the discourse
of analysis. The remoteness and distortion of the “derivatives”
of the unconscious are at the origin of those resistances which
require self-recognition itself to become work. I will say that
metapsychology attempts to account for a sort of bad workman-
ship, a work of misunderstanding, which makes recognition a
kind of work. There is a problem of interpretation because wishes
are fulfilled in a disguised and substitutive mode. The work in
question in dream work is the maneuver by which the psychism
realizes the Ent-stellung, the distortion of meaning, by which
wishes are rendered unrecognizable to themselves. Metapsychol
ogy as a whole is thus the theoretical construction, the concep
tual elaboration, which makes it possible to comprehend the
psychism as work of mis-understandmg, as technique of distor
tion.
We can now complete our description of psychoanalysis as
technique. Its technical object (to use Simondon’s term as a
designation for the respondent and opponent of the analytic
maneuver) is man insofar as he is himself a process of deforma
tion, trans-position and dis-tortion applied to all the presentations
(whether affective or ideational) of his oldest wishes, those
which The Interpretation of Dreams calls M indestructiblew or
“atemporal” and which the article on “The Unconscious” declares
to be zeitlos or timeless. Psychoanalysis is constituted as tech
nique because, in the process of EntateUung, man himself
behaves as a mechanism, submits to an external law, and <con- 4
*9
densesMor ^displaces his thoughts. Man behaves llkt a mech
anism in order to accomplish by deception the aims of wish-
fulfillment. In this way the psyche is itself a technique practiced
on itself, a technique of disguise and misunderstanding. The
soul of this technique is the pursuit of the lost archaic object
which is constantly displaced and replaced by substitute, fan
tastic, illusory, delirious, and idealized objects. In short, what of
the psychic work is revealed in dreams and neuroses? It is the
technique by which wishes become unrecognizable. In turn, this
technique, which is immanent in the wish itself, gives rise to the
maneuver which we have placed under the heading of analytic
technique. Freud’s “naturalism” and “mechanism” are partially
justified by the network constituted by the three forms of work
(the work of analysis, the work of becoming conscious, and
dream work).
II. P s y c h o a n a l y s i s as Ic o n o c l a s m of th e I n t im a t e
N ow I w i l l t a k e u p th e q u estio n s raised by Pro

fessor Castelli concerning technique understood as demythologi
zation carried to its extreme point. According to him, all tech-
nique excludes the classically casuistical, by eliminating choice
and by the unique determination of intentionalities. If this is the
case, the only conceivable casuistry would be one of ultimates
and extremes, i.e., an eschatological casuistry.
In what sense, then, is psychoanalysis a contribution to tech
nique understood as a total way of acting toward the world and
the sacred? I would like to emphasize two points. I will argue
first with as much force as I have that in its profound finality
psychoanalysis does not belong in this technical world, inasmuch
as this world involves techniques for the domination of nature
or utechnology.MIn this sense, psychoanalysis is more an anti
technique. That is what I meant by the title of this essay.
When I say that psychoanalysis is not a technique of domina
tion, I wish to emphasize its important feature of being a tech
nique of veracity. W hat is at stake in psychoanalysis is self-
recognition, and its itinerary goes from lack of recognition to
self-recognition. In this respect its model is the Greek tragedy
Oedipus Rex. Oedipus* fate is to have already killed his father
and married his mother. But the drama of recognition begins
beyond this point and consists in this man^s recognition that he
had begun by pronouncing a curse. I was that m an ；and in a
1 86 / PSYCHOANALYSIS
sense I have always known it, but in another sense I was un
aware of the fact. Now I know who I am. What is the meaning
of the expression “technique of veracity*’ at such a moment?
First, it takes place entirely in the field of speech. It is this initial
situation which is completely unknown by all those, either psy
chologists or psychoanalysts, who have tried to integrate psycho
analysis into a general, behavioral type of psychology. Thus they
prepared for the integration of the analytic maneuver into tech
niques of adaptation which are themselves branches of the tech-
nique of the domination of nature. In reality psychoanalysis is
not a science of the observation of behavior, and this is why it is
not a technique Of adaptation. And since it is not, it is, by fate
and vocation, in an overhanging relationship with all technologi
cal ambitions for the domination of nature. An entire school of
American psychoanalysts, such as Hartmann and Rapaport,
work toward this reintegration of psychoanalysis into academic
psychology and do not realize that all the corrections and refor
mulations which they propose constitute surrender pure and
simple. Yes, it takes courage to say that psychoanalysis is not a
branch of the natural sciences and that this is why its technique
is not an applied natural science or a branch of technology un
derstood as domination of nature. The price to pay for this
avowal is indeed heavy ：psychoanalysis does not satisfy the
standards of the sciences of observation, and the “facts” it deals
with are not verifiable by multiple independent observers. The
‘law s’’ it formulates cannot be converted into relationships of
variables ( “independent variables” of place, “dependent varia
bles” of behavior, and “intermediate variables” ). Its unconscious-
ness is not one extra variable inserted between stimulus and
response. Properly speaking, there are no “facts” in psychoanaly
sis in the sense that experimental science understands “facts.”
This is why its theory is not a theory in the same way that the
theory of gases in physics and the theory of genes in biology
are.
Why? Because the “work” we spoke of in the first part of this
essay is entirely work within language. The psychic work de
tected by analysis is a work of distortion on the level of mean
ing, on the level of a text which may be recounted in a narration.
For psychoanalysis, to proceed technically is to proceed like a
detective. Its economics is inseparable from a semantics. This is
why there are no M factsMnor any observation of M factsMin psycho
analysis but rather the interpretation of a narrated history. Even
facts observed from the outside and related In the course of
analysis are valued not as facts but as expressions of changes in
meaning which occur in this history. Changes in conduct are not
valued because they are “observable” but because they are “mean-
ingfuF for the history of desire. Hence the real object of psycho
analysis is always effects of meaning— symptoms, delirium,
dreams，illusions— which empirical psychology can consider only
as segments of conduct. For the analyst, it is conduct which is a
segment of meaning. The result is that its method is much closer
to that of the historical sciences than to that of the natural sci
ences. The problem of a technique of interpretation has more kin
ship with the question asked by Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Max
Weber， and Bultmann than with the problems of even the tamest
behaviorism. Agreement is the only rejoinder one can bring
against the attacks of logicians, semanticists, and methodologists
who argue against the scientific character of psychoanalysis. We
must grant diem all their points and transform this admission
into a counterstroke. We must agree that its dissent with be
haviorism is original and complete. Original, because the break
is complete from the beginning ：analysis does not begin with ob
servable conduct but rather with meaninglessness that must be
interpreted. All attempts to assimilate psychoanalysis to a science
of observation and to a technique which issues from a science of
observation ignores the essential point ：that it is in the field of
speech that the analytic experience takes place and that, within
this field, what comes to light is, as Lacan says, another lan
guage, which is dissociated from common language and which
gives itself to be deciphered by means of these effects of mean
ing.
We are thus faced with a strange technique. It is a technique,
by its character as work and its commerce with energies and
mechanisms which are attached to the economy of desire. But it
is an utterly unique technique in that it encounters and handles
energies only through effects of meaning— what Freud calls the
“derivatives” of instinctual representatives. The analyst never
handles forces directly but always indirectly in the play of mean
ing, double meaning, and substituted, displaced, or transposed
meanings. An economy of desire, yes 一 but across a semantics of
desire. A dynamics, yes— but across a hermeneutics. It Is in, and
by, meaning effects that the psychism works.
Perhaps we can begin to understand the sense in which psy
choanalysis is a nontechnique if we measure it against tech
niques which manipulate forces and energies directly, for the
purpose of guiding and directing them. All the techniques which
1 88 / PSYCHO ANALYSIS
come out of the psychology of the observation of behavior are,

in the last resort, aimed toward adaptation for the sake of domi
nation. What is at stake in analysis is access to true discourse,
and that is quite different from adaptation, the tactic by which
the scandal of psychoanalysis has been hastily undermined and
rendered socially acceptable. For who knows where a single true
discourse may lead with respect to the established order, i.e., with
respect to the idealized discourse of established disorder? Psy
choanalysis seems to me to be linked, rather, to the express will
to bracket the question of adaptation, which is the question in
evitably posed by the others, that is, by existing society on the
basis and foundation of its reified ideals and the mendacious re
lationship between the idealized profession of its beliefs and the
effective reality of its practical relationships.
Although one may argue that psychoanalysis conceives of
itself as the transition from the pleasure principle to the reality
principle, it seems to me that the major divorce between what is
called “the adaptational point of view” and psychoanalysis con
cerns precisely the reality principle. The reality in question for
analysis is radically distinguished from homologous concepts
such as stimuli or environment. This reality is fundamentally
the truth of a personal history in a concrete situation ；it is not,
as in psychology, the order of stimuli as they are known by the
experimenter but rather the true meaning which the patient
must arrive at through the obscure labyrinth of the fantasy.
Reality consists in a conversion of the meaning of the fantasy.
This relation to the fantasy, as it is given to be understood in the
closed field of analytic speech, brings about the specificity of the
Freudian concept of reality. Reality must always be interpreted
by the aim of the instinctual object ；it must be interpreted as
that which is alternately shown and disguised by this instinctual
aim. We need only recall the epistemological application which
Freud made of narcissism in 1917 in a brilliant little essay en
titled UA Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,w where he ele
vates narcissism to the rank of a fundamental methodological
obstacle. In the end, narcissism is what is responsible for our
resistance to the sort of truth which makes us appear wandering
and lost in a nature deprived of this center in love with itself.
Narcissism is what resisted Copernicus* discovery, since it re
sulted in the fact that we would no longer be the physical center
of the universe ；and narcissism was also responsible for the re
sistance to Darwin's discovery, which stripped us of the title of
masters of life ；finally^ narcissism was what resilted psycho
analysis itself, when it taught us that we were not even masters
of our own domain. Indeed, this is why the ^reality testMcharac
teristic of the secondary process cannot be simply superimposed
on an adjustment procedure. It must be relocated within the
framework of the analytical situation. In this context, the reality
test is correlative with the Durcharbeiten, or working-through,
toward a true meaning, whose only equivalent is in the struggle
for self-recognition in Oedipus Rex.
My second point will be strictly corollary to the preceding
thesis. If the analytic technique is a nontechnique with respect
to the ambition to dominate nature and other men, then it does
not take part in the process of demythization in the same way as
techniques of domination. As Castelli has quite adequately
pointed out, the demythization which is linked to technique as
such is disenchantment. This Entzauberung and Entgotterung
are essentially linked to the reign of the manipulable and usable.
This is utterly different from the path of psychoanalysis, which
is that of ^disillusion/* These are not at all the same. Disillusion
has nothing to do with progress in the usable and manipulable,
i.e., progress in mastery. The demythization which belongs to
psychoanalysis is expressly connected to the semantics of desire
by which it is constituted. The MgodsMit dethrones are those in
whom the pleasure principle has found a refuge, in the most
twisted figures of substitutive satisfaction. When Freud attrib
utes godhead to the father complex, he smashes an idol in which
he recognizes, not simply prohibition, but, just as much, and
even more, the magnified image of infantile consolation. I will
not reiterate my discussion of the interpretation of religion pro
posed by Freud in Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion,
and Moses and Monotheism, which I presented in a previous
colloquium under the title “A Hermeneutics of Reflection.” 12 At
that time I proposed to show how a reductive hermeneutics was
compatible with one which would restore meaning. Today my
concerns are entirely different and much more specific. I would
ask what is the place of this demythization— which is true in its
own terms— with respect to what arises out of the progress of
the technical as such? I would say that this demythization is as
distinct from all others as analytic technique itself is from tech
niques of domination. It remains within the dimension of verac
ity and not that of mastery. It does not belong to the enterprise
12. See below, *The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical

Reflection： II/' pp. 3x5 ft.
I9〇 / PSYCH O ANALYSIS
of using oneself, nature, and other men but to that of knowing

oneself better through the detours of desire. Doubtless you will
agree with me when I say that such demythization is good and
necessary. It concerns the death of religion as superstition,
which may or may not be the counterpart to an authentic faith.
Yet this final meaning of demythization can no longer be de
termined by psychoanalysis itself.
I have no intention of denying that the iconoclasm which be
longs to psychoanalysis rejoins in a certain way the iconoclasm
which belongs to techniques of domination. It is in its social ef
fects that psychoanalysis rejoins the general mentality of tech
nological civilization. Indeed, psychoanalysis is not only a well-
determined experience, which unfolds in a dual relationship. It
is also a cultural event. It fell, by itself, into the public domain.
This fall put into motion a kind of publicity, in the strong sense
of the word. The crimes of desire are put in the pillory and of
fered for everyone to see, and iconoclasm thus becomes a public
iconoclasm. This is where Castelli's formulation seems to be
justified ：a technique of the night is an iconoclasm of the inti
mate. Yet even this situation is not completely lacking in positive
signification. Freud foresaw this quite clearly in an interesting
essay from 1910, entitled M The Future Prospects of Psycho-
Analytic Therapy M：
You know, of course, that the psychoneuroses are substitutive
satisfactions of some instinct the presence of which one is obliged
to deny to oneself and to others. Their capacity to exist depends on
this distortion and lack of recognition. When the riddle they pre
sent is solved and the solution is accepted by the patients, these
diseases cease to be able to exist. There is hardly anything like
this in medicine, though in fairy tales you hear of evil spirits
whose power is broken as soon as you can tell them their name,
the name which they have kept secret.13
Transposing these remarks from the individual to the group,
Freud does not hesitate to predict a time when the social effect
of indiscretion will be at the same time the impossibility of dis
simulation ：
Sick people will not be able to let their various neuroses become
known . . . if they themselves know that In the manifestations
of their illness they are producing nothing that other people cannot
13. "The Future Prospect* of Psycho-Analytic Thmpy/* SE, XI,

148.
instantly interpret. The effect, however, will not be limited to the
concealment of the symptoms— which, incidentally, it is often im
possible to carry out；for this necessity for concealment destroys
the use of being ill. Disclosure of the secret will have attacked, at
its most sensitive point, the “aetiological equation” from which
neuroses arise— it will have made the gain from illness illusory,
and consequently the final outcome of the changed situation
brought about by the physician^ indiscretion can only be that the
production of illness will be brought to a stop. . . . A certain
number of people, faced in their lives by conflicts which they have
found difficult to solve, have taken flight into neurosis and in this
way have won an unmistakeable, although in the long run costly,
gain from illness. What will these people have to do if their flight
into illness is barred by the indiscreet revelations of psycho-analy
sis? They will have to be honest, confess to the instincts that are
at work in them, face the conflict, fight for what they want, or go
without it ；and the tolerance of society, which is bound to ensue
as a result of psycho-analytic enlightenment, will help them in
their task (pp. 149-50).
I am not unaware of the fact that this text expresses a sort of
Freudian Aufklarung. This type of salvation through psycho
analysis, this social repugnance for neurosis, this €<more realistic
and creditable attitude on the part of society,> (p. 150) could
easily be turned into an object of derision as a new form of il
lusion. I would nevertheless like to draw out the better part of
this text and reflect along with you on the phenomenon of disoc-
cultation which is its theme. It is not possible that a repugnance
for insincerity and hypocrisy should remain meaningless in the
dimension of truth. What then could be the authentic meaning
of disoccultation?
Just as I strongly feel that the vulgarization of psychoanaly
sis accompanies everything which makes man banal, profane,
and insignificant, so am I also strongly convinced that a pro
longed meditation on psychoanalysis can have the same sort of
healthy effect as the understanding of Spinoza, which begins by
the reduction of free will and of ideas of good and evil— or
ideals, as we would say with Freud and Nietzsche. Like Spinoza,
Freud begins by denying the apparent freedom of consciousness,
to the extent that this freedom is a misunderstanding of hidden
motivations. This is why, as opposed to Descartes and Husserl,
who begin with an act of suspension and express thereby the
subject's free disposition of Itself, psychoanalysis proceeds in
the image of Spinoza's Ethics, by suspending the control of
consciousness and thus rendering the subject equal to it$ real
192 / PSYCHOANALYSIS
slavery. It is precisely by beginning with the level of this slavery,

by delivering oneself without restraint to the imperious flux of
deep motivations, that the true situation of consciousness is dis
covered. The fiction of the absence of motivation, by which con
sciousness supported its illusion of self-control, is recognized as
such. The fullness of motivation is located at the same place as
the emptiness of the freedom of consciousness. It is this process
of illusion which opens, as does Spinoza, a new problematic of
liberty, no longer bound to the arbitrariness of free will but to
determination which has been understood. It seems to me, there
fore, that meditation on Freud*s work, if not on analytic practice
and experience themselves, can restore to us a new concept of
liberty very close to that of Spinoza. No longer free will, but
liberation. This is the most radical possibility opened up to us
by psychoanalysis. What then are the relationships between this
enterprise of liberation and the human world of technique and
technology? It seems to me that we can legitimately say that
psychoanalysis, when it is well understood and thought through,
frees man for projects other than that of domination.
What projects? I wish to put this liberation into two cate-
gories, 执e abi物 to speafc and the abi吻切 iox;e; but it should
be understood that they form one single project.
The ability to speak ：Let us begin at the level of thought we
just reached, the disclosure of what is secret as an enterprise of
disoccultation. In an inauthentic sense this disclosure can be un
derstood as a reduction pure and simple. Thus, after transposing
without precaution or nuance the schema of neuroses to the do
main of ideals, myths, and religions, we shall say, aNow we know
that these representations are nothing other than . . . This
^nothing other than** could surely be the last word of psycho
analysis and the expression of disillusioned consciousness. I will
not argue with the fact that a part, perhaps the most important
part, of Freuds work tends in this direction ；and yet another pos
sibility seems to me to be open, or at least this appears to be the
case in the short writings on art, “The Moses of Michelangelo”
and Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. Here
interpretation definitely does not consist in exhausting meaning.
Let me here contrast ^secrer and <<enigmaw and say that the dis
closure of the former does not dissipate the latter. The secret is
the absurd product of the work of distortion；the enigma is what
is rendered manifest by interpretation. The secret is the function
of false consciousness；the enigma is the result which has been
restored by interpretation.
Recall the famous interpretation of the vulture fantasy in
Leonardo. Freud uses it, together with a few other biographical
traits, like a detector to penetrate to the layer of the young
Leonardo’s childhood memories, when the artist was taken from
his natural mother and transplanted to the unfamiliar household
of his legal father. At the end of Leonardo we would be tempted
to say, <rWell, now we know what is hidden behind the enigmatic
smile of La Gioconda. It is nothing more than the reproduction
in fantasy of the smile of Leonardo’s lost mother.” But what have
we learned, what do we know, at the end of such an analysis
(which is, moreover, purely analogical, since it does not enter
into a dialogue with Leonardo)? This mothers love and kisses
are, strictly speaking, lost_ lost for everyone ：for us, for Leo
nardo, and for the mother ；and Mona Lisa's smile is precisely
the artistic creation by which, as Freud says, Leonardo both
“surpassed” and “created” the lost archaic object. The mother’s
smile does not exist, no longer exists. All that exists now before
our eyes is the work of art. Thus analysis has not presented us
with any reality which we might use. It has instead opened up
beneath the work of art this play of references which, on every
layer, denotes the wounding of a desire and an absence which is
itself no more than the reference of the fantasy’s impotence to
the symbors power.
The ability to speak ：To rediscover in the semantics of de
sire the impulse to speak without end and the ability to express
and communicate 一 is this project not essentially and funda
mentally opposed to the dream of domination? Does it not point
us toward what can be better called a nontechnique, which is
discourse?
I am well aware that one could object to this (an objection
which will take me to the second panel of the diptych). One
could say that Freud explains himself in terms of power. Does
he not say in one of the last of the New Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis that psychoanalysis can be compared to the proj
ect of filling in the Zuider Zee? Does he not add, answering in
this way his former characterization of the ego as a poor creature
enslaved to three masters, that our task is to reinforce the ego,
make it more independent of the superego and the id, and so
furnish it with domination over the shreds which have been
taken from the id and restored to Its control? More generally, do
we not regress to the usable and manipulable when we speak of
psychoanalysis in terms of control and mastery of energies? Is
Freud not in the end closer to Feuerbach and Nietzsche than to
194 / PSYCH O ANALYSIS
Spinoza when he speaks of giving man back his power? Are we

not ourselves saying ：the ability to speak and the ability to love?
Here is where we must understand that the only power of
fered to man by psychoanalysis is a new orientation for his de-
sire， a new power to love. Lest this idea be banalized and ex
tenuated as soon as it is proposed, I would write deliberately: a
new capacity for enjoyment. Men are not masters of their power
to love and enjoy when it is destroyed by prohibition and libidi-
nal conflicts. Finally, the great problem introduced by psycho
analysis is the problem of satisfaction. Psychoanalysis is com
pletely opposed to the pleasure principle as a curtailing of
enjoyment. All the symptoms which it unmasks are figures of
substitutive satisfaction, derivatives of the pleasure principle.
Thus psychoanalysis would like to be, like Spinoza^s Ethics, a
reeducation of desire. It is this reeducation which it posits as the
prior condition for all human reform, whether intellectual, po
litical, or social.
We can now understand why psychoanalysis has no prescrip
tive or normative answers, nor does it even enter the field of the
question we have posed concerning casuistry in either its old or
new forms. Its problem is, if I dare say so, much more primary ；
with what desires do we approach moral problems? And in what
state of distortion is our desire when we pose such questions?
I would wager that the psychoanalyst would put the frenetic
lover of technology and its disenchanted detractor in the same
category. He would ask whether it is not the same distortion of
language and enjoyment which animates both and delivers the
first over to infantile projects of domination and the second to
the fear of things he cannot control. Totem and Taboo taught us
to situate— psychogenetically and ontogenetically omnipotence
一
among the most archaic dreams of desire. This is why the reality
principle is the answer to our power only when desire is stripped
of its omnipotence. Only desire which has accepted its own death
can freely dispose of things. But the illusion of its own immor
tality is the last refuge of the omnipotence of desire. Only desire
that has passed through what Freud calls resignation, i.e., the
ability to endure the harshness of life (die Schwere des Daseins
zu ertragen), as the poet says, is capable of freely using things,
and the benefits of civilization and culture.
regards the casuistry of extreme situations, which we
would be tempted to contrast with a technological demiurgy, per
haps it belongs to the same circle of disenchantment as techno
logical frenzy. Who says that the proposed casuistry does not
remain a technique of domination and prevention? Prevention
of guilt by the ritualization of the everyday ；domination of the
strange and extraordinary by the imaginary resolution of ex
treme cases.
This is why I think psychoanalysis has nothing specific to say
for or against casuistry, just as it has nothing to say for or
against prescriptive or normative thought. I know that it is will
ing to remain silent on this point. Its function is to pose prior
questions ：Are our wishes free or constrained? Regain the ability
to speak and to enjoy, and all the rest will be given to you as a
bonus. Is this not to say, along with Augustine, aLove, and do
what you wantM? For if your love has rediscovered its place [sa
justesse】， your will will also find its justice— but by grace rather
than by law.
Art and Freudian Systematics
T h e t it l e of th is st u d y refers to Freudian system

atics. How can we understand this term? Freud understands it
in the strict sense as denoting the application to aesthetic phe
nomena of what he calls the ^systematic point of view^ which
is clearly opposed to the descriptive or even to the simply dy
namic point of view. What makes up the systematic point of
view?
It consists, we are told in the Papers on Metapsychology, in
submitting all analyses to two requirements. The first require
ment is to plot all explanations, however partial they may be, on
the psychic topography (the unconscious, preconsciousness, con
sciousness；ego, id, superego). The representation of the psychic
apparatus as a series of nonanatomical points distinguishes the
systematic point of view from any descriptive phenomenology.
This is not the place to justify such a maneuver. I will take it as
a working hypothesis and a discipline of thought. The second
requirement is to establish the economic balance sheet of the
phenomenon, i.e., the investments or cathexes of energy which
can be discovered in a system of forces and its dynamics, its con
flicts and compromises. Thus the problem of pleasure, which
concerns us here, is an economic problem to the extent that Its
quality or value does not come into play so much as its function
as real, deferred, substitutive, Active, etc., satisfaction.
We shall see how this recourse establishes order and consti
tutes a discipline at the same time that it marks the limits of cx-
planatory validity.
Translated by Willis Domingo.
r i 〇8i
Art and Freudian Systematics / 197
I. T h e E c o n o m y of “F o r e p l e a s u r e ”
F reud ^ a p p l ic a t io n of the topographic-economic view

point to works of art serves more than one purpose. It was a way
of relaxing for the doctor of medicine who was also a great
traveler， a passionate collector and bibliophile， and was widely
read in classical literature, from Sophocles, Shakespeare, and
Goethe to contemporary poetry. Freud was an amateur ethnogra
pher and historian of religions as well. This application also
meant for the apologist for his own doctrine— above all during
the period of isolation which preceded the First World War a 一
defense and an illustration of psychoanalysis which was acces

sible to the general and nonscientific public ；for the metapsy-
chological theoretician it was a proof and test of the truth of his
theories；finally, it was a sigripost toward the great philosophical
design which had never left his mind, although it was as much
hidden as manifested in the theory of psychoneuroses.
The exact place of aesthetics in this grand design does not
appear immediately, for the very reason of the fragmentary
quality which we will deal with and even emphasize in order to
defend Freuds various exercises in psychoanalytic aesthetics.
But if we realize that Freudfs sympathy for art is equaled only
by his harshness toward religious “illusion” and that, moreover,
aesthetic “seduction” does not completely satisfy the ideal of ve
racity and truth which is served by science alone without com-
promise, we can expect to discover, under even the apparently
most gratuitous analyses, great tensions, which will not be clari
fied until the very end, when aesthetic seduction itself finds its
place among Love, Death, and Necessity. Art is for Freud the
nonobsessional, nonneurotic form of substitutive satisfaction.
The “charm” of aesthetic creation does not indeed arise from the
return of the repressed. But where, then, is its place between the
pleasure principle and the reality principle? This is the great
question which remains in suspense behind the short essays on
“applied psychoanalysis.”
What we must understand from the very beginning is that
Freud's aesthetic essays are both systematic and fragmentary in
character. It is precisely the systematic point of view which im
poses and reinforces the fragmentary quality. The analytical
explanation of works of art could hardly be compared to a thera
peutic or didactic psychoanalysis for the simple reason that It
198 / PSYCHO ANALYSIS
does not make use of the method of free association and cannot
place its interpretation in the field of the relation between doctor
and patient. In this respect the biographical documents to which
interpretation can turn are no more meaningful than third-
person information in actual analytical therapy. Psychoanalytic
interpretation is fragmentary because it remains analogical.
This is how Freud himself conceived his essays. They re
semble some archaeological reconstruction in which an entire
monument is sketched out from a single architectural detail and
its probable context. The systematic unity of Freud's point of
view responds by holding these fragments together while waiting
for the universal interpretation of the works of culture, which
will come later. Thus is explained the unique character of these
essays, as well as the surprising minuteness of detail and the
rigor, even the inflexibility, of the theory which coordinates these
fragmentary studies with the great fresco of dreams and neuro
ses. Considered as isolated works, each of these studies is quite
circumscribed. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious is a
brilliant but prudent generalization of the laws of dream work
and fictional substitution to humor and the comical. The inter
pretation of Jensen^ Gradiva does not claim to present a general
theory of the novel but simply to cross-check the theory of
dreams and neuroses by the fictional dreams which a novelist
ignorant of psychoanalysis lends to his hero and by the quasi-
psychoanalytic cure toward which the hero is led. The statue in
'T he Moses of Michelangelo^ is treated as a single work, without
proposing 51 general theory of genius or creation. Leonardo da
Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood does not go beyond its
modest title, in spite of appearances. All that is clarified are cer
tain peculiarities of Leonardo^ artistic destiny, like streaks of
light in a group painting which remains in shadows. Streaks of
light, shafts of light, which, as we shall see, may be only talking
shadows.
The process in all of this is the structural analogy from one
type of work to another, from dream work to art work, and, I
dare say, from fate to fate, from instinctual to artistic fate.
It is this oblique understanding that we are going to try to
explain by following some of Freud's analyses fairly closely.
Without holding myself to a rigorous historical order, I will begin
with the short essay from 1908 entitled ^Creative Writers and
Daydreaming/'1 Two reasons justify our placing it at the start of
x. SEt IX, 143- 53 *

our considerations. First, this little essay, which seems extremely
unpretentious, illustrates perfectly the indirect approach to the
aesthetic phenomenon by way of a skillful step-by-step approxi
mation. The poet resembles the child at play. "He creates a world
of fantasy which he takes very seriously— that is, which he in
vests with large amounts of emotion— while separating it sharply
from reality” （p. 144). From play we pass to “fantasying,” not
through vague resemblances but through the presupposition of
a necessary link to the effect that man does not give up anything
but simply exchanges one thing for another by creating substi
tutes. It is thus that, instead of playing, the adult turns to fan-
tasying, which, in its role as play substitute, is the daydream. We
are now on the threshold of poetry, and the intermediate link is
furnished by the novel, i.e., by works of art in narrative form.
Freud discerns in the fictional story of the hero the figure of ''His
Majesty the Egow (p. 150); the other forms of literary creation
are considered to be linked, by a series of continuous transitions,
to this prototype.
Thus the contours of what could be called the oneiric in gen
eral are outlined. Through a striking foreshortening, Freud
brings together the two extremes of the fantasy chain, dreams
and poetry. Both testify to the same fate, the fate of discontented
and unsatisfied man. <JThe motive forces of fantasies are unsatis
fied wishes, and every single fantasy is the fulfillment of a wish,
a correction of unsatisfactory reality” （p. 146).
Are we saying that Freud now has to reiterate The Interpre
tation of Dreams? Two hints warn us that this is not the case.
First, he is not indifferent to the fact that the chain of analogies
passes through play. Beyond the Pleasure PrincipZe will inform
us that a mastery of absence can already be discerned in play.
This mastery is of a different nature from the simple hallucina
tory fulfillment of desires. Second, the stage of the daydream is
also not lacking in meaning ；here the fantasy is presented with a
Mdate markw {Zeitmarke), something which the pure uncon
scious representations which we have contrastingly described as
“outside of time” do not have. Fantasying, as opposed to pure
unconscious fantasy, is able to integrate the present of the cur
rent impression, the past of childhood, and the future of the
projected realization. These two hints remain isolated, as if in ex
pectation.
Moreover, this brief study contains an important suggestion
in fine which leads us from it8 fragmentary to its systematic side.
Although unable to penetrate croation In Its profound dynamism,
200 / p s y c h o a n a l y s i s
we could perhaps say something about the relationship between

the pleasure it inspires and the technique it employs. If the
dream is a type of work, psychoanalysis only naturally takes the
work of art in more or less craftsmanly terms in order to unveil,
with the help of the structural analogy, a functional analogy
which is much more important. Thus research must be oriented
toward breaking down resistances. Enjoying our own fantasies
with neither scruples nor shame— that would be the widest aim
of the work of art. This intention would thus be served by two
procedures, that of masking the egotism of the daydream by ap
propriate alterations and veils and that of seducing by means of
a yield of purely formal pleasure which is attached to the repre
sentations of the poet*s fantasies. MWe give the name of an in
centive bonus, or a fore-pleasure? to a yield of pleasure such as
this, which is offered to us so as to make possible the release of
still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychical sources”
( “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” p. 153).
This general conception of aesthetic pleasure as the detona
tor of profound discharges constitutes the most audacious intui
tion of the entire psychoanalytic aesthetics. This connection be-
tween technical means and hedonistic effect can serve as a
guiding thread in the most penetrating investigations of Freud
and his school. It satisfies both the modesty and the coherence
required of an analytical interpretation. Instead of posing the
immense question of creativity, one explores the limited problem
of the relations between the effects of pleasure and the technique
involved in producing the work. This reasonable question re
mains within the competence of an economics of desire.
II. I n t e r p r e t a t io n s of th e W ork of A rt
F reud f ir s t s e t out a few precise indications of this

economic theory of forepleasure in Jokes and Their Relation to
the Unconscious (19 0 5 ). W hat this brilliant and meticulous es
say proposes is not a general theory of art but the study of a spe
cific phenomenon ：an effect of pleasure sanctioned by discharge
of laughter. Within these strict limits, however, the analysis un
folds in depth.
Freud jfirst studies the verbal techniques of Witz [wit], where
he finds the essentials of dream work, such as condensation, dis
placement, representation through opposites, etc., and thus veri
fies the reciprocity which is continually posited between work,
which arises from an economics, and rhetoric, which allows for
interpretation. At the same time that Witz verifies the linguistic
interpretation of dream work, however, the dream responds by
furnishing the elements for an economic theory of humor and
the comic. Here is where Freud continues and surpasses the
work of Theodor Lipps (Komik und Humor, 1898), and here
especially we rediscover the enigma of forepleasure. Witz, In
fact, lends itself to an analysis in the strict sense, i.e” to a de
composition which isolates the surface pleasure which is stimu-
lated by the verbal mechanism of the joke from the profound
pleasure which it then unleashes and which obscene, aggressive,
or cynical word plays bring to the forefront. This connection be
tween technical pleasure and instinctual pleasure is what consti
tutes the heart of Freudian aesthetics and binds it to the eco-
nomics of instinct and pleasure. If we agree that pleasure is
linked to a reduction of tension, we will also say that pleasure
deriving from technique is minimal and is linked to savings of
psychic work realized by condensation, displacement, etc. Thus
the pleasure of nonsense frees us from the restrictions which
logic imposes on our thought and eases the burden of all intellec
tual disciplines. But if this pleasure is minimal, like the savings
it expresses, it has the remarkable power of acting as interest or
even as part of the capital of erotic, aggressive, and skeptical
tendencies. Here Freud uses one of Fechner's theories on the
“conjimction” or accumulation— of pleasure and integrates it
一
into a schema of functional liberation which is more Jacksonian

than Fechnerian.2
This liaison between the technical aspect of the work of art
and the production of an effect of pleasure constitutes the guid
ing thread and the thread of rigor, so to speak, of psychoanalytic
aesthetics. We can even distinguish between Freud’s aesthetic
essays by whether they are more or less faithful to the interpreta
tive model of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. *The
Moses of Michelangelo” would be the foremost example of the
first group, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood of
the second group. (W e will see that what first leads us astray in
Leonardo may also be what eventually leads us furthest in our
considerations about the true analytical explanation in art and In
other domains as well.)
What Is striking In "The Moses of Michelangelo* is that the
2. Joke$ and Their Relation to Unoontoioui, 8Bt VIII, 13&-38.

202 / PSYCHO ANALYSIS
interpretation of this masterpiece is performed, like an interpre

tation of a dream, by beginning with the details. This genuinely
analytical method allows us to superimpose dream work and
creative work, interpretation of dreams and interpretation Of
works of art. Instead of seeking to explain the nature of the satis
faction generated by the work of art on the level of the widest
generalities— a task on which too many psychoanalysts have
wasted their time— analysis attempts to resolve the general
enigma of aesthetics by the detour of a particular work and the
meanings it creates. \ê are acquainted with the patience and
precision of this interpretation, which we have summarized in
Psychoanalysis and the Movement of Contemporary Culture**
(see above).
‘T h e Moses of Michelangelo” does go beyond the limits of a
mere applied psychoanalysis. It does not limit itself to verifying
the analytical method but points toward a type of overdetermina
tion which will be better seen in Leonardo, in spite of or because
of the contempt that that essay seems to encourage. This over-
determination of the symbol embodied in the statue of Moses
allows us to understand that analysis does not close the door on
explanation but opens the way toward a broadening of meaning.
The essay on Michelangelo already says more than it says. Its
overdetermination concerns Moses, the dead pope, Michelangelo
一 and perhaps Freud himself in his ambiguous relation to
Moses. An endless commentary opens up, which multiplies the
enigma instead of reducing it. Does this not already indicate that
the psychoanalysis of art is essentially interminable?
N ow w e c o m e to Leonardo. Why did I call it an oc

casion or a source of contempt? Simply because this ample and
brilliant essay seems to encourage a bad psychoanalysis of art—
biographical psychoanalysis. Did Freud not intend to discover the
very mechanism of aesthetic creation in general in its relation,
first, to Inhibitions (especially sexual perversions) and then to
sublimations of the libido into curiosity, as expressed in scientific
investigaton? Did he not reconstruct on the fragile basis of the
vulture fantasy (which does not even involve a vulture!) the
enigma of Mona Lisa^ smile?
Did he not say that the memory of the lost mother and her
excessive kisses is transposed not only into the fantasy of the
vulture's tail in the child's mouth or Into the artist's homosexual
tendencies but also into the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa?
M[It】was his mother who possessed the my_terlou_ im llc— the
smile that he had lost and that had fascinated him so much
when he found it again in the Florentine Lady.’’ 3 This is the
same smile which is reiterated in the double image of the mother
in The Virgin and Saint Anne, ^For if the Gioconda^ smile called
up in his mind the memory of his mother, it is easy to under
stand how it drove him at once to create a glorification of
motherhood, and to give back to his mother the smile he had
found in the noble ladyw (pp. m - 1 2 ) . And he adds, *The pic
ture contains the synthesis of the history of his childhood ：its
details are to be explained by reference to the most personal im
pressions in Leonardo^ lifeM(p. 112 ).
The maternal figure that is further away from the boy— the grand
mother一 corresponds to the earlier and true mother, Caterina, in
its appearance and in its spatial relation to the boy. The artist
seems to have used the blissful smile of St. Anne to disavow and
to cloak the envy which the unfortunate woman felt when she was
forced to give up her son to her better-born rival, as she had once
given up his father as well (pp. 113-14).
What makes this analysis suspect according to the criteria

一
we found in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious— is

that Freud seems to go far beyond the structural analogies which
only an analysis of the technique of composition would authorize
and goes all the way to the instinctual thematic which the work
veils and obscures. It is not this very pretension which nourishes
bad psychoanalysis— the analysis of the dead and that of writers
and artists?
Let us take a closer look. Is it first of all remarkable that
Freud does not really speak of Leonardo’s creativity but of its
inhibition by the spirit of investigation ：'The aim of our work
has been to explain the inhibitions in Leonardo's sexual life and
in his artistic activity” （p. 13 1). It is these deficits in creativity
which constitute the true object of the first chapter of Leonardo
and give rise to Freud's most remarkable observations on the
relationships between knowledge and desire. Moreover, right
within this restricted framework, the transposition of instinct
Into curiosity appears as a particular fate for repression which
is irreducible to any other. Repression；says Freud, can lead
either to the inhibition of curiosity itself, which thus shares the
situation of sexuality (this is the type of neurotic inhibition), or
3. Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of Hi$ Childhood, SEt XI, x u .

2〇4 / PSYCHOANALYSIS
to obsessions with sexual overtones, where thought itself is

sexualized (this is the obsessional type). But,
in virtue of a special disposition, the third type, which is the rarest
and most perfect, escapes both inhibition of thought and neurotic
compulsive thinking. It is true that here, too, sexual repression
comes about, but it does not succeed in relegating a component
instinct of sexual desire to the unconscious. Instead, the libido
evades the fate of repression by being sublimated from the very
beginning into curiosity and by becoming attached to the power
ful instinct for research as a reinforcement. Here, too, the research
becomes to some extent compulsive and a substitute for sexual
activity；but owing to the complete difference in the underlying
psychical processes (sublimation instead of an irruption from the
unconscious) the quality of neurosis is absent；there is no attach
ment to the original complexes of infantile sexual research, and
the instinct can operate freely in the service of intellectual in
terest. Sexual repression, which has made the Instinct so strong
through the addition to it of sublimated libido, is still taken into
account by the instinct, in that it avoids any concern with sexual
themes (p. 80).
It is quite clear that in this case we are only describing and clas
sifying and thus actually reinforcing the enigma by calling it
sublimation. Freud willingly grants this in his conclusion. We
are indeed saying that creative work is a diversion of sexual
desires (p. 133) and that it is this instinctual base which had
been liberated by regression to childhood memories stimulated
by the encounter with the Florentine lady. <cWith the help of the
oldest of all his erotic impulses he enjoyed the triumph of once
more conquering the inhibition in his axtM(p. 134). But here we
are only touching the outlines of a problem. “Since artistic
talent and capacity are intimately connected with sublimation,
we must admit that the nature of the artistic function is inac
cessible to us along psychoanalytic lines” （p. 136). And, a little
later, Êven if psycho-analysis does not throw light on the fact
of Leonardo^ artistic power, it at least renders its manifesta
tions and its limitations intelligible to usw (p. 136).
Freud remains within this limited framework and thus does
not perform an exhaustive inventory so much as a restricted
foraging abeneath,* four or five enigmatic features which are
treated as archaeological debris. This is where the interpreta
tion of the vulture fantasy 一 specifically treated as debris— plays
a pivotal role. Because a genuine psychoanalysis Is lmp〇88lblc>
this interpretation Is purely analogical. It la obtained by a
convergence of indices borrowed from diverse sources, such as
the psychoanalysis of homosexuals (erotic relationship with the
mother, repression and identification with the mother, narcis
sistic object choice, projection of the narcissistic object onto an
object of the same sex, etc.), the sexual theory of children about
the mothers penis, and mythological parallels (the phallus of
the vulture goddess attested to by archaeology). It is in a purely
analogical style that Freud writes, iCThe chiles assumption that
his mother has a penis is thus the common source from which
are derived the androgynously-formed mother goddesses such as
the Egyptian Mut and the vulture’s coda in Leonardo’s childhood
fantasy” （p. 97).
What understanding of the work of art is communicated to
us in this way? Here is where contempt for the meaning of
Freud's Leonardo can lead us further than the interpretation of
"The Moses of Michelangelo.”
On a first reading we think we have unmasked Mona Lisa’s
smile and shown what is hidden behind it. We have been able
to see the kisses which the rejected mother showered on Leo
nardo. But let us listen with a more critical ear to a sentence
like the following ：wIt is possible that in these figures Leonardo
has denied the unhappiness of his erotic life and has triumphed
over it in his art, by representing the wishes of the boy, infatu
ated with his mother, as fulfilled in this blissful union of the
male and female natures^ (pp. 1 1 7 -1 8 ). This sentence sounds
like the one we quoted earlier from the analysis of ‘*Moses, What
do “denied” and “triumphed over” mean? Is the representation
which fulfilled the child's wish anything more than a copy of
the fantasy, an exhibition of desire, or a simple revelation of
something hidden? Would not interpreting La Gioconda^s smile
be “showing^ in our turn, in the master’s paintings, the fantasy
which has been uncovered by the analysis of the childhood
memory? These questions lead us from overconfident explana
tion to a second level of doubt. Analysis did not lead us from the
less to the better known. The kisses with which Leonardo^
mother smothered her child are neither a reality which I could
take as a starting point for analysis nor a solid ground on which
I could construct an understanding of the work of art. The
mother and father and the child's relations with them, the con
flicts, the first woundings of love, all this no longer exists except
in the mode of the absent signified. If the painter^ brush re
creates the mother's smile In Mona Lisa's, we must say that the
memory exists nowhere else than In the smile (itself unreal) of
2〇6 / P SYCHO ANALYSIS
La Gioconda, who is signified only by the presence of color and

drawing. Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, as
the title runs, is exactly what La Gioconda’s smile refers to, but
it itself exists only as the symbolizable absence whose void lurks
beneath the Mona Lisa’s smile. Lost like a memory, the mother’s
smile is an empty spot in reality. It is the point where all real
traces get lost and the abolished memory borders on fantasy.
Thus it is not something better known which would explain the
enigma of the work of art. It is an envisioned absence which,
far from dissipating it, redoubles the initial enigma.
III. T h e V a l u e and L im it of A n a l y t ic a l
I n t e r p r e t a t io n
H ere is w h e r e th e d o c t r in e I mean the metapsy

一
chology protects us against the excesses of its own “applica

一
tions.” We never gain access to instincts as such but only to their

psychic expressions, their representatives in ideas and affects.
Hence the economics becomes dependent on textual decipher
ment, and the balance sheet of instinctual cathexes is read only
across the grid of an exegesis of the play of signifieds and signi-
fiers. The work of art is a remarkable form of what Freud him
self calls “psychic derivatives” of instinctual representatives.
Properly speaking, these are created derivatives. In other words,
the fantasy, which is merely a signified given as lost ( the analy
sis of the childhood memory points precisely toward this ab
sence), is presented as a work which exists as a cultural treasure.
The mother and her kisses exist for the first time in works of
fered to human contemplation. Leonardo^ brush creates the
memory of his mother as a work of art ；it does not recreate it. It
is in this sense that Freud could say . . in these figures
Leonardo has denied the unhappiness of his erotic life and has
triumphed over it in his art” （p. 1 18). The work of art is thus
both the symptom and the cure.
These last observations allow us to pose a few questions of
principle ：
i. To what extent is psychoanalysis justified In submitting
works of art and dreams to the single point of view of an eco
nomics of instincts? Does not the work of art endure for the
very reason that it enriches our patrimony of cultural values
with new mcunings? PiychoanalyslN docn not Ignore this value
difference, for this is precisely what it approaches indirectly in
terms of sublimation. Sublimation, however, is as much the
title of a problem as the name of a solution.4
2. This common frontier between psychoanalysis and a phi
losophy of creation can be discovered in another point. The work
of art is not only socially valuable, but, as the examples of *The
Moses of Michelangelo,MLeonardo, and, most strikingly, Freud's
discussion of Sophocles, Oedipus Rex have shown us, these
works are creations insofar as they are not simple projections of
the artists conflicts but the outline of their solution. The dream
looks backward, toward childhood and the past. The work of
art surges forward beyond the artist himself. It is a prospective
symbol of personal synthesis and the future of man rather
than a regressive symbol of his unresolved conflicts. But perhaps
this opposition between regression and progression is true only
as a first approximation. Perhaps we need to surpass it in spite
of its apparent force. The work of art puts us precisely on the
road toward new discoveries about the symbolic function and
about sublimation itself. Would not the true meaning of sublima
tion be to propose new meanings by mobilizing old energies
which have already been cathected in archaic figures? Is it not
here that Freud himself invites us to seek when he distinguishes,
in Leonardo, sublimation from inhibition and obsession and
when he contrasts even more strongly, in Ôn Narcissism ：An
Introduction,Msublimation with repression itself?
But in order to surpass this opposition between regression
and progression, we must first elaborate it and lead it to the
point where it destroys itself.
3. This invitation to investigate psychoanalysis itself by con
fronting it with other points of view which seem to be diametri
cally opposed allows us to glimpse the real meaning of its limits.
These limits are in no way fixed but are mobile and indefinitely
surpassable. They are not, properly speaking, boundaries, like a
closed door which bears the inscription ‘Tiius far, but no fur
ther.” As Kant has taught us, a limit is not an external boundary
but rather a function of the internal validity of a theory. Psycho
analysis is limited by the very thing which justifies it, namely,
its decision to know, in cultural phenomena, only that which
falls under an economics of desire and resistances. I must say
that it is this firmness and rigor which makes me prefer Freud to
4. 8ee, above, 'Ttychoanalysls and the Movement of Contemporary

Culture/' p. 244.
2〇8 / P SYCHO ANALYSIS
Jung. With Freud, I know where I am and where I am going;

with Jung, everything (the psyche, the soul, the archetypes, the
sacred) is in danger o士becoming confused. It is precisely this
limitation within the Freudian problematic which invites us
first to contrast it with another explanatory point of view which
seems to be more appropriate to the constitution of cultural ob
jects as such and then to rediscover within psychoanalysis itself
the reason why it has been surpassed. Our discussion of Freud’s
Leonardo allows us to glimpse something of this movement：ex
planation by means of the libido has led us to a threshold instead
of a terminus. Interpretation does not reveal something real or
even something psychic. The wish to which it refers is itself a
reference to its trail of “derivatives” and an indefinite self-
symbolizing. It is this proliferation of symbols which lends itself
to investigation by other methods ：phenomenological, Hegelian,
or even theological. We must discover in the semantic structure
of the symbol itself the raison d'etre for these other approaches
and for their relationship to psychoanalysis. The psychoanalyst
himself, we should mention, has to be prepared by his own cul
ture for this confrontation, certainly not to learn to limit his own
discipline externally but to rediscover within it the reasons for
constantly pushing forward the boundaries already attained. It
is thus that psychoanalysis itself passes from a first purely re
ductionist reading to a second interpretation of cultural phe
nomena. The task of this second reactog would no longer be to
unmask the repressed and the repressive, in order to make us
see what lies beneath the masks, but to enter into the move
ment of the signifier, which constantly points away from the
absent signifieds of desire to works which presentify fantasies
in a world of culture and thus create them as a reality on the
level of the aesthetic.
PART III
Hermeneutics
and Phenomenology
Nabert on
Act and Sign
T h is e s s a y e x plo r e s at greater length and in a more

leisurely way a difficulty in Nabert’s philosophy which I touched
on too quickly in my preface to his Elements for an Ethic .1 The
difficulty appears for the first time in Nabert's The Inner Ex
perience of Freedom ,2 where the problem of motives and values
is raised. Then, in Elements for an Ethic, the difficulty is fully
formulated and a more radical solution is reached. In its broadest
generality, this difficulty concerns the relationships between the
act whereby consciousness posits and produces itself and the
signs wherein consciousness represents to itself the meaning of
its action. This problem is not restricted to Naber^s thought. It
is common to every philosophy which tries to subordinate the
objectivity of idea, representation, understanding, or whatever
to the founding act of consciousness, regardless of whether this
act is called will, appetite, or action. When Spinoza moves from
the idea of existence to the effort each being makes to exist,
when Leibniz articulates perception with appetite, when Schopen
hauer links representation to will, when Nietzsche subordinates
perspective and value to the will to power, and when Freud
subordinates representation to libido 一 each of these thinkers
Translated by Peter McCormick.

1. Jean Nabert, Elements pour une Hhique (Paris ： Presses Universi-
taires de France, 1943； 2d ed., Aubier, 1960), pp. 10-13. English transla
tion by William J. Petrek, Elements for an Ethic (Evanston, 111.： North
western University Press, 1969), pp. xvll-xxvlli. [Translations of passages
quoted from this book are Petrek's.一 T ra n s .]
2. Jean Nabert, L'Expirience int^rieure de la liberty (Paris ： Presses
UniverdUirei de Firance， 1 9 2 4 ) . 【TranÛtlon馨 of passages quoted from
this book are mine.一 T rans.]
[aiil
212 / PHENOMENOLOGY
makes an important decision about the fate of representation.

Representation is no longer the primary fact, the primary func
tion, or what is best known for psychological consciousness or
for philosophical reflection. Representation becomes a secondary
function of effort and of desire. Representation is no longer what
brings about understanding but what must be understood.
Nabert poses the problem in such abstract and general terms
only in his article in the Encyclopedie frangaise, where he
sketches the genealogical tree of the reflective method.3 There
we discover the extent of the problem. In claiming descent from
Maine de Biran rather than from Kant, Nabert formulates the
problem we are going to analyze later, and he does so in precise
and limited terms. In the tradition stemming from Maine de
Biran, the operations of active consciousness are not reducible
to those which control knowledge and science, and reflective
analysis applied to action must be liberated from the hegemony
of epistemology. In these terms The Inner Experience of Freedom
distinguishes between inquiry about the cogito's ^function of
objectivity and of truth” （p. x ) and reflection on “that produc-
tivlty of consciousness which the categories at the basis of the
truth of knowledge cannot account forw (p. x l). Nabert also
credits Maine de Biran in the following way ：
We believe it is fitting to return to the inspiration of Maine de
Biran, provided that he is interpreted more in terms of the idea
of philosophy that he was trying to create than on some kind of
faith in his literal formulas. For what Maine de Biran wanted to
express is the idea that only an act produces consciousness and
that the cogitof which is essentially the positing of the self in ac
tive consciousness, is not to be confused (at least where there is
question of the volitional life) either with an act of understanding
or with a method for grounding the objectivity of knowledge (p.
157 ).
Never before has it been so well understood that consciousness
could be liberated from the models borrowed from representation
and knowledge of the external world (p. 169).
This emancipation is what creates the problem we are con
cerned with here. For if the constitutive operations of true knowl
edge cannot yield the key to this ^productivitythen the question
now is ： What becomes of representation in the reflective
method?
3. 4<La Philosophic reflexive/* Encyclopedic franâise, XIX, 19.04-14-
1906-3.
Nabert on Act and Sign / 213
The provisional solution that distinguishes and juxtaposes
multiple ôpenings to reflection,w an opening to truth and an
opening to freedom, is inadequate. It is true that Nabert has sev
eral texts to this eflFect. But these texts are not meant to account
for the radical constitution of consciousness and existence, but
only to describe the historical ramifications of reflective philoso,
phy. More important is his suggestion that an “interdependence”
and a wcomplementarity,>must be established between the regula
tive norms of true knowledge and the constitutive operations of
free action. This precept does not invite an eclecticism that would
put Kant and Maine de Biran side by side；rather, it introduces
a philosophy of the act that would account within itself for the
function of objectivity and truth. Nabert expects the final bal
ance of reflective philosophy from this reintegration of the ob
jective cogito with and within active and productive conscious-
ness. <cWithout this counterweight,w the 1924 preface ccmtinues,
“inquiry that is immediately oriented toward the discovery of
concrete forms of inner experience, irreducible to the categories
we use for the construction of nature, would incline philosophy
toward a sterile irrationalism” （p. x). It is notable that the 1957
article in the Encyclop^die frangaise repeats the same warning ：
It was necessary that a critical theory of knowledge situate the
function of objectivity and truth on the first level of the cogito.
The reason was to avoid a situation where the inquiry that was
immediately concerned with the concrete forms of inner experi
ence would be an accomplice of a sterile irrationalism (p.
19.06-1).
But this declaration, made in identical terms at the two limits

of Nabert's work, outlines the contour of a problem more than it
sketches a solution. The first solution arises in the context of a
much more limited and, at first glance, different problem. This
problem is very much the classic and almost academic one where
the immense question of act and sign is at issue, the problem of
the role of motives in a psychology of the will. The Inner Experi
ence of Freedom is an attempt to give an account of freedom in
terms of the problem of psychological causality. <<What is more
difficult than sorting out determinism and indeterminism is
showing how freedom participates, without losing itself, in the
life of a consciousness and in the system of psychological facts
deployed there” （p. 63).
But the author immediately warns us that M when the coinci
dence of freedom and psychological causality is affirmed, no
214 / PHENOMENOLOGY
solution is forthcoming; rather, a problem is raised” （p. 64).

Actually, we run the risk of merely consecrating the duality of
the cogito3s two functions, the function of truth, which is at work
in determinism, and the function of freedom, which is at work
in active and productive consciousness. This is what happens
in the Kantian doctrines which push the chain of motivation
back to the phenomenal level and concentrate everything which
accrues to the subject in the action of a thinking aimed at ob
jectivity. Everything is saved but nothing is gained；for the sub
ject who is given shelter in this way is neither myself nor anyone
at all. Nothing is gained either if we seek to find in the quality
of certain representations and certain ideas the capacity to set
action moving. We know nothing about this motive power of
ideas. And the question remains whether representation is the
basic reality we must start from.
Nabert thinks that we must start resolutely with the act in
order to find again in decision-making the reason why this act
afterward appears to the understanding as an empirical series of
facts (pp. 123-55). This reason is what we will later on be
calling “the law of representation.”
But this law appears only if we move from act to represen
tation and not the other way round. If we are faithful to this
reading, we must grasp again, even in the motives which are
supposed to precede the fulfilled act of decision, the sketches,
rough drafts, and initial stirrings of the act. These are the
sketches which, after the event, seem to me like some kind of
tracing of the act in the representation. And it is in this way that
we come to treat motives as antecedent representations capable
of producing the act. But what precedes the fulfilled act are in
choate, incomplete, and unfulfilled acts. And these unfulfilled
acts, grasped with the help of retrospection, appear in the guise
of a progression and a connection in the representations. This fall
of the unfulfilled act into representation is what we call motive.
Objectified in this way, deliberation appears to us like a body of
necessity in which we no longer know where to fit a spirit wiiich
is free. But these motives are only the effect, or rather the conse
quence, of the causality of consciousness. In each of them <4the
incomplete acts where our consciousnegs tries to act are trans
posed.” But this transposition proceeds from a retreat, a with-
drawal of our responsibility, which, in concentrating itself in the
ultimate act, abandons the previous course to the law of repre
sentation.
So the entire difficulty is contracted in the double nature of
motive, which on the one hand ^participates in the actw and on
the other ênds itself to becoming very quickly an element of a
psychological determinism” （p. 127). it is this double nature of
motive that allows an escape not only from the Kantian antinomy
between noumenal freedom and empirical causality but also
from the Bergsonian opposition between the duree and the super-
ficialself.
But have we, in turn, done anything more than name the
problem? What is this expressive power whose strange virtue
consists in “deploying the act in representation” （p. 129)? We
understand, of course, that in becoming a spectacle the act is
made recognizable for us. By our motives we know what we have
willed. But why is this knowledge presented, not in its signs as
the knowledge of an actual willing, but as the knowledge of a
willing which is abolished in an inert given? Must one go so far
as to say that this function of revelation, of manifestation, in
itself invites the abandonment and the forgetfulness of the
causality by which these signs become what they are? Here is a
strange evil spell. By making itself a “commentary” （p. 130) on
itself, a text to be deciphered, the act is unrecognized at the same
time that it is recognized. And it is always by a painful uprooting
that consciousness must recover itself in its own expression. And
yet nothing is further from Naber^s thinking than to take this
passage, from the act to its sign and from the sign to represen
tation, for a downfall. The possibility of reading the text of
consciousness under the law of determinism exactly coincides
with the effort of clarity and sincerity we need in order to know
what we want. Moreover, if they were not enclosed in an un
interrupted narrative, our acts would be only momentary flashes
and would not make a history or even a duration. Hence, the
moment the act is grasped again in its own verbalization, the
tendency is strongest to forget the act in its sign and to exhaust
the meaning of psychological causality in determinism.
Therefore, the genesis of representation and the problem of
motivation both arise in the passage from the act to its expres
sion. This is why one must never cease to make the opposite
move, what Nabert calls ‘^recovery”一 the move from the repre
sentation to the act. Just as more is in the act, even when it is
only a tentative act, than what is in its representation as motive,
this movement of recovery always seems to get the maximum
from the minimum. This is how tendencies and other forces
which conspire in the volitional act are embodied in representa
tions. These representadont In turn are presented to us as models
216 / PHENOM ENOLOGY
of movements to be made. Then, to account for the gratuity of

the want,w these representations must be assigned different
values；that is, what is actually no more than a sign of the cau
sality of consciousness must be incorporated in them. In brief, to
account for the movement from representation to act, the psycho
logical fact must seem Mto surpass itself by becoming the element
of an act (which in some way it is only the material for) and
hence by referring back to a causality which it does not containw
(p. 149). This move, from the psychological fact, displayed on
the level of representation, back to the act of consciousness is
actually the model of this genesis of representation in the act ：
Everything takes place as if empirical consciousness did not con*
tinue, did not m aintain itself, did not progress except by the re
newed act of a nonempirical consciousness w hich creates in the
phenomenon something that enables it to render and to prolong
the spiritual life (p. 149).
In these two moves which reflection makes, psychological

determinism is grasped again as “the mold of another kind of
causality>, (p. 149). Because of a failure to understand this bond
between the act and the sign, philosophy hesitates between the
profession of an exiled freedom and diat of an empirical expli
cation, faithful only to the law of representation.
S u ch w a s N a b e r t ’s 1924 effort to bring together the

nonempirical act of consciousness and the empirical consequence
of its conditions. At stake in this effort was something clearly
beyond the precise problem of the relations between the phi
losophy of freedom and the psychology of volition. In basing the
law of representation on the double nature of motive, Nabert
tried to introduce an interdependence and complementarity into
the two functions of the cogito that the tradition had separated.
But what does this solution mean? Clearly, it is necessary to go
beyond this structure of motives. The conversion of motive into
representation, spread out under the regard of the understanding,
points up the unfulfilled character of the act whose motive is
expression. But the true act, the fulfilled act, the accomplished
act, where the causality of consciousness would be identical with
itself, is an act which we will never accomplish. All of our de
cisions are in reality unsuccessful attempts at this complete and
concrete act. The effort itself testifies to this lack of fulfillment.
In fact, effort is not the surplus of an act but the lack of one.
The fulfilled act is to be a tireless one, an act without dl讯culty,
without effort. The lack of identity with our own selves is there
fore our lasting condition. Into this gap between empirical con
sciousness and <4the cogito, which is essentially the positing of
self by active consciousness^ (p. 157), slips the law of repre
sentation and, with it, the conviction that our whole existence
can be understood under the sign of determinism. At the same
time, the free act is exiled into the ideal of itself and is projected
before and above us in the idea of the timeless choice in Plato
and Kant. This idea of absolute choice is the counterpart of the
dissimulation of the act which is unfulfilled in a determinist
stream of representations. It is thus not by accident that reflec
tive consciousness and psychological explication are split, but
by necessity.
Reflective philosophy therefore has only pushed the duality
between operative consciousness and the objective function of
the understanding further back. It is no longer the classic duality
between acting and knowing. There is a more subtle division,
at the very heart of active consciousness, between its pure power
of positing itself and its laborious production by M the mecUation
of psychological elementsM (p. 155). It is this division which
makes possible M the slipping of the act of consciousness toward
nature and its insertion into the determinism of psychological
lifew (p. 269). And this forgetfulness, this relaxation, seems to
have resulted from the unfulfillment of the human act and its
lack of conformity to the pure positing of consciousness.
丁he final pages of TTzc Inner fixp泛rienc泛of show
that we are touching here on a much greater enigma than the
initial problem we started from. The problem of psychological
causality is not the only place where this enigma crops up. The
understanding itself, where we have recognized the rule of de-
terminism and, more generally, the norm of truth, is only an
aspect of reason understood as a “set of norms” （p. 304) • “The
understanding expresses reason only to the degree that reason
helps bring about objectivity. But, as Malebranche said, besides
the relations of greatness, there are the relations of perfectionw
(p. 304). The understanding is therefore only the specification
of a more general function of order, an order from which the
norms of beauty and morality also derive.
The solution sketched at the level of the 4<law of representa
tion,w that is, of the understanding, is therefore only a partial
one. The question must be raised about the entire breadth of the
relation between freedom and reason. The Inner Experience of
Freedom tries to do this quickly. The solution glimpsed there
2l8 / PHENOMENOLOGY
introduces the pages of Elements for an Ethic which we will

comment on below. In effect, the last chapter of the 1924 thesis
limits itself to establishing the “complementarity” of freedom and
norms. And it is in the i$ea of value that the “convertibility” of
freedom and reason appears. So, the idea of value displays at the
end of the work the same mixed character that the idea of motive
displayed earlier. Value belongs at the same time on the side of
the “objective” norm and on the side of the contingent adherence
of consciousness. "Reason can furnish norms only. It is the
synthesis between these norms and freedom which produces
values. Values require a contingent adherence of consciousness
to the norms of a thinking stamped with impersonality” （p. 310).
The objectivity of values expresses the resistance of norms to our
desire；their subjectivity expresses the consent without which
value would be a force only. This double aspect of value, similar
to the double aspect of motive, occasions the same split or di
vision. The forgetfulness of the initiative which sustains value
produces the same efFacement of consciousness before the truth
of order. It is the same <<transfer>, (p. 314) of the subject of ac
tion toward the pole of understanding or of reason which gives
to the ideal its apparent exteriority. This ^transfer^ is not a for
feiture. Thanks to it, I am able to judge myself. Nevertheless, it
is a slope which must constantly be reclimbed in order to rescue
the first spontaneity, which occasions the acts, of the contempla
tion of order and of the fascination with order.
This ultimate duality between act and norm shows the in
completeness of the theory of the sign in Nabert*s first work. The
expressions “collaboration” and “equilibrium” （pp. 318 and 332)
show that an invincible duality is reborn between freedom and
reason. The theory of motivation had “reconciled” [rapprochJ]
the spontaneity of consciousness and the objectivity of under
standing. By enlarging the problem to the dimensions of reason,
understood as the level of norms, the final chapter reopens the
debate which the theory of motive had seemed to close. The
Inner Experience of Freedom has at least strongly indicated the
direction of the solution.
This direction is a general theory of signs. The Encyclopedic
frangaise article puts this forcefully ：
It is therefore true that in all of the domains where spirit reveals
itself as creative, reflection is called on to retrieve the acts which
works conceal, because, living their own life, these works are al
most detached from the operations that have produced them. It is
a question of bringing to light the indmata relationship between
an act and the significations in which it is objectified. Reflective
analysis does not overlook the fact that in every order the spirit
must first of all be operative and be produced in history and in an
experience comprehensive enough to grasp its most profound pos
sibilities. Rather, reflective analysis reveals all its richness in sur
prising the moment when the act of the spirit is invested in a sign
which may immediately be turned against it (p. 19.06-1).
The Inner Experience of Freedom sketches this general
theory of signs twice ：at the level of motive and at the level of
value. These two levels correspond to two points of view which
at that time remained exclusive, the viewpoint of psychological
explanation and the viewpoint of normative ethics. And these
two viewpoints are, finally, those of the understanding and of
reason.
C hapter 5 of Elements for an Ethic, ^Promotion of

Values,waims at surpassing both points of view and, at the same
time, overcoming their mutual exclusiveness. Psychological cau
sality and ethicaJ normativity are no longer points of view con
stituted outside reflection. Moreover, the epistemological questfon
of the diversity of reflective levels is transcended in the interests
of a more radical problematic, that of existence. If a difference
always remains between the consciousness that moves itself and
the consciousness that regards itself, it is because existence itself
is constituted by a double relation：between an affirmation which
institutes it and surpasses its consciousness, and a lack of being,
which is attested to by the feelings of fault, failure, and solitude.
'The inadequation of existence to itself* (p. 57) is primary in
relation to the plurality of reflective levels. It is this inadequation,
this lack of identity, which puts at the center of philosophy the
task of appropriating to itself the originary affirmation through
the signs of its activity in the world or in history. It is this lack
of identity that makes of this philosophy an ethics, in the strong
and vast sense that Spinoza gave this word, that is, an exemplary
history of the desire to be.
But in this kind of ethics, what becomes of the theory of signs
which we saw sketched, in the 1924 thesis, against the double
background of the theory of motive and of values? The second
theme now envelops the first. The theory of value can now play
this role because it is itself separated from an antecedent theory
of norms. Now it presupposes one thing only— the relationship
that freedom establishes with the world at the heart of the K/orfc.
In fact, what immediately follows from the lack, in existence^
220 / PHENOMENOLOGY
•of identity with itself is an “alternation” between two movements,

between “a concentration of the self at its source” and “its ex
pansion in the world” （p. 57). Resituated in the field of this
alternation, the problem of value takes on new meaning ：
W hat reflection grasps and affirms as pure consciousness of self
the self appropriates as value to the extent that it creates itself and
becomes really for itself. This means that value appears in view of
existence and for existence when pure consciousness of self has
turned toward the world to become the principle or rule of action
and, at the same time, the measure of satisfaction in a concrete
consciousness (p. 58).
It is in this movement that we again find the forgetfulness of the

act in the sign ：
Value is always linked to a certain obfuscation o f the principle on
which it is based and w hich sustains it. . . . In this respect, the
obfuscation of the generative principle of value is the expression
of a law w hich affects all manifestations o f the human spirit.
W hat Maine de Biran says about signs, that is ， about acts which
reveal its constitutive power to consciousness, must also be said
about values (p. 58).
And nevertheless, this obfuscation is “not an abatement or weak

ening of this principle” （p. 58 )，as in Neoplatonic philosophies
of the intelligible. The risk of treachery is on the very path of
trial or proof without which there is no self-appropriation at all.
Can we go beyond this law of the sign? Nabert suggests that
the shift from vaiue predicates like “courageous” and “generous”
to the essence of courage or generosity follows from forgetfulness
of the fact that I t is characteristic of the human spirit to be
affected by its own creations** (p. 66). This activity of the self
on itself, which Kant already invoked in the second edition of the
Critique, makes possible the division between the generative
movement and the interior law of this movement：an essence
is born when the creative act withdraws itself from its creations,
from its rhythms of intimate existence, which are henceforth
offered to contemplation. The activity of the self on itself seems
to be a kind of inertia of the productive imagination ：
It is patent that the ideality of value-essences Is nothing more than
the ideality o f creations, of permanent directions born of produc
tive imagination w hich have become rules for action and evalua
tion for the individual consciousness. They are clothed, certainly,
In an authority which transcends the contingent movements of an
individual consciousness. However, only the twofold character of
the human spirit, capable at once o f creating and of affecting
itself by its own creations, gives a specious character to the tran
scendence of essences (p. 6 7).
Perhaps what must be found here is the law of every symbol,

the symbol which, as psychoanalysis has shown, both conceals
and reveals, both expresses and diguises. Nabert himself outlines
a similar generalization when he explores the opposite path of
desire in the direction of value, by a movement similar to that
of the previous work, going back from psychological tendency
toward motive and act. Starting, then, from desire, we will say
that all meaning and every value claim is ôbtaining from the
real and from life an expression [of creative intention which]
transcends all expression and all realization” （p. 60) • But this
heightening of desire by value is the passage to the symbol ：
Conditions of increased rigor, rules, forms, signs, and languages,
substitute perceptions and new actions for actions and perceptions
rooted in instinct. . . . Each of the systems of symbols produced
according to this effort of rigor is first o f all a method of dissolu
tion of the real as it is offered to immediate consciousness (p- 75).
By this double access to value— objectification of pure act

and symbolization of natural desire we arrive at the level we
一
have sought so long. As in Kant, uthe imagination is . . . a

mediator” （p. 76). It is the imagination that conceals the double
power of expression because it “symbolizes” the principle (p. 58)
in verifying it and because it elevates desire to symbol by the
will for rigor. This imagination ^creates the instrument, the
matter of value, as much as the value itself* (p. 77). In this
imagination and in the law of the seifs effect on itself, which
belongs to it 一 and which is time itself一 must be sought the key
to the division we have been concerned with in this essay, the
division between the pure production of acts and their conceal
ment in signs. Creation springs up like a stream of time, a durie；
but it is as time itself that works are deposited behind the stream
of time and remain inert, offered to the eye as objects for con
templation or as essences for imitation.
If there must be a summary of this play between manifesta
tion and concealment in motive and in value, then M phenome-
nonMmust be the preferred expression.
The phenom enon Is the manifestation, in a "graspable ex
pression/' M of an Inner operation, which can assure itself as to
what it Is only by forcing Itself toward this expresslonM(p. 77 ).
222 / P H E N O M rE N 0 L 0 G Y
The phenomenon is the correlate of this assurance of the self

in its difference from itself. Because we do not enjoy immediate
self-possession and always lack perfect self-identity, because, ac
cording to The Inner Experience of Freedom, we never produce
the total act that we gather up and project in the ideal of an
absolute choice, we must endlessly appropriate what we are
through the mediation of the multiple expressions of our desire
to be. The detour by way of the phenomenon, then, is based on
the very structure of originary affirmation as both difference and
relation between pure consciousness and real consciousness. The
law of the phenomenon is indivisibly a law of expression and a
law of concealment.
Thus we can understand that 4<the entire sensible world and
all the beings with which we have dealings sometimes appear
to us as a text to be deciphered” （p. 77). Or, to use other words,
which are not Naberfs but which his work encourages：reflec
tion, because it is not an intuition of the self by the self, can be,
and must be, a hermeneutics.
Heidegger and the Question
of the Subject
My in t e n t io n h er e is to understand the scope of the

well-known critique of the subject-object relation which underlies
the denial of the priority of the cogito. I stress the word ^scope^
because I want to show that this denial implies more than a
mere rejection of a notion of the ego or of the self 一 as if they
lacked any meaning or were necessarily infected by the basic
misconception that governs the philosophies generated by the
Cartesian cogito. On the contrary, the kind of ontology developed
by Heidegger gives ground to what I shall call a hermeneutics of
the <fl am,,f which is a refutation of the cogito conceived of as a
simple epistemological principle and at the same time is an indi
cation of a foundation of Being which is necessarily spoken of as
grounding the cogito. In setting out to comprehend this complex
relation between the cogito and this hermeneutics of the “I am,”
I shall relate this problem to the destruction of the history of
philosophy on the one hand and, on the other, to the restatement
or retrieval of the ontological purpose which was in the cogito
and which has been forgotten in the formulation of Descartes.
This general thesis suggests the following order of discussion.
O riginally published in E nglish under the title *The Critique o f Sub
jectivity and Cogito in the Philosophy o f H eidegger,M in Heidegger and
the Quest for Truth, edited by M anfred S. Frings. C opyright © 1968 by
Q uadrangle Books, Chicago. Reproduced b y perm ission o f Q uadrangle/
The N ew York Tim es Book Co. T h e E nglish text w h ich appears in the
Q uadrangle book w as derived from a tape o f a paper delivered b y Profes
sor Ricoeur during the Heidegger Sym posium held a t De P au l U niversity
in C hicago, N ovem ber 1 1 and 12, 1966. D iscrepancies betw een that
text and the one in the present volum e derive from editorial changes made
by Ricoeur in the French text o f the essay w hen he w as preparing this
volume o f collected essays for his French publisher.
First, taking as a guide Heidegger’s introduction to and

Time, I shall point to the primordial link between the question
of Being and the emergence of Dasein in the very interrogation
of the inquirer. This primordial link makes possible both a de
struction of the cogito as first truth and its restatement on the
ontological level as the ‘1 am.”
Second, shifting to the Holzwege, and principally to the
essay ‘"The Age of the World as View,” I shall develop the main
critique of the cogito with the intention of showing that it is less
a critique of the cogito as such than of the metaphysics which
underlies it. That is to say, the critique focuses upon the con
ception of the existent as Vorstellung, as <<representation/>
Third, after this excursion into matters which are destructive
m a Heideggerian sense, I want to explore the positive herme
neutics of the UI am>, which replaces the cogito, in both senses of
the word “to replace.” This third analysis will take as its basis
§§ 9, 12, and 25 of Being and Time and what is said in them
about the self.
At this point it could be objected that such an analysis could
be justified only as long as we rely on Heidegger I,1 and that we
could not proceed to the Kehre9 to the turning or reversal. There
fore, it could also be objected that this Kehre puts an end to this
complex relation with the cogito. This is why I shall try, in my
fourth point, to show that the kind of circular implication be
tween Sein and Dasein, between the question of Being and the
self, of which we read in the introduction of Being and Time,
keeps ruling the philosophy of the later Heidegger. This time,
however, it does so on the level of the philosophy of language
and no longer on the level of an Analytic of Dasein. To put
Being into words repeats the same problematics, the rise of the
being which <4I amw in and through the disclosure of Being a«
such. This kind of second proof or countertest, which I should
have liked to develop at length, will be only a short sketch. The
whole problem overflows into the area of Heidegger’s philosophy
of language. This is to say that the rise of Dasein as self and
the rise of language as speech or discourse [parole] are one and
the same problem.
1. [Ricoeur, in this essay, is takin g fo r granted the fam iliar designa

tion o f the early H eidegger as *Heidegger F and the later Heidegger as
^Heidegger II,w a distinction originated b y W illiam Richardson's inter
pretation o f Heidegger. Ricoeur is, in fa ct, disputing this too strong dis
tinction and is argu in g fo r a u n itary interpretation o f Heidegger.—
Ed.)
Heidegger and the Subject / 225
I S H A L L T A K E AS M Y S T A R T IN G P O IN T and as a guide
what I call the primordial link between the question of Being
and the emergence of Dasein as the inquirer.
Everybody knows how Being and Time starts ：wThis question
[of Being] has today been forgotten:’ 2*Heidegger’s first sentence
clearly implies the shift of emphasis from a philosophy which
starts with the cogito as the first truth to a philosophy which
starts with the question of Being as a question which is forgot
ten, and which is forgotten in the cogito. Now the important
thing is that the problem of Being occurs as a question precisely
in the treatment of the concept of “question” in which we shall
discover this reference to a self. What does it mean that the prob
lem of Being occurs as a question and that what has been for
gotten is not only Being but the question of Being? Forgottenness
bears on the question, but there is not merely a pedagogical pre
caution here. In the question as question there is a structure
which has definite implications for our problem. These impli
cations are of two kinds.
First, the structure is the denial of the priority of the self-
positing or of the self-asserting of the cogito. This is not to be
taken in the sense that the question as question would imply a
degree of uncertainty and of doubt lacking in the cogito. This
opposition is still an epistemological one. An objection against
the Cartesian cogito will be precisely that it starts with a previous
model of certitude and places itself on the epistemological basis
which has been raised as a mirror of certitude. Thus, the struc
ture of the question is not defined by its epistemological degree,
so to speak, or by the fact that if we raise a question it is because
we are not certain. No. What is important in the question is
that it is ruled by the questioned— by the thing about which the
question is asked. Êvery inquiry is a seeking. Every seeking gets
guided beforehand by what is s o u g h t A n y inquiry, as in-
quiry about something， has that which 真 s asked about [hat sein
Befragtes]*9 (p. 24). This is the first implication which will be
developed as the negative aspect in the critique of the cogito.
2. M artin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (H a lle ： M ax N iem eyer, 1928),
p. 5. E nelish translation by John M acquarrie and E dw ard Robinson,
Being and Tim e (N ew Y o rk ： Harper & Row, 19 6 2 ), p. a i . [Page num bers
cited throughout refer to the English translation.]
But at the same time we discover the possibility of a new

philosophy of the ego in the sense that the genuine ego is consti
tuted by the question itself. By <4genuine egow we do not need to
understand an epistemological subjectivity of some kind but
simply the one who inquires. This ego would no longer be the
center, since the question of Being and the meaning of Being
are the forgotten center which has to be retrieved by philosophy.
Thus, in the position of the ego, there is both the forgottenness
of the question as question but also the birth of the ego as the
inquirer. It is this twofold relation which is the real object of
this study.
This ego, as implied in the question, is not posited as certain
of itself. That is to say, it is posited as being itself a being, the
being for which there is the question of Being. Let us consider
the first reference to Dasein in Being and Time ：
Looking at something, understanding and conceiving it, choosing,
access to it 一 all these ways of behaving are constitutive for our in
quiry, and therefore are modes of Being of such a particular being
(Seiendes), viz., that w hich we the inquirers are ourselves [— are
constitutive, are inodes of Being, for those particular entities
which we, the inquirers ourselves are] (pp. 26-27, modified).
Thus, it is immediately as an am” and not as an “I think” that

I am implied in the inquiry；and so, to work out the question of
Being adequately, we must assume an entity, ein Seiendes：
The very asking of this question is an entity^ mode of Being；and
as such it gets its essential character from w hat is inquired about
— nam ely, Being. This entity which each o f us is him self and
w hich includes Inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being,
we shall denote by the term Dasein (p. 27).
Thus, the opposition to the cogito becomes more subtle, since

the question of Dasein has a certain priority in the question of
Being. But this priority, which has led to so many misunder
standings, and, above all, to anthropological interpretations of
Being and Time, is only, and remains, an ontic priority, mixed or
involved in the ontological priority of the question of Being.
this relation is the origin of a new philosophy of the ego. Every
one knows the famous formula according to which Dasein is^
“ontically distinctive in that it is ontological” （p. 32) ，or, in less,
cryptic terms ：Ûnderstanding of Being is itself a definitive char
acteristic of Dasein's being,> (ibid.). We are thus led to a kind of
circular relation which is not a vicious circle. Heidegger tries to
master this extraordinary situation in these terms：aIn the ques
tion of the meaning of Being there is no ^circular reasoning, but
rather a remarkable *relatedness backward or forward* [Riick-
oder Vorbezogenheit) which what we are asking about (Being)
bears to the inquiry itself as a mode of Being of an entity” （p.
28). Here is the birth of the subject. The question of the mean
ing of Being oscillates backward and forward in the inquiry itself
as the mode of being of a possible ego. I propose to take this
relation as the guiding line for the rest of this discussion. In it
are contained not only a contesting of the philosophy of the
cogito but its restatement on its own ontological level, precisely
because the problem for Descartes was ultimately “I amw and
not f<l think/' This is evidenced by the series of propositions
which proceeds from the existence of the ego to the existence of
God and to the existence of the world.
II
T he c o n t e st a t io n of the cogito is a part of the destruc

tion of the history of ontology (to use an expression of Heidegger
himself) such as he sought in the introduction of Being and
Time. In the famous section on Descartes ( § 6) we read that the
assertion of the ''Cogito sumn proceeds from an essential omis-
sion: the omission of an ontology of Dasein. Heidegger says:
“what [Descartes】left undetermined when he began in this ‘radi
cal’ way [with ‘cogito swm’] was the kind of Being which belongs
to the res cogitans, or— more precisely— the meaning of the
Being of the 'sum 9w (p. 46). This means the Being of the U1 am.w
What is the omission? Or rather, what positive decision kept
Descartes from raising the question of the meaning of the Being
which this entity possesses? Being and Time makes only a partial
response: it is “die absolute certainty of the cogito” which has
foreclosed the problem of the meaning of the Being of this entity.
Thus the question now becomes ：in what sense does the quest
or certainty belong to the forgottenness of Being?
The question is elaborated in a text from 1938 ：4<Die Zeit
»es Weltbildes* (The Age of the World as View).8 Here we learn
that the cogito is not an Innocent assertion；it belongs to an age
3. Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfort a.M .： Vittorio Klostermann»
>963 )• PP* 69-105. English translation by Marjorie Grene, Measure, II
269-84.
228 / PHEN OM ENOLOGY
of metaphysics for which truth is the truth of existents and as

such constitutes the forgottenness of Being. How and in what
sense does the cogito belong to the age of metaphysics? The
argumentation is very dense and must be followed scrupulously.
The philosophical ground on which the cogito emerged is the
ground of science in particular, but, more generally, it is a mode
of understanding in which the existent (das Seiende) is put at
the disposal of an êxplanatory representation.,> The first pre
supposition is that we raise the problem of science in terms of
research (suchen), which implies the objectification of an exist
ent and which places that existent before us (vor-Stellung).
Thus calculating man perhaps becomes sure (sicker), gains cer
tainty (Gewissheit), of the existent. It is at the point where the
problem of certitude and the problem of representation coincide
that the cogito emerges. In the metaphysics of Descartes, the
existent was defined for the first time as the objectivity of repre
sentation and truth as certainty of representation.4 With ob
jectivity comes subjectivity, in the sense that this being-certain
of the object is the counterpart of the positing of a subject. So we
have both the positing of the subject and the proposition of the
representation. This is the age of the world as view or picture
(Bild).
Let us try to understand this new move more precisely；we
have introduced the “subject，” but it is not the “subject” in the
sense of the €t\n but in the sense of the substratum. Subjectum
does not first mean M ego,wbut, according to the Greek hypokeime-
non and the Latin substratum, it is that which gathers everything
to itself to become a basis. This subjectum is not yet man and
not at all the What happens with Descartes is that man be
comes the first and real subjectum, the first and real ground.
There is a kind of complicity and identification between the two
notions of the subjectum as ground and subjectum as The
subject, as myself, becomes the center to which the existent, das
Seiende, is related. But this is possible only because the world
has become a Bild (picture). It stands before us. c<Where the
world becomes a 'view* [Bild], the existent as a whole is posited
as that with respect to which a man orients himself, which,
therefore, he wishes to bring and have before himself, and thus,
in a decisive sense, re-presents to himself 5The representational
character of the existent is the correlate of the emergence of
man as subject.
4. Holzwege, p. 220.
5. Ibid., p. 82；Eng. trans., p. 279.
Now, the existent is brought before man as what is objective
or what may be determined. According to this analysis, the
cogito is not an atemporal truth, but it belongs to an age, and
not only to an age, but to the first age for which the world is
made into a view [Bild]. That is why there was no cogito for the
Greeks, since man did not “face” the world. For the Greeks it is
rather man who is faced by the existent and M who is gathered
into its presence by self-disciosing.” 6Heidegger does not say that
there was not yet man for the Greeks. On the contrary, this man
had an essence and the task to ^collect (legein) the self-disclos
ing in its disclosure and to save (sozein) it, to catch it up and
preserve it, and to remain exposed to all sundering confusion
(aletheuein )**7
Let us preserve this theme, since we shall return to it. It
will give us a key for a link between Heidegger I and II in terms
of the continuity of the philosophy of the self. Let us say simply
that the cogito is not an absolute；it belongs to an age, the age
of “world” as representation and as picture. Henceforth, man
puts himself into this setting, he posits himself as the setting in
which the existent must from now on represent itself, present
itself— that is, be a view of the picture. M
Man becomes the repre
sentative of the existent in the sense of the objective.M8 The
claim to master the existent as a whole, in technology, is only a
consequence, and a formidable consequence, of this emergence
of man on the stage of his own representation. The strength of
this analysis is that it does not stay on the level of the cogito as
an argument. We are not discussing the MergoT of the ^cogito
ergo sum.n This analysis digs underneath；what it discloses is the
underlying event of our culture and, more than that, the event
(Ereignis) which affects the existent as a whole. Now humanism
is bom, if by humanism we designate 4<that philosophical inter
pretation of man which explains and evaluates the existent as a
whole from the viewpoint of an inner relation to man.” *
We understand now in what sense the cogito belongs to the
metaphysical tradition. The subject-object relationship inter
preted as Bild, as picture, as view, obliterates, dissimulates, the
belonging of Dasein to Sein. It dissimulates the process of truth
as nonconcealment of this ontological implication. But does this
critique exhaust all possible relations between the Analytic of
23〇 / PHENOM ENOLOGY
Dasein and the tradition of the cogito? I want to show now, at

least briefly, that this destruction of the cogito, with the destruc
tion of the age to which it belongs, is the condition for a justified
repetition of the question of the ego.
I ll
T h at t h e q u estio n of th e ego — of the self一 is not

ruled out by the foregoing critique may be ascertained by return
ing to our point of departure. Dasein has reference to itself.
Dasein has the characteristic of the self. Of course, Dasein is
not defined as this self-reference, but rather by its relation to
the question of Being. It is the question as question, however,
which gives self-reference to Dasein. *This entity which each of
us is himself, and which includes inquiring as one of the pos
sibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term Daseiny, (Being
and Time, p. 27). And further ：KThat kind of being towards
which Dasein can comport itself in one way or another, and
always does comport itself somehow, we call existence
[Existenz]n (p. 32).
A problem now arises from the coincidence between the two
definitions of Dasein ：as the one who inquires and as the one
who has to be its own being and has it as its own. I think that
the identity of the two definitions of Dasein is nothing else but
the Riickbezogenheit, the ^relatedness backward/' from which
we started. In §§ 9, 12, and 25 of Being and Time Heidegger
explains in what sense Dasein implies existentiality. Dasein
always understands itself in terms of its existence and in terms
of its own possibilities ：to be itself or not itself. Here we must
not object that this is the existenziell, and that Heidegger is not
interested in the existenziell, but only in the existential；for
existentiality is nothing other than the totality of the structures
of an existent who exists only in the fulfillment or the lack of
fulfillment of his own possibilities. If a given decision can be
called existenziell, the fact that we have to decide is an êxisten-
tiar of existence itself. Thus the circle of Dasein and the exist
ent, mentioned above, now takes the shape of a circle between
existentiality and Being.
Yet, this circle is nothing else than the circle of the inquirer
and the thing inquired about. This is implied in any questioning.
The great difference with the Cartesian cogito is that the ontic
priority of which we have spoken does not imply any immediate
ness. “Ontically，of course，Dasein is not only close to us — even
that which is closest：we are it, each of us, we ourselves. In spite
of this, or rather for just this reason, it is ontologically diat
which is farthest” （p. 36). At this point, the retrieval of the “I
am” must be not only of phenomenological concern— that is to
say, in the sense of an intuitive description but concerned with
一
interpretation， precisely because the “I am” is forgotten. It has

to be recovered by an interpretation which brings it from con
cealment. Dasein is ontically the closest to itseTf，but ontolog-
ically farthest. And it is in this distance that the “I am” be
comes the theme of a hermeneutics and not simply of intuitive
description. Therefore, a retrieval of the cogito is possible only
as a regressive movement beginning with the whole phenomenon
of <<being-in-the-world>, and turned toward the question of the
who of that being-in-the-world.
But the meaning of the question in itself is hidden. We
read in § 25— which, by the way, it would be very interesting
to compare in detail witli Freud’s psychoanalysis— that the ques
tion of the who remains and must remain a question. It has the
same structure of a question as the question of Being. It is not
a given一 it is not something on which we can rely— but some
thing into which we must inquire. It is not a posit— a proposi
tion；the who remains a question for itself, because the question
of the self as self is first hidden；it is not by chance that the
problem of the self appears interwoven with that of the “one,”
of [the German] “man,” or, better, of the “they” [as in “they
say . . •”]• It appears in the problematic of “everydayness,” of
the everyday being where Êveryone is the other, and no one is
himself” （p. 165). This intricate situation makes of the ego a
question, not a given. aIt could be that the ‘who’ of everyday
Dasein just is not the T. myself w(p. 150).
Nowhere is it more true than in this point that phenomenol
ogy is a hermeneutics, because nowhere is the kind of closeness
belonging to the ontic more deceptive (pp. 61-62). I think that
this is the moment to repeat, but with more emphasis, that
MProximally the <who, of Dasein is not only a problem ontolog
ically；even ontically it remains concealed,> (p. 152). This con
cealment does not imply a skepticism as to the question of the
•elf. On the contrary, the T ' remains an essential characteristic
of Dasein, and for that reason It must be interpreted existen
tially. It is well known that this part of Being and Time starts
with an inquiry on the oncountarlng of others and everyday
being-with (§ 26). We shall not pursue this analysis, but I

wanted to show its philosophical locus. We cannot proceed in
the question of the who without introducing the problem of
everyday life, self-knowledge, the problem of the relation to the
other一 and, ultimately, the relation to death. For Heidegger, at
least in Being and Time (and we shall see that perhaps this
constitutes the major difference with Heidegger II), the authen
ticity of the who is reached only when we have gone to the end
of this process and have reached the theme of freedom for death.
Only then is there a who. There was not yet a who in ordinary
life ；there was only a kind of anonymous self: “one,” [the
German] ^man." This means that the question of the self re
mains formal as long as we have not developed the whole
dialectic of inauthentic and authentic existence. In this way the
question of the who of Dasein emerged in that of the potentiality
of being one’s self as a whole. The recapitulation of existence in
the face of death is the response to the question of the who of
Dasein. And then we have a hermeneutics of the “I am” which
culminates in a hermeneutics of the finite totalization in the
face of death.
IV
A t t h is p o in t I wish to reintroduce the objection which

was mentioned in the introduction. One could say that this
hermeneutics of the “I am” is the topic of Being arid Time only
and that the reversal from Heidegger I to Heidegger II implies
a fading and perhaps even a disappearance of the hermeneutics
of the “I am.” Indeed, the objection could be extended to the
problematic of the self, of Inauthentic and authentic existence,
and of resoluteness in the face of death. One could also say that
all these themes were still too existenziell rather than existential,
that they would have to recede, and that the exegesis of Dasein
must be replaced by an exegesis of the speech or discourse, the
word, of the poet and the thinker. It is my conviction, however,
that the continuity between Heidegger I and Heidegger II lies
mainly in the persistence of the circle which I described above ：
the backward relatedness>, between Being, about which we are
asking in the inquiry, and the inquirer himself, as a mode of
being. Because the question is no longer an Analytic of Dasein,
this circle does not occur in the same way and is not expressed
in the same terms. But it can be recognized as the center of tht
philosophy of language which, to a certain extent, replacefl th«
Analytic of Dasein.
T^he same problems which have been linked to the fitMf uf
Dasein now occur in the problem of language；they ar<5 llnkml
to the problem of the word, of speech. This is the problem of
bringing Being into language. The word represents in the lulrr
Heidegger exactly the same problem as the Da of Dasein, Nlncn
the word is the Da. In the Introduction to Metaphysics HcldoKKî*
speaks in these terms of the function of the word；more jht
cisely, of Nennert, the forming of a name. He says ："A word, thr
forming of a name [establishes] in its Being a being that is open
ing itself up and preserves it in this open-ness, constriction, nnd
Constance.w10 Thus the word, in the Nennen, maintains, pre
serves (bewahrt), what has been opened up as such；it exprcssci
the noein, the Denken, in which are mingled the recollective ac
ceptance and the violence of delimitation. Thus naming [de
nomination] designates the place and role of man in language.
Here, Being is brought into language, and a finite, speaking
existent is bom. In forming a name, we have both disclosure of
Being and enclosure in the finitude of language, which Heideg
ger implies in the terms “to preserve” and “to maintain.” By
preserving, man contains, does violence, and also begins to con
ceal. We are here at a point where man's domination of Being by
reasoning in the science of logic, for example is made pos
一一
sible. This possibility may be traced back to the birth of language

in words and the process of naming. The act of gathering, which
is logos, implies this kind of delimitation, according to which
Being is forced into disclosure. In this respect there is a violence
of the word. This containment belongs to the concealment of
Being which is part of its disclosure. This concealment makes
possible our illusion that as men we ‘liave” language “at our
disposal.” Henceforth， Dasein takes itself as the creator of
language.
Such is the kind of restatement, not only of the cogito, but
also of Heidegger Fs Analytic of Dasein. And here Heidegger I
10. Translation by W. J. Richardson, in Heidegger ： Through Phe

nomenology to Thought (The Hague： Mardnus NijhofF, 1963), p. aga.
See also Martin Heidegger, EinfUhrung in die Metaphysik (Tilbingen:
Niemeyer Verlag, 1953)1 P- 131. Engliih translation by Ralph Manhelm,
Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven i Y tle University Press, 1959), p.
17a: ■ and maintains It In Us optnncit, delimitation and per-
manence.H
is himself retrieved, restated, in the philosophy of language of

Heidegger II. As Richardson says ：
Language takes it origin, then, along with the irruption of ^There-
being,Mfor in this irruption language is simply Being itself formed
into word. It follows that in the rise of language, as in the emer
gence of the <T h ereMitself, Being retains its primacy. Language
as the Over-powering itself, is a might within which the MTherew
finds itself, that dominates the <T h erew through and through and
must be subdued by it.11
This emergence of the ^word^ under the primacy of Being re

peats exactly the emergence of the ^There^ in Being and Time,
as the one who inquires into Being.
The parallelism is even more complete than we would have
expected. The notion of the self in Being and Time (chap. IV)
required a hermeneutics of the M I am,>, and it culminated in the
sense of “resolve” implied in freedom in the face of death. In
the same way, the position of man in language may result in
his pretension to rule language by logic and to make judgment
the tribunal before which Being must stand. Thus, to the emer
gence of Dasein is linked the necessity to claim language as our
work. The life which was called ^freedom for deathw in Being
and Time has, as its correspondence in Heidegger II, the obedi
ence of the poet and the thinker, bound by the word which
creates them. In Urdichtung, primordial poetizing, the poet
testifies to a kind of language in which the Over-powering of
Being founds the power of man and his language. I should say
here that Urdichtung replaces freedom for death as the answer
to the problem of the who and to the problem of the authenticity
of the who. Authentic Dasein is born from the response to Being
and, in responding, preserves the strength of Being by the
strength of the word. Such is the ultimate repetition of the sum,
of the “I am,” beyond the destruction of the history of philosophy
and beyond the destruction of the cogito as a mere epistemologi
cal principle.
My conclusion is, then, first, that the destruction of the
cogito as self-positing being, the destruction of the cogito as
an absolute subject, is the reverse side of a hermeneutics of the
ul amMas constituted by its relation to Being. Second, this her
meneutics of the UI amw is not fundamentally changed from
Being and Time to the last essays of Heidegger. It remains
i l . R ichardson, Heidegger ： Through Phenomenology to Thought, p.
a9 3 .
faithful to the same pattern of a “backward relatedness” from
Being to man. Third, a similar dialectic between authentic and
inauthentic life gives a concrete form to this hermeneutics. The
basic difference, perhaps, between the later Heidegger and
Heidegger I would be that the self no longer finds its authen
ticity in freedom for death but in Gelassenheit, which is the gift
of a poetic life.
The Question of the Subject:
The Challenge of Semiology
T h e p h il o so p h y of t h e s u b j e c t , it is said, is in
danger of disappearing. So be it; but this philosophy has always
been challenged. The philosophy of the subject has never
existed；rather, there have been a series of reflective styles,
arising out of the work of redefinition which the challenge itself
has imposed.
Thus, Descartes's cogito is not isolated, like an immutable
proposition, like an eternal truth suspended above history. For
Descartes himself the cogito is only a moment of thought；it
concludes an operation and opens a new series；it is contem
poraneous with a vision of the world in which the whole of ob-
jectivity is spread out like a spectacle on which the cogito casts
its sovereign gaze.1 In particular, Descartes^ cogito is only one
of the summits一 even if the highest— of a chain of cogitos
which constitute the reflective tradition. In this chain, in this
tradition, each expression of the cogito reinterprets the preceding
one. Thus one can speak of a Socratic cogito ( €Xook after your
souF), an Augustinian cogito (the <<inner,>man distinct from the
flux of êxternaF things and <<higherwtruths), a Cartesian cogito
— of course, a Kantian cogito ( M the I think must be able to ac
company all my representations>,). The Fichtean 4<S eir is, with
out any doubt, the most significant instance of modern reflective
philosophy；as Jean Nabert remarked, there is no contemporary
reflective philosophy which does not reinterpret Descartes
through Kant and Fichte. And the <cegologyM that Husserl at
tempted to graft onto phenomenology belongs to this line.
Translated by Kathleen M cLaughlin.
z. 8ee# above, "H eidegger and the Question of the Subject."
The Question of the Subject / 237
All of these, in imitation of the Socratic cogito, respond to a
challenge, whether from Sophism, empiricism, or, In the opposite
sense, dogmatism of ideas；for all these represent the allegation
of a truth without a subject. By this challenge, reflective philoso
phy is invited, not to remain intact by warding off enemy as
saults, but rather to take support from its adversary, to ally it-
self with that which most challenges it.
We are going to examine two challenges, one coming from
psychoanalysis and the other from structuralism, which together
can be called the challenge of semiology. They indeed have in
common a consideration of signs which questions any intention
or any claim that the subjecfs reflecting on himself or the posit
ing of the subject by himself is an original, fundamental, and
founding act.
I. T h e C h a l l e n g e of P s y c h o a n a l y s is
P s y c h o a n a l y s is m e r it s being called upon first, for it

carries its challenge to the precise point where Descartes thought
he had found the firm ground of certainty. Freud undermines
the effects of meaning which constitute the field of conscious
ness and starkly reveals the play of phantasies and illusions in
which our desire is masked.
The challenge to the primacy of consciousness does, in truth,
go much further；for the psychoanalytic explanation, known as
topography, consists in establishing a field, a place, or rather a
series of places, without considering the internal perception of
the subject. These “places”一 unconscious, preconscious, and
conscious— are in no way defined by descriptive, phenomeno
logical properties but as systems, that is, as sets of representa
tions and affects governed by specific laws which enter into
mutual relationships which, in turn, are irreducible to any
quality of consciousness, to any determination of the ‘lived.”
Thus, the explanation begins with a general suspension of
the properties of consciousness. It is an antiphenomenology
which requires, not the reduction to consciousness, but the re
duction of consciousness. This preliminary abandonment is the
prerequisite for the separation that exists between the field of
•11 Freudian analyses and the descriptions of “lived” conscious-
ntas.
Why Is this exacting approach necessary? Because the
238 / PHENOMENOLOGY
intelligibility of the effects of meaning yielded by immediate

consciousness— dreams, symptoms, phantasies, folklore, myths,
and idols— cannot be grasped at the same level of discourse as
these effects of meaning. And this intelligibility is inaccessible
to consciousness because the latter is itself cut off from the level
of the constitution of meaning by the bar of repression. The idea
that consciousness is cut off from its own sense by an impedi
ment it can neither direct nor know is the key to Freudian
topography：the dynamism of repression, in placing the un
conscious system beyond our reach, requires an interpretive
technique adapted to the distortions and displacements which
are best illustrated by dream work and the work of neurosis.
The result of this is that consciousness itself becomes a
symptom and thus only one system among others, namely, the
perceptual system which regulates our access to reality. Cer
tainly, consciousness is not nothing (we will come back to this
point later )；it is at least the place of all the effects of meaning,
the data to which the analysis is applied. But consciousness is
not the principle, not the judge, not the measure of all things；
and this is the challenge that counts for a philosophy of the
cogito. Later we will speak about the revision, from top to bot
tom, which such a philosophy must undergo.
Before considering the implications of this painful revision,
let us consider a second series of notions which further ac
centuate the divorce between psychoanalysis and the philoso
phies of the subject. As we know, Freud was led to superimpose
a second topography— the ego, the id, and the superego— on the
first：unconscious, preconscious, and conscious. In truth, it is
not really a topography in the precise sense of a series of “places”
where representations and affects are inscribed according to
their position relative to repression. It is rather a question of
a series of “roles” constituting a personology. Certain roles form
a primary sequence：the neutral or the anonymous, the personal,
and the superpersonal. Freud was led to this new division of
agencies [Instanzen] by the following consideration：it is not
only the “deepest” part of the ego but also the ‘^highest” part
that is unconscious. In other words, the unconscious is not only
characteristic of the repressed；it is also characteristic of the
complex operations by which we internalize the imperatives and
the rules which come from agencies of society and, first of all,
from the parental agency, the primary source of restrictions
during infancy and childhood.
Freud had the intuition of this mechanism while studying the
pathological exaggeration of it which appears in obsessional
neurosis and, in particular, in melancholia. The latter ailment
shows clearly how a lost object can be internalized：the object
cathexis is replaced by an identification, that is, by a restoration
of the object inside the ego. Whence the idea of an alteration of
the ego by means of an identification with lost objects. This
operation一 and the desexualization which accompanies it— is
t£e key to all “sublimation•” Freud thinks he has found its equiva-
lent (and finally the general pattern) in the episode of the dis
solution of the Oedipus complex. The play of forces which op
pose three persons and two sexes is resolved, in the normal case,
by an identification with the father, which takes the place of
the wish to supplant him ；the erotic object passes through the
ordeal of mourning. The parental figures are abandoned as
erotic objects and axe internalized and sublimated：thus arises
the identification with the father and mother as ideals.
Freud then undertakes a real genealogy of morality— — in the
quasi-Nietzschean sense. It is a genealogy in the sense that the
superego is called “the heir of the Oedipus complex，” “the ex
pression of the most important libidinal vicissitudes (Schick-
sale) of the id,J；2 it is a genealogy of morality in the sense that
this operation, which remains instinctual from the standpoint of
the forces engaged in a work comparable to the work of mourn
ing, nevertheless engenders îdeals^ since the libidinal goal is
replaced by a socially acceptable goal. This replacement of the
libidinal goal by the ideal is the key to the sublimation initiated
as a consequence of the Oedipus complex. By means of this
work— of this introjection and this identification— the level of
the Kego ideals^ is integrated with the structure of the personal
ity and becomes the internal agency called the ^superego/* which
judges and condemns. Around this primitive core of the super
ego and the ego ideal are arranged, like precipitates, all sub
sequent identifications with sources of authority, with models,
with cultural figures— the same ones that Hegel lists under the
heading of objective spirit. Thus, by means of sedimentation,
moral “consciousness” and the “cultural” agency of the personal
ity in general are constituted.
As we see, this unconscious “from above” is no less irreduci
ble to the autoconstitution of the Cartesian-style ego cogifo than
the unconscious “from below,” which is henceforth called “the
a. Sigm und Freud, The E〇o and the Id and Other Works, Vol. XIX
of The Standard Edition of th0 Compl€t§ W orks of Sigmund Freud, ed.
and trans. James Strachoy (London, i 〇6 i ) t p. 36.
240 / PHENOMENOLOGY
id,” in order to emphasize its strength and its estrangement

from the agency of the ego.
At the same time Freud adds, to the notion of consciousness
conceived as one of the places of his topography, the notion of
the ego as a force in the hands of masters who dominate it. Thus
the question of the subject is split：consciousness is related to
the task of vigilance, of active perception, of the ordered and
regulated apprehension of reality；the ego is dedicated to the
task of mastering and dominating forces which at first crush it.
The essay on 'The Ego and the Idw3 ends with the pessimistic
portrayal of the multiple allegiances of the ego, which is com
pared to a servant claimed by several masters ：the superego, the
id, and reality. Its task is likened to the compromises of a
politician charged with reconciling demands by reducing the
pressure they bring to bear. Thus, the becoming-subject takes
on the double aspect of becoming-conscious and becoming-self,
that is, of becoming vigilant at the boundary between the pleas
ure principle and reality and of becoming master at the cross
roads of a complex of forces. The conquest of the reality princi-
ple and the conquest of the force of the ego are, moreover, one
and the same thing, in spite of the fact that analysis distin
guishes two problematics corresponding to two different se
quences, that of the three ^places^ and that of the three <<roles.>,
Freud has explained the superimposition of the two triads in his
New Introductory Lectures.3 4 He compares them to three popula
tions separated into three districts, where the distribution of the
population does not completely correspond to the geographical
divisions of the districts. The noncoincidence of the two divisions
allows the two problematics to appear, one which corresponds
to the resolution of a problem of perception and reality, the other
which corresponds to the resolution of a problem of allegiance
and dominance. The first is a Kantian problem, the critical
problem of objectivity；the second is a Hegelian problem, the
dialectic of the master and the slave. As in Hegel, the conquest
of objectivity remains an abstract moment, that of the judgment
decision (Ur-teil)yof the understanding which separates (teilen)
the illusion from the real. The concrete moment is the moment
3. Ibid.
4. Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other
Works, Vol. XXII of The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of
Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London, 1964)* PP- 7 a-
73 .
of mutual recognition at the end of a struggle which has taught
the master— himself the vehicle of thought, leisure, and enjoy
ment— how to understand himself through the work of the slave.
It is finally through this exchange of roles, by which each passes
into the other, that the consciousnesses are equalized. It is of this
quasi-Hegelian operation that Freud speaks in the celebrated
saying: &〇 es ich K/erden— 4<Where id was, there ego
shall be.” 5
This brief recall of the principal points of the Freudian
doctrine of the subject discloses that psychoanalysis has in no
way eliminated consciousness and the ego；it has not replaced
the subject, it has displaced it. As we have seen, consciousness
and the ego still figure among the places and the roles which,
taken together, constitute the human subject. The displacement
of the problematic consists in the following ：neither conscious
ness nor the ego is any longer in the position of principle or
origin. How, then, must the problem be reformulated as a result
of this displacement?
Let us start from the final point reached in the preceding
analysis: “ego” shall be where “id” was. This conclusion joins
an earlier remark concerning consciousness：Freud, we said,
substitutes, for conscious being (Bewusst-sein), becoming
conscious (Bewusstwerden). What was origin becomes task or
goal. This can be understood on a very concrete level ：pscho-
analysis can have no therapeutic ambition other than enlarging
the field of consciousness and giving back to the ego some of the
strength ceded to its three powerful masters. This positing of
consciousness and the ego as task and as mastery continues to
link psychoanalysis to the positing of the cogito. Only, the cogito
which has passed through the critical test of psychoanalysis is
no longer the one claimed by philosophy in its pre-Freudian
naivete. Before Freud, two moments were confused ：the moment
of apodicticity and the moment of adequation. In the moment of
apodicticity, the I think-I am is truly implied even in doubt, even
in error, even in illusion；even if the evil genius deceives me in
all my assertions, it is necessary that I, who think, be. But this
impregnable moment of apodicticity tends to be confused with
the moment of adequation, in which I am such as I perceive
myself. Thetic judgment, to use Fichte's expression— the abso
lute positing of existence一 Is identified with a judgment of
5. Ibid., p. 80.
242 / PHENOMENOLOGY
perception, with the apperception of my being-such. Psycho

analysis drives a wedge between the apodicticity of the absolute
positing of existence and the adequation of the judgment bear
ing on the being-such. I am, but what am I who am? That is
what I no longer know. In other words, reflection has lost the
assurance of consciousness. What I am is just as problematical
as that I am is apodictic.
This consequence could have been foreseen by the Kantian
or Husserlian type of transcendental philosophy. The empirical
character of consciousness gives license to the same errors and
the same illusions as worldly perception. In HusserFs Cartesian
Meditations, § § 7 and 9, one finds the theoretical recognition of
this dissociation between the certain character of the cogito and
the dubious character of consciousness. The sense of what I am
is not given, but hidden；it can even remain problematical in
definitely, like a question without an answer. But the philosopher
knows it only abstractly. Now, psychoanalysis teaches that to
know something theoretically is nothing so long as the economy
of underlying desires has not been altered. This is why the re
flecting philosopher cannot go beyond abstract and negative
statements like ：Apodicticity is not immediacy；Reflection is not
introspection；The philosophy of the subject is not the psychol
ogy of consciousness. All these propositions are true, but lifeless.
In the absence of an actual passage through analysis, a mere
meditation on psychoanalysis allows us to go beyond these ab
stractions and arrive at a concrete critique of the cogito. I will
say that the aim of this concrete critique is to deconstruct the
false cogito, to undertake the ruin of the idols of the cogito and
thus to inaugurate an operation similar to the mourning for the
libidinal object. The subject is first of all heir to a love of self
which in its profound structure is analogous to the object libido.
There is a libido of the ego which is homogeneous with the libido
of the object. Narcissism fills the entirely formal truth of the
I thinkr-1 am — fills it with an illusory concreteness. Narcissism
induces the identification of the reflective cogito with immediate
consciousness and makes me believe that I am such as I think
I am. But if the subject is not who I think he is, then conscious
ness must be lost if the subject is to be found.
Thus, I can understand reflectively the necessity for this
abandonment of consciousness and can combine with a philoso
phy of the subject even Freudian antiphenomenology. It Is in
deed the necessity for this release of all immediate consciousness
which justifies the most realist, naturalist, “thinglike” concepts
of Freudian theory. The likening of the psyche to an apparatus,
to a primitive functioning, ruled by the pleasure principle, the
topographical conception of psychic “locations,” the economic
conception of cathexis and withdrawal of cathexis, etc.— all
these theoretical procedures arise from a single strategy and arc
directed against an illusory cogito, which at first takes the place
of a founding act ：I think-I am. Reading Freud in this way be
comes itself an adventure of the reflection. What results from
this adventure is a wounded cogito, a cogito which posits but
does not possess itself, a cogito which understands its primordial
truth only in and through the avowal of the inadequation, the
illusion, the fakery of immediate consciousness.
Does the philosophy of the subject receive any other lesson
from psychoanalysis besides this critical rectification? Rooting
subjective existence in desire permits a positive implication of
psychoanalysis to appear, one which goes beyond the negative
task of deconstructing the false cogito. Merleau-Ponty suggested
calling this incarnation of instinctual drives the ârchaeology
of the subject.”
This aspect of Freudian thought is no less important than the
preceding one ：the dissolution of the Illusions and the idols of
the conscious system is only the inverse of a discovery, the dis
covery of M an econom yw hich Freud said was as fundamental
as the “topography.” it is in terms of this “economy” that the
temporal aspects of wishes are discerned, or rather what stands
out is the absence of a relation of wishes to the ordered time of
the real. The “atemporal,” “timeless” character of unconscious
wishes is, as we know, one of the traits which distinguishes the
Ucs. system from the Cs. system. It is this character which
governs the primitive side of our instinctual life. In particular,
it is what inflicts the affective regression that analysis tracks
down at the center of neuroses and at all levels of phantasies,
from dreams to idols and illusions. It is this archaic character of
desire which is glimpsed in guilt on the ethical plane and in the
fear of punishment and the infantile wish to be consoled on the
religious plane.
This thesis of the anteriority, the archaism, of desire is
fundamental to a reformulation of the cogito：like Aristotle, like
Spinoza and Leibniz, like Hegel, Freud places desire at the center
of the act of existing. Before the subject consciously and will
ingly posits himsolf, he hai already been placed in being at the
244 / P H E N O M ENO LO G Y
instinctual level. The anteriority of instinct in relation to aware

ness and volition signifies the anteriority of the ontic plane to
the reflective plane, the priority of I am to I think. From this
there results a less idealist, more ontological interpretation of
the cogito；the pure act of the cogito3 insofar as it posits itself
absolutely, is only an abstract and empty truth, as vain as it is
Invincible. This positing of the cogito remains to be mediated by
the totality of the world of signs and by the interpretation of
these signs. This long detour is, precisely, suspicion. Thus, both
the apodicticity of the cogito and its indefinitely dubious char
acter must be assumed together. The cogito is at once the in
dubitable certainty that I am and an open question as to what I
am.
I will thus say that the philosophical function of Freudian
thought is to introduce a gap between the apodicticity of the
abstract cogito and the reconquest of the truth of the concrete
subject. Into this gap slips the critique of the false cogito, the
deconstruction of the ego ideals which form a screen between
the ego and myself. This deconstruction is a sort of work of
mourning, transferred from the object relation to the reflective
relation. As part of this discipline of renunciation, the entire
methodological apparatus which Freud called “metapsychology”
belongs to this deconstruction ：the realism of psychic location,
the naturalism of the concepts of energy and economy, the
genetic and evolutionist derivation of cultural dimensions based
on the first instinctual objects, etc. This apparent loss, of the
cogito itself and of the understanding belonging to it, is required
by the strategy of the work of mourning applied to the false
cogito. It resembles the determinist explanation which Spinoza
in the first books of the Ethics applies to the false evidence of
free will before reaching the true freedom (Book IV) and the
beatitude (Book V ) which follow from the rational understand
ing of the state of slavery itself. Consequently, as in Spinoza,
the loss of the illusions of consciousness is the condition for any
reappropriation of the true subject.
It is this reappropriation, in and through the work of mourn
ing which we traced out above, which to my mind constitutes
the future task of a reflective philosophy. For my part, I see this
task in the following terms：if one can call psychoanalysis an
archaeology of the subject, the task of a reflective philosophy
following Freud will be to dialectically relate a teleology to this
archaeology. This polarity of the arch£ and the telos, of the origin
and the end, of the instinctual ground and the cultural aim, can
alone tear the philosophy of the cogito from abstraction, ideal
ism, solipsism, in short, from all the pathological forms of sub
jectivism which infect the positing of the subject.
How can we envisage a teleology of subjectivity which would
have been subjected to the critical examination of a Freudian
archaeology? It would be a progressive construction of the forms
of the spirit, after the manner of HegeFs Phenomenology of the
Spirit, but one which, to a greater extent than in Hegel, would
unfold on the very terrain of the regressive analysis of the forms
of desire.
I allude here to a Hegelian rather than a Husserlian model
for two reasons. First of all, Hegel uses a dialectical instrument
to conceive a sublation on the naturalist level of subjective
existence which preserves the initial instinctual impulse. In this
sense, I would say that the Hegelian Aufhebung, insofar as it is
the preservation of the sublated, is the philosophical truth of
Freudian <<subllmationMand <tidentification.>, Besides, Hegel him
self conceived the dialectic of the figures of the Phenomenology
as a dialectic of desire；The problem of satisfaction (Befriedi-
gung) is the affective motivation for the passage from conscious
ness to self-consciousness ：the infinite nature of desire, its
splitting into the desire of another desire, which at the same
time would be the desire of another, arriving at the equality of
consciousnesses by means of struggle— all these well-known
vicissitudes of the Hegelian Phenomenology constitute an ex
ample which is enlightening but not constraining for a teleologi
cal dialectic of the spirit grounded in the life of desire. Of course,
the Hegelian Phenomenology cannot be repeated today；new
figures of the self and the spirit have appeared since Hegel,
and new abysses have been hollowed out beneath our feet. But
the problem remains the same ：how can a prospective arrange
ment of the figures of the spirit and a progressive linking of die
spheres of culture be made to appear which would, in truth, be
the sublimation of substantial desire, the reasonable effectuation
of this energy which has been unmasked by psychoanalysis
through the archaisms and the regressions of the human world
of phantasies?
The task of a philosophical anthropology after Freud is to
pose this problem in ever more rigorous terms and to resolve It
in a synthesis which satlaflea both the Freudian economics of
desire and the Hegelian teleology of spirit.
246 / PHEN O M ENO LO G Y
II. T h e C h a l l e n g e o f “ S t r u c t u r a l i s m ”
W it h o u t m a k in g another detailed analysis of the

semiological model which today presides over the various struc
turalisms,6 I would like to show the convergence of the attacks
mounted against the philosophy of the subject on the bases of
psychoanalysis and linguistics.
The attack is carried on principally against Husserlian and
post-Husserlian phenomenology. One can understand w hy ：
phenomenology joins the philosophy of the subject to a theory of
meaning which falls within the same epistemological field as
that delineated by the semiological model. More precisely, phe
nomenology unites three theses：( 1 ) meaning is the most
comprehensive category of phenomenological description；(2)
the subject is the bearer of meaning；(3) reduction is the
philosophical act which permits the birth of a being for meaning.
These three theses are inseparable and can be ordered in two
senses. The way we have listed them characterizes the order
of their discovery, from the Logical Investigations to Ideas I：
in this order one sees logical meaning lodged at the center of
gravity of linguistic meaning, and the latter inscribed within the
vaster perimeter of the intentionality of consciousness. Because
of this expansion of the investigation from the logical to the
perceptive plane, linguistic expression and, so much the more,
logical expression appear to constitute merely the reflective form
of a signifying activity rooted deeper than judgment and char
acteristic of Erlebnis in general. It is in this sense that meaning
becomes the most comprehensive category of phenomenology.
And the notion of the ego receives a proportional extension to
the extent to which the ego is what lives in the aiming [visie]
at meaning and is constituted as the identical pole of all these
rays of meaning.
But the third thesis listed in the order of their discovery is
the first in the order of their founding. If meaning, for the
creator of phenomenology, covers the entire field of phenome
nological descriptions, it is because this field is founded in its
entirety by the transcendental reduction, which transmutes
every question about being into a question about the sense of
being. This function of reduction is independent of idealist inter
6. See, above, "Structure, Word, Event.”

pretations of the ego cogito and, first of all, of the interpretation
Husserl himself gives from Ideas I to the Cartesian Meditations.
Our relation to the world becomes apparent as a result of reduc
tion； in and through reduction every being comes to be described
as a phenomenon, as appearance, thus as a meaning to be made
explicit.
One can thus descend, following the order of their founding,
from reduction toward the subject as ego cogito cogitatum, and
from the subject of the theory toward meaning as the universal
mediation between the subject and the world. All is meaning
when every being is seen [visê] as the meaning of the lived by
means of which a subject opens toward transcendencies.
In this way, one can present phenomenology as a generalized
theory of language. Language ceases to be an activity, a function,
an operation among others：it is identified with the entire
signifying milieu, with the complex of signs thrown like a net
over our field of perception, our action, our life. Thus, Merleau-
Ponty was able to say that Husserl "'moves (language) into a
central position.” 7 Phenomenology can even claim that it alone
opens the space of meaning, and thus of language, by thematiz-
ing for the first time the intentional and signifying activity of
the incarnate, perceiving, acting, speaking subject.
And yet, phenomenology has radicalized the question of lan
guage in a way which excludes dialogue with modern linguistics
and with the semiologic disciplines which are built on a lin
guistic model. The partial failure of Merleau-Ponty^ philosophy
of language is instructive in this respect.
The “return to the speaking subject” which Merleau-Ponty
foresaw and began, following the later Husserl, is conceived in
such a way that it rushes past the objective science of signs and
moves too quickly to speech. Why? Because, from the beginning,
7. In a paper delivered in 1951 before the first International Con

ference on Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty wrote： *ln the philosophical
tradition, the problem of language does not pertain to "first philosophy/
and that is just why Husserl approaches it more freely than the problems
of perception or knowledge. He moves it into a central position, and
what he says about it is both original and enigmatic. Consequently, this
problem provides us with our best basis for questioning phenomenology
and recommencing Husserl^ efforts Instead of simply repeating what he
said. It allows us to resume, instead of hii theses, the very movement of
hli thought" (Sipns, trans. Richard C. McCleary [Evanston, 111. ： North
western University Press, 1964], p 84). I like to cite this passage because
our relation to the greatest of French ph«iomeno】ogln ahaB perhapaa】-
ready become what hia wai to HuflMrfi not a repetition but a renewal
of the very movement of hli r«fl«ctlon,
248 / PH E N O M E N O L O G Y
the phenomenological attitude and the objective attitude have

been placed in opposition：
Taking language as a fait accompli— as the residue of past acts
of signification and the record of already acquired meanings_ the
scientist inevitably misses the peculiar clarity of speaking, the
fecundity of expression. From the phenomenological point of view
(that is, for the speaking subject who makes use of his language
as a means of coirnnunicating with a living community), a lan
guage regains its unity. It is no longer the result of a chaotic past
of independent linguistic facts but a system all of whose elements
cooperate in a single attempt to express which is turned toward
the present of the future and thus governed by a present logic.89
As we see, the dialogue with the scientist is poorly begun；

in fact, it is not even begun at all. It is not language taken as an
object of science that forms the system；contrary to Saussure
and his initial definitions, it is stated that linguistics sees ^lan
guage in the past.**fl On the contrary, it would be in the present
moment of speech that a system would be established. Having
placed synchrony on the side of the speaking subject and
diachrony on the side of objective science, the phenomenologist
tries to incorporate the objective viewpoint in the subjective
viewpoint, to show that a synchrony of speech envelops the
diachrony of language.
Formulated in this way, the problem seems easier to resolve
than it will prove to be for the next generation. The problem
consists in showing how past language lives in present lan
guage ：it is the task of a phenomenology of speech to show this
insertion of the past of language into the present of speech.
When I speak, the signifying intention is, in me, only a certain
void to be filled by words；this intention must then become full
by realizing
a certain arrangement of already signifying instruments or al

ready speaking significations (morphological, syntactical, and
lexical instruments, literary genres, types of narrative, modes of
presenting events, etc.) which arouses in the hearer the presenti
ment of a new and difPerent signification, and which inversely (in
the speaker or writer) manages to anchor this original significa
tion in the already available ones.10
8. Signs, p. 85.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.§ p. Q〇 .
In this way, speech is itself the reanimation of a certain lin
guistic knowledge which comes from the previous words of other
men, words which are deposited, “sedimented，” “instituted," im
to become this available credit by which I can now endow with
verbal flesh this oriented void in me (which is signifying inten
tion) when I want to speak.
The analysis of Signs is in the line of the great chapters of
The Phenomenology of Perception, where language was likened
to a ^gesture** which puts in operation a know-how, an acquired
power. Is language as it is considered by linguists taken seri
ously? The fact that the notion of language as an autonomous
system is not taken into consideration weighs heavily on thin
phenomenology of speech. Its recourse to die process of “sedi
mentation1* carries it back to the old psychological notion of
habitus, of acquired powers, and the structural fact as such In
missed.
In truth, what matters to Merleau-Ponty is not the dialogue
with the linguist but the philosophical result：if I can express
myself only by reactivating sedimented and available significa
tions, then speech is never transparent to itself, and conscious
ness is never constituting； consciousness is always dependent on
the “instructive spontaneity’’ 11 of my body, with its acquired
powers and its available verbal tools. It is an entire philosophy of
truth which is at issue here ：truth as the process of recovering
available meanings in new meanings, in the absence of any
ultimate statement given in a pure, absolute, total meaning.
Truth is another name for sedimentation, which is itself the pres

ence of all presents in our own. That is to say that even and es
pecially for the ultimate philosophical subject, there is no objectiv-
ity which accounts for our super-objective relationship to all times,
no light that shines more brighdy than the living present's light.12
Of course, this phenomenology of speech and of the speaking

subject holds in reserve questions that structuralism avoids and
does not resolve ：How does an autonomous system of signs,
postulated without a speaking subject, enter into operations,
evolve toward new states, or lend itself to usage and to history?
Can a system exist anywhere but in the act of speech? Is it any
thing other than a cross-section of a living operation? Is lan
guage anything more than a system, that is potential but never
ix. Ibid., p. 07.
12. Ibid,, p. 06.
25〇 / P H E N O M ENO LO G Y
completely actual, burdened by latent changes, apt for a sub

jective and intersubjective history? -
These questions are doubtless legitimate. But they are pre
mature. We can recover them today only at the end of a long
detour by way of linguistics and in general by way of the science
of signs. Now, this detour includes, at least provisionally,
bracketing the question of the subject with the intention of
constituting a science of signs worthy of the name.
Before proposing a detour, structural linguistics thrusts a
challenge at the philosophy of the subject：the challenge consists
in the fact that the notion of signification is placed in a different
field from that of the intentional aimings of a subject. The
displacement is quite comparable to the one that psychoanalysis
imposes on the effects of meaning of immediate consciousness.
But it results from a system of assumptions different from that
of Freudian topography. We presented these postulates earlier,13
and we will only recall the series here. First postulate：the
dichotomy of language and speech (in language, we letain the
established convention, with its institutional character and its
concept of social constraint； in speech, we fall back on execution,
with its character of individual innovation and unlimited com
binations). Second postulate ：the subordination of the dia
chronic point of view to the synchronic point of view (the
comprehension of system states precedes that of changes, which
are conceived only as the crossing from one system state to
another). Third postulate: the reduction of the substantial as
pects of language— phonemic substance and semantic substance
— to formal aspects. Language, thus relieved of its fixed con
tents, becomes a system of signs defined by their differences
alone； in such a system there is no longer any signification— if
by that we mean the content proper to an idea considered in
itself— but only values, that is, relative, negative, and opposi
tional dimensions. What is at stake in any structural hypothesis
is now clear一 and this is what the fourth postulate expresses：
“it is scientifically legitimate to describe language as being
essentially an autonomous entity composed of internal de
pendencies, in a word, a stru c tu re 14
In other words, the system of signs no longer has any out
side, it has only an inside；the last postulate, which can be
termed the postulate of the closed system of signs, summarizes
13. See, above, “Structure, Word, Event.”

14. L. Hjelmslev, Essais linguistiques (Copenhagen, 1959). p. ai-
and commands all the others. It constitutes the major challenge
for phenomenology. For the latter, language is not an object
but a mediation trou gh which and by means of which we are
directed toward reality (whatever it may be )；language consists
in saying something about something；by this it loses itself as it
moves toward what it says, going beyond itself and establishing
itself in an intentional movement of reference. For structural
linguists, language is self-sufficient：all its differences are im
manent in it, and it is a system which precedes the speaking
subject. In this way, the subject postulated by structuralism re
quires a different unconscious, a different "location** from the in
stinctual unconscious, yet it is a similar unconscious, a homolo-
gous location. This is why the displacement in the direction of
this other unconscious, this other <<location>, of meaning, imposes
on reflecting consciousness the same renunciation as the dis
placement in the direction of the Freudian unconscious；this is
also why one can speak in both cases of one and the same
semiological challenge.
What kind of philosophy of the subject will be capable of
taking up this challenge in the form given to it by structuralism?
Let us look once more at the three theses of phenomenology: its
theory of meaning, its theory of the subject, its theory of reduc
tion一whose solidarity we have shown. The theory of the subject
is certainly our major preoccupation in the present essay；but,
as we have said, its meaning arises from the theory of significa
tion to which it is joined on the descriptive level and from the
theory of reduction which founds it on the transcendental level.
This is why we can arrive at the subject of phenomenological
philosophy from the theory of signification and from the theory
of reduction.
How is the phenomenological concept of meaning affected by
the challenge of semiology? A renewed phenomenology of mean
ing cannot be content with repeating descriptions of speech
which do not acknowledge the theoretical status of linguistics
and the primacy of structure over process which serves as an
axiom for linguistics. Nor can it be content to juxtapose what it
would call the openness of language to the lived world of experi
ence to the closed state of the universe of signs In structural
linguistics：it is through and by means of a linguistics of lan
guage that a phenomenology of speech Is possible today. Only
through a hand-to-hand combat with the presuppositions of
semiology will phenomenology reconquer the sign's relation of
transcendence or Its refergnoa,
252 / P H E N O M ENO LO G Y
Now language, considered according to the hierarchy of its

levels, contains a kind of unit other than those which figure in
inventories of elements, Whether these are phonemic units,
lexical units, or syntactical units. The new linguistic unit on
which the phenomenology of meaning can lay its foundation is
not language but speech or discourse；and this unit is the sen
tence or utterance. It must be termed a semantic and not a
semiological unit because it is what properly signifies. The prob
lem of signification has thus not been eUminated by substituting
for it the difference between signs；the two problems are of
different levels. Nor does one have to choose between a philoso
phy of sign and a philosophy of representation：the first articu
lates the sign at the level of potential systems available for the
performance of discourse；the second is contemporaneous with
the accomplishment of the discourse. The semantic problem dif
fers from the semiological problem precisely in that the sign, con
stituted by difference, is transferred to the universe by means of
reference；and this counterpart that reference constitutes in
relation to difference can legitimately be called representation
in accordance with the whole mediaeval, Cartesian, Kantian, and
Hegelian tradition. A linguist like Benveniste evinces an extreme
tact and an acute sense of tradition when he compares ^saying
something, “signifying，” and “representing.” 15 Opposing sign to
sign is the semiological function；representing the real by signs
is the semantic function, and the first is subordinate to the sec
ond. The first function serves the second；or, if one prefers,
language is articulated for the purpose of the signifying or repre
sentative function.
It is on the basis of this fundamental distinction between
the semiological and the semantic that it is possible to realize a
convergence of the linguistics of the sentence (considered as an
occurrence of discourse), the logic of meaning and of reference
(after the manner of Frege and Husserl), and the phenomenol-
ogy of speech (after the manner of Merleau-Ponty)； but one can
15. Cf. Emile Benveniste, Prohldmes de linguistique g^nSrale (Paris,

1966); English translation by Mary E. Meek, Problems in General Lin
guistics, Miami Linguistics Series, no. 8 (Coral Gables: University of
Miami Press, 1971). [Page numbers refer to English edition.] ‘Tor the
naive speaker as for the linguist, the function of language is 'to say
something/ What exactly is this Something1 in regard to which language
is articulated, and how is it defined with respect to language itself? The
problem of meaning is raised" (p. 7). Now, this function is nothing other
than the ^faculty of representing the real by a 'sign* and of underatanding
the ^sign* as representing the real” (p. 23).
no longer, like the latter, leap directly to the phenomenology of
speech. One must patiently disentangle semantics from semiol
ogy and, consequently, must first take the detour of the structural
analysis of taxonomic systems, then build the level of the ut
terance on the phonological, lexical, and syntactical levels. The
theory of utterances, in turn, requires that the level of meaning
be constructed, moment by moment, as ideal or nonreal, and
then the level of reference— with its requirement of truth, of ap
prehending the real, or, as Husserl says, of fulfillment. Then, and
only then, will it be possible to recover in a nonpsychological
sense the notions of intentionality, outward directedness, and
expression in the sense of Merleau-Ponty. The passage through
language restores to the analysis of speech its properly linguistic
character, which can be preserved only if one seeks it in the
direct extension of the ^gesture." It is, on the contrary, as the
semantic realization of the semiological order that speech, by
an inverse reaction, causes human gesture to appear as signify
ing, at least inchoately. A philosophy of expression and significa
tion which has not passed through these semiological and logical
mediations is condemned to stop short of the properly semantic
level.
In return, it is legitimate to affirm that, outside the semantic
function in which they are actualized, semiological systems lose
all intelligibility；one can even wonder whether the distinction
between the signifier and the signified would retain a sense
outside the referential function. Now this distinction appears
as a requirement of the linguistic sign, to such an extent that
Hjelmslev makes it the criterion for distinguishing the latter
from nonlinguistic signs, which do not present the duality of the
expressive level and the level of content. Is it not then the aim
[irfsJe] of significance— which the sentence confers by degrees
on each of its elements and first of all on the words16— which
assures, through its movement of transcendence, the internal
unity of the sign? Would the signifier and the signified remain
connected if the aim of signification did not pass through them
like an arrow directed toward a possible referent, which exists
or does not exist?
Thus, the semiological order, considered alone, is only the
set of conditions of articulation without which language could
16. On the notion of the word «• a lexical ilgn In relation to the
■ entence, cf. ^Structure, Word, F.v«n(,M ibov«. The word, we stated In
that c»Ay, ii the point of artlaulaiian of the aemiological and the
■ 0m龜ntic, of form _nd In _v_ry In籲Uncfl of d iic o u m
254 / P H E N O M E N O L O G Y
not exist. But, the articulated as such is not yet language in its
power of signifying. It is only the system of systems, which could
be called language in general, whose existence, which is only
potential, makes something like discourse possible； but discourse
exists in each instance only in the occurrence of discourse. Here
are knotted the potential and the actual, articulation and opera
tion, structure and function, or, as we said elsewhere, system
and event.17
Such is the theory of signification which would be capable
of leading, by a descriptive route, to a theory of the subject
which, following the initial intention of this article, would take
support from its obstacle and embrace its adversary.
It is indeed on this level of organization and realization that
language has a reference and a subject：since the system is
anonymous or, rather, has no subject— not even “one”一because
the question “Who is speaking?" has no sense at the level of
language, it is with the sentence that the question of the subject
of language arises. This subject might not be me or who I think
I am; in any case, the question ‘"Who is speaking?” has a sense
at this level, even if it must remain a question without an
answer.
Here again it would be useless to repeat the classical analyses
of Husserlian and post-Husseriian phenomenology. They must
be incorporated into the linguistic domain in the manner sug
gested above：just as the passage from the semiological to the
semantic must be shown, so, too, it must be shown how the
speaking subject arrives at his own discourse.
Now the phenomenology of the speaking subject finds solid
support in the investigations of certain linguists concerning the
personal pronoun and the related verbal forms, the proper noun,
the verb and verb tenses, affirmation and negation, and, in
general, locutionary forms inherent in every occurrence of dis
course. The very expression "occurrence of discourse>, indicates
rather plainly that it is not enough to juxtapose a vague phe
nomenology of the act of speech to a rigorous linguistics of the
system of language ；it is, rather, a matter of tying language to
speech in the work of discourse.
I will limit myself here to a single example, that of the per
sonal pronoun and the relation of persons in the verb, which
was the object of a conclusive study by Benveniste.18 The per-
17. See, above, “Structure, Word, Event.”
18. Benveniste, Problemt in General Linguistics, pp. 195-204, 217-
3〇-
sonal pronouns (I-you-he) are, of course, first of all facts of
language ：a structural study of the relations of person in the
verb must precede any interpretation of the incidence of the
pronoun in each occurrence of discourse. Thus, I and you to
gether oppose he as the person to the nonperson and are them
selves opposed as "lie who speaks** and M he whom one addresses/1
But this structural study is unable to exhaust the comprehension
of these relations； it constitutes only a preface to this endeavor.
The signification of I is formed only in the instant when he who
speaks appropriates its meaning in order to designate himself；
the signification I is singular in each instance；it refers to the
occurrence of discourse which contains it and refers solely to it.
* 7 signifies "the person who is uttering the present instance of
the discourse containing 1 / 19 Outside this reference to a par
ticular individual who designates himself in saying 1, the per
sonal pronoun is an empty sign that anyone can seize ：the
pronoun is waiting there, in my language, like an instrument
available for converting this language into discourse through my
appropriation of this empty sign.
In this way, we overtake the language-speech articulation：
it rests in part on particular signs— or “indicators”一of which
the personal pronouns form only one group alongside demonstra
tive pronouns and adverbs of time and place. These signs do not
connote a class of objects but designate the present occurrence
of discourse；they do not name but indicate the I, the here, the
now, the this, in short, the relation of a speaking subject to an
audience and a situation. What is admirable is that "language is
organized in such a way that it allows each speaker to appro
priate the entire language by designating himself as the ao
The problem of the verb would have to be reconsidered in the
same way. On the one hand, there is a structure of temporal
relations characteristic of a given language ；on the other hand,
there is the utterance of time in an occurrence of language, in a
sentence which, as such, temporalizes the whole of its utterance.
It is this utterance which designates itself by the present tense
and, by this, puts all the other tenses into perspective. This refer
ence to the present is entirely comparable to the ostensive (or
deictic) role of the demonstrative pronouns and of adverbial
locutions (Tiere，” “now,” etc.): “this ’present’ . . . has only a
linguistic fact as its temporal reference: the coincidence of the
i g, Ibid., p. a i i .
20. Ibid., p.
event described with the instance of discourse that describes

it.” 21
Is this to say that the Z is a creation of language? The lin
guist is tempted to say so ('language alone/* writes Benveniste,
“establishes the concept of ‘ego’ in reality, in its reality, which is
that of the beingw).22 The phenomenologist will object that the
ability of the speaker to posit himself as subject and to oppose to
himself another as listener is the extralinguistic presupposition
of the personal pronoun. He will remain faithful to the distinc
tion between the semiologlcal and the semantic, according to
which it is only in language that signs are reduced to internal
differences；as such, I and you as empty signs are creations of
language ；h^t the hie et nunc use of this empty sign through
which the vocable I becomes a signification and acquires a
semantic value supposes the appropriation of this empty sign by
a subject who posits himself in expressing himself. Of course,
the postulate I and the expression I are contemporaneous；but
the expression I as litde creates the postulate I as the demonstra
tive pronoun this creates the spectacle of this world toward which
the deictic indicator points. The subject posits itself, just as the
world shows itself. Pronouns and demonstratives are in the
service of this positing and this showing；they designate as
clearly as possible the absolute character of this positing and
this showing, which are the within and the without of language ；
the world toward which it is directed, insofar as it says some
thing about something；the nonworldly within of the ego which
radiates in its acts. Language is no more a foundation than it
is an object; it is mediation; it is the mediwm, the “milieu，” in
which and through which the subject posits himself and the
world shows itself.
Phenomenology’s task becomes more precise: this positing
of the subject, which the entire tradition of the cogito invokes,
must henceforth be performed in language and not alongside
it, under pain of never transcending the antinomy of semiology
and phenomenology. This positing must be made to appear in
the occurrence of discourse, that is, in the act by which the
potential system of language becomes the actual event of speech.
The phenomenological notion of the subject has still to be
related to the transcendental reduction. We have explained our
position in regard to this double relation of the subject, its rela
21. lbid.t p. 227.

22. Ibid., p. 224.
tion to signification and its relation to reduction. The first rela
tion remains on the descriptive level, as the preceding discussion
confirmed ：the subject, in fact, is what refers to itself in re
ferring to the real；retroreference and reference to the real are
symmetrically constituted. The second relation adds nothing to
the first on the level of description; it concerns the necessary
conditions of self-reference in the reference to something：in
this sense it is like the “transcendental” in relation to the “em
pirical.
What happens, then, to reduction after structuralism?
As we know, Husserl saw in the reduction the primordial
philosophical act by which consciousness cuts itself off from the
world and constitutes itself as an absolute； after reduction, every
being is a meaning for consciousness and, as such, is relative
to consciousness. The reduction thus places the Husserlian cogito
at the heart of the idealist tradition by extending the Cartesian
cogito, the Kantian cogito, the Fichte an cogito. The Cartesian
Meditations go much further in the direction of the self-
sufficiency of consciousness and move as far as a radical sub
jectivism which no longer allows any outcome other than con
quering solipsism by its own excesses and deriving the other from
the originary constitution of the ego cogito.
The privilege thus conferred on consciousness in an idealist
conception of reduction is radically incompatible with the pri
macy that structural linguistics accords to language over speech,
system over process, structure over function. In the eyes of
structuralism, this absolute privilege is the absolute prejudice of
phenomenology. With this antinomy the crisis of the philosophy
of the subject reaches its extreme point.
Must phenomenological reduction be sacrificed at the same
time as the prejudice of consciousness conceived as absolute?
Or is another interpretation of reduction possible? I should like
to explore another path and to propose an interpretation of reduc
tion which would more closely connect it to the theory of signifi
cation, whose central position in phenomenology we have ac
knowledged. Thus, forgoing the identification of reduction with
the direct passage which, at once and in one step, would make
the phenomenological attitude spring from the natural attitude
and would snatch consciousness from being, we will take the
long detour of signs; and we will look for the reduction among
the necessary condltlonM of Nl^nlfylng relations, of symbolic
function as such. Thua carrlod to the level of a philosophy of
language, reduction roll鼸〇■ to appe霾 r as a fantastic operation at
258 / P H E N O M. E N 0 L 0 G Y
the end of which consciousness would be a remainder, a residue

left by the abstraction of being. Reduction appears rather as the
**transcendental" of language, the possibility for man to be some
thing other than a nature among natures, the possibility for him
to relate to the real by designating it through signs. This re
interpretation of reduction, in connection with a philosophy of
language, is perfectly homogeneous with the conception of phe
nomenology as the general theory of meaning, as the theory of
generalized language.
Let us follow this path ：we are encouraged to do so by a
penetrating remark made by Levi-Strauss in his celebrated "In
troduction to the Work of Marcel MaussM：
Whatever the moment or circumstance of its appearance in some

stage of animal life, language could only have come into being
instantaneously. Things could not have come to be meaningful
little by little . . . ; this radical change has no counterpart
within the domain of knowledge, which is developed slowly and
progressively. In other words, at the moment when the entire uni
verse, at once, became meaningful, it was not known any better
for this, even if it is true that the appearance of language must
have precipitated the rhythm of the development of knowledge.
Thus there is a fundamental opposition in the history of the hu
man mind between symbolism, which offers a character of dis
continuity, and knowledge, which is characterized by continu
ity . . .
The symbolic function is thus not on the same level as the

various classes of signs that can be discerned and articulated by
a general science of signs, by a semiology； it is not any kind of
class or genus but a condition of possibility. What is at issue
here is the very birth of man to the order of signs.
Posed in these terms, the question of the origin of the sym
bolic function seems to me to give rise to a completely new
interpretation of the phenomenological reduction ：the reduction,
we said, marks the beginning of a signifying life, and this begin
ning is nonchronological, nonhistorical; it is a transcendental
beginning, in the way that the contract is the beginning of life
in society. The two beginnings, thus understood in their radical
ness, are one and the same beginning if, following L^vi-Strauss*s
remark, the symbolic function is the origin and not the result of2 3
23. Claude L^vi-Strausa, Întroduction k YOeuvre de Marcel Mausi,1

in Marcel MaufiB, anthropoZoyie (Paris, 1 〇 5〇〉 , p. 42,
social life ：""Mauss still believes it possible to develop a sociologi
cal theory of symbolism, while obviously what must be sought
is a symbolic origin of society.M24
But an objection arises：the ideal genesis of the sign, you
will say, requires only a separation, a difference, but not neces
sarily a subject. So that the same L^vi-Strauss who just alluded
to the sudden emergence of symbolism vehemently rejects any
philosophy which would place the subject at the origin of lan
guage and is more willing to speak in terms of “unconscious
categories of thought/>25 Henceforth, is one not obliged to in
clude difference among these unconscious categories of thought,
and is this subjectless difference not the necessary condition of
all the differences that appear in the linguistic field ：difference
between signs, difference, within the sign, between the signifler
and the signified? If this is so, HusserVs fundamental error
would be to have postulated a transcendental subject for this
difference, which, strictly speaking, is only the transcendental
condition which allows for all the empirical differences between
signs and within signs. The difference must then be "desubjec-
tmzedMif it is to be the transcendental of the sign.
If the objection were valid, we would have gained nothing for
a philosophy of the subject by identifying the reduction with the
origin of the symbolic function, since the transcendental order
to which the difference belongs would require no transcendental
subject.
But the objection is not valid. It results from a confusion be
tween the semiological and the semantic levels. Now, as we have
said, discourse is something other than language, and significa
tion is something other than the sign. After acknowledging this,
any reflection which would limit itself to making explicit the
necessary conditions of the semiological order would quite
simply miss the problem of the necessary conditions of the
semantic order as such, which is what is living, concrete, and
actual in language.
It is not surprising that an investigation applied to the tran
scendental of language, but which misses the passage from lan
guage to discourse, discovers only a negative and not a subjec-
tive condition of language ：difference. This is not nothing, of
course, but it is not yet the primary dimension of reduction,
namely, the transcendental production of difference. Husserl,
!24. Ibid., p. 23.
35， Claude U v t-S U iu u , AnihraôiogU itructurale (Paris, i 〇 5〇 ), p.
8a.
too, recognized this negative side of the signifying relation；he

called it "suspension,” “placing in brackets,” “placing out of
bounds," and he applied it directly to the natural attitude in
order to cause the phenomenological attitude to spring from it
through difference. If he called the being, bom of this difference,
consciousness, this difference was only the nonnaturalness, the
nonworldliness required by the sign as such. But this conscious
ness offers no egological character；it is only a ttfield,w the field
of cogitationes. Absolutely speaking, a consciousness without
an ego is perfectly conceivable, and Sartre^ well-known essay
'The Transcendence of the EgoMhas demonstrated this perfectly.
As a result, the birth of consciousness as the difference of
nature, or, to speak like L^vi-Strauss, the appearance of language
through which “the entire universe, at once, became meaning
ful,” does not require a subject, even if it does require a con-
sciousness, that is, a field of cogitationes. This philosophical con
clusion contains nothing that should surprise u s ：the semiologi-
cal order is by definition that of a system without a subject.
But the semiological order does not constitute the whole of
language. One must still pass from language to discourse：it
is only on this level that one can speak of signification.
What, then, becomes of reduction in this crossing-over from
sign to signification, from the semiological to the semantic? One
can no longer remain within its negative dimension of variation,
of distance, of difference；one must reach its positive dimen
sion, namely, the possibility for a being who is torn away from
intranatural relationships by difference to turn toward the
world, to direct his attention toward it, to apprehend it, to grasp
it, to understand it. And this movement is entirely positive； it is
the movement in which, according to the statement of Gustave
Guillaume mentioned above, signs are directed back to the
universe；it is the moment of the sentence, which says some
thing about something. Henceforth, the “suspension” of the
natural relation to things is only the negative condition of the
establishment of signifying relation. The differential principle
is only the other side of the referential principle.
One must then take reduction not merely in its negative sense
but in its positive sense and must challenge all the pretenses of
negativity, all the hypostases of difference, which follow from a
truncated model of language in which the semiological has
taken the place of the semantic.
But If reduction must be taken in its positive sense, as the
necessary condition of reference, It must also be taken In its
subjective sense, as the possibility for an ego to designate itself
in the occurrence of discourse. Positing and subjectivity go hand
in hand to the degree to which the reference to the world and
self-reference— or, as we said above, the showing of a world
and the positing of an ego— are symmetrical and reciprocal. In
the same way, there could be no aiming at the real, thus no
claim to truth, without the auto-assertion of a subject who is both
determined by and involved in his speaking.
If, then, I can conceive a nonsubjective origin of difference
which establishes the sign as sign, the same cannot be said of ihc
origin of reference. In this respect, I would be willing to say that
the symbolic function, that is, the possibility of designating the
real by means of signs, is complete only when it is thought in
terms of the double principle of difference and reference, thus
in terms of an <unconsciousw category and an "egologicar cate
gory. The symbolic function is, of course, the ability to place
every exchange (and, among these, exchanges of signs) under
a law, under a rule, thus under an anonymous principle which
transcends subjects. But, even more, it is the ability to actualize
this rule in an event, in an occurrence of exchange, of which
the occurrence of discourse is the prototype. The latter involves
me as subject and places me in the reciprocity of the question
and the answer. A sense of symbol too often forgotten reminds
us of this ：under its social form, and not its purely mathematical
form, symbolism implies a rule of recognition between subjects,
In his fine book, which owes much to L^vi-Strauss but differs
from him in this particular point, Edmond Ortigues writes：this
law "compels every consciousness to return to itself by way of
its other . . . ；society exists only through this process, which
is internal to each subject/*26 Reduction, in its full sense, is this
return to the self by way of its other which makes the tran
scendental no longer a kind of sign but a kind of signification.
After meeting the semiological challenge, such is the true
^return to the subject.,>It is no longer separable from a medita
tion on language ；it is a meditation which does not stop short,
a meditation which crosses the threshold separating the
semiological from the semantic. For this way of thinking, the
subject founded by reduction is nothing other than the beginning
of signifying life, the simultaneous birth of the spoken being
of the world and the speaking being of man.
a6. Edmond Ortlguoi, L# Di$oour$ §t le iymbole (Paris, 296a), p.

100
III. T o w a r d a H e r m e n e u t i c s o f t h e “I A m ”
T he t i m e has c o m e to compare the two series of analy

ses which make up this study. The reader will undoubtedly have
been struck by the discordant character of these critiques and
even more so by that of the responses. For one thing, it is dif
ficult to superimpose the two kinds of <<realismMwhich follow
from the two critiques ：the realism of the id, the realism of the
structures of language. What do the topographic, economic, and
genetic concepts of psychoanalysis have in common with the
semiological notions of structure and system, the instinctual
unconscious of the former with the categorial unconscious of
the latter?
Now, if these two critiques are independent in their most
fundamental presuppositions, it is not surprising that the re
newals to which they give rise in the philosophy of the subject
are of a different nature as well. This is why the philosophy of
the subject that holds a future is not merely one which will
have undergone the test of psychoanalytic criticism and lin
guistic criticism； it is the philosophy which will be able to project
a new receptive structure for including in its thought both the
lessons of psychoanalysis and those of semiology. The last part
of this paper aims at staking out this direction, and this explains
its rather exploratory and tentative character.
i. First of all, it seems to me that reflection on the speaking
subject allows us to return to the conclusions reached at the close
of the discussion involving psychoanalysis and to place them in a
new light. Consciousness, we said then, is always presupposed by
topography, as is the ego by Freudian personology, and we added
that psychoanalytic criticism was unable to touch the core of
apodicticity of the “I think” but attacks only the belief that I am
such as I perceive myself. This split between the apodicticity of
the “I think” and the adequation of consciousness takes on a
less abstract meaning if it is connected to the notion of the
speaking subject. The apodictic core of the “I think” is also the
transcendental of the symbolic function；in other words：what
is beyond all doubt is the act of retreat and distance which
creates the separation through which the sign is possible, and
its possibility is the possibility of being related in a signifying—
and not just a causal一manner to all things.
What is the benefit of this comparison between apodicticity
and symbolic function? It is the following：that all philosophical
reflection on psychoanalysis must henceforth unfold in the milieu
of sense, of meaning. If the subject is the speaking subject pur
excellence, the whole adventure of reflection, when it puNNrw
through the interrogation of psychoanalysis, is an adventuro on
the level of the signifier and the signified. This rereading ()i'
psychoanalysis in the light of semiology is the first task imposed
on a philosophical anthropology that wants to reassemblo th«i
scattered results of the human sciences. It is notable that, cvt;n
when Freud speaks of instinct, it is always in and based on un
expressive level, in and based on certain effects of meaning
which lend themselves to deciphering and which can be treated
like texts ：oneiric texts or symptomatic texts. It is in this milieu
of signs that the analytic experience itself unfolds, insofar
as it is the work of speech, the duel of speaking and listening,
the complicity of speech and silence. Belonging to the order of
signs justifies in a fundamental manner not only the com
municability of analytic experience but also its ultimate homo
geneity with the totality of human experience which philosophy
attempts to reflect and to understand.
The specificity of psychoanalytic discourse comes from the
effects of meaning that it deciphers which express relations of
force. From this results the apparent ambiguity of Freudian dis
course: it appears to operate with notions belonging to two dif
ferent levels of coherence, to two universes of discourse, that of
force and that of meaning. It is a language of force, whence
the entire vocabulary designating the dynamism of conflicts
and the economic play of cathexes, withdrawal of cathexes, and
countercathexes. It is a language of meaning, whence the en
tire vocabulary concerning the absurdity or the meaning of
symptoms, dream thoughts, their overdetermination, and word
plays— all of which converge in it. These are relations among
meanings, which are disentangled in interpretation：between
the apparent meaning and the hidden meaning there is the rela
tion of an unintelligible text to an intelligible text. These rela
tions of meaning are thus found entangled in the relations of
force ；the entire dream work is expressed in this mixed dis
course ： relations of force are exhibited and disguised in relations
of meaning at the same time that the relations of meaning
express and represent relations of force. This mixed discourse is
not an equivocal discourse for want of clarification ：it grips
firmly the very roullty w« dl*covor when we read Freud and
which we can cull (fMr MPtnantivu of desire. All the philosophers
who have reflected on the relations between desire and meaning

have encountered this problem, from Plato, who duplicates the
hierarchy of ideas in the hierarchy of love, to Spinoza, who re
lates the degrees of the clarity of the idea to the degrees of aflfir-
mation and action of the conatus； in Leibniz, as well, the degrees
of appetition of the monad and those of his perception are cor
relatives : “the action of the internal principle which causes the
change or the movement from one perception to another can
be called appetition；it is true that the appetite cannot always
completely reach the perception toward which it tends, but it
always obtains something from it and attains new perceptionsM
(Monadology, § 15).
Thus reinterpreted in the light of semiology, psychoanalysis
has as its theme the relationship between the libido and the
symbol. It can then be included in a more general discipline
which we can call hermeneutics. Here, I am defining as her
meneutics any discipline which proceeds by interpretation, and
I give to the word înterpretation** its strong sense：the discern
ing of a hidden meaning in an apparent meaning. The semantics
of desire stands out against the much vaster field of the effects
of double meaning：the very ones that a linguistic semantics
encounters under another name, which it calls transfer of mean
ing, metaphor, allegory. The task of a hermeneutics is to bring
face to face the various functions of interpretation by disciplines
as different as the semantics of linguists, psychoanalysis, the
phenomenology and the comparative history of religions, literary
criticism, etc. One then sees how, through this general herme-
neutlcs， psychoanalysis can be related to a reflective philosophy:
by passing through a hermeneutics, reflective philosophy emerges
from abstraction；the affirmation of being, the desire and the
effort of existing which constitute me, find in the interpretation
of signs the long road of awareness. The desire to be and the sign
are in the same relation as libido and symbol. This means two
things：on the one hand, understanding the world of signs is
the means of understanding onself；the symbolic universe is
the milieu of self-explanation； in fact, there would no longer be
any problem of meaning if signs were not the means, the milieu,
the medium by grace of which a human being seeks to situate
himself, to project himself, to understand himself. On the other
hand, in the opposite direction, this relation between desire to be
and symbolism means that the short path of the intuition of the
self by the self is closed. The appropriation of my desire to exist
is impossible by the short path of consciousness；only the long
path of interpretation of signs is open. Such is my working
hypothesis in philosophy. I call it concrete reflection, that is,
the cogito mediated by the entire universe of signs.
2. It is no less important to subject a final reflection on
semiology to the knowledge of psychoanalysis. Nothing could be
more dangerous, in fact, than to extrapolate the conclusions of
a semiology and to say ：everything is sign, everything is lan
guage. The reinterpretation of the cogito as the act of the speak
ing subject can tend in this direction, and, to an even greater
extent, so can the interpretation of the phenomenological reduc
tion as this separation which opens the chasm between the sign
and the thing ：man then seems to be no more than language,
and language seems to be absence from the world. In relating
the symbol to instinct, psychoanalysis forces us to move in the
opposite direction and to immerse the signifier in the existent
once more. In a sense, language is primary, because it is always
starting from what man says that the network of signifying in
which presences are grasped can be unfolded. But, in another
sense, language is secondary；the distance of the sign and the
absence of language from the world are only the negative coun
terpart of a positive relation ：language speaks, that is, shows,
makes present, brings into being. The absence of the sign from
the thing is only the negative condition for the sign to reach the
thing, touch it, and die in this contact. This sense of language
as belonging to being requires, then, that one reverse the rela
tion once more and that language appear itself as a mode of
being in being.
Now, psychoanalysis prepares this reversal in its own fash
ion ：the anteriority, the archaism of desire, which justifies our
speaking of an archaeology of the subject, forces us to subordi
nate consciousness, symbolic function, language, to the primary
position of desire. As we said above, Freud, like Aristotle, like
Spinoza and Leibniz, like Hegel, places the act of existing on the
axis of desire. Before the subject consciously and willingly posits
himself, he has already been posited in being at the instinctual
level. That instinct is anterior to awareness and volition signifies
the anteriority of the ontic level to the reflective level, the priority
of the I am to the I think. What we said earlier in regard to the
relation of instinct to awareness must now be said of the relation
of instinct to languanr. The I am Is more fundamental than the
I speak. Philosophy muMt thon j{ct under way toward the I speak
by starting from Ihr [KiiiHlnB of thc3 I am；from the very heart of
language, philuMt” 山y tnu麵t Begin M thc road toward language/" aa
Heidegger demands. The task of a philosophical anthropology

is to show in what ontic structures language occurs.
I just mentioned Heidegger； a philosophical anthropology to
day, with the resources of linguistics, semiology, and psycho
analysis, must retrace the route outlined by Being and Time, the
route which starts from the structure of being-in-the-world,
crosses through a consideration of situation, the projection of
concrete possibilities, and understanding, and moves toward the
problem of interpretation and language.
In this way, a hermeneutic philosophy must show how inter
pretation itself arrives at being-in-the-world. First there is being-
in-the-world, then understanding, then interpreting, then saying.
The circular character of this itinerary must not stop us. It is
indeed true that it is from the heart of language that we say
all this；but language is so made that it is able to designate the
ground of existence from which it proceeds and to recognize it
self as a mode of the being of which it speaks. The circularity
between 7 speak and I am gives the initiative by turns to the
symbolic function and to its instinctual and existential root. But
this circle is not a vicious circle；it is the living circle of expres
sion and of the being-expressed.
If this is so, the hermeneutics which reflective philosophy
must include must not be limited to effects of meaning and dou
ble meaning ： it must boldly he a hermeneutics of the I am. Only
in this way can the illusion and the pretensions of the idealist,
subjective, solipsistic cogito be conquered. This hermeneutics of
the I am can alone include both the apodictic certainty of the
Cartesian 1 think and the uncertainties, even the lies and illu
sions, of the self, of immediate consciousness. It alone can yoke,
side by side, the serene assertion I am and the poignant doubt
Who am I?
Such is my answer to the initial question：what in reflective
philosophy holds a future? I answer ：a reflective philosophy
which, having completely incorporated the corrections and the
lessons of psychoanalysis and semiology, takes the long and
roundabout route of an interpretation of private and public,
psychic and cultural signs, where the desire to be and the effort
to be which constitute us are expressed and made explicit.
PART IV
The Symbolism
of Evil Interpreted
“Original Sin ” ：
A Study in Meaning
W e read in one of the Confessions of Faith of the Re

formed Churches that the will of man is ^totally captive to sinM
(the La Rochelle Confession of Faith, art. 9). It is easy to find
in this word wcaptivitywthe entire prophetic and apostolic preach
ing. But the Confession of Faith immediately adds ：tcWe believe
that the entire descent of Adam is infected with this contagion.
The contagion is original sin and a hereditary vice. It is not just
an imitation, as the Pelagians, whose errors we deplore, have
held*1 (art. 10). Original sin, hereditary vice ：these words indi
cate that a change in level has occurred. We have passed from
the field of preaching to that of theology, from the domain of
the pastor to that of the doctor. And at the same time a change
is produced in the domain of expression. Captivity was an image,
a parable；hereditary sin tries to be a concept. The following
text suggests even more. M We also believe that this vice is truly
sin and that it suffices to condemn the entire human race, even
infants in the wombs of their mothers, and that it is taken as a
sin before God (etc.)M(art. 11). We have the impression not
only of entering the discipline of theology, which is the concern
of doctors, but also of entering into controversy, the disputes
of the schools. The interpretation of original sin as an original
guilt of little children in the wombs of their mothers is no longer
on the level of preaching. It has reached a point where the
theologian's work veers toward abstract speculation, toward
scholasticism.
I do not Intend to oppose one formulatfon to another on this
Translated by Peter MoOormIch.

270 / THE SYM B O LISM OF EVIL
abstract level. I am not a dogmatic theologian. Rather, I intend

to reflect on the meaning of the theological work crystallized in
a concept like original sin. I am posing, then, a methodological
problem. This concept as such is not a biblical one. And yet, by
means of a rational apparatus which we will have to reflect
upon, it tries to account for the very content of the religious
confession and the ordinary preaching of the church. Hence, to
reflect on its meaning is to retrieve the intentions of the concept,
its power to refer back to what is an announcement and not a
concept. This announcement both denounces evil and pro
nounces absolution. In short, to reflect on its meaning is in a
certain way to deconstruct the concept, to break down its motiva
tions, and by a kind of intentional analysis to retrieve the arrows
of meaning which aim at the kerygma itself.
I have just used a disquieting expression, “to deconstruct the
concept.” I think that the concept must be destroyed as a con
cept in order to understand the meaning intention. The concept
of original sin is false knowledge, and it must be broken as
knowledge. It involves the quasi-juridical knowledge of the guilt
of the newborn and the quasi-biological knowledge of the trans
mission of a hereditary taint. This false knowledge compresses
in an inconsistent notion a juridical category of debt and a
biological category of inheritance.
The point of this apparently destructive criticism, however,
is to show that false knowledge is at the same time true symbol,
a symbol of something which it alone is capable of transmitting.
So the criticism is not just a negative one. The defeat of knowl
edge is the other side of working toward the recovery of meaning.
This recovery is a retrieval of the M orthodoxMintention, the strict
sense, and the ecclesiastical meaning of original sin. And this
meaning, as we shall see, is no longer juridical knowledge,
biological knowledge, or, worse yet, juridical-biological knowl
edge concerning some kind of monstrous hereditary guilt；it is
rather a rational symbol of what we declare most profoundly in
the confession of sins.
What impulse brought Christian theology to this conceptual
elaboration? Two answers can be given to this question. First,
an external one, the impulse of Gnosticism. In The Extracts of
Theodotus we read the questions which Clement of Alexandria
took as a definition of Gnosticism. '*Who were we? What have we
become? Where were we previously? From what world have we
been ejected? Toward what goal are we hastening? From what
have we been delivered? What is birth What Is re
tcOriginal Sin" ： A Study in Meaning / 271
birth (&vay€vvn<Tis)?9t The Gnostics were the ones, a Christian
author says further, who posed the question vbdev rA _
^Whence comes evil?>, Let us understand that it was the Gnostics
who tried to make this question a speculative one and to formu
late an answer to it that would be knowledge, yvCsais, Gnosticism.
Our first working hypothesis, therefore, will be this ：that It
was for apologetic reasons— to combat Gnosticism — that Chris
tian theology came to orient itself along the lines of Gnostic:
thought. Although clearly anti-Gnostic, the theology of evil let
itself become engaged on the very ground of Gnosticism and
hence elaborated a similar conceptual structure,
Anti-Gnosticism became quasi-Gnosticism. I will try to show
that the concept of original sin is anti-Gnostic in its basic pur
pose but quasi-Gnostic in its articulation.
This first answer, however, requires a second one. Tho
apologetic concern cannot by itself explain why Christian theol
ogy let itself become engaged on alien ground. We shall nqed
to search out the reasons for its elaboration in the very meaning
this quasi-Gnosticism carried. In the experience of evil and in the
avowal of sin there is perhaps something terrible and impenetra
ble that makes Gnosticism the permanent temptation of thinking,
a mystery of iniquity whose pseudo-concept of original sin is
like an enciphered language.
Before plunging into our meditation I want to note that the
majority of our examples and quotations will be taken from Saint
Augustine. This is inevitable. Saint Augustine witnesses to the
great historical moment when this concept is formed. Augustine
first led the battle against the Manichaeans and then against the
Pelagians. And in this battle on two fronts the polemical and
apologetic concept of original sin was developed. But my work
is not the work of a historian. It is not the history of the anti-
Manichaean polemic and then the anti-Pelagian polemic which
interests me. I am interested rather in Augustine's own motiva
tions, to the degree that we are able to recover them when we
tiy to think what we believe and profess.
I am, then, neither a dogmatic theologian nor a historian；I
would like, very precisely, to contribute to what I will call a
hermeneutics of the so-called dogma of original sin. This inter
pretation, which is reductive on the epistemological level but
recuperative on the symbolic level, Is a development of what I
have elsewhere nttompted under the title The Symbolism of Evil
It moves the crUlcium of thcologlca] language from the level of
imageB and mythical ^f/mboU like rtcaptivltylw ^fall"
272 / THE S YM B O LISM OF EVIL
“perdition,” “rebellion,” etc.， to that of ratiamiZ symboZs， like those

in Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and the Church Fathers.
As A POLEMICAL AND APOLOGETIC CONCEPT, “original

sinMfirst of all means one thing ：that evil is not something that
exists, that evil has no being, no nature, because it comes from
us, because it is the work of freedom. This first thesis, we will
see, is insufficient, for it accounts only for the clearest aspect of
evil, what we may call actual evil in the double sense of the
exercise or act of evil and of the presence of evil, of evil in the
process of being realized. This second sense is the one Kierke
gaard would say is posited in the instant. In any case, this first
thesis must be well established. For when we speak later on of
peccatum originate or naturale, the reintroduction of a quasi
nature for evil must not budge us from refusing evil a nature
or a substance. This is what will make trouble for the pseudo
concept of peccatum naturale.
In order to comprehend how faithful this concept is, at least
in its first aspect, to the biblical tradition, we must keep in mind
the enormous countervailing pressure which Gnosticism exer
cised on the Church^ confession of faith for several centuries.
If Gnosticism is gnOsis, that is, understanding and knowing and
knowledge, then the reason is, as Jonas, Quispel, Puech, and
others have shown, that evil for Gnosticism is an almost physi
cal reality that infects man from outside. Evil is external. It is
body, thing, and world. And the soul has fallen into it. This
exteriority of evil immediately furnishes the schema of some
thing, of a substance that infects by contagion. The soul comes
from “elsewhere,” falls Tiere，” and must return “there.” The
existential anguish which is at the root of Gnosticism is im
mediately situated in oriented space and time. The cosmos is a
machine for damnation and salvation. Soteriology is cosmology.
At the same time, everything which is image, symbol, and
parable— such as error, fall, captivity, etc.— congeals into a
so-called knowing which sticks to the letter of the image. In
this way, as Puech says, a dogmatic mythology is born which is
inseparable from a spatial cosmic configuration. The cosmos
which the psalmist heard singing the glory of God and whose
beauty and divinity the Stoic philosopher spoke of, la not only
“Original Sin ” ： A Study in Meaning / 273
divinized but counterdivlnized. The cosmos, one might say, is
satanized and hence provides the human experience of evil with
the support of an absolute exteriority, an absolute inhumanity,
an absolute materiality. Evil is the very worldliness of the world.
Far from proceeding from human freedom toward the vanity 〇 (*
the world, evil proceeds from the powers of the world toward
man.
Moreover, the evil which man confesses is less the act of
doing evil, malfeasance, than the state of being in the world, the
misfortune of existing. Sin is destiny interiorized. This is also
why salvation comes to man from elsewhere, from out there, by
a pure magic of deliverance, without any connection with human
responsibility or even personality. In Gnosticism, false knowl
edge, which is the mimicry of rationality, derives from the very
interpretation of evil. Because evil is thing and world, myth is
“knowledge.” The gnosis of evil is a realism of the image, «
making worldly the symbol. In this way the most fantastic dog
matic theology in Western thought is born and the most fantastic
imposture of reason has the name “gnosis.”
It is against this gnosis of evil that the Greek and Latin
Fathers, with a striking unanimity, repeatedly argued that evil
has no nature；evil is not something；evil is not matter；evil is
not substance; evil is not world. Evil does not exist in itself. Evil
comes from us. What has to be rejected is not only the answer to
the question but the question itself. I cannot answer malum esse
(evil is) because I cannot ask quid malum? (what is evil?)；
I can only ask unde malum faciamus? (whence comes the fact
that we do evil? ). Evil is not being but doing.
With this doctrine the Fathers held firmly to the uninter
rupted tradition of Israel and of the Church, which I will call the
penitential tradition, which found in the story of the Fall its
plastic form, its exemplary symbolic expression. What the sym
bol of Adam transmits is first of all and essentially the affirma
tion that man is, if not the absolute origin, at least the point
where evil emerges in the world. Sin has entered the world
through one man. Sin is not world； it comes into the world. Well
before Gnosticism, the Yahwist— or his school— had had to fight
•gainst the Babylonian representations of evil which made of
•Vll a power contemporary with the origin of things. Evil was a
power that God had combatted and vanquished before the
foundation of the world and In order to found the world. The
Idea of a catastrophe befalling an Innocent creation through an
•xcmplary man already animated the great myth of Primordial
274 / THE s y m b o l i s m o f e v i l
Man. The very name of the historic artisan of evil summarized

what is essential in this symbol. Adam is the earthly one, the
man created from a sod and destined for dust.
This existential bearing of the Adamic account is what
Augustine found again in his struggles against Mani and the
Manichaeans. In the dramatic two-day controversy with For-
tunatus, Augustine denounced the basis of the Gnostic myth.
The soul hurled into evil could say to its God: <rYou have thrown
me into unhappiness. Are you not cruel to have wanted me to
suffer for your kingdom, against which this nation of dark ones
can do nothing?M(end of the first day). In this way Augustine
elaborated a purely ethical vision of evil, where man is integrally
responsible. He distinguishes this vision from a tragic vision,
where man is no longer the actor but the victim of a God who
himself suffers even if he is not cruel. Perhaps in the Contra
Felicem Augustine pushed this first conceptualization of original
sin farthest when he opposed the evil will to evil nature. In com
menting on Matthew 12:33 (Either make the tree good and its
fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit badM), he writes ：
this “either ■ . . o r ” designates a power and not a nature
(potestatem indicat, non naturam). Then he summarizes the
essence of the Christian theology of evil as opposed to Gnosti
cism ： **If there is repentance, there is guilt； if there is guilt, there
is will；if there is will in sin, it is not a nature that constrains usM
(Contra Felicem, § 8).
Having come to this point, we might think that the con
ceptualization of sin had to be oriented toward the idea of a
contingency of evil, toward the idea of an evil that arises as a
purely irrational event or, as Kierkegaard would say, as a qualita
tive ‘leap.’’ But a mind which was contemporary with Neo
platonism had no way of thematizing such concepts. To approach
such an idea, it had no other course than to reshape certain
Neoplatonic concepts which were fixed in the spectrum of the
degrees of being. Hence Augustine can say in the Contra
Secundinum that evil is "the inclination of what has more being
toward what has less being" (inclinat ab . . . ad, § 12 )；or,
to be deficient (deficere) is not yet nothing, but it tends toward
the nothing. Because, when things which have more bein^ deviate
{declinant) toward those which have less being, the deficient
things are not the latter but are rather those which are deviating
and which from that moment have less being than before, not by
becoming the things toward which they have deviated but by each
one in its proper species becoming less (| 1 1).
€€Original Sin y ,： A Study in Meaning / 275
In this way the concept of defectus is painfully developed as
the concept of a negatively oriented consent. <4Nothingw desig
nates here not an ontological counterpole to being but an exis
tential direction, the opposite of conversion. It is an aversio a
Deo which is the negative moment of the conversio ad creaturam
(De libero arbitrio I. 16. 35 ；II. 19. 53-54).
So Augustine saw at this moment that the confession of evil
had to reach toward impossible concepts. The answer to the
question unde malum faciamusl must be ：Scm non potest quod
nihil est (It is impossible to know the nothing) (De lib. arb.
II. 19. 54). 'The movement of turning away (aversio) which,
we realize, constitutes sin is a deficient movement ( defectivus
motus), and every deficiency comes from nonbeing (omnis
autem defectus ex nihilo est). This is why we come to confess
without hesitation that this movement cannot be from God^
(ibid.). So, too, in the Contra Fortunatum：M If it is true that
cupidity is the root of all evils, it is useless for us to look beyond
cupidity for any other kind of evil.” Later on Augustine will say
to Julian of Eclanum ：€<You want to know whence comes bad
will? You will find man” (Corztra JiiZiarzum, chap. 41).
Doubtless this impossible concept was too negative— de
fectus, declinatio, corruptio (the last term designating for Augus
tine a defectus in a natura). Moreover, the advance toward noth-
lngness— the ad non esse of evil— is difficult to distinguish from
the ex nihilo of the creature (an expression which designates
only the creature’s imperfect being, its dependence as creature).
Augustine did not have the means to conceptualize the positing
of evil. Hence, to combat the idea of an evil matter, he had to
take over the ex nihilo of the creation doctrine which had served
to combat the idea of an uncreated matter and to make of it an
ad non esse, a movement toward nothingness. But this nothing
ness of inclination would always remain poorly distinguished,
In a theology which employed Neoplatonic terms, from the
nothingness of origin, which designates only the total character
of creation.
Nonetheless, it was not the equivocation between the two
nothings— the nothing of creation and the nothing of deficiency
一which exploded this first conceptualization, which was per
petuated in our Confessions of Faith as wcorruptionMand ^nature
totally corrupted.”
This negativity does not account for a certain number of
traits In the Hebrew and Chrlitian experience which the Adamic
myth had tranimlttod and whioh do not pass into the Idea of a
276 / THE SYM BO LISM OF EVIL
defectus, of a corruptio naturae. But these are the traits which

the anti-Pelagian controversy will accentuate. These are the ones
which will compel the elaboration of a much more positive con
cept— our concept of original sin, of hereditary vice— and will
bring thinking back to Gnostic modes of expression by making
thought construct a concept as consistent as the Valentinians*
precosmic Fall or the Manichaeans* aggression of the Prince of
Darkness— in short, a dogmatic myth parallel to the Gnostic
myths.
II
A nd so t h e a d j e c t i v e “original” is what we now have

to explicate. We have seen that Saint Augustine also employs
the expression naturale peccatum. In addition, he says per gen-
erationem or generatim to indicate that it is not a question of
sins we commit, of actual sin, but of the state of sin in which
we find ourselves existing by reason of our birth.
If we try to reconstitute the filiation or line of descent of
meaning, what I will call the strata of meaning which are
sedimented in the concept, we find at the beginning an interpre
tive schema which is absolutely irreducible to any philosophy of
the will, the schema of inheritance (the Germans say Erbsuhde).
This is the inverse schema of the one we have been commenting
on up to now, the inverse of individual inclination. Contrary to
every individual initiation of evil, inheritance is a question of a
continuation, of a perpetuation, which is like a hereditary taint
transmitted to the entire human race by a first man who is the
ancestor of all men.
As can be seen, this schema of inheritance is linked to the
representation of the first man as the initiator and propagator
of evil. In this way, speculation on original sin finds itself bound
to the Adamic speculation of late Judaism. Saint Paul introduced
this speculation into the Christian deposit of faith by making a
parallel between Christ, the perfect man, second Adam, and
initiator of salvation, and the first man, the first Adam, the
initiator of perdition.
The notion of the first Adam, who in Paul was only an
antitype, “the figure of someone who was to come” (rOv〇 i rov
fikWovTos), was to become itself a nexus of speculation. The Fall
of Adam cuts history in two, just as the coming of Christ cuts
Ôriginal Siri9: A Study in Meaning / 277
history in two. The two schemata are more and more super
imposed like inverse images. A perfect and fabulous humanity
precedes the Fall in the same way as humanity at the end of
time succeeds to the manifestation of the archetypal Man.
On the basis of this core of meaning, the concept of original
sin as Augustine himself willed it to the Church will be con
stituted.
It is useful to stress the rigidity that Augustine introduced
into Paul's text, the text dealing with the parallel between the
two Adams, Romans 5:12 and following.
To begin with, for Augustine the individuality of Adam, a
historical personage and the first ancestor of man, who appeared
only a few millennia before us, is not questionable. But this wus
not a question for Pelagius and the Pelagians either. The Bi* iu6%
avOpu)-K〇v of Romans 5:12 and ig literally means per unumt irby
a single man•” Moreover, Augustine understood the 分， 1*如r«
^fiaprov of verse 12 as in quo omnes peccaverunt, i4in whom we
have sinned”一in quo referring to Adam. The Augustinlan
exegesis is, as we see, already a theological interpretation. For
if v means uall have sinned in Adam," then it is tempting to
find all men already contained in some fashion in the loins of
Adam, as was frequently said ；by contrast, If k<f>* $ means <4by
means of which，” “concerning wiiich，” or even ‘"because of the
fact that'' all have sinned, then the role of individual responsi
bility in this chain of hereditary sin is preserved.
In addition, the Augustinian exegesis minimizes everything
which in the Pauline speculation about Adam comes to limit
the literal interpretation of the role of the first man. First, the
fact that this figure is an antitype of the Christ figure— "in the
same way as . . . so too.w Next comes the progression which
is added to the parallel of the two figures — €ti{ by the fault of a
single man . . . how much more those who receive grace."
^Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound/1 Finally,
for Saint Paul, sin was not invented by the first man ；sin is a
mythic magnitude which goes beyond the figure of Adam. Cer
tainly this magnitude is transmitted by the first man— St
AvdpcjTrov, per unum, by a single man. But this urtus is not so
much a first agent, a first author, as a first vehicle. It is sin as
a supraindividual magnitude that gathers all men together, from
the first man even to ua, that “constitutes” each sinner, that
"abounds’1 and “rclgnu广So much for traits which can slow down
a purely juridical and biological Interpretation of Inheritance.
What I have juat callod tht mythic magnitude of sin In Saint
278 / THE S Y M B O L I S M 〇 F EVIL
Paul, in order to designate the suprapersonal character of entities

like law, sin, death, and flesh, resists the juridicizing that makes
its way through other Pauline concepts like that of imputa
tion (kWoyeiadai) ： Romans 5:13 says that no sin is imputed when
no law exists. We can expect that the loss of the mythic dimen
sion, still present in Saint Paul, ends by dissolving the supraper
sonal magnitude of sin in a juridical interpretation of individual
guilt corrected by a biologism of hereditary transmission.
Augustine is responsible for the classic elaboration of the
concept of original sin and for its introduction into the dogmatic
deposit of the Church on an equal footing with Christology as a
chapter in the doctrine of grace.
Here is where we must assign its true weight to the role of
the anti-Pelagian quarrel. It is certain that the polemic against
the Pelagians had been crucial, even though, as we shall see,
this does not free us from looking for the deep motive of the
dogma of original sin in the internal growth of Augustine’s
thought.
Indeed, Pelagius is in the line of the voluntarism of the anti-
Manichaean writings. In his commentary on the Thirteen Epis
tles of Saint Paul, Pelaglus can be seen to draw all of the conse
quences of a coherent voluntarism. Each man sins for himself.
God is just and can want nothing unreasonable. Hence, God
could not punish a man for someone else^ sin. Moreover, the
“in Adam” which everyone， or almost everyone， used to read in
Romans 5 can only mean a relation of imitation. In Adam means
like Adam. More radically, the austere and demanding Pelagius
does not doubt at all that man invokes his own powerlessness
and the power of sin only to excuse and to dispense himself from
wanting not to sin. This is why it must be said that man always
has the power not to sin, posse non peccare. Hence Pelagius was
in the narrow line of what we might call the contingency of evil,
which we have seen both is and remains an authentically biblical
theme. ul propose to you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose,
then，life”一which Pelagius translates as the libertas ad pec-
candum et ad non peccandum. For a voluntarism of this kind,
which has been pushed to the point of a coherent theory of con
tingency, the naturale peccatum interpreted as an inherited guilt
can only mean a fall back into Manichaeism. "Tou will never
cleanse yourself of the mysteries of Manes/* Julius Eclanus will
later say to Augustine.
It was to combat the interpretation of Pelagius, which does
away with the dark side of sin as a power that encompasseB all
men, that Saint Augustine went to the bitter end of the concept
of original sin by more and more giving it the meaning, on the
one hand, of a guilt of a personal character which juridically
merits death and, on the other, of a taint inherited by birth.
But if the doctrinal stiffness and the false logic of this con
cept can be attributed to the anti-Pelagian polemic, its profound
motivation cannot. While he was pursuing the voluntaristic line
against the Gnostics, the very experience of his conversion and
his vivid experience of the resistance of desire and habit to good
wdll brings Augustine to refuse with all his power the Pelagian
idea of freedom. For the Pelagians, freedom is without any ac
quired nature, without habit, without history and encumbrances.
It is a freedom that in each one of us would be a unique and
Isolated instance of the absolute in determination of creation.
The end of Book VIII of the Confessions testifies to this experi
ence, an experience which recalls Saint Paul and anticipates
Luther. It is the experience of a will that escapes from itself
and obeys another law than itself.
The decisive proof that the controversy with Pelagius does
not explain everything is that we find in the Treatise to Sim-
plicianus of 397— — and so more than 15 years before the first
anti-Pelagian treatise (the De peccatorum mentis et remissione
against Celestius dates from 414/5)— the almost definitive for
mulation of original sin. For the first time Augustine no longer
•peaks only of an înherited yunishmenf or of a '"bad habit,H
as he does in the previous treatises, but speaks rather of inherited
guilt and hence of a fault deserving punishment, a fault anterior
to every personal fault, and linked to the very fact of birth itself,
This step is taken by the meditation on Romans 9:10-29,
which shifts the exegetical center of the debate, so that it is no
longer, as in Romans 5, in the antithesis of two men, Adam and
Christ, but in the duality of God's two choices："1 loved Jacob and
I hated Esau/* "He grants mercy to those he wishes, and he
hardens his heart against those he wills•” Hence the problem of
evil Is again the problem of an antitype, no longer the antitype
of the man Christ but the antitype of an absolute act of God—
election. This antitype is reprobation. To shore up the justice of
this reprobation, symmetrical with election, Augustine states that
Esau was guilty even from before his birth. Here is the famous
text which links predestination and guilt from birth ：
All men form,丨 ■ it w m , i man of iln requiring adebtofexpU-

lion toward the dlvlnt and fovcrtlfn Justice. Thla debt God can
280 / THE S Y M B O L I S M OF EVIL
demand or remit without committing injustice (supplicium debens

divinae summaeque justiciae quod sive exigatur, sive donetur,
nulla est iniquitias). It is the debtors* act of pride which decides
from whom one must demand payment and to whom one will
remit the debt (i. 2. 16).
Here the beautiful image of earthenware and the potter is mo
bilized for designating the infection of all men by the first man.
I will not follow the accumulation of argument in the course
of the di伍cult battle, first from 412 against Celestius, then from
415 against Pelagius, and, finally, against Julius Eclanus, who
was more of a Pelagian than the sober Pelagius himself. On the
one hand, the juridical argument is ceaselessly tightened and
hardened. The indictment of humanity as a whole is the exonera
tion of God. The concern for coherence leads to the statement
that because sin is always voluntary— if it were not, Mani would
be right一 then, even before its exercise, our will must already be
implicated in the bad will of Adam— reatu ejus implicatos. It will
be necessary, then, to speak of a natural will in order to establish
the guilt of infants in the wombs of their mothers. On the other
hand, to combat the Pelagian thesis of a simple imitation of
Adam by the entire human succession, it will be necessary to
look for the vehicle of this infection in ttgeneratlonM(per genera-
tionem), at the risk of reviving the ancient associations in ar
chaic consciousness between stain and sexuality. In this way
the concept of inherited guilt is crystallized, a concept that
unites in an inconsistent notion a juridical category (voluntary
punishable crime) and a biological category (the unity of the
human species by generation). I do not hesitate to say that, from
the epistemological point of view, this concept does not have a
rational structure different from the Gnostic concepts — Valen
tine's fall prior to the empire, the empire of darkness according
to Mani, and so on.
Anti-Gnostic in origin and intention, because evil remains
integrally human, the concept of original sin becomes quasi-
Gnostic to the degree that it is rationalized. Henceforth it con
stitutes the cornerstone of a dogmatic mythology that is compara
ble, from the epistemological viewpoint, to that of Gnosticism.
In order to rationalize divine reprobation, which in Saint Paul
was only the antitype of election, Saint Augustine constructed
what I have been daring to call a quasi-Gnosticism. Certainly,
for Augustine the divine mystery remains total. But this mystery
is that of election：no one knows why God gives grace to one
person and no grace at all to another. In return, there la no
Ôriginal Sin 9>： A Study in Meaning / 281
mystery of reprobation：election is by grace, perdition is by law
[droit], and it is in order to justify this perdition by law that
Augustine has constructed the idea of a natural guilt, inherited
from the first man, effective as an act and, as a crime, punish
able.
I ask then ：does this train of thought differ essentially from
that of Job's friends, who explain to the suffering just man thu
justice of his sufferings? Does not the old law of retribution,
which Ezekiel and Jeremiah vanquished on the level of the col
lective guilt of Israel, take its revenge on the level of humanity
as a whole? Must not the eternal theodicy and its mad project of
justifying God, although it is God who justifies us, be denounced?
Is it not the absurd rationalizing of the advocates of God which
now inhabits the great Saint Augustine?
But then someone will ask, how is it that the concept of
original sin is part of the most orthodox tradition of Christian
ity? I do not hesitate to say that Pelagius can be right a thousand
times against the pseudo-concept of original sin. Nevertheless,
Saint Augustine transmits with this dogmatic mythology some
thing essential that Pelagius completely misunderstood. Perhaps
Pelagius is correct in his quarrel with the mythology of original
sin, and principally with the Adamic mythology. But it is Augus
tine who remains right, through and in spite of this Adamic
mythology.
This is what I want to try to show in the last section of this
paper. The moment has come to apply the rule of thought I
proposed at the beginning. The concept, I said, must be decon
structed. One has to go by way of knowledge^ failure to retrieve
the orthodox intention, the narrow meaning, the ecclesiastical
meaning. And I would suggest that this narrow meaning can no
longer be a concept but a symbol— a rational symbol, a symbol
for reason— of what we declare most profoundly and most es
sentially in the confession of sins.
Ill
W hat did I w ant to indicate by the expression wra-

tlonal symb〇r ? This ：that concepts do not have their own con
sistency but refer back to exproaalona which are analogous, not
because of a lack of rigor but bocauifl of an excess of meaning.
What we have to fathom, then, In the concept of original sin is
282 / THE SYMBOLISM OF EVIL
not its false clarity but its dark analogical riches. So, we must
retrace our steps. Instead of moving even further into specula
tion, we must come back to the enormous burden of meaning
contained in preiational “symbols,” like those contained in the
Bible， prior to any elaboration of an abstract language— symbols
like wandering, revolt, the missed target, the curved and tor
tuous path, and especially captivity (the captivity of Egypt,
then the captivity of Babylon), which becomes the cipher of the
human condition under the reign of evil.
With these symbols, which are more descriptive than ex
planatory, the biblical writers were aiming at certain obscure
and obsessive traits of the human experience of evil which can
not be transformed into the purely negative concept of fault.
What, then, are these traits of the confession of sin which resist
every transcription into the voluntaristic language of the anti-
Manichaean writings, every interpretation in terms of a con
scious waning of individual will?
In this penitential experience I would underline three re
markable traits. The first is what I would call the realism of sin.
The consciousness of sin is not its measure. Sin is my true situa
tion before God. The before GodMand not my consciousness of
it is the measure of sin. That is why there must be an other,
a prophet, to denounce sin. No becoming aware of myself on my
part is sufficient, all the more so because consciousness is itself
included in the situation and is guilty of both lies and bad faith.
This realism of sin cannot be retrieved in the too brief and too
clear representation of a conscious veering of the will. It is rather
a wandering course of being, a more radical mode of being than
any individual act. Thus Jeremiah compares the evil tendency
of the hardened heart to the black skin of the Ethiopian and
to the spots of the leopard (Jer. 13:23). Ezekiel calls this hard
ening of a life become inaccessible to the divine call the *Tieart
of stone.”
The second trait is the following. For the prophets this sinful
condition is not reducible to a notion of individual guilt like the
one the juridical Greco-Roman mind developed to give a just
basis for the administration of sentence by the tribunals. The
sinful condition has from the outset a communal dimension.
Men are included in it in a body. It is the sin of Tyre, of Edom,
of Gilead, the sin of Judah. A “we”一 the M we other poor sinners”
of the liturgy一is uttered in the confession of sins. This trans-
biological and transhistorical solidarity of sin constitutes the
metaphysical unity of the human race. It, too, is unanalyzable
in terms of multiple veerings of individual human wills.
The third trait is this. The penitential experience of Israel
had already underlined a darker aspect of sin. Sin is not only
a state, a situation in which man is sunk；sin is a power which
binds man and holds him captive. In this respect, sin is not so
much a veering as a fundamental impotence. It is the distance
between “I want” and “I can.” It is sin as “misery.”
Now in his conversion experience, Saint Paul had already
stressed this aspect of impotence, of slavery and passivity, to
the point of apparently conceding to the Gnostic vocabulary.
Thus he speaks of “the law of sin which is in our members."
Sin is for Paul a demonic power, a mythical magnitude, like Law
and Death. Sin “inhabits” man more than man commits sin. Sin
"enters” into the world; it “intervenes”；it “abounds”；sin “reigns."
As can be seen, this experience more than any other differs
on all counts from that proud voluntarism of the first writings of
Augusdne. It suffices simply to recall the formula in the De libero
arbitrio— nusquam nisi in voluntate esse peccatus— which the
Retractationes (I. 13. 2；I. 15. 2) will have such difficulty in
saving from Pelagian raillery. In a word, this experience is
oriented toward the idea of a quasi-natural evil, an idea that
dangerously is taken from the existential anguish which is at
the origin of Gnosticism. The experience of possession, of bond
age, of captivity, tends toward the idea of being infected from
without, of a contagion by a bad substance, which is the source
of the tragic myth of Gnosticism.
Perhaps we begin to glimpse the symbolic function of origi
nal sin. I would say two things. First, that this function is the
same as that of the story of the Fall, which is situated not at
the level of concepts but at that of mythical images. This story
has an extraordinary symbolic power because it condenses in
an archetype of man everything which the believer experiences
In a fugitive fashion and confesses in an allusive way. Far from
explaining anything at all (and thereby being nothing more than
an etiological myth, comparable to all the popular fables), this
story expresses, by means of a plastic creation, the unexpressed
basis of human experience一which is inexpressible in direct
and clear language. It can be said that the story of the Fall is
mythical. But if one remains there, the story’s meaning is lost.
It is not sufficient to exclude the myth from history. The truth
which Is not historical must bo disengaged from this myth. The
Cambridge theologian, C. H. Dodd, in his admirable little book

The Bible Today, is very much to the point when he assigns a
primary function to the Adamic myth, that of universalizing to
the human race the tragic experience of exile. “It is the tragic
fate of Israel projected upon mankind as a whole. The Word of
God that drove man out of Paradise is the word of judgment that
sent Israel into exile, now given a universal application."1
Hence, it is not the myth as such which is the word of God, for
its primary meaning could be completely different. It is its
revealing power concerning the human condition as a whole
which constitutes its meaning. Something is discovered,
unconcealed, which, without myth, would have remained cov
ered, concealed.
But this function of universalizing to the human race the
experience of Israel is not all. The Adamic myth reveals at the
same time this mysterious aspect of evil, namely, that if any
one of us initiates evil, inaugurates it一something Pelagius saw
very well— each of us also discovers evil9 finds it already there,
in himself, outside himself, and before himself. For every con
sciousness which awakens when responsibility is taken, evil is
already there. In tracing back the origin of evil to a distant
ancestor, the myth discovers the situation of every m an ：evil
has already taken place. I do not begin evil；I continue it. I am
implicated in evil. Evil has a past；it is its past；it is its own
tradition. Hence, myth unites in the figure of an ancestor of the
human race all these traits we have just enumerated— the reality
of sin anterior to every awakening of conscience, the communal
dimension of sin, which is irreducible to individual responsi
bility, the impotence of will that surrounds every actual fault.
This triple description, which modem man can articulate, crys
tallizes in the symbol of a before** which the myth of the first
man gathers up.
We are here at the source of the schema of inheritance which
we have found at the basis of the Adamic speculation from Saint
Paul to Saint Augustine. But the meaning of this schema ap
pears only if we completely renounce projecting the Adamic
hgure into history, only if we interpret it as a “type,” “the type
of the old man.MWe must not make the transition from myth
to mythology. It will never be said enough just what evil has
been done to Christianity by the literal interpretation, the '"his-
1. C. H. Dodd, The Bible Today (Cambridge, Eng.s At the UnlveTsity

Press, 1968), p. 113.
Ôriginal Sin " ： A Study in Meaning / 285
toricist” interpretation， of the Adamic myth. This interpretation
has plunged Christianity into the profession of an absurd history
and into pseudo-rational speculations on the quasi-biological
transmission of a quasi-juridical guilt for the fault of an other
man, back into the night of time, somewhere between Pithecan
thropus and Neanderthal man. At the same time, the treasure
hidden in the Adamic symbol has been squandered. The strong
mind, the reasonable man, from Pelagius to Kant, Feuerbach,
Marx, or Nietzsche, will always be right against mythology, al
though beyond every reductive critique the symbol will always
invite thought. Between the naive historicism of fundamentalism
and the bloodless moralism of rationalism the way of the her
meneutics of symbols opens up.
Someone will object here that I have accounted for symbols
only on the mythical level, for example, the Yah wist story of the
Fall, but not at all for symbols on the rational level, and hence
not for the concept of original sin which was the object of this
lesson. Did I not say, in fact, that this concept had the same
symbolic function as the story of the Fall in Genesis? This is
true, but it is still only half the meaning. On the one hand, it
must be said that the concept refers back to the myth, and the
myth refers back to the penitential experience of ancient Israel
and of the Church. Intentional analysis goes from pseudo
rationality to pseudo-history, and from pseudo-history to eccle
siastical lived experience. But the path that must be taken is the
opposite one ：myth is not only pseudo-history, it is a revealing.
As such, it unearths a dimension of experience which otherwise
would have remained without expression and which would have
aborted precisely as lived experience. We have suggested some
of the revelations proper to myth. Must we say that the process
of rationalization inaugurated by Paul’s Adamic speculation,
which resulted in the Augustinian concept of original sin, is de
nuded of its proper meaning, that it is only a pseudo-knowledge
grafted onto myth, interpreted literally, and dressed up In
pseudo-history?
I see the essential function of the concept— or pseudo
concept— of original sin in the effort to preserve what was
gained in the first conceptualization, namely, that sin is not
nature but will, and to incorporate in this will a quasi-nature of
evil. Augustine pursues the rationa】phantom of this quasi-nature
that affects not nature but will. This can be seen in the article In
the Retractationen whore Augustine takes up again the and-
Manichaean afllrmullon of hla youth] M Sln Is not to be sought
286 / THE SYM BO LISM OF EVIL
elsewhere than in the will.MThis affirmation is the one which the

Pelagians now throw back at him and to which he responds ：the
original sin of infants is ^spoken of without voluntary absurdity,
because it was contracted as a consequence of the evil will of the
first man and hence is in some way hereditary” （ I. 13. 5). And，
further on, he writes that the sin by which we are “implicated in
his guilt” is “the work of the will” （ I. 15. 2). There is something
desperate here from the viewpoint of conceptual representation
and something very profound from the metaphysical viewpoint.
It is in the will itself that there is something of a quasi-nature.
Evil is a kind of Involuntariness at the very heart of the volun
tary, no longer facing the voluntary but within the voluntary；
and it is this which is the servile will. And this is why there must
be a monstrous combination of a juridical concept of imputation
in order for evil to be voluntary and a biological concept of in
heritance in order for it to be involuntary, acquired, contracted.
At the same time, conversion is brought to the same profound
level. If evil is in a symbolic and not in a real sense at the radical
level of “generation,” conversion itself is “regeneration.” I would
say that, with original sin, there is constituted, by means of an
absurd concept, the antitype of regeneration, the antitype of the
new birth. Thanks to this antitype, the will here appears as
charged with a passive constitution implied in an actual power
of deliberation and of choice.
I will conclude with these three warnings. ( 1 ) We never
have the right to speculate about the concept of original sin—
which, taken in itself, is only a rationalized myth— as if it had a
proper consistency. It makes explicit the Adamic myth, just as
this myth makes explicit the penitential experience of Israel.
One must always come back to the Church^ confession of sins.
(2) We never have the right to speculate on the evil already
there, outside the evil that we do. Here, doubtless, is the ultimate
mystery of sin. We inaugurate evil. It is through us that evil
comes into the world. But we inaugurate evil only on the basis of
an evil already there, of which our birth is the impenetrable sym
bol. (3) We never have the right to speculate on either the evil
that we inaugurate, or on the evil that we find, without reference
to the history of salvation. Original sin is only an antitype. But
type and antitype are not only parallel (M just as . . . so tooM),
but there is a movement from one to the other, a 4thow much
more,” an “all the more” ：“where sin abounded, grace did much
more abound” （ Romans 5:20).
The Hermeneutics of Symbols
and Philosophical Reflection: I
T he a im o f t h is e s s a y is to sketch out a general theory

of symbol by investigating one precise symbol, or rather a de
termined complex of symbols ： the symbolism of evil.
The essay is organized about the following preoccupation：
How can thought that has once entered into the immense prob
lematic of symbolism and into the revealing power of symbol
develop along the line of rationality and rigor that has been
proper to philosophy from its origins? In brief, how can philo
sophical reflection be articulated upon the hermeneutics of sym
bols?
I shall first say a few words about the question itself. A medi
tation on symbols occurs at a certain moment of reflection；it
answers to a certain situation of philosophy and perhaps even of
modern culture. This recourse to the archaic, the nocturnal, and
the oneiric, which is also an approach to the birthplace of lan
guage, represents an attempt to avoid the difficulties in the prob
lem of a starting point in philosophy. We are all too familiar with
the harassing backward flight of thought in search of the M first
truth" and, still more radically, of inquiry after a radical starting
point that might not be a first truth at all.
Perhaps one must have experienced the deception that ac
companies the idea of a presuppositionless philosophy to enter
sympathetically into the problematic we are going to evoke. In
contrast to philosophies concerned with starting points, a medi
tation on symbols starts from the fullness of language and of
Translated by Denis Savage. Thli translation first appeared In the
International Philoiophical Quarterly! Volume II, no. 2 (May, 1962),
p A g e i I 0 X—a i 8 , and ia r«produc«d by permlasion of the publiiher.
[a87l
meaning already there；it begins from within language which

has already taken place and in which everything in a certain
sense has already been said ；it wants to be thought, not pre
suppositionless, but in and with all its presuppositions. Its first
problem is not how to get started but, from the midst of speech,
to recollect itself.
However, to oppose the problematic of symbol to the Car
tesian and Husserlian search for a starting point is to tie this
meditation too narrowly to a precise stage of philosophical dis
course. Perhaps we should take a larger view ：if we raise the
problem of symbol ricm;， at this period of history， we do so in con-
nection with certain traits of our “modernity” and as a rejoinder
to this modernity. The historical moment of the philosophy of
symbol is both the moment of forgetting and the moment of
restoring：forgetting hierophanies, forgetting the signs of the
Sacred, losing hold of man himself as belonging to the Sacred.
This forgetting is the counterpart of the imposing task of nour
ishing men and satisfying their needs through a technical con
trol of nature. The dim recognition of this forgetting is what be-
stirs us to restore the integrity of language. In the very age in
which our language is becoming more precise, more univocal,
more technical, better suited to those integral formalizations that
are called precisely “symbolic” logic (we shall return to this sur
prisingly equivocal use of the word “symbol” ）— it is in this age
of discourse that we wish to recharge language, start again from
the fullness of language. But this too is a gift from <<modemity.w
For we moderns are men of philology, of exegesis, of phenome
nology, of psychoanalysis, of the analysis of language. The same
age develops the possibility of emptying language and the possi
bility of filling it anew. It is therefore no yearning for a sunken
Atlantis that urges us on but the hope of a re-creation of lan
guage. Beyond the wastelands of critical thought, we seek to be
challenged anew.
“Symbol gives rise to thought.” This maxim that I find so
appealing says two things. The symbol gives ：I do not posit the
meaning, the symbol gives it ；but what it gives is something for
thought, something to think about. First the giving, then the
positing； the phrase suggests, therefore, both that all has already
been said in enigma and yet that it is necessary ever to begin
again and rebegin everything in the dimension of thought. It is
this articulation of thought left to itself in the realm of symbols
and of thought positing and thinking that I would like to inter
cept and understand.
The Hermeneutics of Symbols I ： / 289
I. T h e O r d er o f S y m b o l
O f w h a t v a l u e is the example of the symbolism of evil

for an investigation of such a wide range? It is an excellent
touchstone in several respects.
1. It is quite noteworthy that before all theology and all
speculation, even before any mythical elaboration, we should
still encounter symbols. These elementary symbols are the in-
substitutable language of the domain of experience that we shall,
to be brief, call the experience of “avowal” or self-confession
[Vaveu\. In fact there is no direct, nonsymbolic language of evil
undergone, suffered, or committed； whether man admits his re
sponsibility or claims to be the prey of an evil which takes hold
of him, he does so first and foremost in a symbolism whose
articulations can be traced out thanks to various rituals of “con
fession” that the history of religion has interpreted for us.
Whether we are dealing with the stain image in the magical
conception of evil as pollution, or with deviation images of the
crooked path, of transgression, of wandering or error, in the
more ethical conception of sin, or with the weight image of a bur
den in the more interiorized experience of guilt— in all these
cases the symbol of evil is constituted by starting from something
which has a first-level meaning and is borrowed from the ex
perience of nature— of contact, of man's orientation in space. I
have used the term ^primary symbols** for this elementary lan
guage to distinguish it from mythical symbols. Mythical symbols
are more articulated；they leave room for the dimension of nar
rative, with its fabled characters, places, and times, and tell the
Beginning and End of the experience of which the primary sym
bols are the avowal.
The primary symbols clearly point out the intentional struc
ture of symbol. Symbol is a sign in this, that like every sign it
Intends something beyond and stands for this something. But not
every sign is a symbol. Symbol conceals in its intention a double
intentionality. There is, first, the primary or literal intentionality,
which, like any meaningful intentionality, implies the triumph of
the conventional sign over the natural sign ：this is the stain, the
deviation, the weight— words which do not resemble the thing
signified. But upon this first intentionality is built a second in-
tcntlonality, which, through the material stain, the deviation in
space, the experience of burdon, points to a certain situation of
man in the 会 acred; thiN Nltuution. aimed at through the first
290 / THE S YM B O LISM OF EVIL
meaning, is precisely stained, sinful, guilty being. The literal and

obvious meaning, therefore, points beyond itself to something
which is like a stain, like a deviation, like a burden. Thus, in dis
tinction to technical signs, which are perfectly transparent and
say only what they mean by positing the signified, symbolic signs
are opaque：the first, literal, patent meaning analogically intends
a second meaning which is not given otherwise than in the first.
This opaqueness is the symbors very profundity, an inexhausti
ble depth.
But let us rightly understand this analogical bond between
the literal and the symbolic meanings. Analogy is a noncon-
clusive reasoning that proceeds through a fourth proportional
term (A is to B as C is to D). But in symbol I cannot objectivize
the analogical relation that binds the second meaning to the first.
By living in the first meaning I am drawn by it beyond itself ：the
symbolic meaning is constituted in and through the literal mean
ing, which brings about the analogy by giving the analogue. Un
like a comparison that we look at from the outside, symbol is
the very movement of the primary meaning that makes us share
in the latent meaning and thereby assimilates us to the sym
bolized, without our being able intellectually to dominate the
similarity. This is the sense in which symbol t4givesw；it gives be
cause it is a primary intentionality that gives the second mean
ing.
2. The second advantage of this investigation of the primary
symbols of avowal is that it brings directly to light a dynamics,
a life of symbols. Semantics opens to us the fact that there are
veritable linguistic revolutions, oriented in a definite direction；
a certain experience blazes its own trail by means of these verbal
stages. The trajectory of the experience of fault or guilt is thus
marked off by a succession of symbolic sketches. Hence we are
not delivered over to a doubtful introspection on the sense of
guilt； in place of the short and, to my mind, suspect way of intro
spective psychology, there must be substituted the long and more
sure way of reflection upon the dynamics of the great cultural
symbols.1i.
i. The long way seems to me all the more necessary when I confront
my interpretation with that of psychoanalysis. An introspective psychology
does not hold up in face of the Freudian or Jungian hermeneutics； whereas
a reflective approach, by the detour of a hermeneutics of cultural sym
bols, not only holds up but opens a true debate of one hermeneutics
with another. The regressive movement to tlie archaic, the infantile, the
Instinctual, must be confronted with the progressive movement of an as
cending synthesis.
The dynamics of the primary symbols, marked off by the
three constellations of stain, sin, and guilt, has a double mean
ing, and this very equivocation is most revealing of the dynamics
of symbol in general. From one of these symbols to the next,
there is on the one hand a movement of incontestable interiorlza-
tion；on the other, there is a movement of impoverishment of
symbolic richness； that is why, let it be said in passing, one must
not let oneself be misled by a tthistoricistMand M progressivistMin
terpretation of the evolution of consciousness in these symbols.
What is gain from one point of view is loss from the other. In
this progression， each “step” maintains itself only by taking up
the symbolic charge of the preceding；so we shall not be sur
prised that stain, the most archaic symbol, survives as the es
sential in the third step. Though submerged in fear, the expc-
rience of the impure already achieves speech, thanks to the
extraordinary richness of the stain theme.
From the beginning, in fact, stain is more than a spot；it
points to an affection of the person as a whole as regards his
situation in relation to the Sacred. Whatever it is that affects the
penitent cannot be removed by any physical washing. Through
interchangeable acts (covering with earth, spitting, throwing at
a distance, etc.) the rituals of purification intend an integrity
that can be spoken of in none but a symbolic language. This is
why it is the magic conception of pollution or stain, however
archaic and obsolete it be, that has transmitted to us the sym
bolism of the pure and the impure with all its richness of har
monics. At the center of this symbolism stands the schema of
“exteriority,” of investiture or infection by evil, which is perhaps
the inscrutable depths of the “mystery of iniquity.” Evii is evil
only insofar as I posit it, but at the very heart of freedom's posit
ing of evil is revealed a power of seduction by rtevil already there'*
which the ancient “stain” had from the start already affirmed in
the symbolic mode.
But an archaic symbol survives only through the revolutions
of experience and of language which submerge it. The iconoclast
movement does not proceed first from reflection but from sym
bolism itself； a symbol is first of all a destroyer of a prior symbol.
Thus we see the symbolism of sin take shape about images
which are the inverse of stain images；in place of exterior con
tact, it is now deviation (from the target, the straight path, the
limit not to be cro*i〇 d, and so on) which serves as guiding
schema. This switch In themei la the expression of an over
turning of fundamental motifi. A new category of religious
2g2 / THE SYMBOLISM OF EVIL
experience is born ：that of before God,Mof which the Jewish

berit, the Covenant, is the witness. An infinite exigency of perfec
tion comes to light, which keeps remodeling the terse, limited
commandments of the old codes. To this infinite exigency is
coupled an infinite menace that revolutionizes the old fear of the
taboos and makes one dread the encounter of God in his wrath.
What becomes, then, of the initial symbol? On the one hand,
evil is no longer a thing but a broken relationship, hence a noth
ing ；this nothing is expressed in the images of the breathiness,
the emptiness, the vaporousness and vanity of the idol. The very
wrath of God is like the nothingness of his absence. But at the
same time a new positivity of evil arises, no longer an exterior
“something” but a real enslaving power. The symbol of captivity,
which transforms a historical event (the Egyptian captivity, then
the Babylonian captivity) into a schema of existence, represents
the highest expression achieved by the penitential experience of
Israel. Because of this new positivity of evil, the first symbolism,
that of stain, was able to be taken up again ：the schema of ex
teriority is recovered, but at an ethical and no longer at a magical
level.
The same movement of breaking with and taking up again
can be observed in the transition from sin symbols to guilt sym
bols. On the one hand, the purely subjective experience of fault
tends to be substituted for the realist and, if we may so express
it, ontological affirmation of sin. Whereas sin is real even when
it is not known, guilt is measured by man^ awareness of it in be
coming the author of his own fault. In this way the weight and
burden image is substituted for the image of separation, devia
tion, wandering；in the depths of consciousness, before God,J is
being replaced by ‘"before myself” ；man is guilty when he feels
guilty. To this new revolution we incontestably owe a finer and
more measured sense of responsibility which, from being collec
tive, becomes individual, gradual instead of total. We have en
tered the world of reasonable indictment, the indictment by the
judge and the scrupulous conscience. But the ancient stain sym
bol is not, for all that, lost, for hell is displaced from the exterior
toward the interior. Crushed by the law which it shall never
satisfy, consciousness recognizes itself captive in its own in
justice and, even worse, in the lie of its pretension to justice
proper. At this extreme point of involution the stain symbol has
become that of servile liberty, servile will, of which Luther and
Spinoza speak in terms so different, but borrowed from the same
symbolism.
3. I have deliberately carried to this point the exegesis of the
primary symbols of fault, as well as the general theory of symbol
which depends on this exegesis, without relying on the mythical
structure that usually surcharges these symbols. It was necessary
to bracket the second-degree symbols both to make clear the
structure of the first-degree symbols and to bring out the speci
ficity of myth itself. These great narratives, which, as was said,
put into play space, time, and characters woven into story form,
have in fact an irreducible function. It is a threefold one. First,
they place the whole of mankind and its drama under the sign of
an exemplary man, an Anthropos, an Adam, who symbolically
stands for the concrete universal of human experience. Second,
they give to this history an elan, a direction, an orientation, by
unfolding it between a beginning and an end；they thus intro
duce a historical tension into human experience, a tension pro
duced by the double horizon of a genesis and an apocalypse.
Finally, and more fundamentally, they explore the cleavage in
human reality represented by the passage or leap from innocence
to guilt； they recount how man, originally good, has become what
he is in the present. That is why myth can exercise its symbolic
function only through the specific means of narrative；what it
wants to say is already drama.
But at the same time myth can take root only in a multi
plicity of narratives and leaves us before an endless diversity of
symbolic systems, similar to the multiple tongues of an unfixable
Sacred. In the particular case of the symbolism of evil, the diffi
culty of an exegesis of myths appears from the start under a
double form. On the one hand, the infinite multiplicity of the
myths must be overcome by imposing upon them a typology that
permits thought to become oriented within their endless variety,
while not doing violence to the specificity of the mythical figures
brought to the light of language by diverse civilizations；on the
other hand, the difficulty is to move from a static classification
of myths to a dynamics of them, For it is the understanding of
the oppositions and secret affinities among diverse myths that
prepares the way for the philosophical assimilation of myth. The
world of myths, even more than that of the primary symbols, is
not a serene and amicable world ；myths have never stopped
battling one another；every myth is iconoclastic toward others,
in the same way that every symbol】eft to itself tends to thicken,
to solidify into an idolatry. It is necessary, therefore, to share in
this battle, in this dynamics, by which symbolism is subject to
being itself surpassed.
294 / T HE s y m b o l i s m of evil
This dynamics is animated by a deep-seated opposition：on

one side are the myths that take the origin of evil back to a
catastrophe or primordial conflict prior to man ； on the other are
the myths that take the origin back to man.
To the first group belongs the drama of creation, illustrated
by the Babylonian poem of creation, Enuma elish, which tells of
the primordial combat whence proceed the birth of the most
recent gods, the foundation of the cosmos, and the creation of
man. To this same group belong the tragic myths which show the
hero subject to a fatal destiny. According to the tragic schema,
man falls into fault as he falls into existence；and the god who
tempts and misleads him stands for the primordial lack of dis
tinction between good and evil. With the Zeus of Prometheus
Bound, this god has attained the terrifying stature that no
thought can sustain. The Orphic myth of the soul in exile in an
evil body should also be placed in this first group；for this exile
is necessarily prior to every positing of evil by a free and re
sponsible man. The Orphic myth is a situational myth which
clearly seems to have been later projected into an origin myth；
the roots of the latter reach back to the theomachy which is close
to the cosmogonic and tragic myths.
Over against this triple myth stands the biblical narrative of
Adam's Fall. This alone is the anthropological myth proper. In it
can be seen the mythical expression of the whole penitential
experience of Israel. It is man who is accused by the prophet； it
is man who, in the confession of sins, discovers himself to be the
author of evil and who discerns, beyond his evil acts told off in
time, an evil constitution more original than any individual de
cision. The myth recounts the arising of this evH constitution in
an irrational event that unexpectedly takes place in a good crea
tion. It compresses the origin of evil into a symbolic instant that
is the end of innocence and the beginning of malediction.
Through the chronicle of the first man is unveiled the meaning
of the history of every man.
The world of myths is thus polarized between two tenden
cies ：one takes evil back beyond the human ；the other concen
trates it in an evil choice from which stems the pain of being
man. So again we come across, at a higher level of elaboration,
the polarity of the primary symbols, stretched between a schema
of exteriority, which is dominant in the magical conception of
evil as stain, and a schema of interiority, which only fully tri
umphs with the painful experience of the guilty and scrupulous
conscience.
But that is not yet what is most remarkable. The conflict is
not only between two groups of myths, it is repeated within the
Adam myth itself. This myth has in fact two faces. It is the nar
rative of the instant of the Fall, such as we have just presented
it. But at the same time it is the narrative of the temptation,
which is spread out over a duration, a lapse of time, and puts
into action a number of characters：the God who interdicts, the
object of the temptation, the woman who is seduced, and finally
and above all the serpent who seduces. The same myth that con
centrates the event of the Fall in one man, one act, one instant,
likewise disperses it over several characters and several episodes.
The qualitative leap from innocence to fault is, in this second
aspect, a gradual and indiscernible passage. The myth of the
caesura is thus at the same time the myth of the transition; the
myth of evil choice is the myth of temptation, of intoxication, of
imperceptible slipping into evil. The woman, figure of fragility,
is the polar counterpart of the man, figure of evil decision.
The conflict of the myths is thus included in a single myth.
That is why the Adam myth, which at first reading might be
looked upon as the net result of an energetic demythologizing of
all the other myths concerned with the origin of evil, introduces
into the narrative the highly mythical figure of the serpent. The
serpent, at the very heart of the Adam myth, stands for evil*s
other face, which the other myths tried to recount: evil already
there, pregiven evil, evil that attracts and seduces man. The
serpent signifies that man does not begin evil. He finds it. For
him, to begin is to continue. Beyond the projection of our own
covetousness, the serpent stands for the tradition of an evil more
ancient than man himself. The serpent is the Other of human
evil.
From this can be understood why there is a dynamics of
myths. The schema of exteriority which finds projection in the
body-tomb of the Orphics, the wicked god of Prometheus, the
primordial combat of the drama of creation— this schema, doubt
less, is invincible. That is why, dispelled by the anthropological
myth, it rises again within it and takes refuge in the figure of the
serpent. The figure of Adam is much more than the paradigm of
all present evil. Adam, as primordial man, is prior to every man ；
In his own fashion he Is once again the figure of evil prior to
every actual evil. Adam is older than every man, and the serpent
older than Adam. Thui this tragic myth is at the same time re
affirmed and destroyed by tho AdAm myth. This is undoubtedly
why tragedy liva鏖an iiftar Id double destruction by Greek
296 J THE S Y M B O L I S M O F EVIL
philosophy and Christianity； if its theology cannot be thought, if

it is, in the proper sense of the term, unavowable, still, what it
wants to say— and cannot say— continues to be shown in the
basic spectacle of the tragic hero, innocent and guilty.
It is this war of the myths that invites us to attempt the pas
sage from a simple exegesis of myths to a philosophy through
symbols.
II. F r o m S y m b o l i s m to R e f l e c t iv e T h o u g h t
A c c o r d in g l y , t h e t a s k is n o w to think starting from

the symbolic and according to the genius of the symbolic. And it
is a matter of thinking. For my part, I do not in the least abandon
the tradition of rationality that has animated philosophy since
the Greeks. It is not at all a question of giving in to some kind of
imaginative intuition, but rather of thinking, that is to say, of
elaborating concepts that comprehend, and make one compre
hend, concepts woven together, if not in a closed system, at least
in a systematic order. But at the same time it is a question of
transmitting, by means of this rational elaboration, a richness of
meaning or signification that was already there, that has already
preceded rational elaboration. For such is the situation：on the
one hand, all has been said before philosophy, by sign and by
enigma. That is one of the meanings 〇 £ the phrase of Heraclitus ：
'The master whose oracle is at Delphi does not speak, does not
dissimulate: he signifies (AXXA cnyMabei).” On the other hand, we
have the task of speaking clearly, by taking perhaps also the risk
of dissimulating, by interpreting the oracle. Philosophy begins
with itself ；it is a kind of beginning. Hence the coherent dis
course of philosophies is at once hermeneutic recovery of the
enigmas which precede, envelop, and nourish this discourse and
also inquiry into the beginning, search for order, desire for sys
tem. Happy and rare would be the conjunction within one and
the same philosophy of both the abundance of signs and re
tained enigmas and the rigor of a discourse without compla
cency.
The key, or at least the crux, of the difficulty lies in the re
lationship between hermeneutics and reflection. For every sym
bol gives birth to understanding by means of an interpretation.
How can this understanding be both in the symbol and beyond
the symbol?
I see three stages of this understanding, three stages that
stake out the movement which advances from living in symbols
toward thought that thinks from symbols.
The first stage, that of a simple phenomenology, remains an
understanding of symbol by symbol, by the totality of symbols.
This is already a kind of understanding, since it runs through
and interconnects the domain of symbols and gives it the con
sistency of a world. But it is still a life abandoned to symbol, de
livered up to symbol. The phenomenology of religion rarely goes
beyond this level；for it, to understand a symbol is to place it
within a larger homogeneous totality which, remaining on the
level of symbol, forms a system. Sometimes this phenomenology
lays out the multiple values of one and the same symbol to show
its inexhaustible character. In this first sense, to understand Is
to repeat within oneself this multiple unity, this permutation of
all the values within the same theme. Sometimes phenome
nology devotes itself to understanding one symbol by another；
understanding is then gradually extended, according to a remote
Intentional analogy, to all the other symbols that have some af
finity with the symbol under study. In another way, phenom
enology will understand a symbol by a ritual and a myth, i.e., by
other manifestations of the Sacred. It will further be shown, and
this shall be the fourth way of understanding, how the same
symbol unifies several levels of experience or representation ：the
exterior and the interior, the vital and the speculative. Thus, in
multiple ways, the phenomenology of symbol brings to light an
internal coherence, something liie a symbolic system. Cî this
level, to interpret is to bring out a coherence.
This is the first stage, the first level of thought that starts
from symbols. But one cannot rest here； for the question of truth
has not yet been posed. If a phenomenologist should give the
name truth to internal coherence, to the systematization of the
world of symbols, it is a truth without belief, truth at a distance,
a reduced truth. From such truth this question has been elimi
nated: Do I myself believe that? What do 1 personally make of
these symbolic meanings'} Now this question cannot be raised as
long as one remains at the level of comparativism, passing from
one symbol to another without taking a stand. This stage can
only be a stage, the stage of an understanding that is horizontal
and panoramic, curious but not concerned. We now have to enter
Into a relationship with fiymbola that li emotionally Intense and
at the same time critical, To do 10 I must leave the comparadvlat
point of view aside； I must follow the exegete and become impli
cated in the life of one symbol, one myth.
Beyond the horizontal understanding of the phenomenology
of the comparativist, there opens up the field of hermeneutics
proper ：interpretation applied in each case to an individual text.
It is in modern hermeneutics that the symboFs giving of mean
ing and the intelligent initiative of deciphering are bound to
gether. Hermeneutics makes us share in the battle, the dynamics,
by which symbolism is subject to being itself surpassed. Only by
sharing in this dynamics does understanding enter the properly
critical dimension of exegesis and become a hermeneutics.
But then I must quit the position, or better, the exile, of the
remote and disinterested spectator in order to appropriate in
each case an individual symbolism. Then is discovered what may
be called the circle of hermeneutics, which the simple amateur
of myths unfailingly misses. The circle can be stated bluntly ：
'"You must understand in order to believe, but you must believe
in order to understand.”
This circle is not vicious；still less is it deadly. It is quite
alive and stimulating. You must believe in order to understand.
No interpreter in fact will ever come close to what his text says
if he does not live in the aura of the meaning that is sought. And
yet it is only by understanding that we can believe. The second
immediacy, the second naivete that we are after, is accessible
only in hermeneutics；we can believe only by interpreting. This
is the “modern” modality of belief in symbols; expression of
modernity's distress and cure for this distress. Such is the circle:
hermeneutics proceeds from the preunderstanding of the very
matter which through interpretation it is trying to understand.
But thanks to this hermeneutic circle, I can today still communi
cate with the Sacred by explicating the preunderstanding which
animates the interpretation. Hermeneutics, child of “modernity，”
is one of the ways in which this “modernity” overcomes its own
forgetfulness of the Sacred. I believe that being can still speak
to me, no longer indeed in the precritical form of immediate be
lief but as the second immediacy that hermeneutics aims at. It
may be that this second naivete is the postcritical equivalent of
the precritical hierophany.
But hermeneutics is not yet reflection；it is bound up with
individual texts whose exegesis it governs. The third stage of the
understanding of symbols, the properly philosophical stage, is
that of thought starting from symbol,
However, the hermeneutic relation between philosophic dis
course and the symbols that nourish it is threatened by two
spurious substitutes. On the one hand, it can be reduced to a sim
ple allegorical tie. This is what the Stoics did with the fables of
Homer and Hesiod. The philosophical meaning rises victorious
from its imaginative shell； it was there all armed like Athena in
the head of Zeus. The fable was but an outer wrapping； stripped
off, it is rendered vain. Allegory implies that the true meaning,
the philosophical meaning, preceded the fable, which was only
a second disguise, a veil deliberately thrown over the truth to
mislead the simple. I am convinced that we must think, not
behind the symbols, but starting from symbols, according to sym
bols, that their substance is indestructible, that they constitute
the revealing substrate of speech which lives among men. In
short, the symbol gives rise to thought. On the other hand, a fur
ther peril lies in wait for us ：that of repeating the symbol in a
mime of rationality, of rationalizing symbols as such, and
thereby fixing them on the imaginative plane where they are
born and take shape. This temptation of a “dogmatic mythology”
Is the temptation of gnosis. It is impossible to exaggerate the
historical importance of this movement of thought, which has
covered three continents, held sway over numerous centuries,
丨nd animated the speculation of so many minds eager for knowl
edge and salvation through knowledge. Between gnosis and the
problem of evil there is a disquieting and in fact deceptive alli
ance. It was the Gnostics who posed in all its pathetic bluntness
the question：rbOcv rd *a*<i— whence comes evil?
In what does this power of misleading, inherent in gnosis,
consist? First of all in this, that by its content it is structured ex
clusively upon the tragic theme of fall or disgrace, which is char
acterized by its schema of exteriority. For the Gnostic, evil is
Outside. It is a quasi-physical reality that invests man from the
•Xterior. By the same token— and this is the second characteris-
U。 we wish to emphasize— all the images of evil, inspired by this
Mhema of exteriority, "geir in this represented materiality. Thus
ll born a dogmatic mythology, as Puech says, inseparable from
iM Ipatlal and cosmic figuration.2
My problem, then, is this ：How can thought be elaborated in
售 Urtlng from symbol, without going back to the old allegorizing
hUirpretatlon or falling Into the trap of gnosis? How can a
t,
i. On all this, cf. " Original Sin't A Study in Meaning," above.
3 〇〇 / THE SYMBOLISM OF EVIL
meaning be disengaged from symbol that will put thought into

motion, without presupposing a meaning already there, hidden,
dissimulated, covered over, or without getting involved in the
pseudo-knowing of a dogmatic mythology? I would like to try
another way, the way of a creative interpretation, an interpreta
tion that would respect the original enigma of symbols, let itself
be taught by this enigma, but, with that as a start, bring out the
meaning, give it form, In the full responsibility of an autono
mous systematized thought. But how can thought be at once
bound and free? How can one maintain both the immediacy of
symbol and the mediation of thought?
It is this battle between thought and the symbolic that I wish
now to explore, with the help of the problem of evil taken as a
paradigm case. In it, in effect, thought manifests itself alter
nately as reflecUon and as speculation.
Thought as reflection is essentially “demythologizing.” Its
transposition of myth is at the same time an elimination not only
of its etiological function but of its power to open and uncover；
it interprets myth only by reducing it to allegory. The problem of
evil is in this regard an exemplar ：reflection upon the symbolism
of evil reaches its peak in what we shall henceforth call the ethU
cal vision of evil. This philosophizing interpretation of evil feeds
on the richness of primary symbols and of myths, but it continues
the movement of their demythologization that we have sketched
out above. On the one hand, it prolongs the progressive reduction
of stain and sin to personal and inner guilt； on the other, it pro
longs the movement of demythologization of all the myths except
the Adam myth and reduces this latter to a simple allegory of
servile will.
Reflective thought, in its turn, is at battle with speculative
thought. Speculative thought wants to save what an ethical vision
of evil tends to eliminate. It not only wants to save it but to show
its necessity. And its specific peril is gnosis.
We shall turn first to the ethical vision of evil. This level
must be attained and traversed all the way to the end. It is a
level on which we will not be able to stay for long, but it is from
within it that we shall have to go beyond it. To do that, it is
necessary to have completely thought out a purely ethical in
terpretation of evil.
By êthical interpretation of evilwI understand an interpreta
tion in which evil as far as possible is reset within the context
of freedom ； in which, therefore, evil is an invention of freedom.
Reciprocally, an ethical vision of evil is a vision in which free
dom is revealed in its depths as power to act and power to be；
the freedom that evil supposes is a freedom capable of digres
sion, deviation, subversion, wandering. This mutual êxplana-
tionMof evil by freedom and of freedom by evil is the essence of
the moral vision of the world and of evil.
How does the moral vision of the world and of evil relate
to the symbolic and mythical universe? In two ways ：first, it is
a-radical demythologization of the dualist myths, the tragic and
the Orphic；second, it is the assimilation of the Adam narrative
into an intelligible philosophical theme. The moral vision of tho
world is thought that goes counter to evil as substance and in
accordance with the fall of primordial man.
Historically the ethical vision of evil carries the stamp of two
great names who are not customarily associated but whose inti
mate relationship I would like to make felt ：Augustine and Kant.
When I say Augustine, I mean at least Augustine in his fight
against Manichaeism；for we shall see further on that "Augus-
tinianism,Min the precise and narrow sense that Rottmayer gives
it, stands— in opposition now not to Mani but to Pelagius— for
the surpassing of the moral vision of the world and, in certain
respects, for its liquidation. We shall return to this point later.
From its demythologlzing side, the Augustinian interpreta
tion of evil, prior to the struggle against Pelagius, is dominated
by the following affirmation：evil has no nature；evil is not a
something；it is not matter, substance, world. The reabsorption
of the schema of exteriority is pushed to its furthest limits ：not
only does evil not have being, but one must suppress the ques
tion ：quid est malum? (what is evil?) and put in its place the
question：unde malum faciamus? (whence do we do evil?).
Hence it will be necessary to say that evil, as regards substance
and nature， is a “nothing.”
This “nothing,” inherited from the Platonic nonbeing and the
Plotinian nothing, but desubstantialized, has now to be coupled
with concepts inherited from another tradition of Greek phi
losophy, the Nicomachean Ethics. It was here, in fact3 that was
first elaborated the philosophy of the voluntary and the involun
tary (Nic. Eth.y Book III), but Aristotle does not go all the way to
a radical philosophy of freedom. He elaborates the concepts of
"preference" (Tp〇 a— 11)， of deliberate choice, of rational desire,
but not of freedom. It can be affirmed that it was Saint Augus
tine who made evil'i power of nothing meet head on with free
3 〇2 / THE SYMBOLISM OF EVIL
dom at work in the will and thereby so radicalized reflection

upon freedom as to make it into the originary power of saying
“No” to being, the power of “defaulting” （ d^ cere)， of “declin
ing” (decHnare)，of tending toward nothingness (ad won esse).
But Augustine, as I have said elsewhere,3 does not have the
conceptual tools to give integral expression to his discovery. Thus
we see him, in the Contra Felicem, oppose evil will and evil na
ture. But the Neoplatonic framework of his thought does not al
low him to lay out and stabilize the opposition nature/will in a
coherent conception； that would take a philosophy of action and
a philosophy of contingence, in which evil would be said to surge
up as an event, as a qualitative leap.
Nor is it certain that the overly negative concept of defectus,
of declinatio, accounts for the positive power of evil. He would
have had to go further and conceive of the positing of evil as a
qualitative 'leap/* as an event, an instant. But then Augustine
would no longer be Augustine but Kierkegaard.
What is, now, the significance of Kant, and especially of his
wEssay on Radical Evil" (found in his Religion within the Limits
of Reason Alone), as regards the anti-Manichaean treatises of
Augustine? I propose that we try to understand them through
each other. To start with, Kant elaborates the conceptual frame
work that is wanting to Augustine by pushing to the extreme the
specificity of the Kpracticar concepts：Wille, Willkur, Maxim,
will, freedom (free will or free choice), maxim of the will. This
conceptualization is achieved in the Introduction to the Meta
physics of Morals and in the Critique of Practical Reason. By it,
Kant brings to full explicitness the opposition will/nature
sketched out by Augustine in the Contra Felicem.
But above all Kant elaborated the principal condition of a
conceptualization of evil as radical evil, namely, formalism in
morality. This relationship does not appear on a reading of the
Êssay on Radical Evir apart from its ties with the Critique of
Practical Reason. But by his formalism Kant brings to achieve
ment a movement already started in Plato：if înjustice" can be
the figure of radical evil， it is because “justice” is not just one
virtue out of many but the very form of virtue, the unifying prin
ciple which makes the soul, from being several, into one (Re
public, Book IV).
3. On the aversio a Deo, the opposition potestas/natura in the Contra
Felicem, and the fragile distinction between the two “nothings” (the
ex nihilo of creation and the ad non esse of evil), see above, pp. ^74-75.
Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, is also on the road to
a formalization of good and evil：virtues are defined both by
their object and by their formal character of “mean” （ ju时6rr?s);
evil therefore is absence of ^mean/* deviation, extremity in devia
tion. The Platonic adida, the Aristotelian aKpaaia, foreshadow,
therefore, qua imperfect formalisms, the entire formalization of
the principle of morality. I am not unaware that one cannot re
main in a formalism in ethics； but it is without doubt necessary
to have reached it in order to surpass it.
Now, the advantage of this formalism is to construct the con
cept of evil maxim as a rule that the free will forges itself. Evil
no longer resides in sensibility. An end is put to the confusion
between evil and the affective, the passional. It is worth noting
that it was the reputedly most pessimistic of ethics that ac
complished the feat of disjoining evil from sensibility；this sepa
ration is the result of formalism and its bracketing of desire in
the definition of the good will. Kant can say ：N atural inclina
tions that result from sensibility do not even have a direct rela
tionship with evil.MBut neither can evil reside in the subversion
of reason ：a completely lawless being would no longer be bad
but diabolic. It remains that evil resides in a relationship, or the
subversion of a relationship. It is what happens, says Kant, when
man subordinates the pure motive of respect to sensible motives,
when "Tie reverses the moral order of motives by accepting them
in his maxim s.
Thus the biblical schema of deviation, opposed to the Orphic
schema of affecting exteriority, receives its rational equivalent in
the Kantian idea of the subversion of the maxim. More precisely
still, I see in Kant the complete philosophical manifestation that
the supreme evil is not the gross infraction of a duty but the
malice that makes pass for virtue what is virtue’s betrayal. The
evil of evil is the fraudulent justification of the maxim by ap
parent conformity with law— it is the semblance of morality.
Kant was the first, as I see it, to orient the problem of evil in the
direction of imposture or bad faith.
Here we have the extreme point of clarity attained by the
ethical vision of evil ：freedom is the power of deviation, of dis
rupting order. Evil is not a something but the subversion of a
relation. But who does not see that, at the very moment we say
this, we triumph, in a way, In emptiness? The price of clarity is
the loss of depth.
III. D i m m i n g of R e f l e c t io n and Return to the
T ragic
W h at is l a c k in g in the ethical vision of evil? What is

lacking, what is lost, is the darksome experience of evil which
surfaces in different ways in the symbolism of evil and which
constitutes properly speaking the M tragicwaspect of evil.
At the lowest level of the symbolic, the level of primary sym
bols, we have seen the confession of sins acknowledge evil as
evil already there, evil in which I am born, evil which I find in
myself before the awakening of my conscience, evil which can
not be analyzed into individual guilt and actual faults. I have
shown that the symbol of ^captivity," of slavery, is the specific
symbol of this dimension of evil as power that binds, of evil as
reign.
It is this same experience of evil already there, powerful in
my powerlessness, that gives rise to the whole cycle of myths
other than the Adam myth, all of which start out from the
schema of exteriority. But this mythic cycle is not simply ex
cluded by the Adam myth；it is in a certain way incorporated in
it, at a subordinate level, surely, but not a negligible one. Adam
is for all men the prior man and not only the exemplary m an ：he
is the very priority of evil as regards every man ；and he himself
has his other, his prior, in the figure of the serpent, already there
and already sly. Thus the ethical vision of evil thematizes only
the symbol of actual evil， the “swerving,” the “contingent devla-
tion.>, Adam is the archetype, the model of this present, actual
evil that we repeat and imitate each time that we begin evil；and
in this sense each one begins evil each time.
But by starting evil we continue it, and that is what we have
to try to express now ：evil as tradition, as historical concatena
tion, as reign of the already there. But here we also take great
risks, for by introducing the schema of ‘"heritage” and by trying
to coordinate it with that of “deviation” in a coherent concept,
we again run up against gnosis, taken in the largest sense,
namely ：( i ) dogmatic mythology；(2) reification of evil in a
^nature.^ The concept of nature is put forth here in order to
counterbalance that of contingence, which ruled the first move
ment of thought. We are going to try to think something like a
nature of evil, but a nature which would not bo a nature of
things but an originary nature of man, a nature of liberty, hence
a contracted habitus, freedom^ manner of having come to be.
Here again we come across Augustine and Kant, Augustine
when he moves from actual evil to original sin, Kant when he
goes from the wrong maxim of free will back to the ground of all
wrong maxims. (Let me digress here for a moment to remark
that I reject the usual disjunction of spheres of competence to
which people are so ready to submit the work of Augustine, as
if the philosophy of actual evil were the philosopher’s province
and that of original sin the theologian's. I, for one, do not divide
philosophy and theology in this way. As revealing— and not as
revealed— the Adam symbol belongs to a philosophical anthro
pology just as much as all the other symbols. Its belonging to
iheology is determined, not by its own structure， but by its rela
tion in Chnstology with the “event” and “coming” of the Man par
excellence, Jesus the Christ. For my part, I hold that no symbol
qua opening and uncovering a truth of man is foreign to philo
sophical reflection. Hence I do not take the concept of original
sin to be a theme extraneous to philosophy but, on the contrary,
to be a theme subject to an intentional analysis, to a hermeneu
tics of rational symbols whose task is to reconstruct the layers
of meaning which have become sedimented in the concept.)
Now what does this intentional analysis bring to the surface?
It brings this ：as a so-called intelligible concept, the concept of
original sin is a false knowledge and should be likened, as for
epistemological structure, to the concepts of gnosis: a meta-
empirical fall according to Valentinus, an aggression of the realm
of darkness according to Mani. Anti-Gnostic in its intention,
original sin is a quasi-Gnostlc concept in its form. The task of
reflection here is to break it as false knowledge in order to get
hold of its intention as rational symbol— for which there is no
substitute— of evil already there.
Let us make this double movement of reflection.
We must, we said, break the concept as false knowing；in
effect MAugustinianism,Min the narrow sense that we used before,
combines in an inconsistent notion both a juridical concept, that
of imputation, of imputable guilt, and a biological concept, that
of heredity. On the one hand, for there to be sin, fault must be a
transgression of w ill ：such was the fault of man understood as
an individual having really existed at the origin of history. On
the other hand, this imputable guilt mpst be carried per genera-
ttonem so that, each and all, wc may be made guilty “in Adam.”
Throughout the polemic with Polaglui and the Pelagians we see
take shape the idea of a personal guilt juridically meriting death

and inherited by biith In the manner of a blemish. Augustine*s
motivation4 merits a pause ：he aims essentially at rationalizing
the most mysterious of Pauline themes, that of reprobation：ul
loved Jacob and I hated Esau.MBecause God is just, the reproba
tion of little infants in the womb of their mother must be just；
perdition must be by right and salvation by grace. From this de
rives the idea of a guilt of nature, effective as an act and punish
able as a crime, though inherited as a sickness.
This is an intellectually inconsistent idea, we maintained, in
asmuch as it mixes two universes of discourse— that of ethics
or of right, and that of biology. It is an intellectually scandalous
idea, inasmuch as it returns prior to Ezekiel and Jeremiah to the
old idea of retribution and en masse inculpation of men. It is an
intellectually derisory idea, inasmuch as it throws up again the
eternal theodicy and its project of justifying God.
What must be scrutinized in die concept of original sin is
not its false clarity but its obscure analogical richness. Its force
lies in intentionally referring back to what is most radical in the
confession of sins, namely, the fact that evil precedes my aware
ness, that it cannot be analyzed into individual faults, that it is
my pregiven impotence. It is to my freedom what my birth is to
my actual consciousness, namely, always already there； birth and
nature here are analogous concepts. Hence the intention of the
pseudo-concept of original sin is this ：to incorporate in the de
scription of the bad will, such as the will was elaborated against
Mani and Gnosis, the theme of a quasi-nature of evil. The con
cept's irreplaceable function is therefore to integrate the schema
of inheritance with that of contingence.
There is here something of hopelessness from the point of
view of conceptual representation, and of irreplaceability from
the metaphysical point of view. The quasi-nature is in the will
itself；evil is a kind of involuntariness at the very heart of the
voluntary, no longer over against it but in it— and there you have
the servile will. In a stroke, confession is shifted to a deeper level
than that of simple repentance for acts；if evil is at the radical
level of “generation”一in a symbolic, not a factual, sense— con
version itself is ^regeneration.** Thus is constituted, by means of
an absurd concept, an anti-type of regeneration；because of this
4. The Treatise to SimpUcianus of the year 397 li interesting in thlg

regard, for it precedes the first anti-Pelaglan treatlifl by fourteen yeara； It
already contains the essence of the Auguitinlan argumenttHon,
anti-type, will is shown to be affected by a passive constitution
implied in its actual power of deliberation and of choice.
It is th is a n t i -t y p e of regeneration that Kant tried to

elaborate as an a priori of the moral life. The philosophical in
terest of the "Essay on Radical Evil/* which we left hanging In
mid-air, lies in its having achieved what I a moment ago called
the critique of original sin as false knowing and in having at
tempted its 44deductionM — in the sense in which the transcen
dental deduction of the categories is a justification of rules by
their power to constitute a domain of objectivity. The evil o!
nature is thus understood as the condition of possibility of evil
maxims, as their ground.
As such, the propensity to evil is “intelligible.” Kant says:
“Even if the Dflsefn of this propensity can be demonstrated ( dar_
getan) by empirical proofs of conflict in time, the nature (Be-
schaffenheit) and ground (Grund) of this propensity must be
apprehended a priori, for it is a relation of freedom to law, the
concept of which is always nonempirical.” 5 Experience “con
firms our judgments about radical evil, but it “can never reveal
the root of evil in the supreme maxim of the free will relating to
the law, a maxim which, as intelligible act, precedes all experi-
ence.M6 Thus is swept away all naturalism in the conception of
a “natural,” “innate” tendency toward evil. It can be said to be
given “at birth,” but birth is not its cause. It is rather a “manner
of being of freedom which comes to it from freedom.MThe idea
of a “contracted” habit of free will thus furnishes the symbol of
the reconciliation of the contingence and antecedence of evil.7
5. [The translation in the text is based on the French translation of

Kant, La Religion dans les limites de la simple raison (Vrin, 1952), p.
56. In the English translation by Theodore M. Gieene and Hoyt H.
Hudson, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (New York ： Harper
Torchbooks, i960), pp. 30-31, the passage reads： “But even if the
existence of this propensity to evil in human nature can be demonstrated
by experiential proofs of the real opposition, in time, of man's will to the
ach proofs do not teach us the essential character of that propensity
ground of this opposition. Rather, because this character concerns
a relation of the will, which is free (and the concept of which is there
fore not empirical), to the moral law as an incentive (the concept of
Which, likewise, is purely intellectual), it must be apprehended a priori
through the concept of evil, 10 far as evil is possible under the laws of
freedom (of obligation and accountability)."一 Ed ]
6. Ibid., Engliih (ramlatlon, p. 34, aaterisked note.
7. uBy propemUy (prop#m<o；I underitand the subjective ground of
the poulbillty of an incllfudon (habUu«l appetite, concupiacentia) ■〇
far aa mankind In gmuiriil li IUbl« to llH(Eng. trant., pp. 23-24).
But then, in distinction to every “gnosis” which pretends to

know the origin, the philosopher recognized here that he was en
tering upon the inscrutable and the unfathomable："The rational
origin of this . . . propensity to evil remains inscrutable to us,
because this propensity itself must be set down to our account,
and because, as a result, that ultimate ground of all maxims
would in turn involve the adoption of an evil maxim [as its
basis].” 89More strongly still: “There is then for us no conceivable
ground from which the moral evil in us could originally have
come.M0As I see it, the inconceivability consists precisely in this,
that evil, which always begins by freedom, is always already
there for freedom ：it is act and habit, arising and antecedence.
That is why Kant expressly relates this enigma of evil for philoso
phy to the mythical figure of the serpent. The serpent, I think,
represents the “always already there” of evil, of this evil that is
nevertheless beginning, act, determination of freedom by itself.
T hus K a n t c o m p l e t e s A u g u s t in e ：first by definitively

destroying the Gnostic wrappings of the concept of original sin,
next by attempting a transcendental deduction of the ground of
evil maxims, finally by replunging into nonknowing the search
for a ground of the ground. Thought has here a kind of move
ment of emergence, then of replunging：emergence into the
clarity of the transcendental, replunging into the darkness of
nonknowing. But perhaps philosophy is responsible not only for
the circumscription of its knowing but also for the limits by
which it restricts to nonknowing；limit is no longer here a con
fine but an active and sober self-limitation. Let us say again with
Kant: “the origin of this propensity to evil remains impenetrable
to us because it must be imputed to us.M
Having arrived at this point, we may legitimately ask our
selves why reflection reduces the symbolic richness that yet
keeps nourishing it. Perhaps in order to answer (.his we must re
turn to the initial situation. A symbobsm that would be only a
symbolism of the soul, of the subject, of the is from the start
iconoclastic；for it represents a split between the 4"psychicMfunc
tion and the other functions of symbol: cosmic, nocturnal, onei
ric, poetic. A symbolism of subjectivity already marks the
breaking-up of the symbolic totality. A symbol starts to be de-
8. Ib id .3p. 38.
9. Ib id .
stroyed when it stops playing on several registers：cosmic and

existential. The separation o f the ‘"human，” of the “psychic,” is
the beginning of forgetfulness. That is why a purely anthropo
logical symbolism is already on the way to allegory and fore
shadows an ethical vision of evil and of the world.
Hence we understand that the resistance of symbol to the al
legorizing reduction proceeds from the nonethical facet of evil.
The Adam symbol is protected against all moralizing reduction
by the mass of the other myths； and it is the tragic figure of the
serpent at the heart of the Adam symbol that protects it against
all moralizing reduction. That is why the myths of evil have to
be taken all together； it is their very dialectic that is instructive.
Therefore, just as the figure of the serpent, at the center of the
Adam myth, counters the demythologization of the Babylonian
myths, so, too, original sin marks, within the ethical vision of the
world, the resistance of the tragic to the ethical. But is it really
the tragic that resists? We should rather say that it is an aspect
irreducible to the ethical, and complementary to every ethics,
which has found a privileged expression in the tragic. For a
tragic anthropology is inseparable, as we have seen, from a tragic
theology； and this latter is at bottom unutterable.
Nor can philosophy reaffirm the tragic as such without com
mitting suicide. The function of the tragic is to question self-
assurance, self-certitude, one’s critical pretensions, we might
even say the presumption of the moral conscience that is laden
with the entire weight of evil. Much pride is concealed, perhaps,
in this humility. It is then that the tragic symbols speak in the
silence of the humiliated ethical. They speak of a ^mystery of
iniquity” that man cannot entirely handle, that freedom cannot
give reasons for, seeing that it already finds it within itself. Of
this symbol there is no allegorical reduction. But, it will be ob
jected, the tragic symbols speak of a divine mystery of evil. Per
haps it is necessary also to envelop in darkness the divine which
the ethical vision has reduced to the moralizing function of
judge. Against the juridicalism of accusation and justification,
the God of Job speaks “out of the whirlwind.”
At its base the symbolism of evil is never purely and simply
the symbolism of subjectivity, of the separated human subject,
of interiorized self-awareness, of man severed from being, but
symbol of the union of man with being. One must, then, come to
the point where one sees evil as the adventure of being, as part
of the history of being.
310 / THE SYM BOLISM OF EVIL
IV. Spec u la tiv e T hought and It s F a i l u r e
Is e v e r y p o s s ib il it y of t h o u g h t , therefore, extin
guished with the nonknowing of the origin of the ground of evil
maxims? Does the battle between reflective rigor and symbolic
richness cease with the return of the impenetrable symbol of the
Fall? I do not think so. For there remains a hiatus between the
understanding that we can have of man’s essential nature and
the avowal of evil’s unfathomable contingence. Can one leave
side by side the necessity of fallibility and the contingency of
evil?
But it seems that we have neglected a whole dimension of the
world of mythical symbols, namely, that symbols of the 4<begin-
ningMreceive their complete meaning only from their relations
to symbols of the “end” ： purification of stain, remission of sins,
justification of the guilty. The great myths are at once myths of
the beginning and of tJie end— thus the victory of Marduk in the
Babylonian myth, reconciliation in the tragic and through the
tragic, salvation through knowledge of the exiled soul, finally
the biblical redemption characterized by the figures of the end ：
the king of the last times, the suffering servant, the Son of Man,
the second Adam, type of the man to come. What is noteworthy
in these symbolic representations is that the meaning proceeds
from the end to the beginning, from the future to the past. So the
question becomes： What does this chain of symbols, this retro
grade movement of meaning, give us to think about?
Does it not invite us to move from the contingency of evil to
a certain ^necessity** of evil? This is the greatest task but also
the most perilous one for a philosophy nourished by symbols. It
is the most perilous task ： as we have said above, thought ad
vances between the two chasms of allegory and gnosis. Reflec
tive thought skirts the first chasm, speculative thought the sec
ond. Yet it is the greatest task, for the movement which in
symbolic thought goes from the beginning of evil to its end seems
indeed to suppose the idea that all this finally has a meaning,
that a meaningful figure imperiously takes form through the con
tingency of evil— in short, that evil belongs to a certain totality
of the real. A certain necessity . . . a certain totality . . . .
But not just any necessity, not just any totality. The schemata
of necessity that we can test have to satisfy a very strange de
mand； the necessity appears only afterwards, viewed from the

end, and “in spite of” the contingency of evil.
Saint Paul, it seems, invites such an inquiry when he con
fronts the two figures, that of the first Adam and that of the sec
ond Adam, the type of the old man and the type of the man to
come. He does not limit himself to comparing and contrasting
them ： ^Therefore, as by the offense of one judgment came upon
all men to condemnation； even so by the righteousness of one
the free gift came upon all men unto justification of lifew (Rom.
5:18). In addition to the parallel, there is, from one figure to the
other, a movement, a progress, a rise in value ： wIf through the
offense of one many be dead, how much more ( 霄。入X<p the
grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus
Christ, hath abounded unto many” （ verse 15); “where sin
abounded, grace did much more abound** (20). This 4<how much
more,” this “superabundance,” outlines a great task for thought.
But it must be admitted that no great philosophy of the to
tality is capable of giving an account of this inclusion of the
contingency of evil in a meaningful schema. For either the
thought of necessity leaves contingency aside, or it so includes it
that it entirely eliminates the l<leapMof evil which posits itself
and the “tragic" of evil which always precedes itself.
The first case is that of the great nondialectical systems,
those of Plotinus and Spinoza, for example. Both knew some
thing of this problem but were unable to account for it within the
system. Thus did Plotinus in his last treatises try to account for
the ^declination" of souls fascinated by their own image in their
bodies and make it fit with the necessity of the procession. In
Ennead IV. 3. 12-18 he tries to reduce the narcissistic seduction
that stems from the reflection of the soul in its own body to an
impulse by which the soul yields to a universal law ： M
one would
think that it is moved and carried by a magic power of irresisti
ble attractionw(§ 12). Thus evil does not come from us ； it exists
before us and possesses man in spite of himself (Karkxa 〇 lx
l(6vrai). Finally, in the last treatises (III. 2-3) on Providence
(wp6v〇 ia)t Plotinus reanimates the old theme of X670S, descended
from Heraclitus through the Stoics and Philo, and proclaims that
order is born of dissonance and even that order is the reason of
disorder draâ). Thus Providence makes use of evils
that it does not produce； in spite of obstacles, harmony is born
nevertheless In spite of evil, good prevails.
But who docs not see that theodicy never goes beyond the
level of an argumentative and persuasive rhetoric? It is no ac

cident that it has recourse to so mar\y arguments, all the more
abundant in proportion to their weakness. For how could thought
raise itself to the point of view of the whole and be able to say ：
“Because there is order, there is disorder” ？And if it could， would
it not reduce the sorrow of history to a farce, to the sinister farce
of a play of light and shadows, or even to an esthetic of discord
( “Discord has its beauty” ；“Every town must have its tyrant; it is
good he is there；he has his placew)! Such is the bad faith of
theodicy ：it does not triumph over real evil but only over its
esthetic phantom.
Spinoza will completely disavow this suspect argumentation
of theodicy. In a nondialectlcal philosophy of necessity like
his, there is place for finite modes, surely, but not for evil which
is an illusion, which stems from the ignorance of the whole.
However, even in Spinoza there remains an enigma, which finds
its expression in the astonishing axiom of Book IV: wNo single
thing is given in nature than which there is not given another
more powerful. But if anything whatsoever is given, another
more powerful, by which the first can be destroyed, is given.w
As in the last treatises of Plotinus, a law of internal contrariety
is included in the movement of the expansion or expression of
being. But this contrariety is necessary like the movement itself.
The contingency of evil, held to in an ethical vision of evil, is
not there retained, but dissipated like an illusion.
Will a philosophical dialectic of necessity do better justice,
so to speak, to the tragic of evil? There is no doubt that it will.
That is why a philosophy like HegeFs represents both the great
est attempt to account for the tragic aspect of history and the
greatest temptation. The abstraction in which every moral vision
of the world takes refuge is done away with. Evil is given its
place at the same time that the history of the figures of Spirit
starts to unfold. Evil is truly retained and surpassed； conflict is
enlisted as instrument of the recognition of consciousnesses；
everything takes on meaning； it is necessary to pass through con
flict and through the unhappy consciousness, and through the
noble soul, and through the Kantian morality, and through the
split between the guilty conscience and the judging conscience.10
But if evil is acl^ now ledgedandintegratedinT heP he-
nomenology of Spirit, it is so not as evil but as contradiction；
io. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Balllifl
(New York ： Humanities Preit, 1964), In the chap«r '"Evil and the For
give nea a of It.**
The Hermeneutics of Symbols: I / 3 13
its specificity is submerged in a universal function, of which

Kierkegaard said that it is the jack-of-all-trades of Hegelianism：
negativity. Negativity likewise means the inversion of the
singular in the universal, the opposition of interior and exterior
in force, death, conflict, fault. All negativities are drowned in
the negativity.
The chapter of the Phenomenology entitled 4<Evil and For-
givenessMleaves no doubt about this. Remission is already recon
ciliation in absolute knowledge by the passage of one contrary
into the other, of singularity into universality, of the judged
conscience into the judging conscience and reciprocally. “Par
don” is the destruction of “judgment” as being itself a category
of evil and not of salvation. This is indeed very Pauline. The
law itself is judged； but at the same time the symbol of the
remission of sins is lost, for evil is less “pardoned” than “sur
passed” ；it disappears in this reconciliation. By the same stroke,
the tragic accent is displaced from moral evil to the movement of
exteriorization, of alienation (Entfremdung, Entdusserung) of
Spirit itself. Since human history is a revelation of God, the
infinite takes to itself the evil of finitude. As Hyppolite puts it:
‘The whole long history of errors that human development
presents and that the Phenomenology retraces is indeed a fall,
but we must learn that this fall is part of the absolute itself, that
it is a moment of total truth/'11 The all-tragic is the reply of the
dissolution of the ethical vision of the world； it comes to achieve
ment in absolute knowledge with the transposition of the remis
sion of sins into philosophical reconciliation. There remains
nothing of the injustice of evil nor of the gratuity of reconcilia
tion.
If, then, the nondialectical necessity of Plotinus and Spinoza
and the dialectical necessity of Hegel both fail, must we not
seek the answer to our quest for intelligibility in a meaningful
history rather than in a logic of being? Does not the movement
from the Fall to the Redemption, a movement so full of meaning,
exclude a ‘logic,’ whether it be nondialectical or dialectical? Is
It then possible to conceive of a meaningful history, wherein
the contingency of evil and the initiative of conversion would
be retained and encompassed? Is it possible to conceive of a
II. Jean Hyppolite, Gen^se et structure de la ^Ph^nom^nologie de

VEtprlt** (Pariu Aubler, 1946), p. 509. The translation used in the text
Ifl taken from the English translation, Genesis and Structure of ^The
Phenomenology of the Spirit*1 by John Heckman and Samuel Cherniak
(forthcoming from Northwcitarn Unlvazsity Freii).
314 / the symbolism of evil
becoming of being in which the tragic of evil— — of this evil al

ways already there — would be both recognized and surmounted?
I am not in a position to answer the question； I glimpse only
a possible direction for meditation. I shall say, in closing, what
I do perceive. Three formulas present themselves to my mind,
which express three connections between the experience of evil
and the experience of a reconciliation. First, reconciliation is
looked for in spite of evil. This <cin spite of* constitutes a veritable
category of hope, the category which contradicts evil. However,
of this there is no proof but only signs； the milieu, the locus,
of this category is a history, not a logic； an eschatology, not a
system. Next, this “in spite of” is a “thanks to” ；out of evil, the
Principle of things brings good. The final contradiction of evil
is at the same time hidden instruction： etiam yeccata, says
Saint Augustine, as an inscription, as it were, to the Satin
Slipper；*The worst is never sure,Mreplies Claudel in a litotes；
but there is no absolute knowledge of the “in spite of” or of the
“thanks to.” The third category of this meaningful history is the
4<how much more,wthe 7r〇 XX4> h〇X\〇v. This law of superabundance
englobes in its turn the “thanks to” and the “in spite of That is
the miracle of the Logos； from Him proceeds the retrograde
movement of the true； from wonder is bom the necessity that
retroactively places evil in the light of being. What in the old
theodicy was only the expedient of false knowledge becomes the
understanding of hope. The necessity that we are seeking is the
highest rational symbol that this understanding of hope can
engender.
The Hermeneutics of Symbols
and Philosophical Reflection: II
T he p o in t of de p a r t u r e for this second essay arises

out of my previous investigation concerning the symbols of evil
that are elaborated in the ritual literature, the myths and wis
dom, of the ancient Middle East, Israel, and Greece.
Let us remember that that investigation, though it was
deliberately confined to a specific problem— the problem of evil
— and to a particular region of cultures— those which lie at the
root of our Greco-Judaic heritage— actually encompassed a much
more general problem： what is the function of the interpretation
of symbols in the economy of philosophical reflection? I call this
problem, considered in its greatest generality, the hermeneutic
problem, if, by hermeneutics, we mean the science of interpreta
tion.
Let us take up the methodological problem more precisely by
beginning with those aspects that are peculiar to the symbolism
of evil and by showing how such an example can be generalized
to all types of religious symbolism.
We saw that if we take the problem of the symbols of evil
on the semantic level, i.e., the interpretation of linguistic ex
pressions such as stain, sin, and guilt, our first surprise is to
discover that whether evil be passively endured or actively com
mitted, whether it be a question of ethical evil or suffering, the
only access to the experience of evil itself is through symbolic
expressions. Such expressions emerge from some literal mean
ing (such as stain or pollution, deviation or wandering in space,
and weight or burden, bondage, slavery, fall), and they aim at
Tramlatad by Charlei Frtiliota.
[3 !sl
another meaning which we can call existential, i.e., precisely be

ing impure, sinful, guilty, etc. Although these concepts have a
somewhat abstract appearance in our modern languages, they
have a symbolic structure in the languages and cultures in which
the recognition, or rather the avowal, of evil was first elaborated.
The existential signification is here given indirectly, analogically,
by means of the primary, literal signification. For this reason, to
undergo the experience of evil is also to express it in a language；
but furthermore, to express it is already to interpret its symbolic
expressions.
Now the semantic level must not be separated from the
mythological level of symbols (nor from the dogmatic level of
rationalized symbols, which I will not discuss at this time); as
we can see in the Babylonian, tragic, and Orphic myths and in
the biblical account of the Fall, new aspects of our experience of
evil are here manifested and, so to speak, revealed to us. These
myths relate our experience to the deeds of paradigmatic figures
such as Prometheus, Anthropos, and Adam. Moreover, because
they take the form of a story that happened "long ago,w in illo
tempore, they give our experience a certain temporal orientation.
They direct it from a beginning toward an end, from memory
toward hope. Finally, these myths tell us the story, in the form of
a transhistorical event, of the irrational rupture and absurd leap
which permit us to relate the confession of our sinful existence
to the affirmation of the innocence of our created being. At this
level, symbols not only have an expressive value, as on the
semantic level, but also an exploratory value, because they con
fer a universality, a temporality, and an ontological significance
on the expressions of evil, such as stain, sin, and guilt.
It is here that the problem arises as to whether there is a
necessary connection between the interpretation of symbols and
reflection. This question becomes exceedingly acute when we
consider that the symbolism of evil is a particular part of reli
gious symbolism in general. One can suppose that the symbolism
of evil is always the contrary of a symbolism of the good or salva
tion or that a symbolism of salvation is the counterpart of a
symbolism of evil: the pure corresponds to the impure, forgive
ness to sin, freedom to guilt and bondage. In the same manner
one must say that there is a correspondence between the imagery
of the beginning and the imagery of the end: the king en
throned by Marduk, Apollo and his purification, the new An-
thropos, the Messiah, the Just Sufferer, the Son of Man, the Lord
The Hermeneutics of Symbols II ： / 317
(Kyrios), the Logos, etc. The philosopher, as philosopher, can

have nothing to say with regard to the claims of the Gospel,
according to which these figures are “fulfilled” with the coming
of Christ； but, as philosopher, he can and must reflect on the
meaning of these symbols insofar as they stand as representa
tions of the End of Evil. We thus reach the general level of
our question. The hermeneutics of evil appears as a particular
domain that lies at the heart of a general interpretation of
religious symbolism. For the moment we shall consider the
symbolism of evil only as the inverse of a religious symbolism.
We shall ultimately see, however, that the hermeneutics of evil
is not an indifferent domain but the most significant domain,
perhaps the very source of the hermeneutic problem itself.
Why, then, is there a problem for the philosopher? The
reason is that there is something astonishing and even scandal
ous about the use of symbols.
1. The symbol remains opaque, not transparent, since it is
given by means of an analogy based on a literal signification.
The symbol is thus endowed with concrete roots and a certain
material density and opacity.
2. The symbol is a prisoner of the diversity of languages
and cultures and, for this reason, remains contingent： Why
these symbols rather than any others?
3. The symbol is given to thought only by way of an inter
pretation which remains inherently problematical. There is no
myth without exegesis, no exegesis without contestation. The
deciphering of mysteries is not a science in either the Platonic
or Hegelian sense or in the modern meaning of the word science.
Opacity, cultural contingency, and dependency on a problemati
cal interpretation— such are the three deficiencies of the symbol
as measured by the ideal of clarity, necessity, and scientific order
In reflection.
In addition, there does not exist a general hermeneutics, that
1_, a general theory of interpretation, a general canon for
exegesis； there are only various separate and contrasting her
meneutic theories. Thus, our initial problem continues to be
come more and more complicated. It is no longer simple but
double； we must ask not only why reflection requires interpreta
tion but also why it requires conflicting interpretations.
The first part of this essay will be devoted to the most ex
treme opposition in the field of hermeneutics, the opposition
between the phenomenology of religion and the psychoanalytical
31 8 / THE SYMBOLISM OF EVIL
interpretation of religion. In the process, our task will be to

show the necessity of such an opposition within a philosophy of
reflection.
I. T h e C o n f l i c t betw een In ter pr eta tio n s
I pr op ose to e m p h a s i z e three themes that represent,

in my opinion, the principal presuppositions of the phenomenol
ogy of religion. I shall contrast these three themes with the three
working hypotheses of psychoanalysis with regard to the religious
phenomenon.
The first characteristic of the phenomenology of religion is
that its aim is descriptive, not explanatory. To explain the
religious phenomenon means to relate it to its causes, its origin,
or its function, whether this be a psychological, sociological,
or any other type of function. To describe the religious phe
nomenon means to relate it to its object as this object is in
tended and given in cult and faith, in ritual and myth. What are
the implications of this initial distinction with regard to the
problem of symbols? We could say that the theme of the phe
nomenology of religion is the “something*’ that is intended in
ritual action, mythical speech, and mystical feeling. Our task is
to extract this M objectw from the multiple intentionalities of be
havior, discourse, and emotion. Let us call this intended object
the “sacred” without making any claims as to its precise nature.
In this general sense, we shall say that every phenomenology of
religion is a phenomenology of the M sacred,Mand in this way we
emphasize its concern for the intentional object.
To this first characteristic we shall presently oppose the cor
responding characteristic of Freudian hermeneutics, the defini
tion of the religious phenomenon in terms of its economic
function, not in terms of its intentional object.
The second characteristic of the phenomenology of religion
is that there is a M truthMof symbols, a truth in the sense which
Husserl gives to this word in the Jrzi/estigartcms，
a truth
which signifies the fulfillment— die Erfiillung— of the signifying
intention.
What does this mean in relation to the symbols of the
sacred? In the same manner in which we have opposed under
standing in terms of the object to explanation In terms of the
cause, we shall now make use of the distinction between symbol
and sign in order to suggest the essential fullness or plenitude

of symbols. For the first characteristic of the function of the ilgn
(the semiotic function) is the arbitrary nature of the convention
which links the signifier to the signified, but an essontittl
characteristic of the symbol is the fact that it is never completely
arbitrary. It is not empty； rather, there always remains the trace
of a natural relationship between the signifier and the signified,
as in the analogy that we have suggested between the exiatentlttl
experience of impurity and the actual physical stain or bloml«h,
In the same manner, to take an example from the work of
Mircea Eliade, the force of cosmic symbolism lies In thonon-
arbitrary relationship between the visible sky and the lnvlilble
order which it manifests: the sky speafcs of wisdom and Justice,
of immensity and order, by virtue of the analogical power of itfl
primary signification. Such is the fullness, of the symbol as op
posed to the essential emptiness of the sign.
To this second characteristic we shall later oppose that
characteristic of psychoanalytical interpretation which Freud
calls <<illusion,Mas in his famous title The Future of an Illusion.
This leads to a third aspect of hermeneutics, which has to
do with the ontological significance of the symbols of the sacred.
The concern for the object, which was our first point, and the
concern for the fullness of symbols, which was our second point,
already suggest a certain type of ontological understanding. This
understanding achieves its culminating expression in Heideg
gers philosophy of language, according to which symbols are
like a voice of Being. Ultimately, it is this philosophy of lan
guage that is implicit in the phenomenology of religion. It reveals
that language is less spoken by men than spoken to men, that
men are born at the heart of language within the light of the
Logos “which illuminates each man who enters the world.”
In this sense, the implicit philosophy of the phenomenology of
religion is a renewal of the [Platonic] theory of recollection. The
modern concern for symbols implies a new contact with the
sacred, a movement beyond the forgetfulness of Being which is
today manifested in the manipulation of empty signs and
formalized languages.
To this third and final characteristic we shall oppose the
Freudian thesis of the “return of the repressed.”
L et us n o w leap over the apparently unbridgeable

gap which divides die hermeneutic field Into a psychoanalytical
and a phenomenological conception of symbolism. I shall not
attempt to conceal or gloss over this conflict. In the same way in

which I have radicalized the implicit philosophy of the first
system of interpretation, I would now like to confront the in
terpretation which stands directly opposed to this ontology of
the sacred. Dismissing those more reassuring and conciliatory
interpretations of religion that have been proposed by certain
schools of psychoanalysis, I would prefer to deal with the most
decisive and radical interpretation of them all, that of Freud
himself. Ultimately, he remains the master, and it is with him
that we must “explain” ourselves.
We shall first oppose the functional interpretation of religion
in psychoanalysis to the object-oriented interpretation of religion
in phenomenology; then we shall oppose the idea of “illusion” to
that of “truth” （ in the sense of the “fullness” of symbols); and
finally, we shall oppose the theme of the “return of the repressed”
to the “recollection of the sacred.
What do we mean by a functional approach as opposed to an
object-oriented approach? First of all, the interpretation of
religion takes place within the general framework of a theory
of culture. When Freud undertakes to interpret civilization as a
whole, he does not go outside the limits of psychoanalysis； on the
contrary, he is manifesting its ultimate intention to be a general
hermeneutics of culture, not only a branch of psychiatry. This
is the reason why psychoanalysis covers the same domain as the
other hermeneutics. There is no way to distinguish the various
hermeneutic perspectives with regard to their domain, for each
one of them embraces the whole of man and each claims to
interpret and understand the totality of manJs being. If there is
a limit to psychoanalytical interpretation, we must look for it
not in its object but in its point of view. The psychoanalytical
point of view is that of an M economyw of instincts or drives
[pulsions], a balance of renunciations and satisfactions— — satis
factions that may be real, deferred, substituted, or purely fic
tional.
Thus, it is necessary to begin with the most comprehensive
phenomenon, that of “civilization,” and then inscribe within it
the religious phenomenon in the form of illusion. When Freud
undertakes in The Future of an Illusion to grasp the phenome
non of civilization in its entirety, he approaches the problem in
terms of three questions. To what extent is it possible to reduce
the burden of instinctual sacrifices that are imposed upon men?
How is it possible to reconcile men to those renunciations that
are both unavoidable and necessary? How can satisfactory
compensations be offered for these sacrifices? We must under

stand that these questions that we are asking and that Freud
himself asked are not questions about civilization but that, in
effect, they constitute civilization itself, both in its intentions and
its expectations. Thus, the problem of civilization is immediately
taken up within the context of an economic point of view. Re
ligion has to deal with these three questions. First of all, it can
be said that religion reduces the neurotic burden of the in
dividual by relieving him of his individual guilt with the idea
of a substitutive sacrifice (we shall later see how the individual
is protected from individual neurosis only at the price of collec
tive neurosis). In addition, religion functions as a consolation, as
an aid in reconciling the individual to the necessity of sacrifice.
And finally, religion provides the individual with a multitude of
pleasures that can be considered as sublimations of the instincts,
of fundamental eros.
At this point it is necessary to oppose the psychoanalytical
theory of illusion to the phenomenological theory of <<truth,>,
l_e.， truth in the sense of “fulfillment” or “plenitude.” In Freud
this notion of illusion has a functional metapsychological mean
ing and must be taken seriously as such. We cannot avoid the
problem by saying that the statement that religion is an illusion
is nonanalytical or preanalytical and that it merely reflects the
prejudices of a modem scientism, heir to Epicurean “skepticism”
and eighteenth-century rationalism. What is important here,
what is novel about the Freudian point of view, is precisely its
“economic” interpretation of “illusion•” The question is not that
of the “truth” in the phenomenological sense but that of the
function of religious representations in the balance of renuncia
tions and satisfactions by means of which man tries to sustain
his life. The key to <<illusionwis the harshness of life ： life is diffi
cult to bear for a being who not only understands and suffers
but is eager for some form of consolation by virtue of his innate
narcissism. Now civilization, as we have seen, has the task not
only of restraining the instincts but also of protecting man
against the overwhelming forces of nature. “Illusion” is this other
method which civilization employs when the struggle against
nature fails ；it invents gods in order to exorcise fear, to reconcile
man to the cruelty of fate, and to compensate him for the feeling
of “malaise” which the death instinct renders incurable.
We are now reaching the most extreme point of conflict be
tween psychoanalysis and phenomenology, We have projected
onto the latter the light of nn ontological understanding,
according to which all understanding ultimately implies a pre

comprehension of Being； the interpretation of the symbolism of
the sacred has appeared In this context as the renewal of the an
cient doctrine of recollection. There is also a concept of "recollec-
tionM in psychoanalysis, but it emerges along the lines of a
genesis of the religious illusion, having its source in those sym
bols and images in which the initial conflicts of primitive men
and children first come to be expressed. From a methodological
point of view, this part of our analysis is important, for it is at
this point that the genetic explanation is incorporated in the top
ical and economic explanation. If religious representations in
fact have no truth and are merely illusions, then they can only be
understood in terms of their origin. Accordingly, Totem and Ta
boo and Moses and Monotheism reconstruct die historical mem
ories which constitute the ""truth in religion,> (according to a
subhead in Moses and Monotheism)；this truth consists in those
originary representations which lie at the root of the ideational
distortion. I will not refer here to the well-knovm account of this
genesis： the murder of the father, the institution of the laws of
incest and exogamy by the community of brothers, the restora
tion of the image of the father in the substituted form of the to-
temic animal, the ritual repetition of the murder of the father
during the totemic feast, the reappearance of the father figure in
the figures of the gods, etc. I will merely emphasize one funda
mental aspect of this genetic explanation. Religion as we know it
today is a reappearance, in the form of fantasy, of forgotten im
ages of the human past and the individual past. This return of
the forgotten, in the form of religious fantasy, can be compared
to the return of the repressed in the obsessional neurotic. Such a
comparison between the regeneration of religious symbolism and
the return of the repressed provides the opportunity to consider
once again that rupture in the hermeneutic field which we have
previously discussed. Recollection of the sacred, in the sense of
an ontology of the symbol, and the return of the repressed, in
the sense of an etiology of fantasies, together constitute the two
poles of a dynamic tension.I.
II. T h e H e r m e n e u t i c P o l a r i t y
My p r o b l e m is n o w t h e f o l l o w i n g ：
How can these
two hermeneutics, opposed as they are, coexist? My hypothesis
is that each is legitimate within its own context. We cannot, of

course, content ourselves with a simple juxtaposition of these
two styles of interpretation； it is necessary to set up a dialogue
between them and demonstrate their complementary functions.
We shall look for a provisional answer to our problem in the
relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. It
might be objected that this manner of approaching the problem
is itself derivative of one of the two systems of interpretation,
that of psychoanalysis, and I would certainly agree. I believe,
nevertheless, that after Freud’s work it is no longer possible to
speak of consciousness in the same way that we did before.
Moreover, if a new concept of consciousness must be found,
perhaps we can at the same time discover a new connection be
tween this consciousness and what we have called the mani
festation or even the recollection of the sacred. Consciousness is
not the first reality which we can know but the last. We must
arrive at it, not begin with it. And since consciousness is the
place where the two interpretations of the symbol come together,
a double approach to the notion of consciousness should be a
good way of also gaining access to the polarity of symbols.
The principal motive which animates the analytical attempt
to demystify is the desire to contest the privileged status of
consciousness.1 It is on the basis of this critique of what could be
called “the illusion of consciousness” that we can understand the
methodological decision to move away from a description of
consciousness to a topography of psychic structure. The philoso
pher must admit that the recourse to these naturalistic models
takes on its true meaning from the tactic of decentering and
dispossession directed against the illusion of consciousness,
which is itself rooted in narcissism.
At the same time, however, we can readily understand that
the source of meaning can be displaced or decentered in another
manner. The topographical and economic point of view has not
suppressed all other forms of interrogation but has rather re
newed them. The very concept of the M unconsciousMitself re
minds us of its intimate connection to consciousness： conscious-
ness has not been abolished, either theoretically or practically.
Thus, an interpretation which began by abandoning the point
of view of consciousness does not serve to eliminate conscious-
1. I have commented elsewhere on Freud’fl famous text which Bituates
the psychoanalytic movement in the continuing progress of both the
Copemlcan and Darwinian revolutions； cf. above, pp. 151-52,
324 / THE S Y M B O L I S M 〇 F EVIL
ness but in fact radically renews its meaning. What is definitely

denied is not consciousness but its pretension to know itself com
pletely from the very beginning, its narcissism. We must leach
that point of confusion where we no longer know what con
sciousness means in order to recover the sense of consciousness
as that mode of existence which has the unconscious as its
other. This shift in our analysis is decisive, for it is this
dialectical relation between the unconscious and consciousness
which governs the articulation of a relation between the two
hermeneutics.
Let us now consider this new approach to consciousness.
Everything that we can say about consciousness after Freud
seems to be included in the formula ： ^Consciousness is not im
mediate, but mediate； it is not a source, but a task, the task of
becoming more conscious.** We come to understand this formula
when we oppose the function of consciousness to the tendency
toward repetition and regression which is implicit in the Freud
ian interpretation of illusion. The later works of Freud, in
particular, emphasize the theme of the return of the repressed
and the endless reenactment of the primal murder of the father；
the interpretation of religion becomes more and more an occa
sion for emphasizing the regressive tendency in the history of
humanity.
Consequently, the problem of consciousness seems to me to
be related to this question： How does a man emerge from his
childhood, how does he become an adult? At first sight this
seems to be a purely psychological question, since it is the theme
of every genetic psychology and every theory of the personality.
But in fact it takes on its true meaning when we begin to
examine which figures, which images and symbols, guide this
growth, this maturation of the individual. I believe that this in
direct manner of approaching the problem is more revealing
than a direct psychology of growth. Growth itself here appears
as the intersection of two systems of interpretation.
At this point another type of hermeneutics is required, one
whose way of decentering the nucleus of meaning is different
from that of psychoanalysis. It is not within consciousness itself
that the key to understanding resides； we must discover new
figures, new symbols, which are irreducible to those that are
rooted in the libidinal ground. These figures and symbols draw
consciousness forward out of its own infancy. After Freud, the
only possible philosophy of consciousness would be one that is
related to the Hegelian phenomenology of Spirit.2 In this phe

nomenology immediate consciousness does not know itself. To
employ once again our previous mode of expression, I will say
that man becomes adult, becomes ^conscious," if and when he
becomes capable of these new figures, the succession of which
constitutes “Spirit” in the Hegelian sense of the word. An
exegesis of consciousness would involve an inventory and a
step-by-step constitution of the spheres of meaning which con
sciousness must encounter and appropriate for itself so as to
reflect upon itself as a self, as an adult, human, ethical self.
Such a process is by no means a type of introspection or im
mediate consciousness； it is by no means a figure of narcissism,
for the nucleus of the self is not a psychological ego but Spirit,
that is, the dialectic of the figures themselves. “Consciousness”
is only the interiorization of this movement, a movement which
must be rediscovered in the objective structure of institutions,
monuments, works of art, and culture.
L e t u s p a u s e for a m o m e n t to consider the results of

this analysis. We have reached the provisional conclusion that
the meaning of consciousness is never given within a psychology
of consciousness but only by means of a detour through several
metapsychologies which displace the center of reference, either
toward the concept of the M unconsciousM in Freudian meta-
psychology or toward the concept of ^Spirir in Hegelian meta
psychology.
The two types of hermeneutics which we have described in
the first part of this essay rest on this polarity of "metapsy-
chologies•” "The opposition between Mnconscioi/s and Spirit
is expressed in the very duality of these interpretations. The
two sciences of interpretation represent two contrary move
ments： an analytical and regressive movement toward the un
conscious and a synthetic and progressive movement toward
. On the one hand, in Hegelian phenomenology, every
receives its meaning from the one that follows it: Stoi
cism is the truth of the mutual recognition of master and slave,
but skepticism, which destroys the distinction between master
and slave, is the truth of the Stoic position, etc. The truth of one
moment resides in the subsequent moment； intelligibility always
2. [The English translation of Hegel's Geist as ^mind** already too
thoroughly subjectiflea Ricoeur'a interpretation. Thus ^Spirit** will be
used here. —T rans.]
proceeds from the end to the beginning. This is the reason why
we can say that consciousness is a task, that it is ultimately
complete and secure only when it comes to an end. On the other
hand, the concept of the unconscious signifies that understand
ing always proceeds from figures that are prior to it ；
man is the
only being who remains the victim of his childhood for such a
long period of time； man is that being who is always drawn
back toward his own infancy. The unconscious is thus the
principle of all regressions and all stagnation. As a result, we
could say in very general terms that Spirit is the order of the
ultimate, whereas the unconscious is the order of the primordial.
This is the reason why the same play of symbols can support
two types of interpretation； the one is oriented toward the
emergence of figures that are always ‘"behind” us, while the
second is oriented toward the emergence of figures that are al
ways âhead" of us. The exact same symbols are endowed with
these two dimensions and offer themselves to these two opposing
interpretations.
III. R e f l e c t i o n and In t e r p r e t a t i o n
It is n o w t i m e to po se the basic question which we

left in suspense. If philosophy is reflection, as we said at the be
ginning, why must reflection have recourse to a symbolic lan
guage? Why must reflection become interpretation? Apparently
we must go back and try to elaborate a concept of reflection,
which until now has remained a simple presupposition.
When we say that philosophy is reflection, we mean this in
the sense of reflection on itself. But what do we mean by the
self? I will admit here that the positing of the self is the first
truth for philosophy， at least for that vast tradition of modern
philosophy which begins with Descartes and develops with Kant,
Fichte, and the whole reflective current of Continental philoso
phy. For this tradition (which we are here considering as a whole
before distinguishing among its principal representatives) the
positing of the self is a truth which posits itself. Incapable of
being either verified or deduced, it is simultaneously the positing
of a being and an act, a form of existence and an operation of
thought： I am, I think； to exist for myself is to think；
I exist in
sofar as I think. Since this truth can be neither verified as a fact
nor deduced as a conclusion, it must be posited in reflection； its
own self-positing is reflection. Fichte termed this first truth the

thetic judgment. Such is our philosophical point of departure.
But the first reference to the positing of the Self as existing
and thinking is not sufficient to characterize reflection. In
particular， we do not yet understand why reflection requires the
work of deciphering, an exegesis and a science of exegesis or
hermeneutics. Even less do we understand why this interpreta
tion must be either a psychoanalysis or a phenomenology of the
sacred. This point cannot be understood so long as reflection
appears as a return to the so-called evidence of immediate con
sciousness. We must introduce a second characteristic of re
flection, which may be stated in this way ： reflection is not
intuition；or, in positive terms： reflection is the effort to re
comprehend the ego of the ego cogito in the mirror of its objects,
it works, and ultimately its acts. Now, why must the positing of
the ego be recomprehended through its acts? Precisely because
the ego is not given in psychological evidence or in intellectual
intuition or in mystical vision. A reflective philosophy is pre
cisely the opposite of a philosophy of the immediate. The first
truth— I think, I am— remains as abstract and empty as it is
unassailable. It must be “mediated” by representations, actions,
works, institutions, and monuments which objectify it ； it is in
these objects, in the largest sense of the word, that the ego must
both lose itself and find itself. We can say that a philosophy of
reflection is not a philosophy of consciousness if, by conscious
ness, we mean immediate self-consciousness. Consciousness is a
task, we said before, but it is a task precisely because it is not a
given. There is no doubt that I have an apperception of myself
and my acts and that this apperception is a type of evidence.
Descartes cannot be dislodged from this incontestable proposi
tion. I cannot doubt myself without observing that I am doubt
ing. But what is the meaning of this apperception? It is an un
deniable certitude, but a certitude without any truth value. As
Malebranche well understood, as opposed to Descartes, this im
mediate grasp of myself is only a feeling and not an idea. If the
idea is understood essentially in terms of light and vision, there
lfl neither a vision of the ego nor a light of apperception； I
merely feel that I exist and that I think. The mere feeling that
I am awake is the essence of apperception. In Kantian terms, an
•pperception of the ego can accompany all of my representa
tions, but this apperception is not self-knowledge. It cannot be
transformed into an Intuition concerning a substantial soul.
Finally, reflection is completely separated from all knowledge
of the self by the decisive Kantian criticism directed at every

“rational psychology•”
This second proposition, that reflection is not intuition, per
mits us to adumbrate the role of interpretation in knowledge
of the self ； this role is reciprocally designated precisely by the
difference between reflection and intuition.
A new step will bring us closer to our goal： having opposed
reflection to intuition (following Kant as opposed to Descartes),
I would now like to distinguish the task of reflection from a
simple critique of knowledge. This new approach will move us
away from Kant in the direction of Fichte. The fundamental
limitation of a critical philosophy lies in its exclusive concern
for epistemology； reflection is thereby reduced to a single dimen
sion. The only canonical operations of thought are those which
found the “objectivity” of our representations. This priority given
to epistemology explains why, in Kanfs philosophy, in spite of
all appearances, practical philosophy remains subordinate to
theoretical philosophy. Kanfs second Critique, in fact, borrows
all of its structures from the first. The single dominating question
of all critical philosophy is ： what is a priori and what is empiri
cal in knowledge? This distinction, the key to the theory of ob
jectivity, is purely and simply transposed in the second Critique.
The objectivity of the maxims of the will rests on the distinction
between the validity of duty, which is a priori, and the content of
empirical desires.
It is against this reduction of reflection to a simple critique
that I maintain, along with Fichte and his French successor,
Jean Nabert, that reflection is less a justification of science and
duty than it is a reappropriation of our effort to exist. Epistemol
ogy is only a part of this much broader task. We must recover
the sense of existential activity, the positing of the self within all
the density of its works. Now, why is it necessary to characterize
this recovery as an appropriation and even as a reappropriation?
I must recover something which has first been lost. I “appro
priate” that which is “proper” to me, that which has ceased to
fee mine. I make “mine” that from which I am separated by
space or time, by distraction or “diversion,” or by virtue of some
guilty act of forgetting. The concept of appropriation signifies
that the original situation from which reflection proceeds is
“forgetfulness” ； I am lost, “astray” among the objects of the
world, separated from the center of my own existence, just as
I am separated from others and the enemy of all. Whatever may
be the secret of this separation, this diaspora, it aignifles that
The Hermeneutics of Symbols 11 ： / 329
I do not originally possess that which I am. The truth which

Fichte called ^thetic judgment'* is situated in the emptiness of an
absence from myself. This is why reflection is a task— an
Aufgabe— the task of equating my concrete experience with the
affirmation： I am. Such is the final elaboration of our Initial
proposition that reflection is not intuition. We can now say ： the
positing of the self is not a given, it is a task；it is not gegeben
but aufgegeben.
One might ask whether we have not overemphasized the
practical and ethical side of reflection. Is this not a new limita
tion, comparable to the epistemological emphasis of Kantian
philosophy? Moreover, are we not now more distant than ever
from the problem of interpretation? I do not think so. The
emphasis placed on the ethical side of reflection is not a limita
tion if we understand the notion of ethics in its broadest sense,
much in the manner of Spinoza, who referred to “ethics” as the
total project of philosophy.
Philosophy is ethical insofar as it transforms alienation into
freedom and beauty； for Spinoza, this conversion is attained
when knowledge of the self becomes equivalent to knowledge of
the unique substance； but this speculative process has an ethical
meaning insofar as the alienated individual is transformed by
this knowledge of the whole. Philosophy is ethics； but ethics is
not purely concerned with morals. If we follow this Spinozisdc
usage of the word "ethics/* we must say that reflection is ethical
before it becomes a critique of morality. Its goal is to grasp the
ego in its effort to exist, in its desire to be. It is here that a
reflective philosophy rediscovers and perhaps preserves both the
Platonic idea that the source of knowledge is itself eros, desire,
or love, and the Spinozistic idea that it is conatus, effort. This
effort is a desire because it is never satisfied； but conversely,
this desire is an eflFort because it is the affirmation of a unique
being, not simply a lack of being. Effort and desire are the two
aspects of this positing of the self in the first truth ： I am.
We are now ready to complete our negative proposition—
reflection is not intuition— with a positive proposition— reflection
Is the appropriation of our effort to exist and our desire to be by
means of works which testify to this effort and this desire. This
It why reflection is more than a simple critique of moral judg
ment； prior to any critique of judgment, it reflects on this activity
of existence which we manifest in both our effort and in our
deilre.
Thlfl third approach has lid us to the threshold of our
33〇 / THE SYMBOLISM OF EVIL
problem of interpretation. We suspect now that effort and desire

are not only deprived of all intuitive knowledge but are affirmed
only by works whose meaning remains uncertain and revocable.
Reflection here appeals to interpretation and seeks to transform
itself into hermeneutics. Such is the ultimate root of our prob
lem ； it resides in this primitive connection between our activity
of existence and the signs which we manifest in our works；
reflection must become interpretation, for I can grasp the activity
of existence only through those signs that are scattered through
the world. This is why a reflective philosophy must include the
results of the methods and presuppositions of all the sciences
that attempt to decipher and interpret the signs of man.
IV. Ju s t i f i c a t i o n of t h e He r m e n e u t ic C o n flict
O n e e n o r m o u s d i f f i c u l t y r e m a i n s ； we understand
that reflection must find its way among symbols which constitute
an opaque language, symbols that belong to the uniqueness and
contingency of different cultures and which give rise to equivocal
interpretations. But why must these signs be interpreted as
symbols of the sacred or manifestations of the unconscious?
Moreover, neither the realism of the unconscious in psycho
analysis nor the transcendence of the sacred in the phenomenol
ogy of religion seems to be well suited to reflective method. Is
not reflection a method of immanence? Must it not resist a
transcendence from above as much as a transcendence from
below? How can it include this double transcendence?
The two interpretations that we have tried to set in a kind of
confrontation or dialogue have at least one trait in common：
both of them reduce the status of consciousness and displace
the source of meaning. A philosophy of reflection not only under
stands this decentering but requires it. The problem would be
resolved if we understood why reflection implies both an archae
ology and an eschatology of consciousness.
Let us consider in succession the two sides of the question.
Reflection requires a reductive and destructive interpretation
because consciousness is originally false consciousness, M the pre
tension to self-knowledge.” A connection is immediately ap
parent between the task of becoming conscious and the type of
demystification of false consciousness that psychoanalysis
elucidates. The importance of this demyitlflcatlon appears In
its full significance when we place Freud himself among the

great masters of “suspicion,” from de la Rochefoucauld to
Nietzsche and Marx. The closeness of the relationship between
Freud and Nietzsche is perhaps the most illuminating ： for both
of them, it is not consciousness which is the original given, but
false consciousness, prejudice, illusion, and for this reason con
sciousness must be interpreted. Nietzsche was the first to make
a connection between suspicion and interpretation. From Ger
man philology he borrowed the concept of Deutung, exegesis or
interpretation, and he extended it to the dimensions of the
philosophical knowledge of the “will to power.” It is not by
accident that the same concept of Deutung reappears in Freud's
work in the title and in the content of his great work Die
Traumdeutung— The Interpretation of Dreams. In both cases,
the problem is to oppose to the ruse of the will to power, or the
libido, the ruse of deciphering enigmas and the great art of
suspicion. “Consciousness” of tie sefi must become “knowledge”
of the self, i.e., indirect, mediate, and suspicious knowledge of
the self. In this manner, reflection is disassociated from all im
mediate consciousness. Such immediate consciousness offers it
self to be explicated as a pure symptom and to be interpreted by
an external observer. If consciousness is primarily false con
sciousness， reflection must accept this decentering of conscious-
ness. It must, in the words of the Bible, first lose itself in order
to find itself.
Let us now consider the other interpretation, that of the phe
nomenology of religion. We understand now why it must take the
form of a restoration of the sacred. We have previously char
acterized the order of Spirit in opposition to the order of the
unconscious. We have said that Spirit, according to the profound
Insight of Hegel, is a progressive and synthetic movement
through various figures or stages, in which the truth of one
moment resides in the truth of the following moment. For this
reason, we noted, consciousness is a task and is never complete
丨 nd fulfilled until it comes to an end， whatever this end may
be. Spirit is the order of the ultimate, the unconscious is the
order of the primordial. Thus, the meaning of consciousness is
not in itself but in Spirit, that is, in the succession of figures
that draw consciousness forward away from itself.
An ambiguity now appears in our meditation. We have felt
that the progressive unfolding of figures that we have called
"Spirit'* does not attain the level of a phenomenology of religion.
Between the figures of Spirit and tha symbols of the sacred there
is a serious ambiguity. I shall not deny this. I myself, however,

see the articulation between the phenomenology of religion,
with its symbols of the sacred, and the phenomenology of Spirit,
with its figures of historical cultures, as the point where Hegel
failed. For Hegel, as we know, an end is given to this progression
of figures, and this end is absolute knowledge. Would it not be
possible to say, however, that the end is not absolute knowledge,
that is, the completion of all reflections in a whole, in an all-
inclusive totality, but rather that the end is only a promise,
promised through the symbols of the sacred. For me, the sacred
thus takes the place of absolute knowledge, though it is not
merely its substitute. The meaning of the sacred remains
eschatological and can never be transformed into knowledge or
gnosis. I would like to show that this impossibility is not ar
bitrary.
One of the reasons why I do not think that absolute knowl
edge is possible is precisely because of the problem of evil, the
problem which was our original point of departure and which
then appeared to us to be merely an occasion for posing the
problem of symbolism and hermeneutics. At the end of this
discussion, we discovered that the great symbols concerning the
nature, the beginning, and the end of evil are not ordinary sym
bols but are endowed with a certain privileged status. If we are
concerned with extending the scope of the problem of symbols,
it does not suffice to say, as we have shown, that evil is merely
the inverse of good or that all symbolism of evil is the counter
part of a symbolism of the good. These symbols teach us some
thing decisive with regard to the transition from a phenomenol-
ogy of Spirit to a phenomenology of the sacred. These symbols,
in fact, are resistant to any reduction to rational knowledge.
The failure of all theodicies, of all systems that attempt to deal
with the problem of evil, is testimony to the failure of absolute
knowledge in the Hegelian sense. All symbols invite thought,
but the symbols of evil demonstrate in an exemplary manner
that there is always something more in myths and symbols than
in all of our philosophy and that, hence, a philosophical inter
pretation of symbols will never become absolute knowledge.
The symbols of evil, in which we can read the limits of our own
existence, announce at the very same time the limits of all
systems of thought which would try to incorporate these symbols
in an absolute knowledge. This is one of the reasons, perhaps
the most striking, why no absolute knowledge but only the
symbols of thtf sacred Me beyond the flgurM of Spirit. I will say
that these figures are summoned by the sacred through the

medium of signs. The signs of the summons are just as much
given in the context of history, but the summons itself designates
the other, that which is other than all history. We might say that
these symbols are the prophecy of consciousness. They manifest
the dependence of the self on an absolute source of existence and
meanings, on an eschaton, an ultimate end toward which all
the figures of Spirit point.
We can now conclude our discussion. We could fully under
stand the problem of hermeneutics if we could grasp the double
dependence of the self on the unconscious and on the sacred,
since this double dependence is manifested only in a symbolic
mode. In order to elucidate this double dependence, reflection
must reduce the status of consciousness and interpret it in terms
of the symbolic meanings that approach it from behind and
ahead, from above and below. In short, reflection must embrace
both an archaeology and an eschatology.
Within this philosophical foundation, the two opposing inter
pretations of religion with which we began no longer appear
to us to be a mere accident of modem cultural history but a
necessary opposition which reflection comprehends. As Bergson
and others have said, there are two sources of morality and
religion. On the one hand, religion is idolatry, falsity, fabulation,
illusion； ancient poetry tells us that it is fear which originally
created the gods. We understand, in the full sense 〇 £ the word,
that religion depends on an “archaeology” of consciousness to
the extent to which it is a projection of an ancient destiny, both
ancestral and infantile. This is why the interpretation of reli
gion first takes the form of a demystification. It has been ob
served that Freud never speaks of God but only of the gods of
men. And, in truth, we have never wholly rid ourselves of these
gods.
But I understand this demystification to be the inverse of a
renewal of the signs of the sacred, those signs which are the
prophecy of consciousness. This prophecy of consciousness,
however, always remains ambiguous and equivocal； we are
never certain that a given symbol of the sacred is not also a
“return of the repressed” ；or rather, it is certain that every
symbol of the Sacred is also simultaneously a return of the re
pressed, the reemergence of both an ancient and an infantile
symbol. The two symbolisms are intermingled. There is always
*ome trace of archaic myth which Is grafted to and oper
ates within tho moit prophotlc meanings of the sacred. The
334 / the s y m b o l i s m of evil
progressive order of symbols is not exterior to the regressive

order of fantasies；
the plunge into the archaic mythologies of the
unconscious brings to the surface new signs of the sacred. The
eschatology of consciousness is always a creative repetition of its
own archaeology.
Was it not Freud who said: Wo es soli ich Harden—
Where id was, there ego shall be?
The Demythization of Accusation
I w a n t t o t a k e u p today, from the standpoint of

accusation, that is, from the standpoint of consciousness1 when
judging, the question of evil which I have elsewhere discussed
from the standpoint of avowal, that is, from the standpoint of
consciousness as judged.
This new approach will allow me to return to the question of
guilt, where I left it at the end of my book, The Symbolism of
Evil. It wall allow me to introduce new points which my more
recent reading of Freud has helped me discover.
It seems to me that the question of accusation— more pre
cisely, the question of the accusatory agency— helps bring out
the double function of demythization.2 On the one hand, de
mythization recognizes myth as myth but with the purpose of
renouncing it. Ih this sense we must speak of demystification.
The result of this renunciation is the gaining of a thought and
a will which are no longer alienated. The positive side of this
destruction is the manifestation of man as maker of his own
human existence. It is an anthropogenesis. On the other hand,
demythization is recognizing myth as myth but with the purpose
of freeing its symbolic basis. In this sense we must speak of
demythologization. What is deconstructed here is not so much
Translated by Peter McCormick.
z. [Although conscience, in the expressions conscience jug6e and
Conscience jugânte, carries the senses of both “conscience” and “con-
flclousnesa/* we have used the latter term, to retain the sense of an
ftnalytla of the subject in keeping with Rlcoeur's broader problematic.一
£d.] °
a. PAgancy" ii the tramUtlon uiad in the Standard Edition of
Fraud'i worki for In$tanzt Frtnoh imtanot.一 Ed.】
myth as the secondary rationalization that holds it captive, the

pseudo-logos of myth. The result of this discovery is the gaining
of the revealing power that myth conceals under the mask of
objectification. The positive side of this destruction is the estab
lishing of human existence on the basis of an origin which it
does not have at its command but which is announced to it
symbolically in a word which founds it.
I propose to apply this hypothesis of a double demythization
to the agency of accusation.
But the philosopher cannot be content with a superficial
eclectic juxtaposition of the two modalities of demythization. He
must construct the relationship between them, He must, there
fore, determine what problematic will provide a basis for
systematically articulating demystification and demythologiza
tion, the renunciation of myth and the reconquest of myth on its
symbolic base.
What is this properly philosophical problematic which must
regulate our working hypothesis here? It is not, I think, what
the entire Kantian tradition calls moral obligation in its double
aspect of formalism and constraint. This double elimination of
desire, as both foreign to the pure form of duty and rebellious
to commandment, seems to me the major illusion of Kantian
ethics. I would like to associate and incorporate the double
movement of demythization— the renunciation of the fable and
the reconquest of the symbol— into a reflective work aimed at
disengaging the originary question of ethics. It is this reflective
work which will enable us to hold the two movements of de
mythization together.
In part I, I will look for the properly philosophical bearing of
a destructive hermeneutics applied to the theme of accusation,
and I will show that what can and must be demystified is the
false transcendence of the imperative. Thus the horizon will be
freed for a more primordial interrogation, a more fundamental
one, which will discover the essence of ethics in our desire to
be, in our effort to exist.
In part II, I will look for the properly philosophical bearing
of a positive hermeneutics, and I will show that what the
philosopher can understand of a kerygma of salvation is less
concerned with the commandment that oppresses us than with
the desire that constitutes us. The ethics of desire thus gains an
articulation, a focus, and a philosophical basis for the double
process of demythization.
Only then, and this will be part III, will we be able to ask
The Demythization of Accusation / 337
ourselves what becomes of the avowal of evil when accusation

has been subjected to demystification and when the ethical
problem has been placed again in the light of a kerygma which
does not condemn but which calls to life.
I. T h e D e m y s t i f i c a t i o n of A ccusation
As a r e s u l t of t h e H e g e l i a n cr it iq u e of the ethical
view of the world, there is constituted what can be called an
accusation of accusation. This critique is developed through
Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.
Because of my previous studies, I will limit myself here to
the Freudian critique. My purpose, however, is not to remain
there but to use it to initiate a critique of Kant's views on obliga
tion. What I want to retain from the enormous Freudian corpus
which runs from Totem and Taboo to Civilization and Its Dis
contents is the responding encounter between the psychoanalysis
of the superego and the critique of obligation. I will begin with
the methodological divorce between Freud and Kant.
The basic gain of psychoanalysis is, I think, its inauguration
of what seems impossible, that is, of a genealogy of the so-called
principle of morality. Where the Kantian method discerns a
primitive and irreducible structure, another method discerns a
derived and acquired agency. What is primary— and this is what
“principle” means— for a regressive analysis of the formal condi
tions of the good will is no longer primary for another type of
analysis. But this other method, which is also called analysis, is
no longer a reflection on conditions of possibility but an interpre
tation, a hermeneutics of the figures in which the agency of the
Judging consciousness invests itself.
Let us understand this point well. If I say that accusation
ll what is unspoken in obligation, that accusation is what is
understood in obligation, then this “unspoken” and this “under-
■ tood" are not accessible to any kind of direct analysis. This
proposition, rather, is an interpretation, a hermeneutic proposi
tion. It presupposes that a method of deciphering drawn from
philology and exegesis is substituted for the formal method
borrowed from the axlomatizatlon of the knowledge of nature.
Kantianism proceeds from a categorlal analysis, Freudianism
from a philological one. This is why what is primary for one can
be something derived for the other, why what la principle for
one can be genealogy for the other. One cannot, therefore,

separate the Freudian genealogy— or its model in the Nie-
tzschean genealogy— from the hermeneutic method, which
erects a structure of double meaning where a simple axiomatics
of voluntary intention discerns only a simple form, the form of
morality in general.
This opposition between genealogical and formal method can
be pursued further. The recourse to philology is at the same time
the mobilizing of a suspicion which displaces the apparent mean
ing toward another text, which the first conceals. The intro
duction of concealment into the sphere of the good conscience
marks a decisive turn. Consciousness judging becomes con
sciousness judged. The tribunal is submitted to a critique of a
second order, which puts the judging consciousness back into the
field of desire, from which Kanfs formal analysis had tried to
remove it. Obligation, interpreted as accusation, becomes a func
tion of desire and fear.
What are the consequences of this methodological opposition
for the interpretation of accusation? In what follows I will take
for this analysis four characteristics, which I will treat in ascend
ing order, from the most superficial to the most profound.
The demystification of accusation is obtained initially by
the convergence of several clinical analogies between ethical fear
and taboo fear, between scrupulosity and obsessional neurosis,
between moral vigilance and observed madness, between re
morse and melancholy, between moral strictness and mas
ochism. This network of analogies sketches what can be called a
pathology of duty precisely where Kant spoke only of a pathology
of desire. According to this new pathology, man is a being sick
with the sublime.
If the exemplary history of the individual or the species
is considered, this descriptive relation becomes a genetic filia
tion. But what distinguishes Freudian geneticism from every
other kind is the fact that it is elaborated on the level of the
phantasm, by the play of figurative substitutions. Hence Freud's
geneticism rediscovers a bond between the imperative and the
figurative which places the agency of obligation in the signifying
structures of discourse. At the center of this symbolic system
the father figure of the Oedipus complex dominates. Freud often
calls it the “paternal complex.” The institution of the law is thus
found coupled to a system of figures, let us even gay, to a
“primitive scene”一the murder of the father一 which In Kant's
eyes could appear only as the empirical conitltutlon of man. It li
precisely this contingent constitution which is revealed to be,

for an exegetical method, the founding structure and, finally,
the irreducible destiny, as the connection with Sophoclean
tragedy attests.
Therefore, where Kant says law, Freud says father. What
stands out here is the difference between formalism and exege
sis. For the hermeneutics of accusation, the formal law is a
secondary rationalization and, finally, an abstract substitute, in
which the concrete drama is hidden yet underlined by several
key, numerically limited, meanings— birth, father, mother, phal
lus, death.
Third characteristic： from the descriptive relation, by way
of the genetic filiation, we must move to the economic deriva
tion of the agency of accusation, which we shall now call the
superego in order to treat it as a differentiation of the inner
world. The superego, Freud says, is much closer to the obscure
world of drives than is the ego, whose function of conscious
ness— an essentially superficial function— represents the exte
rior world. The analysis of the ego and the id is well known. The
hypqthesis of an economic redistribution of libidinal energy be
tween the id and the superego has a profound meaning. It is
from the stuff of our desires that our renunciations are made.
The analogy between moral consciousness and the structure of
melancholy is in this respect very illuminating. It makes it pos
sible to approach again from the economic viewpoint the moral
agency of the archaic object which was lost and installed in the
interiority of the ego.
Final characteristic： in the overdetermined and ambivalent
figure of the father two functions intersect— the function of re
pression and the function of consolation. It is the same figure
who threatens and protects. In the same figure the fear of pun
ishment and the desire for consolation are tied together. Hence,
by a sequence of substitutions and equivalencies, the cosmic
figure of God can be derived as the dispenser of consolation for
man, who remains a child and is delivered over to the harshness
Of life. This is why the denunciation of the father*1 will also be
the renunciation of consolation. This renunciation is no small
thing, for we prefer moral condemnation to the anguish of an
•xlstence that is both unprotected and unconsoled.
All of these traits— and especially the last one— make the
demystification of accusation resemble a work of mourning.
The point now is to disengage tho philosophical significance
of the Freudian critique of accuNation. I will sum it up in this
34〇 / THE S Y M B O L I S M OF EVIL
formula ： it is to move from the morality of obligation back to

an ethics of the desire to be or of the effort to exist.
But this philosophical meaning could not come from the
Freudian critique. On the contrary, it is the ethics of desire
which determines the meaning of the critique. Actually, nothing
is resolved here, everything remains to be done. What is the
significance of the analogy between moral consciousness and
the various pathological structures which are its clinical equiva
lent? What does the genetic filiation signify if the source of
morality, like the father of the Oedipus phantasm, remains
foreign to desire? What does identification with this father mean
if it is true that there are two identifications— a cannibal desire
to have and to possess, and a desire to be like, to resemble? It
must be granted that the genealogy is sufficient to dethrone the
pretended absolute of obligation, but the origin it designates is
not a primordial one.
The philosopher’s task is to conjoin the demystification of
accusation with the problematic of a fundamental ethics, but one
whose horizon has been cleared by the destruction of false
transcendencies.
For my part, I would look for this fundamental ethics along
the lines of a reflective philosophy like that of Jean Nabert. To
be sure, a reflective philosophy is a philosophy of the subject but
not necessarily a philosophy of consciousness, that is, a phi
losophy where the central question is the question of the subject,
a philosophy where the question "Who is the one who speaks?"
is the origin we are returning to. My working hypothesis, there
fore, is that only a reflective philosophy can assume, together,
the two modes of demythization_ the destruction of myth as
the false transcendence of obligation and the liberation of the
symbolic potential of the kerygma.
Fundamental or originary ethics, therefore, is the hinge be
tween these two movements of our thought： the movement of
mythical destruction and the movement of symbolic instruction.
The possibility that obligation is not the primary structure
of ethics can be seen by a simple reference to the title of
Spinoza^ Ethics. Ethics is the appropriation of our endeavor to
exist, in its total process from slavery to beatitude. But this is
what a reflection on obligation initially hides. It conceals the
actual dimensions of human activity under formal categories
derived from the structures of objectivity in a critique of knowl
edge. The unjustified parallel between the two Kantian Critiques
imposes a division between a priori and a posteriori which is
contrary to the Intimate structure of action. Hence, the principle

of morality is severed from the faculty of desire. When the
faculty of desire, considered in its entirety, is set aside, then hap
piness is denied, because it is denounced as the ^materiaF prin
ciple of the determination of willing, and a ^formar principle
of obligation is isolated abstractly. The demystification of accusa
tion has the philosophical consequence of again putting into
question this privilege of formalism as the first step of an ethics.
I have already said that formalism appears to us as a secondary
rationalization, obtained on the practical level by a simple trans
position of the critique of knowledge and the distinction between
the transcendental and the empirical. This transposition com
pletely misconstrues the specific quality of acting in relation to
knowing. So it is necessary to renounce every kind of opposition
of form and matter, which insists on the constitutive opera
tions of truth, and instead arrive at a dialectic of action, whose
central theme is the relation between operation and work, be
tween the desire to be and the effectuation of this desire.
I say effort and also desire in order to place at the origin of
ethical reflection an identity between effort, in Spinoza*s sense
of conatuSy and eros, in both its Platonic and Freudian senses.
I take 'efforr the way Spinoza does in the Ethics, that is, as the
positing of existence— ponit sed non tollit— an affirmation of
being to the degree that this affirmation involves an indefinite
time, a duration which is nothing other than the continuation of
existence itself. It is this positive aspect of existence which is
at the basis of the most primordial or originary affirmation, the T
amwthat Fichte called thetic judgment. It is this af?irmation that
constitutes us, and it is this affirmation of which we are dis
possessed in multiple ways. It is this affirmation which must be
attained and reattained indefinitely, even though basically this
affirmation is not subject to loss, is inalienable, primordial.
But while it is affirmation3 this efF〇 Tt is at the same time
應elf-dividedness，lack, desire for the other. What has to be
understood here is that conatus is at the same time eros. Love,
Plato says in the Symposium, is love of something, of something
that is not possessed, of something one is deprived of, of some
thing one lacks. The affirmation of being in the lack of being：
in Its most primordial structure, this is what effort is.
What does this primordial affirmation found an ethics on?
On this ：that the °I amMis for itself Its own need. It has to
be what It prlmordially Is. Duty Is only the peripeteia between
need and aspiration • As Nabert 塞ayt:
Consciousness owes its possibility to be to the relationship which

its desire sustains with a primary certitude of which the law is
only a symbol. The order of duty contributes to revealing to the
self a desire to be whose deepening is identified with ethic itself.3
II. T h e K e r y g m a t ic C or e of E t h ic s
R e o r i e n t i n g t h e p r o b l e m o f e t h i c s on the basis of
the desire to be instead of on the basis of pure obligation enables
us to pose the question of the religious core of ethics in new
terms.
Is the threshold between ethics and religion genuinely
crossed when moral commandment is linked with the historical
manifestation of a divine will? Does morality become religion
when the universality which is duty becomes the uniqueness of
the semel jussit semper paret, the hapax legomenon of a com
mencement, which is commandment? This is what I would
seriously like to dispute here. The demystification of accusation
brings suspicion to bear precisely at the point where interdiction
is sacralized.
But restoring an ethical basis to our desire to be authorizes
us to pose the problem in completely different terms. It allows us
to entertain a new kind of connection between the event of the
Gospel and our morality. Let us follow Saint Paul when he
organizes his entire moral theology around the conflict between
law and grace, or the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews when
he reorganizes the major significations of the Old Testament
around faith rather than law ：4,By faith Abraham when he was
called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an
inheritance, obeyed. . . . By faith Abraham, when he was tried,
offered up Isaac” （ Hebrews i i :8, 17),
The attempt to think the religious core of ethics as a com
mandment which has its beginning or commencement in a
divine event— perhaps this is the myth of moral religion, the
myth which must be demystified. And perhaps it is on the basis
of this demystification that the event can be recovered, the pure
event of kerygma and its relation to the origin of our desire to be.
For my part, I woud leave ethics in its anthropological ele
3. Jean Nabert, Elements for an Ethic, tran§. William J. Petrek

(Evanston, 111.: Northweitem University Preii, z 〇6〇 ), p. 117,
ment; I would reunite the notion of value with the dialectic

between a principle of unlimitation, linked to the desire to be,
and a principle of limitation, linked to the works, institutions,
and structures of economic, political, and cultural life. I would
not project value into the heavens, where it becomes an idol. If
value is an event, if it is a commencement or beginning, if it is a
historical mystery which is announced and attested to only in
the element of witness, then value is the event of a kerygma
which relocates man— man and his law, man and his ethics— in
a history of salvation, that is, in a history where everything can
be lost and where everything can be saved or, rather, in a history
where everything is already lost on the basis of an event which
endlessly occurs, the Fall, and in a history where everything is
already saved on the basis of an event endlessly remembered
and signified, the death of the Just One. It is this contextualiza-
tion of man and his human ethics in relation to the evangelical
summons that constitutes the kerygmatic moment of ethics.
The task of a moral theology, it seems to me, is to think as
far as possible the relation, not so much between the kerygma
and obligation, but between the kerygma and that desire of
which obligation is a secondary function. I am not saying that
we will find nothing like “obeciience”一Abraham twice obeyed：
the call to depart and the call to offer Isaac— but it is a question
of something completely different from the sacralization of
moral obligation. As Kierkegaard realized, it is a matter of an
obedience beyond the suspension of the ethical, of an ""absurd*1
obedience, one related to the singularity of a call and to a need
which renders the believer a stranger and a sojourner on earth
and which consequently opens the chasm of his desire. This is
what the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews calls, in almost
Gnostic language, “the desire [for] a better country” (Heb.
11:16 ). It is in the origin, in the emptiness, in the tension of
desire that the kerygmatic moment of ethics must be recovered.
The kerygma— because it is related to the singularity of the
“departure” and the “offering，” as the story of Abraham recalls,
and is not at all related to the generality of law, because it is the
singular relation of a singular event to the historicity of our
desire— is accessible only as witness.
If this is how things are, then what can a philosophy of re
ligion and faith say? As I see it, the cleavage between philosophy
and theology takes place in the following way. Theology deals
with relations of intelligibility in the domain of witness. It is a
logic of the Chrlitological Interpretation of salvation events. In
saying this, I am remaining basically Anselmlan and Barthian.

Theology is an intellectus fidei. The philosophy of faith and
religion is something else. What philosophy organizes in terms
of the Christological basis of witness, the philosophy of religion
organizes in terms of man’s desire to be. And here I do not
hesitate to say that I return to the Kantian analyses in Religion
within the Limits of Reason Alone, to the degree that they di
verge from a formalism.
I would foDow Kant in two places, first in his definition of the
ethical function of religion, and second in his definition of the
representative content of religion.
For Kant, religion has an ethical function irreducible to The
Critique of Practical Reason, irreducible but not at all foreign.
It has as its theme wthe whole object of the w ill* This theme
is distinct from the “principle of morality,” which is the object
of a simple analytic. It is in terms of the dialectic that the prob
lematic of religion is articulated, because the dialectic concerns
the necessity of reason in the practical order, that is, ^the un
conditioned totality of the object of pure practical reason.>, Re
ligion must be situated where evil will have to be resituated, that
is, on the level where the demand of practical reason is con
tradicted. The fact that Kant conceived this whole object of the
will as a synthesis of virtue and happiness is less important to
us than the demand for a totality which situates us on the level
of an irreducible question. In Kanfs own language, the question
<€What can I hope for?w is completely different from the ques
tion <cWhat must I do?,J To the degree that religion is where this
question arises, religion is not simply the double of morality, as
it would be were religion to limit itself to enunciating duty as a
divine command. In fliis respect religion would he only an was if*
pedagogy：obey as if God himself commanded you. But the com
mandment is resituated in a new problematic when it becomes
a moment of hope, that of participating in the kingdom of God,
of entering into the kingdom of reconciliation.
With Kant himself the inclusion of duty (the theme of the
Analytic) in the movement of hope (the province of the Dia
lectic) marks the transition from morality to religion. The spec
ificity of the religious object is thus outlined at the very core of
Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, It belongs to the mediating
character of the synthesis that it effects between virtue and hap
piness. It is a new object in relation to the Faktum of the moral
law, and it maintains a specific exteriority with relation to the
synthesis that it effects.
This is why there is a specificity in religious alienation and

why, in Kant, the doctrine of radical evil is completed only
with the doctrine of religion, with the theory of the church and
of cult in Books III and IV of Religion within the Limits of Rea
son Alone. If, in fact, hope is added to duty, just as the question
“What may I hope?” is distinct from the question “What must I
do?M, then the fulfillment which is the object of the promise has
the character of a given which permeates both man^ actions and
his morality. Hence, religious alienation is an alienation which
is proper to the dimension of the promise. What Kant denounces
as Schwarmerei and Pfaffentum— mysticism and priestly fanati
cism— is part of the problematic of totalization and fulfillment
which is specific to religion. A point which has not been suffi
ciently emphasized is that the problem of evil in Kant is related
not only to the Analytic, that is, to the regressive demonstration
of the formal principle of morality, but to the Dialectic, that is,
to the agreement and reconciliation between reason and nature.
Truly human evil concerns premature syntheses, violent syn
theses, short circuits in the totality. It culminates in the sublime,
with the “presumption” of the theodicies and their numerous
successors in modern politics. But this is possible precisely be
cause the aim of the totality is an irreducible aim and because
it opens the space of a Dialectic of total will which cannot be
reduced to the simple Analytic of the good will. There are in
deed perverse syntheses because there is an authentic question
of the sjmthesis, of the totality, in what Kant calls the total ob
ject of the will.
I would also follow Kant in his definition of the representa
tive content of religion. Up to now we have defined only the most
general possibility of religion with the question 4<What can I
£ope?” The “postulate” itself of God does not yet make a real
religion. Religion is born with the “representation” of the “good
principle” in an “archetype.” Here is w豆ere the Christology which
the theologian takes as his space of intelligibility is related to the
will in the philosophy of religion. The central question of the
philosophy of religion is this ：How is the will affected in its most
intimate desire by the representation of this model, this archetype
of a humanity agreeable to God, which the believer calls the
Son of God? The question of religion— and here Kant prefigures
Hegel_ is deployed at the level of a schematism of the desire
for totality. This question is essentially the problem of the rela
tion of representation to the dialectic of practical reason. It con
cerns the schematlzatlon of the good principle in an archetype.
Kanfs Christology, of course, is not without relation to Spi

noza. In this respect Kanfs Christology satisfies, I think, the
requirements for a philosophy of religion. Like Spinoza, Kant
does not think that man can himself produce the idea of a suf
fering just man who offers his life for all men. Certainly the
theologian would hardly admit the reduction of what can only
be an event to an idea• 入nd we can easily say that this reduction
is in line with the formalism and the entire abstract mentality
of Kantianism, a philosophy which misunderstands die dimen
sion of witness to the degree that it misunderstands, more gen
erally, the dimension of historicity. Moreover, it is only as a
quasi-event that the philosopher can represent to himself this
coming of the idea of the Son of God into the human will. But if
a theology cannot partake of this Kantian infirmity, the phi
losophy of religion can be satisfied with it. Its problem is how the
human will is affected by this archetype in which the good prin
ciple is schematized. But in this respect Kantianism is quite
precise. *This idea/* Kant says, <£has taken root in man without
our understanding how human nature has been able to welcome
it.” Hence Kant’s Christ concerns our meditation to the precise
degree that Christ is not the hero of duty but the symbol of ful
fillment. He is not the example of duty l?ut the exemplar of the
sovereign good. In my terms I would say that, for the philosopher,
Christ is the schema of hope. He comes from a mythicopoetic
imagination, which concerns the completion of the desire to be.
This does not suffice for the theologian, who asks how the
schema is rooted in the historical witness of Israel and how the
apostolic generation was able to recognize it in ‘the Word
made flesh/* But this is sufficient for the philosopher, who now
has what he needs for elaborating a kerygmatic conception of an
ethics which is no longer in principle a sacralization of interdic
tion. Religion— or rather what in religion is faith— is not In its
essence condemnation but “good new s. In witnessing to the
Christ event, it offers to reflection and to philosophic speculation
an analogon of the sovereign good, a schema of totality. In short,
faith gives to philosophic^ thinking an object other than duty；
it oflFers it the representation of a promise. At the same time3 it
engenders an original problematic, that of the relation between
the imagination that produces such schemata and the 4 lan itself
of our desire. The abstract problem of formalism yields to the
concrete problem of the genesis of desire. This genesis of desire,
this poetics of the will, is what faith yields for understanding
in the symbol of the new man and in all the lymboli of the
second birth and regeneration, which we must now reappropriate,

beyond every moralizing allegorism, in their primordial power.
Ill, E v il as a K e r y g m a t ic P roblem
W e w i l l h av e su c c e e d e d in our attempt to demystify

accusation, and we will have fully recovered t h e kerygmatic
dimension, of ethics, when we will have resituated the object
of accusation_ guilt— in the field of kerygma, in the light of the
promise.
So long as religion is linked to accusation, so long as it is
limited to sacrallzing interdiction, evil remains itself transgres
sion, remains disobedience to the divine commandment. The
demystification of accusation must go all the way, to the demysti
fication of transgression. The religious dimension of evil is not
there. Here again Saint Paul has said what is essential：sin is
not transgression；it is the link between law and covetousness,
on the basis of which there is transgression；sin is remaining
within the narrow economy of the law, where the commandment
excites covetousness. The contrary of sin is not morality but
faith.
Hence, the problem must be reversed in its entirety. Evil is
not the first thing that we understand but the last；it is the last
article of the creed and not the first. A prior reflection on the
origin of evil is not religious because it seeks out a radical evil
behind evil maxims. Nor is it religious because it discerns some
thing inscrutable which can be expressed only mythically. What
qualifies this meditation as religious is a complete reinterpreta
tion, on the basis of the kerygma, of our notions of evil and of
guilt. This is why I am speaking of a kerygmatic interpretation
of evil.
Let us attempt this reinterpretation of evil, I would say this
recurrent reinterpretation of evil, on the basis of the evangelical
kerygma. If this movement of eschatology back toward genesis
is not to constitute a shameful reverse, it must satisfy three
basic conditions ：( 1 ) the pressure of demystification, when ap
plied to accusation, must be constantly maintained；(2) this
demystification of accusation must remain linked to the demysti
fication of consolation；and (3) demystification must proceed
from the kerygmatic core of faith, that is, from the good news
that God la love. Let us take up these three points in turn.
i. What does the feeling of evil mean, once accusation has

been demystified? This first question deals with what might be
called the epigenesis of the feeling of guilt. The question is far
from being a simple one. It cannot be dealt with simply by means
of the resources of a psychology. It would be childish to believe
that someone could add to the psychology or to the psychoanaly
sis of the superego. It is not a question of completing Freud.
This epigenesis of the feeling of guilt can be obtained only in
directly, by means of an exegesis in the Diltheyan sense of the
word, of an exegesis of the text of penitential literature, where
an exemplary history of guilt is constituted. A man arrives at
adult guilt when he understands himself according to the figures
of this exemplary history. An epigenesis of the feeling of guilt,
therefore, cannot be obtained directly. It has to pass by way of
an epigenesis of representation, which would be a conversion
of the imaginary into symbols or, in another language, a con
version of the vestigial phantasm of a primitive scene into a
poem of origins. The primordial crime, in which Freud sees
the primitive scene of the collective Oedipus complex, can be
come a founding representation if it is permeated with au
thentic creation of meaning.
The question the demythizing of evil poses, then, is this ：
besides the demystification of accusation, can the phantasm of
the ^primitive scene*' be reinterpreted as a symbol of origins? In
more technical terms ：can such a phantasm furnish the first
level of meaning for an imagination of origins that is more and
more detached from its function of infantile and quasi-neurotic
repetition and more and more available for an Investigation of
the fundamental meanings of human destiny?
This cultural creation on the basis of a phantasm constitutes
what I call the symbolic function. I see here the reappropriation
of a phantasm of the primitive scene converted into an instru
ment of discovery and into an exploration of origins.
Thanks to these “detecting^* representations， man says the
inauguration of his humanity. Hence the stories of struggle in
Babylonian and Hesiodic literature, the story of the fall in Orphic
literature, and the stories of the primitive fault and of exile in
Hebraic literature can be treated the way Otto Rank treated
them, as a kind of collective oneirism. But this oneirism is not a
relic of prehistory. Rather, across its vestigial function the
symbol shows an imagination of origins at work. This imaglna-
tion can be called gescfeicfetKcfe， because It 餳 ay_ an advent, a
coming to being； but It cannot be called h ia to rtich , because It
has no chronological signification. Making use of Husserllan

terminology, I would say that the phantasms Freud explored
constitute the hyletic data of the mythicopoetic imagination. This
new intentionality, by which the phantasm is symbolically inter
preted, is suggested by the very character of the phantasm, since
it speaks of a lost origin, of lost archaic objects, of the lack
inscribed in desire. What stimulates the endless movement of
interpretation is not the fullness of remembering but its empti
ness, its openness. Ethnology, comparative mythology, and bibli
cal exegesis confirm that each myth is the reinterpretation of an
earlier story. Hence, the interpretations of interpretations can
very well be operative on phantasms which are assignable to
different ages and to different stages of the libido. But what is
important is not so much this ^suggestive materiar as the move
ment of interpretation which is included in the promotion of
meaning and which constitutes its intentional innovation. Myth
can thus receive a theological signification, as is seen in the
biblical stories of origins, by means of this endless correction,
which becomes concentrated and then becomes systematic.
It seems to me, therefore, that two methods must converge,
one, closer to psychoanalysis, which shows the conditions for
the reinterpretation of the phantasm as a symbol, and the other,
closer to textual exegesis, which shows this promotion of mean
ing at work in the great mythical texts. Taken separately, these
two methods are powerless. For the movement from phantasm
to symbol can be recognized only by the mediation of the docu
ments of culture, more precisely of texts, which are, as Dilthey
taught, the direct objects of hermeneutics. This is really Freud's
error in Moses and Monotheism: he thought he could economize
on biblical exegesis, that is, on the texts in which biblical man
formed his faith, and proceed directly to the psychological gen
esis of religious representations while contenting himself with
several analogies furnished by clinical experience. Because he
did not link the psychoanalysis of the symbol with the exegesis
of the great texts in which the thematic of faith is constituted,
he found, at the end of his analysis, only what he knew before^
undertaking it — a personal God, who, according to Leonardo da
Vincfs phrase, is only a transfigured father.
On the other hand, a textual exegesis is abstract and remains
meaningless for us so long as the M figurativesn it comments on
are not inserted into the affective and representative dynamism.
The task here is to show how cultural products preserve lost
archaic object! and yet go beyond the function of the simple
35〇 / the s y m b o l i s m of evil
return of the repressed. The prophecy of consciousness is not

exterior to its archaeology. The symbol is a phantasm disavowed
and overcome but not at all abolished. It is always on some trace
of archaic myth that the symbolic meanings appropriate to
reflective interpretation are grafted.
Finally, it is in the element of the word [parole] that this
promotion of meaning is deployed. The conversion of the phan
tasm and that of the aflFect are only the shadow cast on the
imaginary level and the level of drives by the conversion of
meaning. If an epigenesis of affect and of image is possible,
then it is because the word is the instrument of this hermeneia,
this interpretation, which is itself the symbol in relation to the
phantasm.
The result of this indirect exegesis, which cannot be re
duced to any kind of direct introspection, is that guilt progresses
by passing over two thresholds. The first is that of injustice— in
the sense of the Platonic adikia一and of the “justice” of the
Jewish prophets. The fear of being unjust, the remorse for hav
ing been unjust, are no longer taboo fear, taboo remorse. The
breaking of the interpersonal bond, the wrong done to the person
of another, are more important than the threat of castration.
The consciousness of injustice constitutes the first creation of
meaning in relation to the fear of vengeance, to the fear of
being punished. The second threshold is that of the sin of the
just man, of the evil of justice itself. In this presumption of
the honest man the delicate conscience discovers radical evil. To
this second cycle are attached the most subtle evils, those which
Kant links to the pretension of empirical consciousness to say
the totality, to impose its own vision of it on others.
It appears that the sexual is not at the center of this exegesis
of true guilt. Sexual guilt must itself be reinterpreted. Everything
which maintains the trace of a condemnation of life must be
eliminated from an interpretation which is to proceed entirely
from the consideration of the relation with others.
And if the sexual is no longer at the center, this is because
the place whence judgment proceeds is no longer the parental
agency or any agency derived from the father figure. It is the
figure of the prophet, the figure outside the family, outside
politics, outside culture, the eschatological figure par excellence.
2. But guilt is rectified only if consolation also goes through
a radical ascesis. The moral God, in fact, is also the providential
God, as the old law of retribution, discuiied ai early as the
Babylonian sages, attests. It is God who regulates the phyulcal

order of things according to the moral interests of humanity. It
is necessary to reach the point where the ascesis of consolation
takes precedence over the ascesis of guilt, guiding the mourn
ing of punishment and of recompense.
Again, it is literature which stakes out this ascesis: the “wis
dom” literature. In its archaic forms, “wisdom” is a long medita-
tion on the prosperity of the wicked and the unhappiness of the
just. This wisdom literature, taken up again and transposed into
the register of reflective thought, is essential to the rectification
of accusation. It, too, bears a mourning, the mourning of re
crimination. It is on the basis of this renunciation of recrimina
tion that the critique of accusation can itself be carried to its
furthest point. Actually, it is this critique which makes judging
consciotzsness appear as impure consciousness. Under the re
crimination of judging consciousness the power of resentment
is unmasked, a power which is simultaneously a very hidden
hatred and a very shrewd hedonism.
This critique of judging consciousnesss in its turn grants
access to a new form of inner conflict between faith and religion.
This is the faith of Job confronted by the religion of his friends.
Faith, instead of undergoing an iconoclasm, now effects one. In
making itself critical of the judging consciousness, faith gives
its own account of the critique of accusation. It is faith itself that
fulfills the task that Freud called '"renunciation of the father.^
Job in fact receives no explanation of the meaning of his suffer
ing. His faith is simply removed from every moral vision of the
world. In return, the only thing shown to him is the grandeur
of the whole, wdthout the finite viewpoint of his own desire re
ceiving a meaning directly from it. A path is thus opened ：that
of a nonnarcissistic reconciliation. I renounce my viewpoint; I
love the whole as it is.
3. The third condition for a kerygmatic reinterpretation of
evil is that the symbolic figure of God should preserve from the
theology of anger only what can be assumed into the theology of
love.
With this, I hardly think that all severity is abolished. The
“good Lord” is more derisory than the God hidden in anger.
There is also an epigenesis of God’s anger. What is the anger of
love? It is perhaps what Saint Paul calls grieving the Spirit.
The sadness of love is more difficult to endure than the anger
of a magnified father. It is no longer the fear of punishment— in
Freudian language, the fear of castration— which inhabits it but

the fear of not loving enough, of not loving correctly. Here is
the final level of feax, of the fear of God. At the same time,
Nietzsche^ phrase is fulfilled ：'The only God that is refuted is
the God of morality
I do not conceal the problematic character of this third
theme； it is the weakest, though it should be the strongest. It is
weak because it is at the point of convergence of two sublima
tions— that of accusation and that of consolation. But these two
sublimations effect the suspension of the ethical in apparently
irreconcilable senses. The first sublimation, that of accusation,
puts one on Kierkegaard’s path; the second， that of consolation,
on the path of Spinoza. The task of a theology of love would be
to show their identity. That is why I am saying that the theme
of the God of love ought to be the strong point of this whole
dialectic. Far from being lost in effusiveness or drowned in
sentimentality, the task of such a theology would be to witness to
the profound unity between the two modalities of the suspension
of ethics, the profound identity between the supreme Thou and
the Deus sive natura. It is perhaps here that the figure of the
father, disavowed, overcome as phantasm and lost as idol, re
awakens as symbol. But it is then nothing more than the surplus
of meaning aimed at by this theorem of Book V of Spinoza’s
Ethics：*The intellectual love of the mind toward God is the very
love with which he loves “himself"— quo Deus seipsum amat.*
The last stage of the father figure is the seipsum of Spinoza.
The symbol of the father is no longer at all that of a father I
am able to have. In this regard the father is not a father. But it
is the likeness of the father, in conformity to which the renuncia
tion of desire is not death but love, again in the sense of the
corollary of Spinoza’s theorem: “• . . the love of God toward
men and the intellectual love of the mind toward God are one
and the same thing.” 4 5
How are the two modalities of the suspension of the ethical—
that of accusation and that of consolation— the same? To under
stand this is the task of intellectual love. My thesis here is that
this comprehension remains intelligible to faith in the endless
correction of its symbols：intelligible, because understanding
must struggle, without a truce, with the antinomy；and faith—
4. Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, tranfl. James Gutmann (New York ：

Hafner, 1 9 4 9 ). P- a7 4 -
5. Ibid., p, 175.
and, even more, love— because what actuates this understand

ing is the ceaseless work of purification applied to desire and
to fear.
It is only in the light of the intellectual love of God that
man can be rightly accused and consoled in truth.
Interpretation of the
Myth of Punishment
B e c a u s e o f t h e c o n f u s i o n of its themes, the myth of

punishment calls for a deliberately analytical treatment. That
is why I am inclined, first of all, to enumerate the difficulties
and paradoxes which adhere to the notion in order to determine
the rational nucleus of the law of punishment. I shall then
inquire if there is not a stronger law than the law of punishment
by which the myth might be shattered.
I. D i f f i c u l t i e s and P a r a d o x es
T he m a j o r p a r a d o x is doubtless placing the notion of

punishment in the category of myth. But we will understand
what, so to speak, produces myth in the notion of punishment
only by examining a preliminary paradox, which would appear
to lead in another direction than that of myth.
I shall call this first aporia the aporia of the rationality of
punishment. Nothing, indeed, is more rational, or at least noth
ing puts in more of a claim to rationality, than the notion of
punishment. Crime merits chastisement, says the collective
consciousness；and the Apostle confirms this：the wages of sin
is death. The paradox is that this presumed rationality, which
we shall call the logic of punishment, is an undiscoverable
rationality. It posits a necessary connection between the mani
festly heterogeneous moments that we shall find gathered to-
Tramlated by Robert Swaancy.
【354】
Interpretation of the Myth of Punishment / 355
r in the following definition, which I have taken from the

dictionary："Tunishment：what one is forced to submit to
for something judged reprehensible or blameworthy." Let un
subject to scrutiny the elements of this definition.
First, punishment implies from the beginning a suffering
(the painful element of punishment), which is found in the af
fective order and consequently belongs to the sphere of the body；
this first element makes of punishment a physical evil which la
added to a moral evil. But, second, this passivity, this affection,
this affliction, does not occur in the manner of the contingencies
of life and history；it is ordained by a will, which thus afFect§
another will; it is the “forced submission” at the origin of the
“submission.” We say ：M orderw punishment, M inflictM punish
ment. This second element establishes the punishing at the
source of the painful. Third, the meaning of punishment, insofar
as it is a conjunction of submission and forcing submission,
resides in the presumed equivalence between, on the one hand,
evil suffered and inflicted, and, on the other hand, evil com
mitted, at least as it has been so judged in a judicial suit. This
equivalence constitutes the rationale of punishment, around
which will revolve our whole discussion；it goes without saying
that, for penal reasoning, a penalty can be of equal value to a
crime. This is what our definition says ：<fWhat one is forced to
submit to for something*’ ；this “for” is a “for” of value, which we
sometimes express in the language of price. We say ："Make him
pay the penalty"；Punishment is the price of crime.w Fourth,
the culprit is the subject of the will in which the equivalence of
crime and punishment is posited；he is presumed to be one and
the same in the committed evil of the wrongdoing and in the
suffered evil of punishment；it is in him that punishment sup
presses, effaces, annuls the wrongdoing or fault.
Such are the elements into which punishment is analyzed.
The whole enigma rests In the rationale that we have called
price or value ；this rationale of punishment is not indeed an
identity for the understanding. This is for two reasons. What is
there in common, first of all, between the suffering of punish
ment and the commission of wrongdoing? How can a physical
evil equal, compensate for, and cancel out a moral evil? Crime
and punishment are inscribed in two different frames, that of
enduring and that of acting； but we must think them as united in
the same will, that of the culprit. Moreover, submission and forc
ing submlmlon aro In two different wills, that of the accused
and that of th« Judg^, aviumlng that the commission and the
submission are in the same subject— but we have seen that,

even then, they are not in the same frame— forcing submission
and submission are in two different subjects：the judging con
sciousness and the judged consciousness；yet we must think of
judge and culprit as only one will.
Thus, the rationale of punishment would appear split apart
between acting and suffering in the same will, between submis
sion and forcing submission in two distinct wills. It overcomes
this double fracture by the thought of an equivalence, the equiva
lence of crime and punishment. This equivalence is presumed to
reside in the culprit himself, so that what has been done by the
crime may be undone by punishment. Such is the reasoning be
hind punishment；it appears only in a duality for understand
ing ：duality of the committed crime and the punishment sub-
mitted to, duality of the judging consciousness and of the con
sciousness judged. In short, an identity of reason is hidden be
hind this duality of understanding.
It is here that the second aporia presents itself and, with it,
the question of the myth. What the understanding divides, the
myth thinks as one in the Sacred.
Let us consider, indeed, the relation of stain or pollution to
purification in the sacral universe. Stain is a certain attack on
an order, itself defined by a network of prohibitions. Purification
comes as a process of cancellation；it consists in a group of
acts, themselves codified in a ritual, which are reputed to act on
the process of stain to destroy it as stain. Punishment is a
moment in this process of cancellation; we call “expiation” this
quality of punishment in virtue of which it can cancel stain and
its effects in the order of the sacred. Expiation thus occupies in
the sacral universe the place of the rationale that an Initial
analysis looked for in vain on the level of understanding.
In what way does expiation create an aporia? In the fact
that the myth and reason occur in it together. A curious aporia
in truth. The myth, indeed, does not occur in the form of a nar
rative but in the form of a law. To be sure, we always find
origin narratives which tell how the law was first given to men,
how a certain ritual was first established, why such a punish
ment erases stain, why a certain sacrifice equals punishment
and purification. By these origin narratives the myth of punish
ment is rendered homogeneous, from a literary point of view—
I mean by the very form of the narrative一to other myths ：
myths of the origin of the cosmos, the enthronement of the king,
the founding of the city, the Institution of the cult, 6 tc« But the
form of the narrative is here only the exterior form of an inter

nal form, which is the law. Yet, the myth of punishment is a
strange myth, since the myth is reason. Among all myths, that
of punishment has the privilege of revealing that law that lies
at the heart of every origin narrative, the law which anchors
historical time in primordial time. But, in return, it is a strange
reason which establishes a divisive understanding within a law
which does not relate to a logic of ideas but to a logic of powers；
by punishment, a power of stain or pollution is canceled by a
power of purification.
Such is the second aporia：the identity of reason which we
have sought for at the root of the duality of crime and punish
ment, for the understanding, occurs first as myth of the law, of
the Way, the Hodos, the Tao. It is this mythic reason which
creates the power of expiation. Thus punishment puts us face
to face with a mytho-logy, with an indivisible unit of mythology
and rationality.
I shall now develop this aporia in two directions：that of
the right to punish and that of religion, since these are the cul
tural spheres in which the question of punishment is posed. But
it is this very association which expresses the preceding aporia：
the identity of myth and reason in the logic of punishment has
its most extraordinary cultural expression in the kinship between
the sacred and the juridical. Without cessation, indeed, the
sacred sacralizes the juridical: this will be our third aporia. With
out cessation, on the other hand, the juridical juridicizes the
sacred ：this will be our fourth aporia.
That the sacred sacralizes the juridical is easily seen in the
kind of religious respect which surrounds judicial action even in
the most secularized societies. This should not fail to astonish us ；
indeed, the sphere of the right to punish is the one where the
greatest effort of rationality has been expended. To measure
punishment, to proportion it to the misdeed, to equalize, by in
creasing approximation, the balance between the two scales of
guilt and punishment is clearly the work of understanding— the
understanding of measures； and measures by means of a reason
ing of proportionality of the following type ：punishment A is to
punishment B what crime Af is to crime B\ Ceaselessly to refine
this reasoning of proportionality is the whole work of juridical
experience in its penal form. Its brightest jewel is to think of
punishment In terms of the rights of the guilty ：the guilty one
has a right to ft punlihment proportioned to his crime. But, and
this Is our third aporlA, to the degree that this rationality
358 / THE SYM B O LISM OF EVIL
progresses— this rationality of the understanding that propor

tions the punishment to the crime— there is also discovered the
mythic rationality which undergirds the whole edifice. If it is
reasonable to proportion the punishment to the crime, it is under
the condition of an înterior identity which, within exterior exist
ence, is reflected in the understanding as equality” (this cita
tion of Hegel, which I here present in an enigmatic form, will
find its justification below, in the second part). We are there
fore referred, by the under stan dings very work of approximation
to the law of punishment which intends that chastisement be
the price of crime, to the action of suppressing a committed evil
by an evil that is submitted to ：*lf we do not understand the
virtual internal connection between a crime and the act which
abolishes it . . . » we succeed in seeing in a punishment prop
erly so-called only the arbitrary connection between an inflicted
evil and a forbidden action.MThus the very progress of under
standing in penal justice reveals the problematic character of
the principle of punishment. The unthought element of the
crime is the violation of the right；what is not thought of in the
punishment is the suppression of the violation. It is on this
aporia that all theories of punishment stumble. What good is
it to proportion the magnitude of the penalty to that of the
crime if we do not comprehend the function assigned to punish
ment? It is well, indeed necessary, that the defense of society
prevail over vengeance, intimidation over chastisement, menace
over execution, rehabilitation over liquidation. But if one ex
cludes every intention to suppress the violation of the right in
the subject of the violation, the very idea of punishment vanishes.
Crime and the criminal are then simply noxious， and “one can
perhaps judge it senseless to will an evil because an evil al
ready exists*' (Hegel). Such is the aporia of the right to punish ：
to rationalize punishment in accordance with understanding,
by eliminating the myth of expiation, is at the same time to de
prive it of its principle. Or, to express this aporia in terms of a
paradox：What is most rational in punishment, namely, that it
fits the crime, is at the same time most irrational, namely, that
it erases it.
If now— fourth aporia— we turn toward the properly religious
sphere, the aporia of punishment becomes particularly insup
portable. What is at stake is no longer the sacralization of right
but the juridicization of the sacred. The same proximity of the
sacred and the juridical, whose effects in the penal order we
have just considered, is present in the oppoiito sense on the
theological level, where it rules what I shall call penal theology.

If today we can speak of the myth of punishment in terms of an
aporia, it is because of this penal theology. More precisely, It Is
because of the death of this penal theology in Christian preach
ing and in the whole of our culture. Modem man no longer
understands what one is talking about when one defines origlnul
sin as a juridically imputable crime in which humanity is im
plicated collectively. To belong to a massa perdita, guilty and
punishable according to the juridical terms of the crime, to b«
condemned to death according to the juridical law of punish
ment— that is what we no longer understand. But this penal
theology would appear to be indlssociable from Christianity, at
least at first glance. The whole of Christology is situated within
the framework of penal theology by the double channel of expia
tion and justification. These two theological ^grounds" are tra
ditionally tied to punishment by the most solid of rational tlo§.
The death of the Just One has been understood as the sacrifice
of a substitute victim who satisfies the law of punishment. HHo
has suffered for usMsignifies that He has paid for us the price of
the ancient crime. I shall say, further on, that this purely penal
interpretation does not totally cover the mystery of the Cross
and that the theory of satisfaction is only a second-degree ra
tionalization of a mystery whose center is not punishment but
the gift. It remains to be said that the reinterpretation of this
mystery in terms that are different from those of penal theology
is rendered very difficult by reason of the support that this latter
seems to receive from the Pauline theme of ^justification.” As we
know, Saint Paul has expressed the mystery of the new economy
in a language impregnated with judicial references. Justification
(dikaiosune) refers to a process in which man figures as the
accused ( katakrinein) and is subject to condemnation (kata-
krima). In this judicial context, gTace is expressed in terms of an
acquittal；to be justified is to be exempted from punishment,
whereas chastisement was due. The justified man is the one
whose faith is counted (logizesthai) as justice. We know the
place these texts have held in the great debate between Protes
tants and Catholics. But what was the object of this debate,
namely, the role of man in justification, is not what causes me
to be interested in them here. They interest me for the much
more fundamental reason that they seem, indeed, to confirm the
law of punishment at the very moment when that law is split
apart；they icscm to say that we cannot think of grace, pardon,
and morcy oxcopt in relation to the law of punishment, which is
360 / THE SYM BOLISM OF EVIL
found thus to be retained as well as suspended. Doesn’t acquittal

still make reference to the law of punishment? Doesn’t grace
itself remain a judicial grace, against the background of judicial
retribution? Doesn’t discovery remain judicial discovery, to the
degree that it remains a verdict, even if it be a verdict of non
imputation, of acquittal? Such is the ultimate aporia: what
seems most contrary to the logic of punishment, namely, the
gratuitousness of grace, would appear to be the most radical con
firmation of it.
II. D e c o n s t r u c t io n of the M yth
B y th is l a s t a po r ia we are brought to the heart of the

matter. The myth of punishment is of such a special character
that it is necessary to apply a specific treatment to it and to take
up once again the whole program of demythologization.
What is it to demythologize punishment?
It is, first of all, as everywhere, to deconstruct the myth. But
what is it to deconstruct a myth of logical appearance? It seems
to me that it is, essentially, to reconnect the logic of punishment
with its sphere of validity and thus deprive it of its onto-theologi-
cal bearing. Now I find this first step fully accomplished by
Hegel in his Philosophy of Right. 1 What Hegel has pointed out,
and, in my opinion, definitively demonstrated, is that the law of
punishment is valid, but only in a limited sphere which he
calls âbstract right/1 To justify punishment within this sphere
and to reject it outside this sphere is one and the same enter
prise, which, taken en bloc, constitutes the deconstruction of the
myth of punishment.
Hegel, then, has thought through punishment. It is from him
that I have just borrowed the strongest formulas of my analysis
of punishment. It is a matter now of thinking through, in ac
cordance with the concept, this interior identity between crime
and punishment, which the understanding attains only in ex
teriority, as a synthetic connection between an acting and a suf
fering, between a judge and a guilty party. What, asks Hegel,
is this “inner identity whose reflection in the external world
appears to the Understanding as Equality1* 7 (p. 7a). Answer：
1. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trani. T. M. Knox (New
York: Oxford Unlveraity Presi, 1942), pp. 68-73. (All quotatloni will be
from this tranaladon.]
Let us conceive first the idea of a “philosophical science of right,”

and let us define its domain as being that of “the free will” or of
“realized freedom” ( Hegel says again ：“the world of spirit
brought forth out of itself like a second nature^ [Introduction,
§ 4]). It is therefore on a certain course, one which turns its
back on *'the freedom of the voidM(§ 5), that a logic like this
can be encountered. It is when freedom returns to an order,
renounces being for itself only an abstract representation and
realizing itself only as a “fury of destruction” （ § 5 )， in brief, it
is when it is bound to determinations, walls itself as a reflected
particularization, that it can enter into the dialectic of crime and
punishment. This dialectic achieves the first stage, the most
immediate one, which the idea of free will, in and for itself,
runs through in its development；this stage is that of abstract
and formal right. Why abstract and formal? Because the real is
not yet included in the definition of free will, and because only
the conscious relation of self without content posits the wiD as
subject, as person. Only a subject of right is posited：the impera
tive of right which corresponds to it says only ：‘*Be a person
and respect others as persons” （ § 36).
How is the dialectic of crime and punishment going to be
set within this formal framework? Under two conditions. It is
necessary, first, that, by appropriation, the juridical person place
his will in a thing ；the I henceforth has something under its
exterior power；in return, the I exists in exteriority. Under this
first condition, it becomes comprehensible that the law of punish
ment can itself be unfolded in exteriority. It is necessary, next,
that, by means of a contract, a relation be established among
several wills when there are things to appropriate. The exclu
sion of the other, correlative to the appropriation of things by one
particular will only, prepares the way for a law of exchange and,
in general, a relation of reciprocity among independent im
mediate persons. Under this double condition— existence of
freedom in an exterior thing, contractual relation between wills
external one to the other— something like an injustice is pos
sible ：the violation of right, at this abstract and formal level,
will be nothing else than force against the existence of my
freedom in an external thing” （ § 94).
It then becomes possible to conceive of punishment on the
basis of injustice itself. Indeed, force exercised against the will
Is a force and a constraint which is “in its very conception di
rectly ，df-de_tructlVG because U Is an expression o全 a will
which annuli tho oxprenion or determinate existence of a willM
(§ g2). Now this contradicts itself, the will being idea or real
freedom only to the degree that it occurs in exteriority. Every
thing turns henceforth around this internal contradiction of
injustice. The right of coercion is secondary with respect to this
internal contradiction which gnaws at the unjust act. Hence
§ 97 of the Philosophy of Right, in which the whole logic of
punishment is summed up. I quote § 9 7 ：
The infringement of right as right is something that happens

and has positive existence in the external world, though inherently
it is nothing at all. The manifestation of its nullity is the appear
ance, also in the external world, of the annihilation of the in
fringement, This is the right actualized, the necessity of the right
mediating itself with itself by annulling what has infringed it.
We grasp finally the concept of punishment；it results from

the very negativity of crime. The concept of punishment is
nothing else than
that necessary connection between crime and punishment already

mentioned；crime, as the will which is implicidy null, e o i p s o con
tains its negation in itself, and this negation is manifested as
punishment. It is this inner identity whose reflection in the ex
ternal world appears to the Understanding as <<equalityw (§ 101).
What is more, we understand why it is the guilty person him

self who must pay ：his will is the existence which contains the
crime and which should be suppressed. wIt is this existence which
is the real evil to be removed, and the essential point is the
question of where it lies” (§ 99). It is necessary to go even
further：ttrThe injury [the penalty] which falls on the criminal is
not merely implicitly just , . . ；it is also a right established
within the criminal himself, i.e., in his objectively embodied will,
in his action” （ § 100). Indeed, in punishing the criminal I
recognize him as a rational being who posits the law in violating
it ；I subject him to his own right, Hegel goes so far as to say ：
“Since that is so, punishment is regarded as containing the
criminal’s right, and hence by being punished he is honoured
as a rational being,* (§ 100).
Thus is resolved the enigma of punishment. But it is resolved
only if the logic of punishment remains enclosed within the
problematic wherein it is developed, namely, within the limits of
the philosophy of right. Let us group together these conditions
of validity ：( 1 ) a philosophy of the will, that is, of the realiza

tion of freedom；(2) the level of abstract right, that is, of the
will not yet reflected in its subjectivity；(3) the idea of a deter
mination that the will takes from things, specifically from things
appropriated and possessed；(4) the reference to a contractual
right which binds wills that are external to one another. If
such are the conditions of the possibility of punishment, we
must understand the right to punish as contemporaneous with
this right of things and contracts. Like it, it is anterior— logically,
if not chronologically— tq subjective morality (Part II of the
Philosophy of Right) and, a fortiori, anterior to the objective
morality which rules the family, civil society, and finally the
state (Part III of the Philosophy of Right).
On this foundation, demythization can be rationally under
stood； it signifies nothing else, at least in its negative phase, than
the return of punishment to abstract right. This return is itself
simply the critical counterpart of the thought of abstract right
in accordance with its concept.
What does this mean? It means that one can neither
moralize nor divinize punishment.
We cannot moralize it, because the first appearance of the
subjective self-conscious will in the exercise of punishment is
revenge. From the moment I consider the inflicting of punish
ment as the action of a subjective will, the particularity and the
contingency of this will become very obvious. Revenge is the
very contingency of justice in the punisher. In the punisher,
punishment is, from the first, impure；punishment is from the
first only a manner of perpetuating violence in an infinite chain
of crimes；the âd infinityMreturns to the scene and contami
nates justice；it was undoubtedly of Aeschylus and the Oresteia
that Hegel was thinking when he wrote: “Hence revenge, be
cause it is a positive action of a particular will, becomes a new
transgression；as thus contradictory in character, it falls into an
infinite progression and descends from one generation to another
adinfinituni3 102).
The abolition of wrongdoing thus opens up a new contradic
tion— that between justice and the punisher, between law and
the contingency of force. In order for punishment not to be
vengeance, it would be necessary that the will M as particular and
subjective, will the universal as such” （ § 103). It is the task of
subjective morality to reflect this contingency onto itself in
such a way thnt thia Infinity la not only In itself but for itself.
With this new task, Hegel notes, we leave antiquity for

Christianity and the modern age;
The right of the subjects particularity, his right to be satisfied, or
in other words the right of subjective freedom, is the pivot and
centre of the difference between antiquity and modem times. This
right in its infinity is given expression in Christianity, and it has
become the universal effective principle of a new form of civiliza
tion (§ 124).
And yet this enterprise of moralizing punishment, of van

quishing the spirit of revenge within the framework of subjective
morality, must run aground and lead to the point of view of ob
jective morality, that is, of concrete historical communities
(family, civil society, state). Why this failure and this impos
sibility of remaining within the point of view of subjective
morality? Because, says the Philosophy of Right, 4<abstract re
flection fixes [the] moment [of particularity] in its distinction
from and opposition to the universal and so produces a view of
morality as nothing but a bitter, unending, struggle against self-
satisfaction . . ( § 124).
We see, then, that the philosophy of right cannot incor
porate the concept of moral certitude— of Geivissen— into the
doctrine of subjective morality without taking with it the whole
cortege of antinomies that the Phenomenology of Spirit developed
in Chapter VI.2 Now the Phenomenology of Spirit had shown
that we cannot transfer the logic of punishment outside the
sphere of abstract right and introduce it into a morality of
intention without entering into a hopeless problematic. To will
to extirpate evil, no longer as a violation of right but as impure
intention, is to be delivered over to the mortal conflict between
the judging consciousness and the judged consciousness. Now
this conflict, we remember, finds its result in a theory, not of
punishment, but of the reconciliation that is called apaidon.M
Gevnssen cannot therefore lead from crime to punishment,
according to a logic of identity, but to an interior laceration.
It is then the judging consciousness which must take the initia
tive to break out of the hell of punishment. It will have to dis
cover itself as hypocritical and hard ；hypocritical, because it
2. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie
(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967), pp. 644-62. [All quotations will
be from this translation. As noted elsewhere, we are referring to this book
as The Phenomenology of Spirit, since this translation of e»prii (Geist)
is more in keeping with Rlcoeur's terminology.— T a a n i .)
has withdrawn from action and all effectiveness；hard, because

it has rejected equality with the acting consciousness. There
remains for it only one outcome: not punishment, which remains
the point of view of the judging consciousness, but pardon, by
which the judging consciousness renounces the particularity and
the unilateralness of its judgment：
The forgiveness it extends to the first is the renunciation of self,
of its unreal essence, since it identifies with this essence that other
which was real action, and recognizes what was called bad— a
determination assigned to action by thought— to be good； or rather
it lets go and gives up this distinction of determinate thought with
its self-existent determining judgment, just as the other forgoes
determining the act in isolation and for its own private behoof.
The word of reconciliation is the objectively existent spirit, which
immediately apprehends the pure knowledge of itself qua uni
versal essence in its opposite, in the pure knowledge of itself qua
absolutely self-confined single individual— — a reciprocal recognition
which is Absolute Spirit (ibid.} p. 677).
The moment of reconciliation, which the Phenomenology
placed at the juncture of the theory of culture and the theory of
religion, is full of meaning of us. If we compare this develop
ment with what corresponds to it in the Philosophy of Right, 9
we understand that the problem of punishment no longer finds
any place in the sphere of subjective morality.4 The logic of
crime and punishment retains a meaning that is only juridical
and not at all moral； from the moment one speaks of evil and no
longer of crime, of moral evil and no longer of the violation of
3. The Philosophy of Right re fers e x p re ssly to the Phenomenology

of Spirit a t the en d o f §§ 13 5 a n d 140.
4 - H egel speaks once o f crim e, b u t in order to say th at it is n ot n eces
sary to h a ve the p sy ch o lo g y o f th e crim in a l en ter into the im p utarion of
c r im e ： 'T h e c la im is m ade th a t the c rim in a l in the m o m en t o f hia action
m u st h a v e had a 'cle a r idea* o f th e w ro n g and its cu lp a b ility befo re it can
be im p u ted to him as a crim e. A t first s ig h t, th is c la im seem s to p reserve
the r ig h t of his su b je c tiv ity , b u t the tru th is that it d eprives him o f his
in d w e llin g n a tu re a s in te llig e n t . . (Philosophy of Right, § 1 3 2 ) . T h u s
s u b je c tiv ity m u st n ot be re tro sp ectiv e ly p ro jecte d in to the sphere of
a b stra ct rig h t. H egel adds: 4<T h e sphere in w h ic h these e x te n u a tin g cir
cu m sta n ce s com e in to co n sid era tio n as gro un ds fo r the m itig a tio n of
p u n ish m e n t is a sp h ere o th er th a n th a t o f rig h ts, the sp here o f p ard o n "
(ibid ) , Is it not le g itim a te to co n n e ct this rem a rk w ith the d ia lectic of
evil and fo rg iv en e ss in the Phenomenology of Spirit? T h e o n ly possible
p ro jectio n o f s u b je c tiv e m o ra lity onto a b stract rig h t is not the m oraliza-
tion o f p u n ish m en t b u t pardon it s e lf ； b u t, by the sam e token, w e are
beyond pure righ t.
right, one enters into the antinomies of infinite subjectivity：the

consciousness of evil, when it no longer has support from ab
stract right, without yet having that of objective morality, that
is, of the concrete community, is too “subjective” to develop an
objective logic. In this respect, § 139 of the Philosophy of Right,
dedicated to moral evil, is not inferior to the Phenomenology of
Spirit：the logic of injustice and punishment, which has served
us as a guiding thread through the schema of abstract right,
cannot any longer be extrapolated to the schema of subjective
consciousness, because reflection and evil have the same origin,
namely, the separation between subjectivity and the universal；
that is why, says Hegel, moral certitude is itself “on the verge
of slipping into evir (ibid.). Strange paradox, in truth ：reflec
tion is condemned to vacillate on that point where consciousness
of evil and consciousness as evil become indiscernible； this point
of indecision rests precisely “in independent self-certainty, with
its independence of knowledge and decision*' (ibid.). We could
certainly conclude from this, with Saint Paul, Luther, and Kant,
that evil is necessary, that is, 4<Man is therefore evil by a conjunc
tion between his natural or undeveloped character and his reflec
tion unto him seir (ibid.). But no logic of punishment can
proceed from an evil which no longer has any objective measure
in right. Here the contradiction is sterile. This is why the con
sciousness of evil is no longer resolved in a punishment equal
to the wrongdoing but in the decision not to be held to this
“stage of diremption” ；the overcoming is not in punishment but
in abandoning the point of view of subjectivity.
Whereas the Phenomenology of Spirit opens out into the
problematic of forgiveness, through the dialectic of the judging
consciousness and consciousness judged, the Philosophy of Right
emerges from the swamp of subjective conviction by the path
of objective morality, that is, of a theory of the state. But the
fundamental meaning is the same ：punishment sanctions the
distance between the judging consciousness and consciousness
judged ；the transcending of punishment is the equalization of
the two consciousnesses, the reconciliation, which we call “for
giveness" in the language of religion or “community” in the lan-
guage of objective morality, that is, finally, in the language of
politics.5
5. It is on the basis of this comparison that the Philoiophy of Right
integrates the analyses of the Phenomenology of Spirit: "In my Phe-
o尸 Spirit, I have ahown how thU abiolut看 __lf•complacency
fails to rest In a solitary worship of Itself but build_ up 魏 sort of com
At the end of this second part of our essay, where Hegel

has served as our guide, the task of demythologizing punishment
would appear to be simple and clear. To the degree that the
myth of punishment is a mytho-logic of crime and punishment,
to demythologize punishment is to restore the logic of punish
ment to its original place, where it is a logic without myth. This
original place is abstract right, of which the right to punish is
an aspect. Here, the reason of punishment is without myth be
cause it rests on the concept of rational will. We shall say, then,
that the logic of punishment is a logic without myth to the degree
that it can be restored to a logic of the will, that is, to a logic
of the historical determinations of freedom.
Myth begins whenever the moral consciousness attempts to
transpose into the sphere of interiority a logic of punishment
which has only a juridical meaning and which rests on the
double presupposition of the exteriorization of freedom in a thing
and of the external connection between wills in a contract. Such
is the rationale of punishment. But the counterpart of it is no
less strict：any attempt to moralize punishment is lost in the
antinomies between the judging consciousness and the judged
consciousness. Even more, one cannot divinize it without return
ing to the ûnhappy consciousnessMwhich consecrates separa
tion, distance：that is, the world of religion as terror, the world
of Kafka^ Trial and of the unpaid debt.
Thus the logic, without the myth, of punishment, in revert
ing to abstract right, uncovers the vast expanse of the myth of
expiation. Is this a myth without reason, the converse of a reason
without myth? Put differently, is the demythologizing of punish
ment exhausted in the deconstruction of the myth? For my own
part, I do not believe so. The whole matter remains thinkable
in the idea of a punishment that is nonjuridical, hyperjuridical.
But then it is necessary to give a new meaning to demythologiz
ing, to join reinterpretation to deconstruction. This will be the
object of the third part.
munity whose bond and substance is, e.g., the ^mutual asseveration of
conscientiousness and good Intentions, the enjoyment of this mutual
purity/ but is above all the Refreshment derived from the glory of this
self-knowledge and self-expression, from the glory of fostering and cherish
ing this experience/ I have shown also how what has been called a
'beautiful soul'一 that still nobler type of subjectivism which empties the
objective of d 】 contant and so fades away until it loses all actuality— is
a vaiintlnn of lubjtcdviim like other forms of the same phenoTnenon akin
to th« of Khain h m ooniidaKd" (§ 140, at end).
III. From th e Ju d ic ia l “F ig u r a t iv e ”
to th e "M e m o r ia l ” of Pu n is h m e n t
W h a t is it to r e in t e r p r e t p u n is h m e n t ? In posing
this final question, we are confronted with the most extreme
difficulties, the same ones we considered in the fourth aporia
under the heading of the °juridicizing of the sacred/' Now, we
will be bringing to this aporia an incomplete response if we
limit ourselves to passing from the literal meaning of punish
ment in the right to punish to its analogous or symbolic mean
ing in the dimension of the sacred. To be sure, this should be
done. But the myth of punishment, by reason of its rational
structure, demands a special treatment, as much in the order of
reinterpretation as in that of deconstruction. We would remain
within the framework of image or representation if we claimed
to overcome the logic of law and punishment by a symbol which
would be left unthought. Only a new logic can overcome an out
moded logic. It is therefore the whole economy of thought, of
which punishment is only a moment, which must be surpassed
in a new economy, following an intelligible progression. That is
why the analogical treatment of punishment will be only a first
moment in looking toward another logic. This other logic— other
than the logic of equivalence— I will try to disengage from the
Pauline doctrine of justification； this new reading will correspond
to the nondialectical reading which undergirded our fourth
aporia. This new logic, this “absurd” ]ogic, to speak like
Kierkegaard, wdll be expressed in the law of superabundance,
which alone renders null and void the economy of punishment
and the logic of equivalence. Only then will it be possible to
propose a good usage of the myth of punishment；the only
conceivable status of the myth of punishment is indeed that of
a stricken myth, of a ruined myth, of which we always have to
make a memorial. It is toward this idea of a memorial of punish
ment that our meditation will henceforth be oriented. M Figura-
tive” of punishment, 'logic” of superabundance, “memorial” of
punishment：such will be the three moments of our progression.
Here is what I understand by the “figurative" of punishment.
Punishment belongs to a constellation of representations,
along with terms like ^tribunal,*' ^judgment/* Condemnation,"
"acquittal、 this constellation, taken together, constitutes a
schema of representations in which relations of another order

come to be projected.
What judicial language codifies, in the strict sense of the
word, are essentially ontological relations susceptible of being
represented by analogy with person-to-person relations. Hegel
has shown precisely that, in a logic of the will, punishment is
contemporary with the constitution of the right of persons. It is
this same person-to-person relation that we shall find again, in
an analogous sense, in what would be a poetics of the will and
not solely a logic of the will. With this person-to-person relation
come all the other relations of the same level：debt, ransom,
redemption.
That this poetics of the will is not exhausted in the analogy
of the relation of right is attested to by other analogies, which
balance and rectify it. I shall mention only two, which are op
posed to each other but which together are opposed to the juridi
cal metaphor. The first, the "'conjugar metaphor, is of the lyrical
order; the second, the metaphor of the “wrath of God,” is of the
tragic order. Taken together, they permit a dejuridiciziiig of
the personal relation itself that ancient Israel expressed in a
notion that is more fundamental than any right, the notion of
the Covenant.
Certainly, this theme of the Covenant lends itself to a juridi
cal transcription. The clothing in the judicial “figurative” is made
possible by the eminently ethical character of the religion of
Yahweh ；more specifically, the transition between the hyper-
juridical pact of the Covenant and its juridical analogon was
assured by the notion of Torah, which signifies, very broadly,
instruction for life but whose Latin equivalent— lex— by way of
the Nomos of the Septuagint, was charged with connotations of
Roman law in Latin Christianity. In this respect, the jurispru
dence of rabbinical law and the whole conceptual system at
tached to it greatly facilitated the juridicizing of the group of
relations concentrated in the theme of the Covenant.
But the juridical conceptual system has never exhausted the
meaning of the Covenant. This latter has never ceased to desig
nate a living pact, a community of destiny, a bond with creation,
which infinitely surpasses the relation of right. This is why the
meaning of the Covenant has been able to be clothed in other
“flguratlves/* such as the conjugal metaphor In Hosea and
Isaiah；it Is there that there comes to be expressed the surplus
of meaning which doei not come under the figure of right. The
conjugal xnflUphor gr魏 ip_ more closely than any juridical figure
37〇 / the s y m b o l i s m of evil
the relation of concrete fidelity, the bond of creation, the pact of

love— in short, the dimension of gift, which no code can suc
ceed in capturing and institutionalizing. We venture to say that
this order of the gift is, to that of law, what the order of charity
is to that of the spirits in the famous Pascalian doctrine of the
Three Orders.
It is into this dimension of the gift— proper to a poetics of
the will一that the myth of punishment ought to be transposed.
In such a poetics, what can sin and punishment signify? Sin
dejuridicized does not fundamentally signify violation of a right,
transgression of a law, but separation, uprooting.
That, in this experience of separation, the juridical aspect
is secondary and derivative is attested to by the other symbolism
we mentioned above, that of the “wrath of God•” This symbolism，
with its tragic accent, would at first appear to be incompatible
with the conjugal symbolism, with its lyric accent；by reason
of its nocturnal side, it would appear to lean toward terror and
to be enlisted on the same side as the logic of punishment. But
it differs profoundly from this by its character of theophany.
As distinct from the anonymous law of punishment, of the im
personal demand for a restoration of order, the symbol of the
“wrath of God” brings in the presence of the living God; this is
what places it in the same cycle as the conjugal symbol, at the
heart of a poetics of the will. The order of the gift, contrary to
all appearances, does not lead to sweet effusions; one enters
there by the doorway of the “terrible.” The tragic in the “wrath，”
the lyricism of the “conjugal” bond， are， as it were, the nocturnal
and diurnal sides of the encounter with the living God. The
tragic and the lyric transcend, each in its own way, the ethical
framework of law, commandment, transgression, and punish
ment.
I am quite aware that in ancient Israel this theme of God’s
wrath was heavily moralized by contact with the law and the
commandments. But its irrational side surged up again when
the “wisdom” of Babylon and Israel was confronted with another
problem than transgression, namely, the problem of the failure
of theodicy. If the course of history and of individual destinies
escapes the law of retribution, then the moral vision of the world
collapses；it is necessary to accept, in resignation, confidence,
and reverence, an order which is in no way transcribable into
ethical terms. The tragic God arises again from the ruins of
retribution, in the same measure that the ethlctl God has been
juridicized on the path of the law and innumerable ordinances.
This is why the return to the theme of Go^s wrath forms part
of the dejuridicization of the sacred which we are pursuing along
several paths at the same time. The symbolism of M wrathw and
that of the “conjugal” bond are here concurrent: if indeed the
Covenant is more than a contract, if it is the sign of a creative
relation, and if sin is more than a transgression, if it is the
expression of an ontological separation, then the wrath of God
can be another symbol of this same separation, experienced as
threat and as active destruction.
If such is sin in its hyperjuridical sense, it must be said that
punishment is nothing else than sin itself； it is not an evil which
is added to evil；it is not what a punitive will makes someone
undergo as the price of a rebel will. This juridical relation of
willing to willing is only the image of a more fundamental
situation, in which the punishment for sin is sin itself as punish
ment, namely, the separation itself. In this sense I shall venture
to say that it is necessary to dejuridicize punishment as much
as it is necessary to desacralize the juridical. We must redis
cover this radical dimension where sin and punishment are one,
and together signify a break within a creative community. The
two operations are conjoined：we must restore punishment to
the sphere of abstract right and at the same time deepen it in
its nonjuridical sense, to the point where it is identified with the
fundamental evil of separation.
Such is the “figurative” of punishment. We now understand
its derivative character and, at the same time, its efficacy and
attraction. It is a myth of second degree, a rationalization, which
replaces more primitive symbols of a lyric or tragic character；
as such, the whole symbolism of law is placed on the same level
as mythologies of a cosmological character. But it has a pre
eminence over artificialist and animist myths which is easily
explained：first of all, the myth of law, which includes that of
punishment, represents the personalizing intention of the bond
of creation, by virtue of the upersonalistM aspects of abstract
right, whereas the artificialist or animist myth represents the
nonpersonal, cosmic aspects of this bond. In addition, as distinct
from other metaphors of Judaeo-Christian creationism, the
juridical metaphor articulates highly rationalizable traits of
human experience, nothing having more clarity, rigor, or his
torical continuity than the juridical experience, under its double
form of contract and punishment; the juridical mythology has
this advantage over all others of being a M mytho-logic.w Finally,
just an, In thi) myth, the rationality of right rejoins the sources
372- / THE SYMBOLISM 〇 F EVIL
of terror at that point where the sacred signifies absolute menace,

the conjunction of reason and danger makes of this €<mytho-
logic” the most deceiving, the most fallacious of mythologies,
the most difficult, consequently, to deconstruct, but, above all,
the one which resists reinterpretation most strenuously.
Now, h a v e w e s a t i s f ie d t h e r e q u ir e m e n t s of a re
interpretation, worthy of this “mytho-logic,” by treating punish-
ment as a simple “figurative” ？Ought we to be content with a
procedure that is limited to breaking the shell of one metaphor
by striking it against that of opposed metaphors? It is clear that
this game remains a prisoner of representation and does not
overcome the law of punishment on the level of the concept.
This is why analogy ought only to give access to a new logic, one
which is first enunciated in the traits of antilogic or “absurd”
logic. This is the way of the Pauline paradox, in the famous
texts on justification which we have already mentioned once,
but in accordance with the logic of punishment. It is a matter
now of making the myth of punishment ^self-destruct** by a
kind of ^reversal of the pro and the con,Mperformed in the very
schema of the law and with the resources of judicial language
itself. I will therefore attempt a second reading of Pauline justi
fication, which will correspond point by point with the literal
reading at the beginning.
From the first words of the great text of the Epistle to the
Romans (1:16 -17 , 5 :2 1), it is clear that what Paul calls the
justice of God— dikaiosunS Theou— is hyperjuridical in its con
ception；here is the opening statement of this famous develop
ment: M For I am not ashamed of the Gospel：it is tiie power of
God saving all who have faith— Jews first, but Greeks as well—
since this is what reveals the justice of God to us ：it shows how
faith leads to faith, or as scripture says ：The just man finds life
through faithM(Rom. 1:16-17).® It is noteworthy that all the
commentators have had to confront this complex theme, which
condemns them to lay out and juxtapose heterogeneous ele
ments：judicial justice and grace；punishment and fidelity to
promises；expiation and mercy. But can the properly juridical
moment subsist simply alongside the moment of mercy, without
undergoing a transformation which destroys it as juridical? How
6. [The Jerusalem venion of the Bible li u«od for theie citation!.一

T r a n s .]
could the living justice which is life-giving remain judicial in

one self-enclosed part?
Let us follow the movement of the Epistle.
As we said in our first reading, Paul enters the problematic
of justification by the gateway of anger ：M The anger of God is
being revealed from heaven against all the impiety and injustice
of men who keep truth imprisoned in injustice” （ Rom. 1:18 ).
Here it is the case, then, that the justice which vivifies reiterates
the justice which condemns；the so-called logic of punishment
is even inserted like a block in the development: “on that day
of Wrath . . . when the just judgment of God will be made
known. He will repay each one as his works deserve. For those
who sought renown and honor and immortality by always doing
good there will be eternal life ； for the unsubmissive who refused
to take truth for their guide and took injustice instead, there will
be anger and fury^ (Rom. 2:5-8). How can this closed economy
of judgment, which separates the good from the wicked outside
any Gospel, be complementary with anything other than itself
within a broader economy, whose principle we shall speak of
below? How can a fragment of judicial justice subsist within
life-giving justice? Will this f<pre-gosper remain unassimilated,
an island within the Gospel of grace?
It seems to me that the logic of Paul is much more para
doxical than we are able to understand within a juridical men
tality, which, Hegel has shown, remains a logic of identity.
Paul is truly the creator of this reversal of the pro and the
con which Luther, Pascal, and Kierkegaard have raised to the
rank of a logic of faith.
For Paul, it is first necessary to go to the extreme of condem
nation in order then to go to the extreme of mercy ：*Tor the
wages of sin is death；the present given by God is eternal life in
Christ Jesus our LordM(Rom. 6:23). This absurd logic, as Kier
kegaard calls it, makes the logic of law shatter upon an internal
contradiction ：the law pretends to give life but gives only death.
An absurd logic, which produces only its contrary. What would
appear to us as a logic of identity— “the wages of sin is death” 一
becomes the lived contradiction which makes the economy of
the law break apart. By this absurd logic, the concept of law
destroys itself and, with the concept of law, the whole cycle of
notions which are governed by it ：judgment, condemnation,
punishment. This economy is now placed en bloc under the sign
of death.
The logic of punishment serves thus as contrast, as counter

part, as counterpoint for the annunciation and proclamation
which is the Gospel itself ：<4But now, without the law, the justice
of God is manifested . . .w (Rom. 3:21), It is still justice, but
the justice which vivifies："This justification by faith without
the deeds of the law” (Rom. 3:28) poses an unprecedented
problem for thought：is it the justification which falls within the
logic of punishment by reason of the expiation of Christ, as we
were saying at the beginning? We can certainly maintain justi
fication within the juridical framework where it is expressed
and claim that the tribunal is confirmed by acquittal, which,
strictly speaking, is still a judicial act. But does not one then
remain a prisoner of words, of images, and, if I dare say it, of the
stage setting? The judicial apparatus plays the role, in the doc
trine of justification, of an awesome and grandiose staging,
comparable to the primitive “scenes” that the archaeology of the
unconscious discovers. One could speak, by way of symmetry,
of the “eschatological scene” ：one drags the accused before the
tribunal；the public prosecutor convicts him of crime；he de
serves death； and then, here is the surprise：he is declared just!
Another has paid ； the justice of this other one is imputed to him.
But how could one take this imagery literally? What kind of
tribunal is it where the accused, convicted of crime, is acquitted?
Isn^ this a nontribunal? Isn*t the verdict of acquittal a non
verdict? The imputation a nonimputation?
We cannot, therefore, treat the logic of punishment as an
autonomous logic ：it is eliminated in the absurd demonstration
of its contrary；it has no internal consistency；and about anger,
condemnation, and death we know only one thing, namely, that
in Jesus Christ we have been debvered from them. It is only
when we have crossed the border, into grace, that we can look
back on what we have been exempted from.
It is toward this interpretation that the argument of Paul
points when, in its second moment, the absurd logic is surpassed
fey what one can call the logic of “superabundance.” We know
the parallel often cited between Adam and Jesus Christ in Chap
ter 5 of the Epistle to the Romans ：M As the fault of one brought
condemnation upon all men, so also the justice of one procures
for all a justification that gives life. For as by one man’s dis
obedience, the whole race was rendered sinful, so by the obe
dience of one, the whole race will be rendered Juit* This parallel
is only the rhetorical framework in which ia inserted another
logic ：with a feigned negligence, Paul beglni the parallel! then
suspends it and suddenly breaks it: wJust as by one man sin en
tered the world and through sin death and thus death has passed
through the whole human race because everyone has sinned*'—
then follows a succession of incidents ：<rWhen law came . . .
‘"Nevertheless death « « 广一 and then, suddenly, the break in the
construction and the reversal："But the gift considerably out
weighed the fall/* "But not as the fault, so also the giftM(Rom.
5 :12 -15 ). It is another economy that is expressed rhetorically by
this syntactical rupture ：
For if by the fault of one many died, how much more ( 賞〇入 \^
MaXW ) the grace of God and the gift conferred by the grace of
one man, Jesus Christ, have abounded unto many. And again, the
gift is not to be compared in its effect with that one man's sin.
The results of the gift also outweigh the results of one man's sin：
for after one single fall came judgment with a verdict of con
demnation, now after many falls comes grace with its verdict
of justification. For if the reign of death was established by the
one man through the sin of him alone, how much more (xoXXqj
/ifiXXw) shall the reign of life be established in those who receive
with profusion the grace and gift of justice by the one man Jesus
Christ (Rom. 5:15-17).
“How much more “How much more . Will one still
dare to call logic this reversal of the pro and the con which
makes the grammar of comparison break into pieces? ^Moreover
the law entered, that fault might abound. But where sin
abounded, grace did much more abound,> (Rom. 5:20-21). The
logic of punishment was a logic of equivalence (the wages of sin
is death)； the logic of grace is a logic of surplus and excess. It is
nothing else than the folly of the Cross.
The consequences are considerable. Is not the representation
of a judgment which would separate the just from the unjust by
a kind of method of division which would send some to hell and
others to heaven itself surpassed, as nondialectical, as foreign to
this logic of superabundance? The ultimate paradox seems to be
that of a double destination, each overlapping the other：the
justification of all men is superimposed in some way on the con
demnation of all3by means of a kind of outbidding at the heart
of the same history. The economy of superabundance is there
intermixed with the work of death in the midst of the same “mul
titude” of men. Whoever could understand the ^how much more”
of the justice of God and the ^superabundance** of his grace
would thereby bo finished with the myth of punishment and its
logical appearance.
B u t w h a t is it to be finished with the myth of punish

ment? Is it to relegate it to the bin of lost illusions? I would sug
gest one solution to all our aporias, a solution which would sat-
isfy both the Hegelian demythologization and the absurd logic of
Paul：the logic of punishment would appear to me to subsist in
the manner of a shattered myth, a ruin, at the heart of this new
logic, that is at the same time foolishness, the folly of the Cross.
The status of the myth is then that of the memorial By tfme-
moriar I understand this paradoxical status of an economy
which can be preached only as a ruined epoch. For Paul, punish
ment forms part of an entire economy which he calls nomos,
law, and which has its own internal logic ：law leads to covetous
ness, which evokes transgression, which entails condemnation
and death. This whole economy oscillates within the past under
the thrust of the '*but now"*："*But now, without the law, the jus
tice of God is made manifest • • (Rom. 3 :2 1).
Thus the memorial is a transcended past, on which one can
confer neither the status of illusion, from which one would be
delivered, without relapse, by a simple movement of demythol
ogization at the service of our thought, nor that of an eternal law
of truth, which would find in the atonement of the Just One its
supreme confirmation. Punishment is more than an idol to break
and less than a law to idolize. It is an economy which “marks an
epoch** and which preaching retains in its memory of the Gospel.
If the wrath of God no longer had any meaning for me, I would
no longer understand what pardon and grace signify ； but if the
logic of punishment had its own meaning, if it were sufficient
unto itself, it would be forever invincible as a law of being；the
atonement of Christ would have to be inscribed within this logic,
and this would be the greatest victory, because it occurs in the
theologies of ^vicarious satisfaction,wwhich remain theologies of
punishment and not of gift and grace.
Can we now think this memorial of punishment? This is per
haps the last aporia we have to consider here ；this aporia con
cerns the epochal character of a ruined economy, which is some-
thing more than a human representation or than an illusion to be
dissolved, and something less than an eternal law. Can we think
the passage from one economy to the other as an event in the
divine, as an accession to the sacred? Philosophers perhaps do
not yet have a logic that conforms to this thinking；poets, at
least, have always had a language for expressing these epochs of
being. Aeschylus asks, in the Oresteia：'Third la for the savior.
He came. Shall I call it that, or death? Where is the end? Where

shall the fury of fate be stilled to sleep, be done with?'* (The
Libation-Bearers7 11. 1073-75)« Amos answers Aeschylus: *The
wrath of God is for a moment；his hesed, his fideKty, is for the
whole of life.”
PART Y
Religion and Faith

Preface to Bultmann
To p r e s e n t to a F r e n c h p u b l ic today two works of

Rudolf Bultmann as significant as the Jesus of 1926 and the
book which resulted from the 1951 conferences, Jesus Christ and
Mythology, 1 does not require summarizing a text that speaks
clearly for itself. More urgent, perhaps, is first of all inviting the
reader to adopt an interrogatory point of view so that the ques
tion which motivates this text can be posed. This is the her
meneutic question in Christianity. It might next be useful to
clear up several false conceptions, principally about myth and
demythologizing, which obscure the work for the reader and pre
vent him from reading Bultmann correctly. Finally, it might be
illuminating to confront these essays with other kinds of con
temporary work in hermeneutics which can highlight Bultmann's
work and help the reader to better comprehend his enterprise. An
introduction will have fulfilled its task if it permits the reader to
better question, read, and think the book he is about to take up.
I. T h e H e r m e n e u t i c Q u e s t i o n
A lth o u g h th e r e has a l w a y s b e e n a hermeneutic

problem in Christianity, the hermeneutic question today seems to
Tranalatad by Peter McCormick.
x. Rudolf Bultminn, Jeau$ and the Wordt trans. Louise P. Smith and
Ermlnic Huntftsa (New Yorki Scrlbnorâ, 1934)* Jenu Chriit and
Mytholooii, ed. Paul flchub«rt (New York: 6cribner,s, ZQ58 ).
[a8i]
382 / RE LIGIO N AND FAITH
us a new one. What does this situation mean, and why does it
seem marked with this initial paradox?
There has always been a hermeneutic problem in Christianity
because Christianity proceeds from a proclamation. It begins
with a fundamental preaching that maintains that in Jesus
Christ the kingdom has approached us in decisive fashion. But
this fundamental preaching, this word, comes to us through writ
ings, through the Scriptures, and these must constantly be re
stored as the living word if the primitive word that witnessed to
the fundamental and founding event is to remain contemporary.
If hermeneutics in general is, in Dilthey^ phrase, the interpreta
tion of expressions of life fixed in written texts, then Christian
hermeneutics deals with the unique relation between the Scrip
tures and what they refer to, the ^kerygma" (the proclamation).
This relation between writing and the word and between the
word and the event and its meaning is the crux of the hermeneu
tic problem. But this relation itself appears only through a series
of interpretations. These interpretations constitute the history of
the hermeneutic problem and even the history of Christianity
itself, to the degree that Christianity is dependent upon its suc
cessive readings of Scripture and on its capacity to reconvert this
Scripture into the living word. Certain characteristics of what
can be called the hermeneutic situation of Christianity have not
even been perceived until our time. These traits are what makes
the hermeneutic problem a modern problem.
Let us try to chart this hermeneutic situation, in a more
systematic than historical way. Three moments can be distin
guished here which have developed successively, even though
implicitly they are contemporaneous.
The hermeneutic problem first arose from a question which
occupied the first Christian generations and which held the fore
even to the time of the Reformation. This question is ： what is the
relation between the two Testaments or between the two Cove
nants? Here the problem of allegory in the Christian sense was
constituted. Indeed, the Christ-event is hermeneutically related
to all of Judaic Scripture In the sense that it interprets this Scrip
ture. Hence, before it can be interpreted itself — and there is our
hermeneutic problem— the Christ-event is already an interpreta
tion of a preexisting Scripture.
Let us understand this situation well, Originally, there were
not, properly speaking, two Testaments, two Scriptures; there
was one Scripture and one event. And it I， thii event that makes
the entire Jewish economy appear ancient, like an old letter. But
Preface to Bultmann / 383
there is a hermeneutic problem because this novelty is not purely

and simply substituted for the ancient letter；rather, it remains
ambiguously related to it. The novelty abolishes the Scripture
and fulfills it. It changes its letter into spirit like water into wine.
Hence the Christian fact is itself understood by effecting a muta
tion of meaning inside the ancient Scripture. The first Christian
hermeneutics is this mutation itself. It is entirely contained in
the relation between the letter, the history (these words are
synonyms), of the old Covenant and the spiritual meaning which
the Gospel reveals after the event. Hence this relation can be ex
pressed quite well in allegorical terms. It can resemble the alle
gorizing of the Stoics or that of Philo, or it can adopt the quasi-
Platonic language of the opposition between flesh and spirit,
between shadow and true reality. But what is issue here is basi
cally something else. It is a question of the typological value of
the events, things, persons, and institutions of the old economy
in relation to those of the new. Saint Paul creates this Christian
allegory. Everyone knows the interpretation of Hagar and Sarah,
the two wives of Abraham, and of their lineage. In their regard
the Epistle to the Galatians says ："These things are said alle-
goricaiily•” The word “allegory” here has only a literary resem
blance to the allegory of the grammarians, which, Cicero tells us,
“consists in saying one thing to make something else under
stood.” Pagan allegory served to reconcile myths with philosophy
and consequently to reduce them as myths. But Pauline allegory,
together with that of Tertullian and Origen, which depend on it,
is inseparable from the mystery of Christ. Stoicism and Platon
ism will furnish only a language, indeed a compromising and
misleading surplus.
Hence there is hermeneutics in the Christian order because
the kerygma is the rereading of an ancient Scripture. It is note
worthy that orthodoxy has resisted with all its force the currents,
from Marcion to Gnosticism, which wanted to cut the Gospel
from its hermeneutic bond to the Old Testament. Why? Would
it not have been simpler to proclaim the event in its unity and
thus to deliver it from the ambiguities of the Old Testament in
terpretation? Why has Christian preaching chosen to be her
meneutic by binding itself to the rereading of the Old Testa
ment? Essentially to make the event itself appear, not as an
irrational irruption, but as the fulfillment of an antecedent
meaning which remained in suspense. The event itself receives
a temporal denilty by being inscribed in a signifying relation
of “promlM** to “fulfillment.** By entering in this way into a
384 / RELIGION AND FAITH
historical connection, the event enters also into an intelligible

liaison. A contrast is set up between the two Testaments, a con
trast which at the same time is a harmony by means of a trans
fer. This signifying relation attests that the kerygma, by this
detour through the reinterpretation of an ancient Scripture, en
ters into a network of intelligibility. The event becomes advent.
In taking on time, it takes on meaning. By understanding itself
indirectly, in terms of the transfer from the old to the new, the
event presents itself as an understanding of relations. Jesus
Christ himself, exegesis and exegete of Scripture, is manifested
as logos in opening the understanding of the Scriptures.
Such is the fundamental hermeneutics of Christianity. It
coincides with the spiritual understanding of the Old Testament.
Of course, the spiritual meaning is the New Testament itself；
but because of this detour through a deciphering of the Old Tes
tament, '"faith is not a crywbut an understanding.
The second root of the hermeneutic problem is also Pauline.
This is so even though it did not reach its full growth until very
recently and, in certain respects, only with the moderns, spe
cifically with Bultmann. This idea is that the interpretation of
the Book and the interpretation of life correspond and are mu
tually adjusted. Saint Paul creates this second modality of Chris
tian hermeneutics when he invites the hearer of the word to
decipher the movement of his own existence in the light of the
Passion and Resurrection of Christ. Hence, the death of the old
man and the birth of the new creature are understood under the
sign of the Cross and the Paschal victory. But their hermeneutic
relation has a double meaning. Death and resurrection receive a
new interpretation through the detour of this exegesis of human
existence. The lerm eneutic circle” is already there, between the
meaning of Christ and the meaning of existence which mutually
decipher each other.
Thanks to the admirable work of de Lubac on the “four
meanings” of Scripture— historical, allegorical, moral, anagogi-
cal— the breadth of this mutual interpretation of Scripture and
existence is known. Beyond this simple reinterpretation of the
old Covenant and the typological correlation between the two
Testaments, medieval hermeneutics pursued the coincidence be
tween the understanding of the faith in the lectio divina and the
understanding of reality as a whole, divine and human, histori
cal and physical. The hermeneutic task, then, Is to broaden the
comprehension of the text on the side of doctrine, of practice, of
neditation on the mysteries. And consequently it is to equate the

jnderstanding of meaning with a total interpretation of exist
ence and of reality in the system of Christianity. In short, her-
neneutics understood this way is coextensive with the entire
economy of Christian existence. Scripture appears here as an
inexhaustible treasure which stimulates thought about every
thing, which conceals a total interpretation of the world. It is
hermeneutics because the letter serves as foundation, because
Bxegesis is its instrument, and also because the other meanings
are related to the first in the way that the hidden is related to the
manifest. In this way the understanding of Scripture somehow
enrolls all the instruments of culture— literary and rhetorical,
philosophical and mystical. To interpret Scripture is at the same
time to amplify its meaning as sacred meaning and to incor
porate the remains of secular culture in this understanding. It is
at this price that Scripture ceases to be a limited cultural object：
explication of texts and exploration of mysteries coincide. This
is the aim of hermeneutics in this second sense：to make the
global sense of mystery coincide with a differentiated and ar
ticulated discipline of meaning. It is to equate the multiplex in-
tellectus with the intellectus de mysterio Christi.
Now, among the “four meanings” of Scripture， the Middle
Ages made a place for the ^moral meaning^ which marks the ap
plication of the allegorical meaning to ourselves and our morals.
The “moral meaning1’ shows that hermeneutics is much more
than exegesis in the narrow sense. Hermeneutics is the very de
ciphering of life in the mirror of the text. Although the function
of allegory is to manifest the newness of the Gospel in the old
ness of the letter, this newness vanishes if it is not a daily new
ness, if it is not new hie et nunc. Actually, the function of the
moral sense is not to draw morals from Scripture at all, to
moralize history, but to assure the correspondence between the
Christ-event and the inner man. It is a matter of interiorizing the
spiritual meaning, of actualizing it3 as Saint Bernard says, of
showing that it extends hodie usque ad nos, M even to us today
That is why the true role of moral meaning comes after allegory.
This correspondence between allegorical meaning and our exist
ence is well expressed by the metaphor of the mirror. It is a
matter of deciphering our existence according to its conformity
with Christ. We can still speak of interpretation because, on the
one hand, the mystery contained in the book is made explicit in
our oxporience and Its actuality is confirmed here, and because,
on the other hand, we understand ourselves in the mirror of the

word. The relation between the text and the mirror— liber et
speculum is basic to hermeneutics.
一
This is the second dimension of Christian hermeneutics.

The third root of the hermeneutic problem in Christianity
was not fully recognized and understood until the moderns— un
til the critical methods borrowed from the secular sciences of
history and philology had been applied to the Bible as a whole.
Here we return to our initial question：how is it that the her
meneutic problem is so old and so modern? Actually this third
root of our problem relates to what can be called the hermeneu
tic situation itself of Christianity, that is, it is related to the
primitive constitution of the Christian kerygma. We must re
turn, in fact, to the witness character of the Gospel. The
kerygma is not first of all the interpretation of a text；it is the
announcement of a person. In this sense, the word of God is, not
the Bible, but Jesus Christ. But a problem arises continually from
the fact that this kerygma is itself expressed in a witness, in the
stories, and soon after in the texts that contain the very first
confession of faith of the community. These texts conceal a first
level of interpretation. We ourselves are no longer those wit
nesses who have seen. We are the hearers who listen to the wit
nesses：fides ex auditu. Hence, we can believe only by listening
and by interpreting a text which is itself already an interpreta
tion. In short, our relation, not only to the Old Testament, but
also to the New Testament itself, is a hermeneutic relation.
This hermeneutic situation is as primitive as the two others
because the Gospel is presented from the time of the second gen
eration as a writing, as a new letter, a new Scripture, added to
the old In the form of a collection of writings which will one day
be gathered up and enclosed in a canon, the “Canon of Scrip
tures.” The source of our modern hermeneutic problem，then, is
this ：the kerygma is also a Testament. To be sure, it is new, as
we said above；but it is a Testament, that is, a new Scripture.
Hence the New Testament must also be interpreted. It is not
simply an interpreting with regard to the Old Testament, and an
interpreting for life and for reality as a whole；it is itself a text
to be interpreted.
But this third root of the hermeneutic problem, the herme
neutic situation itself, has somehow been masked by the two
other functions of hermeneutics in Christianity. So long as the
New Testament served to decipher the Old, it was taken as an
absolute norm. And It remains an absolute norm as long as Its
literal meaning serves as an indisputable basis on which all

the other levels of meaning— the allegorical, moral, and anagogi-
cal— are constructed. But the fact is that the literal meaning is
itself a text to be understood, a letter to be interpreted.
Let us reflect on this discovery. At first glance it may seem
to be a product of our modernity, that is, something which could
have been discovered only recently. This is true, for reasons
which will be mentioned later. But these reasons themselves re
fer us back to a fundamental structure which, despite its having
been recently discovered, nonetheless was present from the be
ginning. This discovery is a product of our modernity in the
sense that it expresses the backlash of the critical disciplines 一
philology and history— on the sacred texts. As soon as the whole

Bible is treated like the Iliad or the Presocratics, the letter is
desacralized and the Bible is made to appear as the word of hu
mans. In the same way, the relation 'liuman word/word of Godw
is placed, no longer between the New Testament and the rest of
the Bible, no longer even between the New Testament and the
rest of culture, but at the very heart of the New Testament. For
the believer, the New Testament itself conceals a relation that
needs deciphering. This relation is between what can be under
stood and received as word of God and what is heard as human
speaking.
This insight is the fruit of the scientific spirit, and in this
sense it is a recent acquisition. But reflection brings us to dis
cover in the first hermeneutic situation of the Gospel the ancient
reason for this later discovery. This situation, we have said, is
that the Gospel itself has become a text, a letter. As a text, it ex
presses a difference and a distance, however minimal, from the
event that it proclaims. This distance, always increasing with
time, is what separates the first witness from the entire line of
those who hear the witness. Our modernity means only that the
distance is now considerable between the place I myself occupy
at the center of a culture and the original site of the first wit
ness. This distance, of course, is not only spatial； it is above all
a temporal one. But the distance is given at the beginning. It is
the very first distance between the hearer and the witness of the
event.
Thus the somehow accidental distance of a twentieth-century
man, situated in another, a scientific and historical culture, re
veals an original distance which remained concealed because it
was so 雇hort: yet it was already constitutive of primitive faith
Itself. Thli distance has only become more manifest, particularly
since the work of the Formgeschichte school. This school has

made us conscious of the fact that the witnesses gathered In the
New Testament are not only individual witnesses— free wit
nesses, one might say ；they are already situated in a believing
community, in its cult, its preaching, and the expression of its
faith. To decipher Scripture is to decipher the witness of the
apostolic community. We are related to the object of its faith
through the confession of its faith. Hence, by understanding its
witness, I receive equally, in its witness, what is summons,
kerygm a,the good news,’
I hope this reflection has shown that hermeneutics has for us
modems a sense that it did not have for the Greek or Latin
Fathers, for the Middle Ages, or even for the Reformers, that the
very development of the word ‘Tiermeneutics’’ indicates a “mod
ern” sense of hermeneutics. This modem meaning of hermeneu-
tics is only the discovery, the manifestation, of the hermeneutic
situation which was present from the beginning of the Gospel
but hidden. It is not paradoxical to defend the thesis that the two
ancient forms of hermeneutics we have described have con
tributed to concealing what was radical in the Christian herme
neutic situation. The meaning and function of our modernity is
to unveil, by means of the distance which today separates our
culture from ancient culture, what has been unique and extraor
dinary in this hermeneutic situation since the beginning.
II. D e m y t h o l o g i z a t i o n
It s e e m s t o m e that the hermeneutic question in its

third form contains the principle of what Bultmann calls de
mythologization or demythization. But if the hermeneutic ques
tion has been correctly understood, it is important not to separate
two problems which are related for Bultmann. It would be wrong
to treat them in isolation since in a sense they constitute inverse
sides of the same thing. The first problem is demythologization；
the second is what is called the hermeneutic circle.
At first glance demythologization is a purely negative enter
prise. It consists in becoming conscious of the mythic clothing
around the proclamation that ttthe kingdom of God has drawn
near in a decisive fashion in Jesus Christ.MIn this way we be
come attentive to the fact that this ^coming** Is expressed in a
mythological representation of the universe» with a top and a
bottom, a heaven and an earth, and celestial beings coming from

up there to down here and returning from down here to up there.
To abandon this mythic wrapping is quite simply to discover
the distance that separates our culture and its conceptual ap
paratus from the culture in which the good news is expressed. In
this sense, demythologization cuts to the letter itself. It consists
in a new use of hermeneutics, which is no longer edification, the
construction of a spiritual meaning on the literal meaning, but
a boring under the literal meaning, a de-struction9 that is to say,
a de-construction, of the letter itself. This enterprise has some
thing in common with demystification, which I will be speaking
about later on. It too is a modem accomplishment, in the sense
that it belongs to a postcritical age of faith.
But demythologization is distinguished from demystification
by the fact that it is moved by the will to better comprehend the
text, that is, to realize the intention of the text which speaks not
of itself but of the event. In this sense, demythologization, far
from being opposed to kerygmatic interpretation, is its very first
application. It marks the return to the original situation, namely,
that the Gospel is not a new Scripture to be commented on but
is effaced before something else because it speaks of someone
who is the true word of God. Demythologization then is only the
inverse side of the grasp of the kerygma. Or, one might say, it is
the will to shatter the false scandal constituted by the absurdity
of the mythological representation of the world by a modern man
and to make apparent the true scandal, the folly of God in Jesus
Christ, which is a scandal for all men in all times.
Here the question of demythologization refers back to the
other question, which I have called the hermeneutic circle. The
hermeneutic circle can be stated roughly as follows. To under
stand, it is necessary to believe；to believe, it is necessary to un
derstand. This formulation is still too psychological. For behind
believing there is the primacy of the object of faith over faith ；
and behind understanding there is the primacy of exegesis and
its method over the naive reading of the text. This means that
the genuine hermeneutic circle is not psychological but meth
odological. It is the circle constituted by the object that regulates
faith and the method that regulates understanding. There is a
circle because the exegete is not his own master. What he wants
to understand is what the text says；the task of understanding is
therefore governed by what is at issue in the text itself. Christian
hermonoutlci la moved by the announcement which is at issue in
the text, To undoralAnd li to ivibmlt oneself to what the object
39〇 / RELIGION AND FAITH
means. Here Bultmann rejects Dilthey*s view that understanding

the text means grasping in the text an expression of life. This
means that the exegete must be able to understand the author of
the text better than the author has understood himself. Bultmann
says no. It is not the life of the author that governs understand
ing, but the essence of the meaning that finds expression in the
text, Here Bultmann agrees perfectly with Karl Barth, who says
in his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, that under
standing is under the command of the object of faith. But what
distinguishes Bultmann from Barth is that Bultmann has per
fectly understood that this primacy of the object, this primacy of
meaning over understanding, is performed only through the un
derstanding, through the exegetical work itself. It is necessary
therefore to enter the hermeneutic circle. Only in the under
standing of the text do I in fact know the object. Faith in what
the text is concerned with must be deciphered in the text that
speaks of it and in the confession of faith of the primitive church
which is expressed in the text. This is why there is a circle ：to
understand the text, it is necessary to believe in what the text an
nounces to me ； but what the text announces to me is given no
where but in the text. This is why it is necessary to understand
the text in order to believe.
These two series of remarks, one about demythologization
and the other about the hermeneutic circle, are inseparable. In
deed, by cutting into the letter, by taking off the mythological
wrappings, I discover the summons which is the primary mean
ing of the text. To separate kerygma from myth is the positive
function of demythologization. But this kerygma becomes the
positive side of demythologization only in the movement of in
terpretation itself. That is why it cannot be fixed in any objective
statement that would remove it from the process of interpreta
tion.
W e are n o w in a po sitio n to confront the errors and

mistakes which Bultmann^ demythologization has occasioned.
In my opinion all of these come from the fact that attention has
not been paid to the fact that demythologization is operative on
several strategically different levels.
In what follows I want to distinguish the levels of demythol
ogization in Bultmann as well as the successive definitions of
myth which correspond to these levels.
At a first level, the most extrinsic and superficial one and
hence the most obvious, it is modern man who demythologizes.
What he demythologizes is the cosmological form In primUiVt

preaching. In fact, the conception of a world componetl of thrtttt
stories— heaven, earth, and hell— and peopled with NiipornMlural
powers which descend down here from up thorr In purely und
simply eliminated, as out of date, by modern Nckinro iiimI m〇 (l«rn
technology as well as by how man represents ullilrul and poltllcul
responsibility. Everything that partakes of this v InIoii ol' \\w worlil
in the fundamental representation of tlie ovcmtH ol' Nalvulion In
from now on void. And at this level Bultmann in rl}{ht In nuylng
that demythologization must be pursued witlioul roMorvn or ex
ception, for it is without a remainder. The dt^lnUlon of myth
which corresponds to this level of demylhnln^l/iHlon In that of a
prescientific explanation of the cosmoioyicul und cHchalol〇 f{lcal
order, an explanation which for modern man Is unbcll«vuble. It
is in this sense that myth is an additional scandal, added to the
true scandal, which is the “folly of the Cross."
But myth is something else than an explanation of the world,
of history, and of destiny. Myth expresses in terms of the world
— that is, of the other world or the second world— the under
standing that man has of himself in relation to the foundation
and the limit of his existence. Hence to demythologize is to in
terpret myth, that is, to relate the objective representations of the
myth to the self-understanding which is both shown and con
cealed in it. Again, we are the ones who are demythologizing, but
according to the intention of the myth, which aims at something
other than what it says. Myth, then, can no longer be defined in
opposition to science. Myth consists in giving worldly form to
what is beyond known and tangible reality. It expresses in an ob
jective language the sense that man has of his dependence on
that which stands at the limit and at the origin of his world. This
definition sets Bultmann in complete opposition to Feuerbach.
Myth does not express the projection of human power into a
fictitious beyond but rather man’s grasp on his origin and end,
which he effects by means of this objectification, this putting in
worldly form. If myth is really a projection on the level of repre
sentation, then it is first of all the reduction of what is beyond to
what is on this side. Imaginative projection is only one means
and one stage of the giving of a worldly form to the beyond, in
terms of the here and now.
At the second level, demythologization is no longer the ex
clusive work of the modern spirit. The restoration of the myth*s
intention, counter to Its objectifying movement, requires an exis-
tential IrUerpnjUtlon, such a丨Heidegger’s in Sdri wrzd Zeit. Far
from expressing a necessity of the scientific spirit, this existential

interpretation challenges the philosophic and in itself unscien
tific pretension to exhaust the meaning of reality by science and
technology. Heidegger’s philosophy furnishes only the philo
sophical preliminary of a criticism of myth which has its center
of gravity in the process of objectification.
But this second level is not the final one. For a Christian
hermeneutics, it is not even the most decisive one. Existential
interpretation is rightfully applicable to all myths, as Hans
Jonas’s work indicates. Jonas first applied it, not to the Gospels,
but to Gnosticism, in his Gnosis und spatantiker Geist, a work
published as early as 1930, with an important preface by Ru
dolf Bultmann. At the first level this myth had no specifically
Christian aspects. This is still true at the second level. Thus,
Bultmann's entire undertaking is pursued on the assumption that
the kerygma itself wants to be demythologized. It is no longer
modem man, educated by science, who calls the shots. It is no
longer the philosopher and his existential interpretation applied
to the universe of myths. It is the kerygmatic core of the original
preaching which not only requires but initiates and sets in mo
tion the process of demythologization. Already in the Old Testa
ment the creation stories effect a vigorous demythologization of
the sacred cosmology of the Babylonians. More fundamentally
still, the preaching of the “name of Yahweh” exercises a cor
rosive action on all the representations of the divine, on the Baals
and their idols.
The New Testament, despite a new recourse to mythological
representations, principally to those of Jewish eschatology and
the mystery cults, begins the reduction of the images which serve
it as a vehicle. The description of man outside of faith puts into
play what can already be called an anthropological interpreta
tion of concepts like “world,” “flesh,” and “sin” which are bor-
rowed from cosmic mythology. Here, it is Saint Paul who begins
the movement of demythologization. As to eschatological repre
sentations in the proper sense, it is John who goes farthest in the
direction of demythologization. The future has already begun in
Jesus Christ. The new age has its root in the Christie now. From
now on, demythologization proceeds from the very nature of
Christian hope and from the relation that the future of God
maintains with the present.
I think that this hierarchy of levels, in demythologization and
in myth itself, is the key to reading Bultmann correctly. If these
different levels are not distinguished, Bultmann will be accused
either of being inconsistent or of doing violence to the texts. On

the one hand, he will be accused of wanting to save a remnant,
the kerygma, after having said that demythologization must be
brought to its conclusion, without reservation or attenuation. On
the other hand, he will be reproached with imposing alien pre
occupations on the texts— those of modern man, the heir of
science, and those of existential philosophy, borrowed from Hei
degger. But Bultmann speaks in turn as a man of science, an
existential philosopher, and a hearer of the word. When he oc
cupies this last circle, he preaches. Yes, he preaches；he makes
the Gospel heard. Hence it is as a disciple of Paul and Luther
that Bultmann opposes justification by faith to salvation by
works. By works man is justified and is glorified, that is, man
sovereignly determines the meaning of his own existence. In
faith he divests himself of his pretension of being self-deter
mined. So it is the preacher who gives the definition of myth as
a work wherein man determines God instead of receiving from
God his justification. The preacher here turns against the myth-
maker, against the man of science, and against the philosopher
himself. If the philosopher claims to find something else, in his
description of authentic existence, than a formal and empty
definition, a possibility for which the New Testament announces
the realization, then the philosopher himself falls under the blow
of condemnation. Because he declares that he knows how au
thentic existence becomes realized, he too claims to determine
himself. Here is the limit of existential interpretation and, in
general, of the recourse to philosophy. This limit is perfectly
clear. It coincides with the passage from the second interpreta
tion of myth to the third, that is, to the interpretation which be
gins from the kerygma itself. More precisely, it begins from the
theological core of justification by faith, according to the Pauline
and Lutheran tradition.
If, therefore, Bultmann thinks he can still speak in non-
mythological terms of the Christ-event and of the acts of God, it
is because, as a man of faith, he makes himself dependent on an
act which determines him. This decision of faith is thus the cen
ter from which the previous definitions of myth and demythol
ogization can begin to be taken up again. Consequently a circula-
tion is set up among all the forms of demythologization—
demythologization as work of science, as work of philosophy,
and as proceeding from faith. By turns, it is modern man, then
the exlNtcntlal phlloiophcr, and finally the believer who calls the
•hots. Tim entire cxcgctlcal and theological work of Rudolf
394 / RELI GI ON AND F A I T H
Bultmann consists in setting up this great circle in which exe-
getical science, existential interpretation, and preaching in the
style of Paul and Luther exchange roles.
III. T h e T a s k o f I n t e r p r e t a t i o n
W e n e e d to t h in k through Bultmann5s work still

more fully. Sometimes we must think with him and sometimes
against him. What is not yet sufficiently thought through in Bult
mann is the specifically nonmythological core of biblical and
theological statements and hence, by contrast, the mythological
statements themselves.
Bultmann holds that the “signification” of “mythological
statements” is itself no longer mythological. It is possible, he
says, to speak in nonmythological terms of the finitude of the
world and of man before the transcendent power of God, even
of the signification of eschatological myths. The notion of an wact
of GodMand of "God as actMis, according to him, not mythologi
cal. This even includes the notions of rtthe word of GodJ, and also
that of the "call of the word of God." The word of God, he says,
calls man and draws him back from self-idolatry. It calls man to
his true self. In short, the activity of God, more precisely his
acting for us, in the event of the summons and of decision, is the
nonmythological element, the nonmythological signification of
mythology.
Do we think this signification?
It would be tempting to say first off, in Kantian language,
that the transcendent, the completely other, is what we ^think^
preeminently but which we <<represenf, to ourselves in objective
and worldly terms. The second definition of myth goes in this
direction：putting the beyond into worldly terms consists in an
objectification of what must remain limit and foundation. In
general, everything that opposes Bultmann to Feuerbach— and I
insist strongly on the total character of the opposition— draws
Bultmann close to Kant. ^Myth*1 holds in the first thinker the
same place that transcendental illusion*' holds in the second.
This interpretation is confirmed by the constant use of the word
Vorstellung— “representation” 一to designate the “images of the
world"* with which we illusorily fill the thoughts of the transcend
ent. Does not Bultmann also say that the incomprehensibility of
God does not reside on the level of theoretical thought but only
on the level of personal existence, that is, on the level of our

idolatrous and rebellious will?
But this interpretation of nonmythological elements in the
meaning of the limit-idea is contradicted by much more impor
tant dimensions of Bultmann^ work. Thus it seems that the no
tions M act of God/* ^word of God,>, and ''future of God^ are state-
ments of pure faith and derive their entire meaning from the
surrender of our will when it renounces self-determination. Only
in this event do I experience what “act of God” signifies， that is ，
at the same time order and gift, birth of the imperative and of
the indicative (because you are conducted by the spirit, you walk
according to the spirit). Just as for his teacher, Wilhelm Her
mann, so too for Bultmann the object of faith and its foundation
are one and the same thing: what I believe is that whereby I
believe, that which gives me something to believe. Finally, the
nonmythological core is constituted by the statement of the justi
fication of faith which appears consequently as the Gospel in the
Gospel. In this Rudolf Bultmann is thoroughly Lutheran, Klerke-
gaardian, and Barthian. But, with the same stroke, the very ques
tion of the meaning of such expressions as wholly other, tran
scendent, and beyond, as well as act, word, and event, is avoided.
It is striking that Bultmann makes hardly any demands on this
language of faith， whereas he was so suspicious about the lan
guage of myth. From the moment language ceases to “objectify,”
when it escapes from worldly "<representations,wevery interroga
tion seems superfluous concerning the meaning of this Dass —
of this event of encounter— which follows on the Was— on gen
eral statements and on objectifying representations.
If this is the case, then there is no reflection in Bultmann on
language in general but only on “objectification.” Hence Bult
mann does not seem to be very much preoccupied with the fact
that another language replaces the language of myth and hence
calls for a new kind of interpretation. For example, he grants
without difficulty that the language of faith can take up myth
again in the form of symbol or image. He grants also that the
language of faith, besides symbols or images, has recourse to
analogies. This is the case for all the "personalisr expressions
of “encounter•” God summons me as a person, encounters me as
a friend, commands me as a father. These expressions, Bult
mann says, are neither symbols nor images but a way of speak
ing analogically. Protestant theology believed that it could rely
on the "pononalliir relation of the I-Thou kind and develop
on thlfi IiunU m thoocontrk， ponmnallsm that would escape the
difficulties of a natural theology in the Catholic vein, a natural

theology considered as a hypostasis of cosmology. But is it pos
sible to avoid critical reflection on the use of analogy in this
transposition of the human you to the divine Thou? What rela
tion does analogy have with the symbolic use of myth and with
the limit concept of the wholly other? Bultmann seems to believe
that a language which is no longer “objectifying” is innocent. But
in what sense is it still a language? And what does it signify?
Is the question no longer raised, is the question still under
the sway of an objectifying thinking, which looks for the security
of the \V〇 5 in “general statements” and puts off surrendering to
the insecurity of the Doss, of the decision of faith? But in this
case, what must be renounced is the very question which has set
the entire inquiry in motion, the question of the ^signification"
of mythological representations. It must be said, then, that the
nonmythological signification of myth is no longer of the order
of signification at all, that, with faith, there is no longer anything
to think, anything to say. The sacrifLcium intellectus we refused
to employ for myth is now employed for faith. Moreover, kerygma
can no longer be the origin of demythologization if it does not
initiate thought, if it develops no understanding of faith. How
could it do so if it were not both event and meaning together and
therefore “objective” in another acceptation of the word than the
one eliminated with mythological representations?
This question is at the center of post-Bultmannian hermeneu
tics. The opposition between explanation and understanding that
came from Dilthey and the opposition between the objective and
the existential that came from an overly anthropological reading
of Heidegger were very useful in a first phase of the problem.
But, once the intention is to grasp in its entirety the problem of
the understanding of faith and the language appropriate to it,
these oppositions prove to be ruinous. Doubtless it is necessary
today to award less importance to Verstehen (wunderstanding,,)3
which is too exclusively centered on existential decision, and to
consider the problem of language and of interpretation in all its
breadth.
I am not formulating these questions against Bultmann but
with the aim of thinking more adequately what remains un
thought in Bultmann. And I am doing this for two reasons.
First of all, his work as a New Testament exegete has an in
adequate basis in his hermeneutic philosophy. Yet Bultmann—
who is too little known in France — is above all the author of the
ample and solid Theology of the New Testament and the ad
mirable Commentary on the Gospel of John. (Here a task re

mains, that of confronting Bultmann^ actual exegesis with the
representation he gives of it in his theoretical writings.) His
exegesis, it seems to me, is more opposed to Dilthey than his
hermeneutics. His exegesis breaks with Dilthey on the essential
point. The task of interpretation, when applied to a specific text,
is not “to understand its author better than he understood him-
self,” according to a phrase which goes back to Schleiermacher.
Rather, the task is to submit oneself to what the text says, to
what it intends, and to what it means. But this independence,
this sufficiency, this objectivity of the text presupposes a con
ception of meaning which borrows more from Husserl than from
Dilthey. Even if it is true, finally, that the text accomplishes its
meaning only in personal appropriation, in the ^Tiistoricar de
cision (and this I believe strongly with Bultmann against all the
current philosophies of a discourse without the subject), this
appropriation is only the final stage, the last threshold of an un
derstanding which has first been uprooted and moved into an
other meaning. The moment of exegesis is not that of existential
decision but tfiat of “meaning,’ which， as Frege and Husserl have
said, is an objective and even an “ideal” moment (ideal in that
meaning has no place in reality, not even in psychic reality).
Two thresholds of understanding then must be distinguished, the
threshold of “meaning，” which is what I just described, and that
of “signification广which is the moment when the reader grasps
the meaning, the moment when the meaning is actualized in
existence. The entire route of comprehension goes from the
ideality of meaning to existential signification. A theory of in
terpretation which at the outset runs straight to the moment of
decision moves too fast. It leaps over the moment of meaning,
which is the objective stage, in the nonworldly sense of ôbjec-
tive.MThere is no exegesis without a Nearer [teneur] of mean
ing,w hich belongs to the text and not to the author of the text.
Therefore, far from the objective and the existential being
contraries— as happens when there is too exclusive an attach
ment to the opposition between myth and kerygma— it must be
said that the meaning of the text holds these two moments
closely together. It is the objectivity of the text, understood as
content— bearer of meaning and demand for meaning— that be
gins the existential movement of appropriation. Without such a
conception of meaning, of its objectivity and even of its ideality,
no textual criticism is possible. Therefore, the semantic moment,
the moment of objective meaning, must precede the existential
moment, the moment of personal decision, in a hermeneutics

concerned with doing justice to both the objectivity of mean
ing and the historicity of personal decision. In this respect the
problem Bultmann posed is the exact inverse of the problem
which contemporary structuralist theories pose. The structuralist
theories have taken the “language” side， whereas Bultmann has
taken the “speaking” side. But we now need an instrument of
thought for apprehending the connection between language and
speaking, the conversion of system into event. More than any
other discipline that deals with "'signs/* exegesis requires such an
instrument of thought. If there is no objective meaning, then the
text no longer says anything at all； without existential appropria
tion, what the text does say is no longer living speech. The task
of a theory of interpretation is to combine in a single process
these two moments of comprehension.
This first theme brings us to a second. It is not only the exe-
gete in Bultmann but the theologian in him who demands that
the relation between the meaning of the text and existential de
cision be more adequately conceived and stated. In effect only
the îdeal meaning^ of the text, its nonphysical and nonpsycho-
logical meaning, can be the vehicle of the coming of the word
toward us, or, in Bultmann's own language, of "the decisive act
of God in Jesus Christ/* I do not say that this act of God, this
word of God, find their sufficient condition in the objectivity of
meaning； but they find their necessary condition there. The act
of God has its first transcendence in the objectivity of meaning
which it announces for us. The idea itself of announcement, of
proclamation, of kerygma, presupposes, if I may say so, an initia
tive on the part of meaning, a coming to us of meaning, which
makes speech a partner or correlate of existential decision. If the
meaning of the text does not already confront the reader, how
shall the act it announces not be reduced to a simple symbol of
inner conversion, of the passage from the old man to the new?
To be sure, there is no authorization for saying that God for
Bultmann is only another name for authentic existence. Nothing
in Bultmann seems to authorize any kind of a Xhristian athe
ism/* in which Christ would be the symbol of an existence de
voted to others. For Bultmann as for Luther, justification by faith
comes from an other than the self, from an other who grants me
what he commands of me. Otherwise, authenticity would again
become a ^workw whereby I would be determining my own ex
istence.
Preface tQ Bultmann / 399
What 4<lays claim to me>, comes to man and does not proceed
from him.
But if Bultmann^ intention is not dubious, is it provided with
the means to think this other origin? Does not his entire enter
prise threaten to veer toward fideism since it lacks the support
of a meaning that could announce its other origin by confronting
me? Here a Husserlian theory of meaning is insufficient. The
claim (Anspruch) which God5s word addresses to our existence,
if it is to be thought, presupposes not only that the meaning of
the text is constituted as an ideal correlate of my existence. It
presupposes also that the word itself belongs to the being who
addresses himself to my existence. A complete meditation on the
word, on the claim of the word by being, and hence a complete
ontology of language is essential here if the expression M word of
God” is to be meaningful or, in Bultmann’s terms, if this state
ment is to have a nonmythological signification. But, in Bult-
mann^ work, this remains to be thought. In this regard the help
he has looked for from Heidegger is not completely satisfying.
What Bultmann asks of Heidegger is essentially a philosophical
anthropology capable of furnisSlng the “proper conceptuality,’
at the moment of entering upon a biblical anthropology and of
interpreting the cosmological and mythological statements of the
Bible in terms of human existence. The recourse to Heidegger
and to the <<preunderstandingMthat he offers does not seem con-
demnable in principle. What Bultmann says about the impossi
bility of an interpretation without presuppositions seems con
vincing to me. But I would reproach Bultmann with not having
sufficiently followed the Heideggerian “path.” In order to avail
himself of Heidegger’s “existentials” he has taken a short cut,
without having made the long detour of the question of being
without which these existentials— being-in-the>world, fallenness,
care, being-toward-death, and so on— are nothing more than
abstractions of lived experience, of a formalized existenziell. It
must not be forgotten that in Heidegger the existential descrip
tion does not concern man but the place— the Da-sein— of the
question of being. This aim is not preeminently anthropological,
humanistic, or personalist. Consequently, meaningful statements
about man and the person and, a fortiori, the analogies concern
ing God as a person can be thought and grounded only ulteriorly.
This inquiry about being, which is part of the being that we are
and which makes of us the “there” of being， the Da of Dasein，
is In 鍾 omo _enie short-circuited in Bultmann. At the same time.
the labor of thought connected with this inquiry is also lacking.

But two important things— important even to Bultmanns
enterprise— are bound to this labor of thought which he has
economized on.
First is the examination of a kind of death of metaphysics as
the site of the forgetfulness of the question of being. This exam
ination, which extends also to the metaphysics of the I-Thou
relation, belongs today in an organic way to the entire ^return to
the foundation of metaphysics” itself. Everything that we have
said above about limit and foundation, even with respect to
myth, has something in common with this return and with the
crisis of metaphysics connected with it. The second implication
of the labor of thought proposed by Heidegger concerns language
and consequently our effort to think the expression wword of
God/* If one runs too quickly to the fundamental anthropology of
Heidegger, and if one lacks the questioning of being to which
this anthropology is attached, then one also lacks the radical
revision of the question of language which it allows. The theo
logian is directly concerned by the attempt to <(bring language
into language/" Let us understand this as bringing the language
we speak to the language which is the saying of being, the com
ing of being into language.
I do not say that theology must go by way of Heidegger. I say
that, if it goes by way of Heidegger, then it is by this path and to
this point that it must follow him. This path is longer. It is the
path of patience and not of haste and precipitation. On this path
the theologian must not be in a hurry to know whether being for
Heidegger is the God of the Bible, It is by postponing this ques
tion that the theologian may later on think again what the ex
pressions "act of GodMand âction of God in his word^ denote.
亍o think the expression “word of God” is to agree to be engaged
on paths which may become lost. In Heideggers own words, M It
is only by beginning from the truth of being that the essence of
the Sacred lets-itself be thought. It is only by beginning from the
essence of the Sacred that the essence of divinity is to be
thought. And it is only in the light of the essence of divinity that
whatever the word God names can be thought** (Letter on Hu-
v .
this remains to be thought. There is no shorter path for
joining a neutral existential anthropology, according to philoso
phy, with the existential decision before God, according to the
Bible. But there is the long path of the question of being and of
the belonging of saying to being. It is on this longer path that
this can be understood：that the ideality of the meaning of thtt

text, in the spirit of Husserl, is still a wmetaphysicar abNtracllon,
a necessary abstraction, to be sure, when faced with tho |«y«
chological and existential reductions of the meaning of the l«xt|
but an abstraction nonetheless in relation to being's prlmardlul
claim to say.
Yes, all of this remains to be thought, not at all as a rojticllon
of Bultmann or even as a mere supplement to his work, hut mn
somehow a foundation supporting it.
Freedom m the Light of Hope
T he c o n c e p t of re lig iou s fr e e d o m can be ap

proached in several ways and on several levels. For my part, I
discern three. First, one can raise questions about the freedom of
the act of faith ；one then situates the problem in the field of an
essentially psychological or anthropological discussion. But faith
is not thereby recognized in its theological specificity； it is treated
like a species of belief, and the freedom of the act of faith ap
pears as a particular case of the general power of choosing, or,
as we say, of forming an opinion.
On a second level, questions of political science can be raised
about the right to profess a specific religion； it is not only a mat
ter of subjective conviction but of public expression of opinion.
Religious freedom is then a particular case of the general right
to profess opinions without being intimidated by public power.
This right forms part of the political pact (contract) which
renders the right of one person reciprocal to the right of another.
In the last analysis, the basis of this freedom consists not in the
psychological power to choose but in the mutual recognition of
free wills within the framework of a politically organized com
munity. In this politics of freedom, religion figures as a cultural
power, a recognized public force；and the freedom that one
claims for it is the more legitimate as religion is not its exclusive
beneficiary.
On a third level, the one on which I will try to situate myself,
religious freedom signifies the quality of freedom that pertains
to the religious phenomenon as such. There is a hermeneutics
T ra n sla ted b y Robert S w een ey.
[4 〇al
Freedom in the Light of Hope / 403
of this freedom to the degree that the religious phenomenon it

self exists only in the historical process of interpretation and
reinterpretation of the word that engenders it. Therefore I under
stand the hermeneutics of religious freedom as the explication ol'
the meanings of freedom which accompany the explication of tlu4
founding word or, as we say, the proclamation of the kerygnia.
This third way of posing the problem does not exclude tin*
preceding ways；I hope to show that this quality of freedom, de
veloped by proclamation and interpretation, recapitulates the
anterior degrees of freedom inasmuch as it concerns what I shall
henceforth call the completion of the discourse of freedom. This
power of recapitulation will even be my constant preoccupaiion.
In fact, the task of the philosopher appears to me here to he
distinguished from that of the theologian, in the following man
ner ： biblical theology has the function of developing the kerygma
according to its own conceptual system；it has the duty of criti
cizing preaching, both by confronting it with its origin and by
reorganizing it in a meaningful framework, in a discourse of its
own kind, corresponding to the internal coherence of the
kerygma itself. The philosopher, even the Christian one, has a
distinct task；I am not inclined to say that he brackets what he
has heard and what he believes, for how could he philosophize
in such a state of abstraction with respect to what is essential?
But neither am I of the opinion that he should subordinate his
philosophy to theology, in an ancillary relation. Between absten
tion and capitulation, there is the autonomous way which I have
located under the heading "the philosophical approach/*
I take “approach” in its strong sense of “approximation.” I
understand by this the incessant work of philosophical discourse
to put itself into a relation of proximity with kerygmatic and
theological discourse. This work of thought is a work that begins
with Ustening, and yet within the autonomy of responsible
thought. It is an incessant reform of thinking, but within the
limits of reason alone. The “conversion” of the philosopher is a
conversion within philosophy and to philosophy according to its
internal exigencies. If there is only one logos, the logos of Christ
requires of me as a philosopher nothing else than a more com
plete and more perfect activation of reason；not more than rea
son, but whole reason. Let us repeat this phrase, whole reason；
for it is this problem of the integrality of thinking which will
prove to be the core of the whole problematic.
Hero, then, is how wo dhall proceed. I will first of all sketch
out what I, o n a honrer of (ho Word, consider to be the kerygma
4 〇4 / RELIGION AND FAITH
of freedom. Then I shall attempt to say— and this is the principal

point of my paper— what kind of discourse on freedom philoso
phy can articulate, beyond psychological and political discourse,
that will still merit the name of “discourse” on religious freedom.
This homologous discourse is that of religion within the limits of
reason alone.
I. T h e K e r y g m a o f F r e e d o m
It is n o t in it ia l l y of FREED〇M、 that the Gospel speaks

to m e ； it is because it speaks to me of something else that it
speaks to me also of freedom ： "The truth shall make you free/*
says John.
Where shall we begin then, if not with freedom? For my part
I have been very much taken with— I should say, won over by—
the eschatologocal interpretation that Jurgen Moltmann gives to
the Christian kerygma in his work The Theology of Hope. 1 As we
know, Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer are at the origin
of the reinterpretation of the whole of the New Testament, start
ing with the preaching of the Kingdom of God and of the last
things and breaking with the moralizing Christ of the liberal exe-
getes. But then, if the preaching of Jesus and of the primitive
church proceeds from the eschatological source, it is necessary
to readjust all theology in accordance with the norm of eschatol
ogy and cease to make of discourse on the last things a sort of
more or less optional appendix to a theology of revelation cen
tered on a notion of logos and of manifestation which would
itself owe nothing to the hope of things to come.
This revision of theological concepts beginning with an exe
gesis of the New Testament centered on the preaching of the
Kingdom to come finds support in the parallel revision of the
theology of the Old Testament inspired by Martin Buber, which
insists on the massive opposition between the God of the promise
— the God of the desert, of the wandering— and the gods of the
“epiphanic” religions. This systematized opposition goes very
far. The religion of the “name” is opposed to th站 of the “idol,” as
the religion of the God who is coming is opposed to the religion
of the God of present manifestation. The first engenders a his
tory, while the second consecrates a nature full of gods. As to
i. Jurgen Moltmann, The Theology of Hope, trans. J. W, Leitch (New
York ： Harper & Row, 1967).
this history, it is less the experience of the change of everything

than the tension created by the expectation of a fulfillment； his
tory is itself hope of history, for each fulfillment is perceived um
confirmation, pledge, and repetition of the promise. This lust
designates an increase, a surplus, a “not yet,” which malntaimi
the tension of history.2
It is this temporal constitution of the t<promiseMthat must
now guide us in the interpretation of the New Testament. At first
glance, one might think that the Resurrection, the heart of the
Christian kerygma, has exhausted the category of promise by
fulfilling it.
What has appeared to me precisely as most interesting in the
Christology of Moltmann is his effort to resituate the central
preaching of the Resurrection in an eschatological perspective.
This is crucial for our being able to speak shortly concerning
freedom in the light of hope. One might be tempted to say that
the Resurrection is the past event par excellence. One thinks of
the Hegelian interpretation of the empty tomb as a memorial to
nostalgia. All the more might one prefer to locate it within the
category of the present by applying it to ourselves, to the new
man, as in the existential interpretation of Rudolf Bultmann.
How can we interpret the Resurrection in terms of hope, of
2. I have retained from the exegetical studies of the 0 】d Testament

only the core of the promise insofar as it engenders a historical vision.
It would be necessary to distinguish, at the interior of this general schema
of the promise, prophecy and its intrahistorical hope of later eschatologies,
and, among them, the Apocalypses, properly so called, which carry beyond
history the final term of all threat and all expectation. But if these dis
tinctions and even these oppositions— particularly those between worldly
and transcendent eschatologies— are essentia] for a theology of the Old
Testament, they are less so for the implicit philosophical meaning,
namely, the horizon structure of history itself. The horizon is both that
which delimits expectation and that which moves along with us. For the
imagination, the distinction between a hope in history and a hope outside
history is fundamental. Furthermore, in his ^The Theology of Israel's
Historical Traditions,” Gerhard von Rad invites us to redraw the dividing
line between prophecy and eschatology： the message of the prophets must
be considered eschatological in every case where it considers the old
historical bases of salvation null and void. We will therefore call escha-
tcôgical not just any expression of faith in the future, even if this future
is that of sacred institutions； prophetic teaching deserves to be called
eschatological only when the prophets dislodge Israel from the security
of earlier saving actions and abruptly move the basis of salvation in the
direction of n future action of God (von Rad, Old Testament Theology,
trans. D. M, C, fllalkcr [New York: Harper fit Row, 1962], p. 126). Yet
the opposition la ncv«r complete, inasmuch as acts of deliverance
ftrniouncod n_W| _ri 麄 nalogy to saving acts of the past:
New Kurlh, N«w T)nvI(1, N#w /ion. N«w Exodus, New Covenant.
4 〇6 / RELIGION AND FAITH
promise, of the future? Moltmann attempts it by resituating the

Resurrection entirely within the framework of the Jewish the-
ology of the promise and by removing it from the Hellenistic
schemas of epiphanies of eternity. The Resurrection, interpreted
within a theology of promise, is not an event which closes, by
fulfilling the promise, but an event which opens, because it adds
to the promise by confirming it. The Resurrection is the sign that
the promise is henceforth for all；the meaning of the Resurrec
tion is in its future, the death of death, the resurrection of all
from the dead. The God who is witnessed to is not, therefore, the
God who is but the God who is coming. The “already” of his
Resurrection orients the wnot yet'* of the final recapitulation. But
this meaning reaches us disguised by the Greek Christologles,
which have made the Incarnation the temporal manifestation of
eternal being and the eternal present, thus hiding the principal
meaning, namely, that the God of the promise, the God of Abra
ham, Isaac, and Jacob, has approached, has been revealed as He
who is coming for all. Thus disguised by epiphanic religion, the
Resurrection has become the pledge of all divine presence in the
present world ：cultic presence, mystic presence. The task of a
hermeneutics of the Resurrection is to reinstitute the potential
of hope, to tell the future of the Resurrection. The meaning of
the ^Resurrection,>is in suspense insofar as it is not fulfilled in a
new creation, in a new totality of being. To recognize the Resur
rection of Jesus Christ is to enter into the movement of hope in
resurrection from the dead, to attain the new creation ex nihilo,
that is, beyond death.
If such is the meaning of hope on its own level of discourse,
that of a hermeneutics of the Resurrection, what is the meaning
of freedom if it also must be converted to hope? What is freedom
in the light of hope? I will answer in one word ：it is the meaning
of my existence in the light of the Resurrection, that is, as re
instated in the movement which we have called the future of the
Resurrection of the Christ. In this sense, a hermeneutics of re
ligious freedom is an interpretation of freedom in conformity
with the Resurrection interpreted in terms of promise and hope.
What does this mean?
The above formula attests that the psychological, ethical, and
even political aspects are not absent；but they are not basic be
cause they are not original. Hermeneutics consists in deciphering
these original traits in their psychological, ethical, and political
expressions, then in reascending, from these expressions, to the
nucleus— which I shall call kerygmatic— of freedom in the light

of hope.
Indeed, we can speak in psychological terms of a choice for
or against life, of a radical alternative； we find texts in this sense
which make us think of a philosophical conception of freedom of
choice, for example in Deuteronomy： WI call heaven and earth to
witness against you today： I set before you life or death, blessing
or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants
might live, in the love of Yahweh your God, obeying his voice,
clinging to himw (Deut. 30:19-20).3 The preaching of John the
Baptist, and, even more, that of Jesus, is an appeal which incites
a decision, and this decision can be transcribed into the alterna
tive ：either/or. We know the use that has been made, from Kier
kegaard to Bultmann, of the theme of the existential decision.
But the existential interpretation of the Bible has not been suffi
ciently attentive to the specificity of this choice； perhaps it even
marks a subtle emptying of the eschatological dimension and a
return to the philosophy of the eternal present. In any case, there
is a great risk of reducing the rich content of eschatology to a
kind of instantaneousness of the present decision at the expense
of the temporal, historical, communitarian, and cosmic aspects
contained in the hope of the Resurrection. If we wish to express
freedom in the light of hope in appropriate psychological terms,
it will be necessary to speak, with Kierkegaard again, of the pas
sion for the possible, which retains in its formulation the mark
of the future which the promise puts on freedom. Indeed, it is
necessary to draw all the consequences for a meditation on free
dom of Moltmann's antithesis between religion of promise and
religion of presence, to extend the debate with the theophanic
religions of the Orient to a debate with the whole of Hellenism,
to the degree that this latter proceeds from the Parmenidean
celebration of the is.wIt is then not only the Name that must
be opposed to the idol， but the “He is coming"’ of Scripture must
be opposed to the "'It iswof the Proem of Parmenides. This divid
ing line is henceforth going to separate two conceptions of time
and, through them， two conceptions of freedom. The Parmeni-
dean “It is” in effect calls for an ethics of the eternal present; this
is sustained only by a continual contradiction between, on the
one hand, a detachment, an uprooting from passing things, a
3. [The Jerusalem version of the Bible is used in all biblical quota

tions In this essay.一 T r a n s .]
4 〇8 / RELIGIO N AND FAITH
distancing and an exile in the eternal, and, on the other hand,

consent without reservation to the order of the whole. Stoicism is
doubtless the most developed expression of this ethics of the
present； the present, for Stoicism, is the unique time of salva
tion； the past and the future are equally discredited； in one
stroke, hope is rejected for the same reason as fear, as a dis
turbance, an agitation, which proceeds from a revocable opinion
concerning imminent evils or coming goods. Nec spe— nec metu
(Do not hope— do not fear) Spinozist wisdom will say with equal
emphasis. And perhaps today what there is of Spinozism in
contemporary philosophy returns us to this same wisdom of the
present, by means of suspicion, demystification, and disillusion
ment. Nietzsche speaks of love of fate and pronounces the
eternal yes to existence； and Freud reintroduces the tragic
anake into the principle of reality. But hope is diametrically
opposed, as passion for the possible, to this primacy of necessity.
It is allied with the imagination insofar as the latter is the power
of the possible and the disposition for being in a radical re
newal. Freedom in the light of hope, expressed in psychological
terms, is nothing else dian this creative imagination of the
possible.
But we can also speak in ethical terms and emphasize its
character of obedience, of listening. Freedom is a “following^
(Folgen). For ancient Israel, the Law is the way that leads from
promise to fulfillment. Covenant, Law, Freedom, as power to
obey or disobey, are derivative aspects of the promise. The Law
imposes (gebietet) what the promise proposes (bietet). The
commandment is thus the ethical face of the promise. Of course,
with Saint Paul this obedience is no longer transcribed in terms
of law; obedience to the Law is no longer the sign of the efficacy
of the promise； rather, the Resurrection is the sign.
Nevertheless, a new ethics marks the linkage of freedom to
hope— what Moltmann calls the ethics of the mission
(Sendung)；the promissio involves a missio；in the mission, the
obligation which engages the present proceeds from the promise,
opens the future. But more precisely, the mission signifies some
thing other than an ethics of duty, just as the passion for the
possible signifies something other than what is arbitrary. The
practical awareness of a M missionw is inseparable from the de
ciphering of the signs of the new creation, of the tendential
character of the Resurrection, to quote Moltmann once more.
The mission would thus be the ethical equivalent of hope,
just as the passion for the possible was its psychological

equivalent.
This second trait of freedom in the light of hope removes us
further than the first trait did from the existential interpretation,
which is too much centered on present decision； for the ethics
of the mission has communitarian, political, and even cosmic
implications, which the existential decision, centered on personal
interiority, tends to hide. A freedom open to new creation is in
fact less centered on subjectivity, on personal authenticity, than
on social and political justice ； it calls for a reconciliation which
itself demands to be inscribed in the recapitulation of all things.
But these two aspects, psychological and ethicopolitical, of
freedom according to hope are the second expressions of a core
of meaning which is properly the kerygmatic center of freedom,
of which we will soon undertake a philosophical approximation.
I shall say this: “Christian freedom”一to take a phrase from
Luther— is to belong existentially to the order of the Resurrec
tion. There is its specific element. It can be expressed in two
categories, on which I have reflected and worked several times,
which explicitly tie freedom to hope: the category of “in spite of”
and that of *liow much more.>, They are the obverse and re
verse of each other, just as are, with Luther, “freedom from”
and “freedom for.”
For the “in spite of* is a “free from,” but in the light of hope;
and the 'Tiow much moreMis a M free for," equally in the light
of hope.
In spite of what? If the Resurrection is resurrection from the
dead, all hope and freedom are in spite of death. This is the
hiatus which makes of the new creation a creatio ex nihilo— a
hiatus so profound that the identity of the risen Christ with Jesus
crucified is the great question of the New Testament. That
identity is not certain； the apparitions do not teach it, but only
the word of the Risen One: “It is I, the same.” The kerygma
announces it as the good news: “the living Lord of the church is
the same as Jesus on the Cross." The same question of identity
has its equivalent in the Synoptics ： how tell the story of the
Resurrection? Well, properly speaking, one does not tell it ； the
discontinuity in the account is the same as in the preaching；
for the account also, there is a hiatus between the Cross and the
apparitions of the Resurrected. The empty tomb is the expression
of this hiatus.
What follows from this for freedom? Henceforth all hope
4i 〇 / RE LIGION AND FAITH
will carry the same sign of discontinuity, between what is head

ing toward death and what denies death. This is why it contra
dicts actual reality. Hope, insofar as it is hope of resurrection,
is the living contradiction of what it proceeds from and what is
placed under the sign of the Cross and death. According to an
admirable phrase of the Reformers, the Kingdom of God is
hidden under its contrary, the Cross. If the connection between
the Cross and the Resurrection is of the order of paradox and not
of logical mediation, freedom in the light of hope is not only
freedom for the possible but, more fundamentally still, freedom
for the denial of death, freedom to decipher the signs of the
Resurrection under the contrary appearance of death.
But defiance of death is in its turn the counterpart or inverse
of a life-force, of a perspective of growth, which the Mhow much
more” of Saint Paul comes to express. Here I link up with my
earlier reflection on the “Interpretation of the Myth of Punish
ment”;4 there I was opposing to the logic of equivalence, which
is the logic of punishment par excellence, the logic of super
abundance：
but the gift itself considerably outweighed the fall. If it is certain
that through one man*s fall so many died, it is even more certain
that divine grace, coming through the one man, Jesus Christ,
came to so many as an abundant free gift. . . . If it is certain
that death reigned over everyone as the consequence of one man’s
fall, it is even more certain that one man, Jesus Christ, will cause
everyone to reign in life who receives the free gift. . . . When
law came, it was to multiply the opportunities of falling, but how
ever great the number of sins committed, grace was even greater
(Rom. 5:12-20).
This logic of surplus and excess is as much the folly of the
Cross as it is the wisdom of the Resurrection. This wisdom is
expressed in an economy of superabundance, which we must
decipher in daily life, in work and in leisure, in politics and in
universal history. To be free is to sense and to know that one
belongs to this economy, to be “at home” in this economy. The
“in spite of,” which holds us ready for disappointment, is only
the reverse, the dark side, of the joyous ‘Tiow much more” by
which freedom feels itself, knows itself, wills to conspire with
the aspiration of the whole of creation for redemption.
With this third trait the distance is further widened between
an eschatological interpretation of freedom and an existential
4. See, above, pp_ 374-76.
interpretation which contracts it within the experience of

present, interior, subjective decision. Freedom in the light of
hope of resurrection has a personal expression, certainly, but,
even more, a communitarian, historical, and political expression
in the dimension of the expectation of universal resurrection.
It is by starting from this kerygmatic core of hope and free
dom that we should now search out a philosophical approxima
tion.
II. A P hilosophical A pproximation of F reedom

in the L ight of H ope
I n b e g in n in g t h e t a s k that is proper to the philoso

pher, I wish to recall what I said in the introduction concerning
the approximation in philosophical discourse to the kerygma of
hope. This setting in proximity, I said, is both a work of listening
and an autonomous enterprise, a thinking “in the light of • ， •"
and a free thinking.
How is this possible?
There is, it seems to me, in the kerygma of hope, both an
innovation of meaning and a demand for intelligibility, which
simultaneously create the measure and the task of approxima
tion.
An innovation of meaning is what Moltmann emphasizes by
opposing the promise to the Greek logos；hope begins as wa-
logicaL” It effects an irruption into a closed order; it opens up a
career for existence and history. Passion for the possible, mission
and exodus, denial of the reality of death, response of super
abundance of meaning to the abundance of non-sense— these
are so many signs of the new creation whose novelty catches us,
in the strict sense, unawares. Hope, in its springing forth, is
âpoTetic/* not by reason of lack of meaning but by excess of
meaning. Resurrection surprises by being in excess in compari
son to the reality forsaken by God.
But if this novelty did not make us think, then hope, like
faith, would be a cry, a flash without a sequel； there would be
no eschatology, no doctrine of last things, if the novelty of the
new were not made explicit by an Indefinite repetition of signs,
were not verified in the M serlousneiflMof an interpretation which
Incessantly Mparttai hope from utopia. Likewise, the exegesis
of hope by rmani o l frMdom, u we have just outlined ltP la
already a way of thinking according to hope. The passion for the

possible must graft itself onto real tendencies, the mission onto
a sensed history, the superabundance onto signs of the Resurrec
tion, wherever they can be deciphered. It is necessary, therefore,
that the Resurrection deploy its own logic, which obviates the
logic of repetition.
We cannot restrict ourselves to the nondlalectical opposition
between the promise and the Greek logos；we cannot remain
there, under pain of not being able to say, with the theologian
himself, spero ut intelligam— I hope in order to understand.
But what understanding?
At the end of the introduction I was suggesting a possible
direction of research by sajdng that the discourse of the philoso
pher on freedom which stays close to the kerygma, which makes
itself homologous with it, is the discourse of religion within the
limits of reason alone.
The phrase sounds Kantian, to be sure; it “shows its colors.”
But the Kantianism that I wish to develop now is, paradoxically,
more to be constructed than repeated； it would be something Uke
a post-Hegelian Kantianism, to borrow an expression from Eric
Weil, which, it appears, he applied to himself. For my own part
I accept the paradox, for reasons that are both philosophical
and theological.
First, for reasons that are philosophical： chronologically,
Hegel comes after Kant, but we later readers go from one to the
other. In us, something of Hegel has vanquished something of
Kant； but something of Kant has vanquished something of
Hegel, because we are as radically post-Hegelian as we are post-
Kantian. In my opinion, it is this exchange and this permutation
which still structure philosophical discourse today. This is why
the task is to think them always better by thinking them together
— one against the other, and one by means of A e other. Even
if we begin by thinking something else, this ^thinking Kant and
Hegel better'* pertains, in one way or the other, to this ^thinking
differently from Kant or Hegel,” “something other than Kant or
Hegel•”
Such “epochal” considerations, internal to philosophy, join up
with another order of Teflection, which concerns what I have
called “approximation,” “putting into proximity•” This closeness
to a kerygmatic thought provokes, it seems to me, “effects of
meaning,Mon the level of philosophical discourse itself, which
often take the form of dislocation and recasting of systems. The
theme of hope has preci*ely a flssuring power with regard to
Freedom in the Light of Hope / 4 13
closed systems and a power of reorganizing meaning； it is in

clined by this very fact to the exchanges and permutations I was
just now suggesting.
I therefore see as converging toward the idea of a post-
Hegelian Kantianism the spontaneous restructurings of our
philosophical memory and those wMch proceed from the shock
effect of the kerygma of hope on the philosophical problematic
and on the structures of its discourse.
The route I propose to explore is opened up by the important
distinction instituted by Kantian philosophy between under
standing and reason. This split contains a potential of meaning
whose suitability to an intellectus fidei et spei I would like to
demonstrate, How? Essentially by the function of horizon that
reason assumes in the constitution of knowledge and will. That
is, I address myself directly to the dialectical part of the two
Kantian Critiques：Dialectic of theoretical reason and Dialectic
of practical reason. A philosophy of limits which is at the same
time a practical demand for totalization— this, to my mind, is
the philosophical response to the kerygma of hope, the closest
philosophical approximation to freedom in the light of hope.
Dialectic in the Kantian sense is to my mind the part of Kantian
ism which not only survives the Hegelian critique but which
triumphs over the whole of Hegelianism.
For my own part, I abandon the ethics of duty to the Hege
lian critique with no regrets； it would appear to me, indeed, to
have been correctly characterized by Hegel as an abstract
thought, as a thought of understanding. With the Encyclopaedia
and the Philosophy of Right, I willingly concede that formal
“morality” is simply a segment in a larger trajectory, that of the
realization of freedom (Preface to Philosophy of Right, § 4).
Defined in these terms, terms that are more Hegelian than
Kantian, the philosophy of the will neither begins nor ends
with the form of duty； it begins with a confrontation of will with
will, with respect to things that can be appropriated； its first
conquest is not duty but the contract, in a word, abstract right.
The moment of morality is only the infinite reflective moment,
the moment of interiority, which makes ethical subjectivity
appear. But the meaning of this subjectivity is not in the ab
straction of a separated form ； it is in the further constitution
of concrete communities ： family, economic collectivity, political
community. We recognize there the movement of the Ency
clopaedia and the Philosophy of Right: movement from the
sphere of 丨 bitract right to ihe spliere of subjective and abstract
morality, then to the sphere of objective and concrete morality.

This philosophy of the will which traverses all the levels of ob
jectification, universalization, and realization is to my eyes the
philosophy of the will, with much more justification than the
meager determination of the Wille by the form of the imperative
in the Kantian philosophy. Its greatness derives from the diver
sity of problems that it traverses and resolves： union of desire
and culture, of psychology and politics, of the subjective and the
universal. All the philosophies of the will, from Aristotle to
Kant, are there assumed and subsumed. This great philosophy of
the will is, for me, an inexhaustible reservoir of descriptions
and mediations. We have not yet exhausted it. A theology of
hope cannot but be in dialogue with it, so close to it is the
problem of the actuation of freedom.
And yet, Kant remains. What is more, he surpasses Hegel
from a certain point of view—•a point of view which is precisely
essential for our present dialogue between a theology of hope and
a philosophy of reason. The Hegel I reject is the philosopher of
retrospection, the one who not only accompanies the dialectic
of the Spirit but reabsorbs all rationality in the already happened
meaning. The point of discordance between the intellectus fidei
et spei and Hegel becomes clear to me when I reread the famous
text which terminates the Preface of the Philosophy of Right:
To say one more word about preaching what the world ought to be
like, philosophy arrives always too late for that. As thought of the
world it appears at a time when actuality has completed its de
velopmental process and is finished. What the conception teaches,
history also shows as necessary, namely, that only in a maturing
actuality the ideal appears and confronts the real. It is then that
the ideal rebuilds for itself this same world in the shape of an
intellectual realm, comprehending this world in its substance.
When philosophy paints its gray in gray, a form of life has become
old, and this gray in gray cannot rejuvenate it, only understand it.
The owl of Minerva begins its flight only when dusk is falling.5
^Philosophy always comes too late." Philosophy, without a
doubt. But what about reason?
It is this question which sends me from Hegel to Kant, to a
Kant who does not founder in the ethic of the imperative, to a
Kant who, in his turn, understands Hegel. As I have said, this
is the Kant of the dialectic, the Kant of the two Dialectics.
5. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, tram. T, M. Knox (New

York: Oxford l/niveraity Pie", 1943), Prefftce, a<i /lit.
For both Dialectics accomplish the same movement, ex

amine the same division, by instituting the tension which makes
of Kantianism a philosophy of limits and not a philosophy of
system. That division is discerned from the first and decisive
distinction between Denken, or thought of the unconditioned,
and Erkennen, or thought by way of objects, proceeding from the
conditioned to the conditioned. The two Dialectics result from
this initial division between Denken and Erkennen；and, with
the two Dialectics, is thus bom the question which sets in motion
the philosophy of religion ： What can I hope for? It is that
sequence, Dialectic of pure reason— Dialectic of practical
reason— philosophy of religion, which we must now scrutinize.
The first is necessary to the second and the third because it
introduces, at the very heart of the thought of the unconditioned,
the critique of transcendental illusion, a critique that is in
dispensable to an intellectus spei. The domain of hope is quite
precisely coextensive with the region of transcendental illusion.
I hope, there where I necessarily deceive myself, by forming
absolute objects： self, freedom, God. In this respect we have
not sufficiently stressed the idea that the critique of the paralo
gism of subjectivity is as important as the critique of the antin
omy of freedom and, of course, as important as the critique of
the proofs for the existence of God. The sophisms of the sub
stantiality of the 111' even today retain a particular luster, along
with the Nietzschean and Freudian critiques of the subject； it
is not without importance to find the root and philosophical
meaning of them in the Kantian dialectic； this latter has con
demned in advance any claim to dogmatize on personal existence
and knowledge of the person； the person is manifested only in
the practical act of treating it as an end and not merely as a
means. The Kantian concept of the transcendental illusion, ap
plied to the religious object par excellence, is one of inexhausti
ble philosophical fecundity； it grounds a critique that is radically
different from that of Feuerbach or Nietzsche. It is because there
is a legitimate thought of the unconditioned that the tran
scendental illusion is possible； this latter does not proceed from
the projection of the human into the divine but, on the contrary,
from the filling-in of the thought of the unconditioned according
to the mode of the empirical object. That is why Kant can say ：
it is not experience that limits reason but reason that limits the
claim of sensibility to extend our empirical, phenomenal, spatio-
temporal knowledge to the noumenal order.
Thli tntire movemont—-thought of the unconditioned,
4 16 / RELIGION AND FAITH
transcendental illusion, critique of absolute objects — is essential

to an understanding of hope. It constitutes a receptive structure
within the framework of which the descriptions and denuncia
tions of the post-Hegelian era will be able to be reassumed.
Kantian philosophy comes out of this enriched； but, in return,
atheism, whenever it is recharged by the Kantian philosophy of
the transcendental illusion, is stripped of another illusion— its
own ： the anthropological illusion.
What does the Dialectic of practical reason add that is new?
Essentially a transposition to the will of what we might call the
completion structure of pure reason. This second step is con
cerned very closely with our meditation on the understanding
of hope. Indeed, the Dialectic of practical reason adds nothing
to the principle of morality, assumed to be defined by the formal
imperative； nor does it add anything more to our knowledge of
our duty than the Dialectic of pure reason adds to our knowledge
of the world. What it does give to our will is essentially a goal—
die Absicht aufs hochste Gut. That goal is the expression, on the
level of duty, of the demand, the claim— the Verlangen— which
constitutes pure reason in its speculative and practical use;
reason ^demands the absolute totality of conditions for a given
conditioned thing*' (beginning of the Dialectic of the Critique of
Practical Reason). By the same stroke, the philosophy of the
will takes on its true meaning： it is not exhausted in the relation
between the maxim and the law, between the arbitrary and the
willed； a third dimension appears ： arbitrary— law— aim of
totality. What the will thus requires, Kant calls "the entire object
of pure practical reason.” He says again: “the unconditioned
totality of the object of pure practical reason, that is, of a pure
will/" That he applies to it the old name of highest good** should
not hide the novelty of his move ： the concept of the highest
good is both purified of all speculation by the critique of the
transcendental illusion and entirely measured by the problematic
of practical reason, that is, of the will. It is the concept by
which the completion of the will is thought. It thus takes the
place of Hegelian absolute knowledge exactly. More precisely,
it does not permit any knowledge, but only a demand which,
we will see further on, has something to do with hope. But we
already have some presentiment of it in the role played by the
idea of totality； highest" signifies not solely M supremeM(nonsub-
ordinated) but ^whole" and 4<completeH (gam und vollendete).
Now this totality is not given but demandod； It cannot be given,
not only because Che critique of the tranicondontal Illusion ac
companies it vsathout fall, but because practical reason, in its

dialectic, institutes a new antinomy； what it demands, in fact,
is that happiness be added to morality； it thus requires to be
added to the object of its aim, that this object may be whole,
what it excluded from its principles, that they might be pure.
This is why a new kind of illusion accompanies it, no longer
a theoretical illusion but a practical one, that of a subtle hedon
ism, which would reintroduce an interest into morality under the
pretext of happiness. In this idea of an antinomy of practical
reason I see a second receptive structure for a critique of reli
gion, applied more properly to its instinctual aspects, as in
Freud. Kant gives us the means of thinking that critique of
“hedonism” in religion— reward, consolation, etc.— by means of
the very close-knit dialectic where pleasure, enjoyment, satisfac
tion, contentment, beatitude, are confronted. Henceforth, the
connection一 the Zusammenhang— between morality and happi
ness must remain a transcendent synthesis, the union of differ
ent things, “specifically distinct.” Thus the meaning of the
Beatitudes is approached philosophically only by the idea of a
nonanalytic liaison between the work of man and the content
ment susceptible of satisfying the desire which constitutes his
existence. But for the philosopher this liaison is not meaningless,
even if it cannot be produced by his will； he can even say
boldly: M It is a priori (morally) necessary to bring forth the
highest good through the freedom of the will； the condition of its
possibility therefore must rest solely on a priori grounds of
knowledge/*6
Such is the second rational approximation of hope ： it resides
in this Zusammenhang, in this connection that is necessary yet
not given, but simply demanded, expected, between morality
and happiness. No one as much as Kant has had a sense for the
transcendent character of this connection, and this against the
whole of Greek philosophy to which he is directly opposed, re
jecting Epicurean and Stoic equally： happiness is not our ac
complishment: it is achieved by superaddition, by surplus.
A third rational approach to hope is that of religion itself,
but of religion within the limits of reason alone. Kant explicitly
brings religion to the question ‘What can I hope for?” I do not
know any other philosopher who has defined religion exclusively
6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. L. W. Beck

(Now York 1 LlhorAl Art« Press, 1956), ^Dialectic/* p. 117. [All page num
ber! In p^ninlhtMt In text In the remainder of this essay refer to this
volunii* I
with that question. Now, that question is born both within and
outside the critique： within the critique, by means of the famous
^postulates* *；outside the critique, by the detour of a reflection on
radical evil. Let us try to understand this new linkage. So little is
it arbitrary that it alone contains the final implication of freedom
within hope— an implication on which the first part of our
meditation rested.
First, the postulates. These are, as we know, beliefs of a
theoretical character— bearing on existents— but necessarily
dependent on practical reason. This status would be scandalous
if one had not previously established the status of practical
reason itself in its dialectical part. Theoretical reason, as such,
is postulation, the postulation of a fulfillment, of a complete
achievement. The postulates therefore participate in the process
of totalization initiated by the will in its terminal directedness；
they designate an order of things to come to which we know we
belong； each one designates a moment of the institution, or
better, of the installation, of that totality which, as such, is to be
effected. One does not, therefore, understand the true nature of
it if one sees there the surreptitious restoration of transcendent
objects whose illusory character had been denounced by the
Critique of Pure Reason；the postulates are theoretical deter
minations, to be sure； but they correspond to the practical postu
lation which constitutes pure reason as a demand for totality.
The very expression “postulate” should not mislead us; it ex
presses, on the properly epistemological level and in the lan
guage of modality, the "liypotheticar character of the existential
belief involved in the demand for completion, for totality, which
constitutes practical reason in its essential purity. The cor
responding postulates will be forever restrained from veering
toward “fanaticism” and “religious folly” （ Scfw 吞 rmerei) by the
critique of the transcendental illusion； this latter plays in their
regard the role of a speculative "death of God.w The postulates
speak in their own way of a God “resurrected from ihe dead.”
But their way is that of religion within the limits of reason
alone； they express the minimal existential implication of a
practical aim, of an Absicht, which cannot be converted into an
intellectual intuition. The “extension”一 Erweiterung— the “ac
cession”一 Zuwachs— they express is not an extension of knowl
edge and awareness but a "disclosureJ,> an Erdffnung (Critique
of Practical Reason, p. 140 )； this ''disclosure'* is the philosophical
equivalent of hope.
The specific character of the “postulate!!” appeal^ clearly If
Freedom in the Light of Hope / 4 19
we enumerate them beginning with fieedom and not with im

mortality or the existence of God. Freedom is the true pivot of
the doctrine of the postulates； the other two are in some sort its
complement or explication. One might be surprised that freedom
is postulated by the dialectic when it is already implied by duty
and has been formulated as autonomy in the framework of the
Analytic of the Critique of Practical Reason. But freedom thus
postulated is not the same as the freedom analytically entailed
by duty. Postulated freedom is what we are looking for here； it
has a direct relation with hope, as we shall see. What does Kant
say about freedom as the object of the postulate of practical
reason? He calls it “freedom affirmatively regarded (as causality
of a being so far as he belongs to the intelligible world)w (p.
137). Two traits characterize this postulated freedom. First of
all, it is an effective freedom, a freedom which can, which is
suitable to "this perfect willing of a rational being who at the
same time would have om nipotenceA freedom which can be
willed good. It is therefore a freedom which has ôbjective
reality"; whereas theoretical reason has only the idea of it,
practical reason postulates its existence, as being that of a real
causality. We shall see shortly how the problem of evil is
articulated exactly at this point of real efficacy. Moreover, it is a
freedom which belongs to, which is member of, which partici
pates. We will not fail to relate this second aspect of postulated
freedom to the third formulation which the Fundamental
Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals gives to the categorical
imperative； speaking of the “possible kingdom of ends,” Kant
remarks that this formulation, which comes in the third part,
crowns a progression of thought which runs from the unity of
the principle— namely, the single rule of universalization— to
the plurality of its objects— namely, persons taken as an end—
Mand from there, to the totality or integrality of the systemM(p.
159)- It is indeed this capacity to exist， by belonging to a system
of freedoms, which is postulated here ； thereby is concretized
^that perspectiveM(Aussicht), evoked from the beginning of the
Dialectic, that view 'Into a higher immutable order of things, in
which we already are, and in which, to continue our existence in
accordance with the supreme decree of reason, we may now,
after this discovery, be directed by definite precepts** (p. 112).
That is what we will supremely； but that our capacity be
equal to our will, that we exist according to this supreme vow,
that is what can only be postulated. Postulated freedom is this
mannor of oxiitlng froe among freedoms.
That this postulated freedom is indeed freedom according to

hope is, to my mind, what the other two postulates which frame
it signify (following the order of the three parts of the Dialectic
of the Critique of Pure Reason, which runs from rational psy
chology to rational cosmology and to rational theology). The
other two postulates, I shall say, serve only to make explicit
the potential of hope of the postulate of existential freedom.
Postulated immortality implies no substantialist or dualist thesis
about the soul or its separated existence； this postulate develops
the temporal implications of freedom suggested by the text cited
above, which speaks of the order in which we are capable of
^continuing our existence Kantian immortality is there
fore an aspect of our need to effectuate the highest good in
reality； now, this temporality, this "'progress toward the infinite,"
is not in our power； we cannot give it to ourselves； we can only
“encounter” it (antre/fen)_ It is in this sense that the postulate of
immortality expresses the face of hope of the postulate of
freedom ： a theoretical proposition concerning the continuation
and indefinite persistence of existence is the philosophical
equivalent of the hope for resurrection. It is not by chance that
Kant uses the term “expectation”一 Erwartung— for this belief.
Insofar as it is practical, reason demands completeness； but it
believes in the mode of expectation, of hope, in the existence
of an order where the completeness can be actual. Kerygmatic
hope is thus approximated by the movement which proceeds
from practical requirement to theoretical postulate, from de
mand to expectation. This movement is the same as that which
enables us to pass from ethics to religion.
Now, this postulate is nothing else than the preceding one:
for ôpe of participating in the highest goodw is freedom itself,
concrete freedom, that which finds itself in itself. The second
postulate only succeeds in deploying the temporal-existential
aspect of the postulate of freedom； I shall say ：it is the dimen
sion of hope of freedom itself. This latter belongs to the order of
ends, participates in the highest good, only to the extent that one
may '4iope for uninterrupted continuance of this progress, how-
ever long his existence may last, even beyond this life” （ p. 128).
In this respect, it is worth noting that Kant recognized this
practical temporal dimension, for his philosophy hardly leaves
any room for a conception of time beyond the time of representa
tion according to the Transcendental Aesthetic, that lg, the time
of the world.
As to the third postulate, that of ihr existence of God, we
respect its character as postulate, that is, as a theoretical propo

sition dependent on a practical exigency, if we tie it very directly
to the first through the second： if the postulate of immortality
deploys the temporal-existential dimension of freedom, the
postulate of the existence of God manifests existential freedom
as the philosophical equivalent of the gift. Kant has no place for
a concept of gift, which is a category of the Sacred. But he has
a concept for the origin of a synthesis which is not in our power；
God is "4the adequate cause of this effect which is manifested
to our will as its entire object, namely, the highest good/* What
is postulated is the Zusammenhang, the connection, in a being
who encompasses the principle of accord between the two
constituents of the highest good. But the postulate holds only
insofar as we will, from the depths of our will, that the highest
good be realized. The expectation, here again, is grafted onto
the exigency. The “theoretical” expectation is articulated on
the “practical” exigency. This nexus is that between the practical
and the religious, between obligation and belief, between moral
necessity and existential hypothesis. And, here again, Kant is
not Greek but Christian； the Greek schools, he says, did not
resolve the problem of the practical possibility of the highest
good： they believed that the wisdom of the sage enclosed in its
analytic unity the just life and the happy life. The transcendent
synthesis of the highest good is, on the contrary, the closest
philosophical approximation of the Kingdom of God according
to the Gospels. Kant even has a word which is consonant with
what Moltmann says of hope when he calls it “totally new” ：
Ethics, because it formulated its precept as pure and uncompro
mising (as befits a moral precept), destroyed man*s confidence of
being wholly adequate to it, at least in this life ；but it reestab
lished it by enabling us to hope that, if we act as well as lies in
our power, what is not in our power will come to our aid from an
other source, whether we know in what way or not. Aristotle and
Plato differed only as to the origin of our moral concepts (p. 13a,
note 2).
Such, therefore, is the first origin of the question 'What can
I hope for?wIt is situated again at the heart of moral philosophy,
itself engendered by the question <4What should I do?** Moral
philosophy engenders the philosophy of religion when the hope
of fulfillment is added to the consciousness of obligation：
The moral law commands us to make the highest possible good in
q world the final object of all our conduct. This I cannot hope to
caffect tx 〇
«pt through the agreement of my will with that of a holy
and beneficent Author of the world. . . . Therefore, morals is not

really the doctrine of how to make ourselves happy but of how we
are to be worthy of happiness. Only if religion is added to it can
the hope arise of someday participating in happiness in proportion
as we endeavored not to be unworthy of it (p. 134).
Why should the philosophical meaning of religion be con
stituted a second time at the exterior of ethics? The reply to that
question will make us take a new step— the last— in what we
have called the philosophical approximation of hope and of
freedom in the light of hope.
In fact, it is the consideration of evil which constrains us to
make this new move； now, with the consideration of evil, it is the
very question of freedom, of the real freedom evoked by the
postulates of the Critique of Practical Reason, which returns； the
problematic of evil requires us to tie, more directly than we have
so far been able to do, the actual reality of freedom to the re
generation which is the very content of hope.
What the Essay on Radical Evil teaches about freedom, in
deed, is that this same power that duty imputes to us is in reality
a nonpower； the “propensity for evilw has become “corrupt
nature/* although evil is still only a manner of being of the
freedom which comes to it from freedom. Freedom has from
the beginning always chosen badly. Radical evil signifies that
the contingency of the evil maxim is the expression of a neces
sarily corrupt nature of freedom. This subjective necessity of
evil is at the same time the reason for hope. To correct our
maxims— that we can do, since we should do it ； to regenerate
our nature, the nature of our freedom— that we cannot do. This
descent into the abyss, as Karl Jaspers has seen very well, ex
presses the most advanced point of a thought of limits, which
henceforth extends from our knowledge to our power. The non
power signified by radical evil is discovered in the very pl^ce
whence our power proceeds. Thus is posed in radical terms the
question of the real causality of our freedom, the very same
freedom which the Practical Reason postulated at the end of its
Dialectic. The “postulate” of freedom must henceforth cross
through, not only the night of knowing, with its crisis of the
transcendental illusion, but also the night of power, with its
crisis of radical evil. Real freedom can spring up only as hope
beyond this speculative and practical Good Friday. Nowhere
are we closer to the Christian kerygma： hope is hope of resurrec
tion, resurrection from the dead.
I am not unaware of the hostility of philosophers, since
Goethe and Hegel, toward the Kantian philosophy of radical

evil. But have we understood it in its true connection with the
ethical? I mean, not only in regard to the Analytic, to the
doctrine of duty, but, even more, to the Dialectic, to the doctrine
of the highest good. One has seen there the projection of the
unhappy consciousness, of rigorism, of puritanism. There is
something true in this. And a post-Hegelian interpretation of
Kant must proceed by way of this radical contestation. But there
is something else in the theory of radical evil, which only our
prior reading of the Dialectic permits us to discern； radical evil
concerns freedom in its process of totalization as much as in its
initial determination. That is why the critique of Kantian
moralism does not liquidate his philosophy of evil but, perhaps,
reveals it in its true meaning.
That meaning ultimately appears in Religion within the
Limits of Reason Alone. Indeed, it has not been sufficiently noted
that the doctrine of evil is not completed in the Essay on Radical
Evil, which initiates the philosophy of religion, but that it ac
companies the latter through and through. True evil, the evil
of evil, is not the violation of an interdict, the subversion of the
law, disobedience, but fraudulency in the work of totalization. In
this sense, true evil appears only in the very field where religion
is produced, namely, in the field of contradictions and confficts
determined, on the one hand, by the demand for totalization
which constitutes reason, both theoretical and practical, and,
on the other hand, by the illusion which misleads thought, the
subtle hedonism which vitiates moral motivation, and finally by
the malice which corrupts the great human enterprises of
totalization. The demand for a complete object of the will is
basically antinomic. The evil of evil is bom in the area of this
antinomy.
By the same token, evil and hope are more closely connected
than we will ever think them； if the evil of evil is born on the
way of totalization, it would appear only in a pathology of hope,
as the inherent perversion in the problematic of fulfillment and
of totalization. To put it in a few words, the true malice of man
appears only in the state and in the church, as institutions of
gathering together, of recapitulation, of totalization.
Thus understood, the doctrine of radical evil can furnish a
receptive structure for new figures of alienation besides the
speculative illusion or even the desire for consolation— of
alienation in the cultural powers, such as the church and the
state； It la Indeed at the heart of these powers that a falsified
expression of the synthesis can take place； when Kant speaks of

“servile faith,” of “false cult，” of a “false Church，’’ he completes
at the same time his theory of radical evil. This culminates, we
might say, not with transgression, but with flawed syntheses in
the political and religious spheres. That is why true religion is
always in a debate with false religion, that is, for Kant, statutory
religion
Henceforth, the regeneration of freedom is inseparable from
the movement by which the figures of hope7 are liberated from
the idols of the market place, as Bacon put it.
This whole process constitutes the philosophy of religion
within the limits of reason alone； it is this process which consti
tutes the philosophical analogon of the kerygma of the Resur
rection. It is also this process which constitutes the whole
adventure of freedom and which permits us to give a compre
hensible meaning to the expression ^religious freedom/*
7. A historical study of Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone

should be dedicated to showing just how far the philosopher can go in
the representation of the origin of regeneration. The Kantian schematism
offers us an ultimate resource here. What we can conceive abstractly as
the “good principle,” which struggles within us with the “evil principle,”
we can also represent concretely as the man, pleasing to God, who suffers
for sake of the promotion of the universal good. To be sure, Kant is in
no way interested in the historicity of Christ： “this man, the only one
pleasing to God,Mis an Idea. However, this archetype is not at all an idea
that I can give myself arbitrarily. Although it is reducible as an event of
salvation, this archetype is irreducible as an Idea to a moral intention；
“we are not authors of it” （p. 54). It “has established itself in man without
our comprehending how human nature could have been capable of re
ceiving it** (ibid.). That is the irreducible element： “the incomprehensi
bility of a union between [the good principle】 and man’s sensible nature”
in the moral constitution of man (p. 77). Now this Idea corresponds com
pletely with the synthesis demanded by pure reason or, more exactly, with
the transcendent object which causes that synthesis. This is not only an
example of duty, in which case it would not exceed the Analytic, but an
ideal exemplar of the highest good, in that this Idea illustrates the
resolution of the Dialectic. Christ is an archetype and not a simple ex
ample of duty because he symbolizes this fulfillment. He is the figure of
the End. As such, this “repiesentation” of the good principle does not
have for its effect “to extend our knowledge beyond the world of sense
but only to make clear for practical use the conception of what is for us
unfathomable,* (p. 52). "Such is the schematism of analogy, with which
(as a means of explanation)/’ says Kant, “we cannot dispense*, (p. 58,
note). It is within the strict limits of a theory of the schema and analogy,
hence, of a theory of transcendental imagination, that the philosopher
approaches not only the meanings of hope but the figure of Christ in
which these meanings are concentrated. [Page numbers in parentheses
refer to the English translation of Kant's Religion within the Limits of
Reason Alone, by T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson (New York ： Harper
Torchbooks, i960),]
Guilt, Ethics, and Religion
My p r i n c i p a l t a s k will be to determine the distinction

between ethical discourse and religious discourse on the ques
tion of guilt. These will be the two main divisions of my analysis.
But, before treating these two respective discourses with a
view to distinguishing them and understanding their relation
ship, I suggest that first we come to an agreement about the
meaning of the terms in question. Allow me, then, by way of
preface, to develop a semantic analysis of the very term M guilt.w
I. G u i l t ： S e m a n t i c A n a l y s i s
I PR O P O S E , F IR S T , T O CO NSIDE R T H IS T E R M , n o t i n itS
psychological, psychiatric, or psychoanalytic usage, but in the
texts where its meaning has been constituted and fixed. These
texts are those of penitential literature wherein the believing
communities have expressed their avowal of evil； the language
of these texts is a specific language, which can be designated, in
a very general way, as ^confession of sins,w although no particu
lar confessional connotation is attached to this expression, not
even a specifically Jewish or Christian meaning. Some decades
ago, Professor Pettazzoni of Rome wrote a collection of works
Thin EnglUh vomion of this essay first appeared in Talk of God,

edited by ( 1. N. A. Vmcy for (he Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecturea,
Volumo II, iofl7~ i 〇 08 Copyright ® 2069 bv MacmilJan and Co. Ltd.,
London mid uiiingaluka, iiid by (9t, M artini Press, New York, Repro-
duc«uM，y p_nnlMton nf puMtthcrfl.
426 / RE LIGION AND FAITH
covering the entire field of comparative religions. He called this

precisely Confession of Sins. But it is not from the comparative
point of view that I take up the problem. My point of departure
is in a phenomenology of confession or avowal. Here I under
stand by phenomenology the description of meanings implied in
experience in general, whether that experience be one of things,
of values, of persons, etc. A phenomenology of confession is
therefore a description of meanings, and of signified intentions,
present in a certain activity of language, namely, confession.
Our task, in the framework of such a phenomenology, is to re
enact in ourselves the confession of evil, in order to uncover its
aims. By sympathy and through imagination, the philosopher
adopts the motivations and intentions of the confessing con
sciousness； he does not “feel” but “experiences” in a neutral
manner, in the manner of <4as if,w that which has been lived in
the confessing consciousness.
But with which expressions shall we start? Not with expres
sions of confessions that are the most developed, the most ra
tionalized, for example the concept or quasi-concept of ôriginal
sin,w which has so often guided philosophical thought. On the
contrary, philosophical reasoning should consult expressions of
the confession of evil which are the least elaborated, the least
articulated.
We should not be embarrassed by the fact that behind these
rationalized expressions, behind these speculations, we encounter
myths, that is, traditional narratives which tell of events which
happened at the origin of time and which furnish the support of
language to ritual actions. Today, for us, myths are no longer
explanations of reality, but, precisely because they have lost
their explanatory pretension, they reveal an exploratory signifi
cation； they manifest a symbolic function, that is, a way of ex
pressing indirectly the bond between man and what he considers
sacred. Paradoxical as it may seem, myth thus demythologized
in its contact with physics, cosmology, and scientific history be
comes a dimension of modern thought. In its turn, myth refers
us to a level of expressions more fundamental than any nar
ration and any speculation. Thus, the narrative of the Fall in the
Bible draws its signification from an experience of sin rooted in
the life of the community； it is the cultic activity and the
prophetic call to “justice” and to “mercy” which provide myth
with its substructure of significations.
Therefore, it is to this experience and to its language that we
must have recourse； or rather, to this experience in Its language.
For it is the language of confession which elevates to the light

of discourse an experience charged with emotion, fear, and
anguish. Penitential literature manifests a linguistic inventive
ness which marks the way for existential outbursts of the con
sciousness of fault.
Let us, therefore, interrogate this language.
The most remarkable characteristic of this language is that it
does not involve expressions which are more primitive than the
symbolic expressions to which myth refers. The language of
confession is symbolic. Here I understand by wsymb〇 r a lan
guage which designates one thing in an Indirect way by
designating another thing directly. It is in this way that I speak
symbolically of "<elevatedM thought, M lowM sentiments, M clearM
ideas, the “】ight” of understanding, the “kingdom” of heaven, etc.
Therefore, the work of repetition as applied to the expressions
of evil is, in essence, the explicitation, the development, of dif
ferent levels of direct and indirect significations which are inter
mingled in the same symbol.1 The most archaic symbolism from
which we can start is that of evil conceived as defilement or stain,
that is, as a spot which contaminates from the outside. In more
elaborated literatures, such as that of the Babylonians and es
pecially of the Hebrews, sin is expressed in different symbolisms,
such as to miss the target, to follow a tortuous path, to rebel, to
have a stiff neck, to be unfaithful as in adultery, to be deaf, to be
lost, to wander, to be empty and hollow, to be inconstant as dust.
This linguistic situation is astonishing；the consciousness of
self, so intense in the sentiment of evil, does not, at first, have
at its disposal an abstract language but a very concrete lan
guage, on which a spontaneous work of interpretation is per
formed.
The second remarkable characteristic of this language is that
it knows itself as symbolic and that, before any philosophy and
theology, it is en route toward explicitation；as I have said else
where, the symbol winYitesMthought；the mythos is on the way
toward logos. This is true even of the archaic idea of defilement
or stain ：the idea of a quasi-material something which con
taminates from the outside, which harms by means of invisible
properties. This idea possesses a symbolic richness, a potential
of symbolization, which is precisely attested to by the survival
of this symbol in more and more allegorical forms. We speak
1, C f «b〇v«, H«rniffnautloi of Symbols and Philosophical Re

flection 1 I,11 op, tA^Q0,
428 / RE LIGIO N AND FAI TH
even today, in a nonmedical sense, of contamination by the spirit

of monetary profit (“filthy lucre”）， by racism, etc.; we have not
completely abandoned the symbolism of the pure and the im
pure. And this, precisely because the quasi-material representa
tion of stain is already symbolic of something else. From the be-
ginning it has symbolic power. Stain has never literally signified
a spot, impurity has never literally signified filth; it is located
in the chiaroscuro of a quasi-physical infection and a quasi
moral unworthiness. We see this clearly in rites of purification,
which are never just a simple washing； ablution and lustration
are already partial and Active actions which signify, on the level
of body, a total action which addresses itself to the person con
sidered as an undivided whole.
The symbolism of sin, such as is found in Babylonian and
Hebraic literature, in Greek tragedies, or in Orphic writings, is
certainly richer than that of stain, from which it is sharply
distinguished. To the image of impure contact it opposes that of
a wounded relationship, between God and man, between man
and man, between man and himself； but this relation, which will
be thought of as a relation only by a philosopher, is symbolically
signified by all the means of dramatization offered in dally ex
perience. So too the idea of sin is not reduced to the barren idea
of the rupture of a relation； it adds to this the idea of a power
which dominates man. Thus it maintains a certain affinity and
continuity with the symbolism of stain. But this power is also the
sign of the emptiness, of the vanity of man, represented by
breath and by dust. So the symbol of sin is at one and the same
time the symbol of something negative (rupture, estrangement,
absence, vanity) and the symbol of something positive (power,
possession, captivity, alienation). It is on this symbolic founda
tion, in this network of images and nascent interpretations, that
the word guilt should be resituated.
If we want to respect the proper intention of words, the
expression “guilt” does not cover the whole semantic field of
“confession.” The idea of guilt represents the extreme form of
interiorization which we have seen sketched in the passage from
stain to sin. Stain was still external contagion, sin already
the rupture of a relation. But this rupture exists even if I do
not know it. Sin is a real condition, an objective situation； I
would venture to say, an ontological dimension of existence.
Guilt, on the contrary, has a distinctly subjective accent：
its symbolism is much more interior. It describe* the conscious
ness of being overwhelmed by a burden which cruahea, It in
dicates, further, the bite of a remorse which gnaws from wdthin,

in the completely interior brooding on fault. These two meta
phors of burden and of biting express well the arrival at the level
of existence. The most significant symbolism of guilt is that
which is attached to the theme of tribunal. The tribunal is a
public institution； but metaphorically transposed into the in
ternal forum, it becomes what we call the “moral conscious
ness.” 2 Thus guilt: becomes a way of putting oneself before a
sort of invisible tribunal which measures the offense, pro
nounces the condemnation, and inflicts the punishment； at the
extreme point of interiorization, moral consciousness is a look
which watches, judges, and condemns； the sentiment of guilt is
therefore the consciousness of being inculpated and incriminated
by this interior tribunal； it is mingled with the anticipation of
the punishment. In short, the coulpe— in Latin, culpa— is self
observation, self-accusation, and self-condemnation by a con
sciousness doubled back on itself.
This interiorization of guilt gives rise to two series of re
sults： on the one hand, the consciousness of guilt marks a
definite progress in relation to what we have described as M sinM；
while sin is still a collective reality, in which a whole community
is implicated, guilt tends to individualize itself. (In Israel, the
prophets of the Exile are the artisans of this progress [Ezek.
31:34]; this preaching is a liberating action; at a time when a
collective return from exile, comparable to the ancient Exodus
from Egypt, appeared impossible, a personal path of conversion
opened itself to each one. In ancient Greece, it was the tragic
poets who assured the passage from hereditary crime to tho
guilt of the individual hero, placed alone before his own
destiny.) Moreover, in becoming individualized, guilt acqulroN
degrees； to the egalitarian experience of sin is opponcd thfl
graduated experience of guilt. Man is entirely and radically
sinner, but he is more, or less, guilty. It is the progress of ponnl
law itself, principally in Greece and Rome, which has an effect
here on moral consciousness： the whole of penal law is actually
an effort to limit and to gauge the penalty in proportion to the
fault. The idea of a parallel scale of crimes and sins is In-
teriorized, in its own turn, in favor of the metaphor of the
tribunal； moral consciousness becomes itself a graduated con
sciousness of guilt.
2. [On the double meaning of French conscience ( “conscience" and

“consciousness"), see note i, p. 335.— E d ]
This individualization and this gradation of guilt surely

indicate a progress, compared to the collective and unqualified
character of sin. We cannot say as much for the other series of
results. With guilt there arises indeed a sort of demand which
can be called scrupulosity and whose ambiguous character is
extremely interesting. A scrupulous consciousness is a delicate
consciousness, a precise consciousness, enamored of increasing
perfection； it is a consciousness anxious to observe all the com
mandments, to satisfy the law in all things, without making an
exception of any sector of existence, without taking into account
exterior obstacles, for example the persecution of a prince, and
which gives as much importance to little things as to great. But
at the same time scrupulosity marks the entrance of moral
consciousness into its own pathology； a scrupulous person en
closes himself in the inextricable labyrinth of commandments；
obligation takes on an enumerative and cumulative character,
which contrasts with the simplicity and sobriety of the com
mandment to love God and man. The scrupulous consciousness
never stops adding new commandments. This atomization of the
law into a multitude of commandments entails an endless
“juridization” of action and a quasi-obsessional ritualization of
daily life. The scrupulous person never arrives at satisfying all
the commandments or even any one. At the same time, even the
notion of obedience is perverted； obedience to a commandment,
because it is commanded, becomes more important than love of
neighbor and even love of God； this exactitude in observance is
what we call legalism. With it we enter into the hell of guilt,
such as Saint Paul described it: the law itself becomes a source
of sin. In giving a knowledge of evil, it excites the desire of
transgression and incites the endless movement of condemnation
and punishment. The commandment, says Saint Paul, “has
given life to sin” and thus ‘Tiands me over to death” （ Rom. 7)_
Law and sin give birth to each other mutually in a terrible
vicious circle, which becomes a mortal circle.
Thus, guilt reveals the malediction of a life under the law.
At the limit, when the confidence and tenderness, which are still
expressed in the conjugal metaphors of Hosea, disappear, guilt
leads to an accusation without accuser, a tribunal without judge,
a verdict without author. Guilt has then become that irreversible
misfortune described by Kafka ： condemnation has become
damnation.
A conclusion of this semantic analysis is that guilt does not
cover the whole field of the human experience of ovllj the study
of these symbolic expressions has permitted us to distinguish in

them a particular moment of this experience, the most am
biguous moment. On the one hand, guilt expresses the interiori-
zation of the experience of evil and, consequently, the promotion
of a morally responsible subject一 but, on the other hand, it
marks the beginning of a specific pathology, wherein scrupulos
ity marks the point of inversion.
Now the problem is posed ： what do ethics and the philosophy
of religion make of this ambiguous experience of guilt and of
the symbolic language in which it is expressed?
II. T he E thical D im ension
In w h a t s e n s e is the problem of evil an ethical prob

lem? In a twofold sense, it seems to me. Or rather, by reason of
a double relationship, on the one hand with the question of
freedom and, on the other hand, with the question of obligation.
Evil, freedom, and obligation constitute a very complex net
work, which we shall try to unravel and to order in several
stages of reflection. I shall begin and end with freedom, for it is
the essential point.
In a first stage of reflection, I say ： to affirm freedom is
to take upon oneself the origin of eviL By this proposition, I
affirm a link between evil and freedom which is so close that
the two terms imply one another mutually. Evil has the meaning
of evil because it is the work of freedom； I am the author of evil,
By that fact, I reject as an alibi the claim that evil exists after
the manner of a substance or of a nature, that it has the same
status as things which can be observed by an outside spectator.
This claim is to be found not only in the metaphysical fantasies,
such as those against which Augustine fought— Manichaeism
and all sorts of ontologies which conceive of evil as a being. This
claim can take on a positive appearance, or even a scientific
appearance, under the form of psychological or sociological
determinism. To take upon oneself the origin of evil is to lay
aside as a weakness the claim that evil is something, that it is
an effect in a world of observable things, whether these things be
physical, psychic, or social realities. I say: it is I who have acted
— Ego sum qui feci. There is no evil-being； there is only the
evll-done-by-me. To take evil upon oneself is an act of language
comparable to the performative, in this sense, that it is a
432 / RELI GI ON AND F A I T H
language which does something, that is to say, that it imputes
the act to me.
I said that the relationship is reciprocal； indeed, if freedom
qualifies evil as a "doing,51 evil is that which reveals freedom.
By this I mean to say ： evil is a privileged occasion for becoming
aware of freedom. What does it actually mean to impute my own
acts to myself? It is, first of all, to assume the consequences
of these acts for the future； that is, he who has acted is also
he who will admit the fault, who will repair the damages, who
will bear the blame. In other words, I offer myself as the bearer
of the sanction. I agree to enter into the dialectic of praise and
blame. But in placing myself before the consequences of my act,
I refer myself back to the moment prior to my act, as one who
not only acted but who could have acted otherwise. This con
viction of having done something freely is not a matter of ob
servation. It is once again a performative: I declare myself, after
the fact, as being he who could have done otherwise； this 4,after
the fact” is the backlash of taking upon oneself the conse
quences. He who takes the consequences upon himself declares
himself free and discerns this freedom as already at work in the
incriminated act. At that point I can say that I have committed
the act. This movement from in front of to behind the responsi
bility is essential. It constitutes the identity of the moral subject
through past, present, and future. He who will bear the blame is
the same as he who now takes the act upon himself and he who
has acted. I posit the identity of him who accepts the future
responsibilities of his act and him who has acted. And the two
dimensions, future and past, are linked in the present. The
future of sanction and the past of action committed are lied
together in the present of confession.
Such is the first stage of reflection in the experience of evil:
the reciprocal constitution of the signification of free and the
signification of evil is a specific performative: confession or
avowal. The second stage of reflection concerns the link between
evil and obligation. I do not at all want to discuss the meaning
of expressions such as ‘"You ought” or their relation with the
predicates “good” and “e v il. This problem is well known to
English philosophy. I will limit myself to the contribution that
a reflection on evil can bring to this problem.
Let us take as our point of departure the expression and
the experience ul could have done otherwise/1 This is, as we
have seen, an implication of the act by which I impute to myself
the responsibility for a past act. But the awaronoii th丨 t one
could have done otherwise is closely linked to the awareness

that one should have done otherwise. It is because I recognize
my “ought” that I recognize my “could.” A being who is obligated
is a being who presumes that he can do what he should do. We
are well aware of the usage to which Kant put this affirmation：
you must, therefore you can. It is certainly not an argument,
in the sense that I could deduce the possibility from the obliga
tion. I would rather say that the “ought” serves here as a
detector： if I feel, or believe, or know that I am obligated, it is
because I am a being that can act, not only under the impulsion
or constraint of desire and fear, but under the condition of a law
which I represent to myself. In this sense Kant is right ： to act
according to the representation of a law is something other than
to act according to laws. This power of acting according to the
representation of a law is the will.
But this discovery has long-range consequences ： for in
discovering the power to follow the law (or that which I
consider as the law for myself) I discover also the terrible power
of acting against. (Indeed, the experience of remorse, which is
the experience of the relation between freedom and obligation, is
a twofold experience ： I recognize an obligation, and therefore a
power corresponding to this obligation； but I admit to having
acted against the law which continues to appear to me as
obligatory. This is commonly called a transgression.) Freedom
is the power to act according to the representation of a law and
not to meet the obligation. ("Here is what I should have done,
therefore what I could have done, and look at what I did/* The
imputation of the past act is thus morally qualified by its rela
tion to the M oughtMand ^can.**)
By the same fact, a new determination of evil and a new
determination of freedom appear together, in addition to the
forms of reciprocity which are described above. The new deter
mination of evil can be expressed in Kantian terms： it is the
reversal of the relation between motive and law, interior to
the maxim of my action. This definition is to be understood as
follows ： if I call a maxim the practical enunciation of what I
propose to do, evil is nothing in itself ； it has neither physical nor
psychical reality； it is only an inverted relationship； it is relation,
not a thing, a relation inverted with regard to the order of
preference and subordination indicated by obligation. In this
way, we have achieved a “de-realization” of evil: not only does
evil exist only in the act of taking it upon oneself, of assuming
it, of claiming it, but what characterizes it from a moral point
of view is the order in which an agent disposes of his maxims；

it is a preference which ought not to have been (an inverted
relation within the maxim of action).
But a new determination of freedom appears at the same
time, I spoke a moment ago of the terrible power of acting
against. It is, indeed, in the confession of evil that I discover the
power of subversion of the will. Let us call it the “arbitrary,” to
translate the German Willkur, which is at the same time free
choice, i.e., the power of contraries, that which we recognized in
the consciousness that one could have done otherwise, and in
the power not to follow an obligation which one simultaneously
recognizes as just.
Have we exhausted the meaning of evil for ethics? I do not
think so. In the "Essay on Radical Evir which begins Religion
within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant poses the problem of
a common origin of all evil maxims；indeed, we have not gone
far in a reflection on evil as long as we consider separately one
bad intention, and then another, and again another. Kant says ：
In o rd e r, t h e n , to c a l l a m a n e v il, it w o u ld h a v e to b e p o s s ib le a
p r io r i to in f e r f r o m s e v e r a l e v il a c ts d o n e w it h c o n s c io u s n e s s o f
th e ir e v il, o r f r o m o n e s u c h a c t, a n u n d e r ly in g e v il m a x i m ； a n d
f u r t h e r , fr o m th is m a x im to in f e r th e p r e s e n c e in th e a g e n t o f a n
u n d e r ly in g c o m m o n g r o u n d , i t s e l f a m a x im , o f a ll p a r t ic u la r
m o r a lly -e v il m a x im s .3
This movement toward greater depth, which goes from evil

maxims to their evil foundation, is the philosophical transposi
tion of the movement from sins to sin (in the singular), of
which we spoke in part I, on the level of symbolic expressions,
and in particular of myth. Among other things, the myth of
Adam signifies that all sins are referred to a unique root, which
is, in some way or other, anterior to each of the particular ex
pressions of evil；yet the myth could be told because the con
fessing community raised itself to the level of a confession of
evil as involving all men. It is because the community confesses
a fundamental guilt that the myth can describe the unique com-
ing-to-be of evil as an event which happens only once. The
Kantian doctrine of radical evil is an attempt to recapture phi
losophically this experience and this myth.
What qualifies this reexamination as philosophical? Es
3. Immanuel Kant, R e lig io n w ith in th e L im its n f ReaMon A lo n e , trans.
T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson (New York; Harper Torchbooki, i960),
p. 16.
Guilt, Ethicsi and Religion / 435
sentially the treatment of radical evil as the foundation of

multiple evil maxims. It is therefore upon this notion of founda
tion that we should bring to bear our critical effort.
Now, what do we mean by a foundation of evil maxims?
We might well call it an a priori condition in order to emphasize
that it is not a fact to be observed or a temporal origin to be
retraced. It is not an empirical fact but a first disposition of
freedom that must be supposed so that the universal spectacle of
human evil can be offered to experience. Neither is it a temporal
origin, for this theory would lead back to a natural causality.
Evil would cease to be evil if it ceased to be “a manner of being
of freedom, which itself comes from freedom.” Therefore, evil
does not have an origin in the sense of an antecedent cause. "'In
the search for the rational origin of evil actions, every such
action must be regarded as though the individual had fallen
into it directly from a state of innocence/*4 Everything is in this
“as i f . It is tie philosophical equivalent of the myth of the Fall;
it is the rational myth of the coming-to-be of evil, of the in
stantaneous passage from innocence to sin；as Adam— rather
than in Adam— we originate evil.
But what is this unique coming-to-be which contains within
itself all evil maxims? It must be admitted that we have no
further concept for thinking of an evil will.
For this coming-to-be is not at all an act of my arbitrary will,
an act which I could do or not do. For the enigma of this founda
tion is that reflection discovers, as a fact, that freedom has al
ready chosen in an evil way. This evil is already there. It is in
this sense that it is radical, that is anterior (in a nontemporal
way) to every evil intention, to every evil action.
But this failure of reflection is not in vain ；it succeeds in
giving a proper character to a philosophy of limit and in distin
guishing it from a philosophy of system, such as that of Hegel.
The limit is twofold：limit of my knowledge, limit of my
power. On the one hand, I do not know the origin of my evil
freedom；this nonknowledge of the origin is essential to the
very act of my confession of my radically evil freedom. The
nonknowledge is a part of the performative of confession or,
in other words, of my self-recognition and self-appropriation. On
the other hand, I discover the nonpower of my freedom, (Curious
nonpower, for I declare that I am responsible for this nonpower.
This nonpower is completely different from the claim of an
4. Ibid., p. 36.
outside constraint.) I claim that my freedom has already made

itself not-free. This admission is the greatest paradox of ethics.
It seems to contradict our point of departure. We began by
saying ： evil is what I could have not done；and this remains true.
But at the same time I claim ：evil is this prior captivity, which
makes it so that I must do evil. This contradiction is interior
to my freedom； it marks the nonpower of power, the nonfreedom
of freedom.
Is this a lesson in despair? Not at all ：this admission is, on
the contrary, the access to a point where everything can begin
again. The return to the origin is a return to that place where
freedom discovers itself as something to be delivered— in brief,
to that place where it can hope to be delivered.
III. T he R e l ig io u s D im e n s io n
I h a v e j u s t a t t e m p t e d , with the aid of the philosophy

of Kant, to characterize the problem of evil as an ethical prob
lem. It is the twofold relation of evil to obligation and to freedom
which has seemed to me to characterize the problem of evil as
an ethical problem.
Now, if I ask what is the specifically religious way of speak
ing about evil, I would not hesitate for a moment to answer：
the language is that of hope. This thesis requires an explanation.
Leaving aside for a moment the question of evil, to which I shall
return later, I would like to justify the central role of hope
in Christian theology.5 Hope has rarely been the central concept
in theology. And yet the preaching of Jesus was concerned es
sentially with the Kingdom of God：the Kingdom is at hand;
the Kingdom has drawn near to you; the Kingdom is in your
midst. If the preaching of Jesus and of the primitive church
thus proceeds from an eschatological perspective, we should
rethink all of theology from this eschatological viewpoint. The
God who comes is a name；the god who shows himself is an
idol. The God of the promise opens up a history；the god of
natural epiphanies animates a nature.
What follows from this for freedom and for evil, which
ethical consciousness has grasped in their unity? I shall begin by
5. See “ F reedom in th e L ig h t o f H ope,” above, w h ere w a re v e a l the
e x e g e tica l fo u n d a tio n s, in the O ld and N e w T o ita m e n U , of the escha
to log ical In terp retation o f b ib lica l theology.
a discussion of freedom, for a reason which will become clear

in a moment. It seems to me that religion is distinguished from
ethics, in the fact that it requires that we think of freedom under
the sign of hope.
In the language of the Gospel, I would say ：to consider free
dom in the light of hope is to resituate my existence in the
movement which might be called, with Jurgen Moltmann, the
“future of the Resurrection of Christ.” This “kerygmatic” formula
can be translated in several ways in contemporary language.6
First of all, with Kierkegaard, we could call freedom in the light
of hope the "passion for the possible'9；this formula, in contrast
to all wisdom of the present, to all submission to necessity,
underscores the imprint of the promise on freedom. Freedom,
entrusted to the "God who comes,,J is open to the radically new ；
it is the creative imagination of the possible.
But, in a deeper dimension, freedom in the light of hope is a
freedom which affirms itself in spite of death and is willing, in
spite of all the signs of death, to deny death.
Likewise, the category of “in spite o f’ is the opposite or
reverse side of a vital thrust, of a perspective of belief which
finds its expression in the famous “how much more” of Saint
Paul. This category, more fundamental than the “in spite of,”
expresses what might be called the logic of superabundance,
which is the logic of hope.
This logic of surplus and excess is to be uncovered in daily
life, in work and in leisure, in politics and in universal history.
The “in spite o f’ which keeps us in readiness for the denial is
only the inverse, the shadow side, of this joyous "Tiow much
more” by which freedom feels itself, knows itself, and wills
itself to belong to this economy of superabundance.
This notion of an economy of superabundance permits us
to return to the problem of evil. It is from this point of departure,
and in it, that a religious or theological discourse on evil can
be held. Ethics has said all it can about evil in calling it ( 1 ) a
work of freedom, (2) a subversion of the relation of the maxim
to the law, and (3) an unfathomable disposition of freedom
which makes it unavailable to itself.
Religion uses another language about evil. And this language
keeps itself entirely within the limits of the perimeter of the
promise and under the sign of hope. First of all, this discourse
6. See “Freedom in the Light of Hope," pp. 407-10, above, on the

“passion for the possible/’ the “in spite of," and the “how much more "
438 / R E LIG IO N AND FAITH
places evil before God. "Against you, against you alone have I
sinned, I have done evil in your sight/* This invocation, which
transforms the moral confession into a confession of sin, appears,
at first glance, to be an intensification in the consciousness of
evil. But that is an illusion, the moralizing illusion of Christianity.
Situated before God, evil is installed again in the movement of
the promise；the invocation is already the beginning of the
restoration of a bond, the initiation of a new creation, fh e “pas
sion for the possible” has already taken possession of the con-
fession of evil；repentance, essentially directed toward the
future, has already cut itself off from remorse, which is a brood
ing reflection on the past.
Next, religious language profoundly changes the very content
of the consciousness of evil. Evil in moral consciousness is es
sentially transgression, that is, subversion of a law ；it is in this
way that the majority of pious men continue to consider sin.
And yet, situated before God, evil is qualitatively changed；it
consists less in a transgression of a law than in a pretension of
man to be master of his life. The will to live according to the
law is, therefore, also an expression of evil— and even the most
deadly, because the most dissimulated：worse than injustice is
one^ own justice. Ethical consciousness does not know this, but
religious consciousness does. But this second discovery can
also be expressed in terms of promise and hope.
Indeed, the will is not constituted, as we have seemed to
believe in the context of the ethical analysis, merely by the re
lation between the arbitrary and the law (in Kantian terms,
between the Willkur, or arbitrary will, and the Wille, or deter
mination by the law of reason). The will is more fundamentally
constituted by a desire of fulfillment or achievement.7 Kant him
self, in the Dialectic of the Critique of Practical Reason recog
nized this intended goal of totalization. It is this precisely which
animates the Dialectic, as the relation to the law animates the
Analytic. Now this tendency toward totalization, according to
Kant, requires the reconciliation of two moments which rigorism
has separated：“virtue，” that is, obedience to pure duty, and
^happiness/* that is, satisfaction of desire. This reconciliation
is the Kantian equivalent of hope.
This rebound of the philosophy of will entails a rebound of
the philosophy of evil. If the tendency toward totalization is
thus the soul of the will, we have not yet reached the founda-
7. Cf. 'Treedom in the Light of Hope/* p. •bovt,

tion of the problem of evil so long as we have kept it within the

limits of a reflection on the relations of the arbitrary and the
law. The true evil, the evil of evil, shows itself in false syn
theses, i.e., in the contemporary falsifications of the great under
takings of totalization of cultural experience, that is, in political
and ecclesiastical institutions. In this way, evil shows its true
face— the evil of evil is the lie of premature syntheses, of violent
totalizations.
But this greater deepening of our understanding of evil is,
once again, a conquest of hope：it is because man is a goal of
totality, a will of total fulfillment, that he plunges himself into
totalitarianisms, which really constitute the pathology of hope.
As the old proverb says, demons haunt only the courts of the
gods. But, at the same time, we sense that evil itself is a part
of the economy of superabundance. Paraphrasing Saint Paul,
I dare to say ：Wherever evil “abounds,” there hope “super-
abounds/1 We must therefore have the courage to incorporate
evil into the epic of hope. In a way that we know not, evil itself
cooperates, works toward, the advancement of the Kingdom of
God. This is the viewpoint of faith on evil.
This view is not that of the moralist. The moralist contrasts
the predicate evil with the -predicate good； he condemns evil；he
imputes it to freedom；and finally, he stops at the limit of the
inscrutable；for we do not know how it is possible that freedom
could be enslaved. Faith does not look in this direction； the origin
of evil is not its problem； the end of evil is its problem. With the
prophets, faith incorporates this end into the economy of the
promise；with Jesus, into the preaching of the God who conies；
with Saint Paul, into the law of superabundance. This is why
the view of faith on events and on men is essentially benevolent.
Faith justifies the man of the Aufklarung, for whom, in the great
romance of culture, evil is a factor in the education of the hu
man race, rather than the puritan, who never succeeds in taking
the step from condemnation to mercy and who thus remains
within the ethical dimension and never enters into the perspec
tive of the Kingdom to come.
Religion, Atheism, and Faith
In t r o d u c t io n
T he s u b j e c t of th is e s s a y compels me to take up a
radical challenge. I would like to state to what extent I am willing
to accept the critique of religion which has emerged from an
atheism like that of Nietzsche and Freud, and to what extent I
consider myself a Christian in spite of and beyond such a cri
tique. If the title 'The Religious Meaning of Atheismw is not
nonsensical, it implies that atheism is not limited in meaning to
the mere negation and destruction of religion but that, rather,
it opens up the horizon for something else, for a type of faith
that might be called, in a way that we shall further elucidate,
a postreligious faith or a faith for a postreligious age. This is
the hypothesis that I propose to examine and eventually de
fend.
The title that I actually chose for this essay— “Religion,
Atheism, and Faith” 一clearly expresses my own intention in
this regard. The word “atheism” has here been placed in an
intermediate position, both as a division and as a link between
religion and faith ；it looks back toward what it denies and for
ward toward what it makes possible. I am not unaware of the
difficulties of such a formulation. In a sense, it is both too sim
ple and too difficult. It is too simple if one accepts the distinction
between religion and faith as a given fact, or if one permits one
self to use atheism as an indiscreet means of apologetics, a
means of “preserving faith,” or, worse, if one uses it as a clever
and hypocritical method of taking back with one hand what
T ra n s la ted b y C h a r le s F relllch.
[44〇 ]
Religion, Atheism, and Faith / 441
one was forced to relinquish with the other. Such an opposition

must itself be elaborated in a responsible manner； it is not some
thing that is purely given but a difficult task that presents itself
to thought. I, however, prefer to run the opposite risk, that of
failing to reach the goal by attempting to break a path which,
as it were, goes astray en route. In a sense, this is what will
occur in the two parts of this essay, They both begin something
that is never completed；they point toward something that is
never revealed；moreover, they suggest from a distance some
thing that is never made fully manifest. It is in this sense that
my project is too difficult. I believe, however, that such is the
unavoidable situation of the philosopher when he is confronted
by the dialectic, such as it exists, between religion, atheism, and
faith. The philosopher is not a preacher. He may listen to preach
ing, as I do；but insofar as he is a professional and responsible
thinker, he remains a beginner, and his discourse always re
mains a preparatory discourse. Perhaps this is not something
to be regretted. This period of confusion, in which the true
consequences of the death of religion perhaps still remain
concealed, is also the time of long, slow, and indirect prepara
tion.
Since I cannot expect to cover the entire field of questions
that suggest themselves, I have chosen two themes, those of
accusation and consolation. I have chosen them because they
represent the two main aspects of religion ：taboo and refuge.
And these two fundamental significations in turn determine
the two poles of religious feeling, at least in its simplest and
most archaic form ：the fear of punishment and the desire
for protection. We might add that it is the same god who both
threatens and consoles. I thus understand religion as a primitive
structure of life which must always be overcome by faith and
which is grounded in the fear of punishment and the desire for
protection. Accusation and protection are, so to speak, “the
corrupt parts of religion,f, in the same sense in which Marx
referred to religion itself as the corrupt part of philosophy. It
is here that atheism discovers its true justification and per
haps reveals its double signification as both destructive and
liberating. It is also here that atheism opens up the way to a
faith situated beyond accusation and protection. This is the kind
of dialectic that I would like to explore in the two parts of this
essay, the first of which will deal with accusation, the second
with coniolatlon.
I. O n A c c u sa tio n
i . T he t y p e of a t h e i s m I have in mind is that of

Nietzsche and Freud. The reason for this choice is not merely
the fact that they are the most outstanding representatives of the
critique of religion insofar as it exists in the form of prohibition,
accusation, punishment, and condemnation. What is more
significant is to know exactly why they have been able to attack
religion on this ground. For Nietzsche and Freud have created
a kind of hermeneutics which is completely different from the
critique of religion that is rooted in the tradition of British
empiricism and French positivism. The problem for them is not
that of the so-called proofs of the existence of God, nor do they
criticize the concept of God as something devoid of meaning.
They have created a new kind of criticism, a critique of cultural
representations considered as disguised symptoms of desire and
fear.
For both of them, the cultural dimension of human existence,
to which ethics and religion belong, has a hidden meaning which
requires a specific mode of interpretation, a stripping-away of
masks. Religion has a meaning that remains unknown to the
believer by virtue of a specific act of dissimulation which con
ceals its true origin from the investigation of consciousness. For
this reason, religion demands a type of interpretation that is
adapted to its own peculiar mode of dissimulation, i.e., an inter
pretation of illusion as distinct from simple “error,” in the
epistemological sense of the word, or as distinct from ‘lying,” in
the ordinary ethical sense of the word. Illusion is itself a
cultural function. Such a fact presupposes that the public mean
ings of our consciousness conceal true meanings, which can be
brought to light only by adopting the attitude of suspicion and
cautious critical scrutiny.
Nietzsche and Freud have developed in a parallel manner
a type of reductive hermeneutics which is at the same time a
kind of philology and a kind of genealogy. It is a philology, an
exegesis, an interpretation insofar as the text of our conscious
ness can be compared to a palimpsest, under the surface of
which another text has been written. The task of this special
exegesis is to decipher this text. But this hermeneutics is at
the same time a genealogy, since the distortion of the text
emerges from a conflict of forces, of drives [plosions] and coun
terdrives, whose origin must be brought to light. It is evident

that this is not a genealogy in the orcinary chronological sense
of the word. For even when it refers to historical stages, this
genesis does not lead back to a temporal origin but rather to a
possible source or, better, an empty place from which ethical
and religious values emerge. The genealogical task is to reveal
the emptiness of this source.
The fact that Nietzsche calls this true origin the “will to
power” while Freud calls it the “libido” is not essential to the
present argument. On the contrary, in spite of differences with
regard to background, focus, major interests, and even inten
tions, their respective analyses of religion, considered as the
source of prohibition, mutually reinforce each other. It might
even be said that we can better understand each of them in
dividually when we have first considered them both together.
On the one hand, Nietzsche reveals so-called ideal being as
a “realm” that is exterior and superior to human volition. ProSibi-
tion and condemnation come down to man from this realm of
the outside and up-above. But this “realm” is, after all, “nothing.”
It emerges only from the weakness of the slave morality, which
projects itself into the heavens. The task of the philological and
genealogical method is to reveal this ideal source as a nothing
ness. The God of prohibition is this ideal realm which does not
exist and which is yet the source of all prohibitions. This non
existent realm is what traditional metaphysics has described as
the intelligible, as the absolute good, as the transcendent and
invisible source of all values；but since this realm is essentially
empty, insofar as it is ideal, the destruction of metaphysics in
our own era must take the form of nihilism. Nietzsche did not
create nihilism, nor did nihilism create nothingness. Nihilism
is a historical process to which Nietzsche bears witness, and
nihilism in itself is only the historical manifestation of the
nothingness that pertains to the illusory origin. Thus, nothing
ness does not emerge from nihilism ；even less does nihilism
emerge from Nietzsche. Nihilism is the soul of metaphysics, inso
far as metaphysics posits an ideal and supernatural origin. Such
a conception expresses nothing other than scorn for life,
calumny of the earth, hatred of the vitality of the instincts,
resentment of the weak against the strong. Christianity must
also be Included in this reductive hermeneutics to the extent that
it serves ai Platonism for the people^ a kind of ethical super-
naturaliiim. Finally, the famoui Umwertung, the 4<transvalua-
tlon/1 tht ovtrthrowingf of traditional values Is only the reversal
444 / religio n and faith
of a prior reversal and, hence, the restoration of the true origin

of values, which is the will to power.
This well-known critique of religion, which can be found in
Beyond Good and Evil and in The Genealogy of Morals, is a good
introduction to what Freud called the superego. The superego is
also an ideal construction that serves as a source of prohibition
and condemnation. Thus, psychoanalysis is, in its own way,
an exegesis that allows us to read the drama of Oedipus behind
the official text of moral consciousness, and it is, at the same
time, a genealogy that links the energies invested in repression
to forces derived from the id, i.e., from the profundity of life. In
this way, although the superego takes up a position above the
ego and functions as a tribunal, an agency [instance] that ob
serves, judges, and condemns, it is stripped of its absolute ap
pearance；it rather appears to be a structure that is derivative
and acquired. There is, of course, an element in Freud that is
not to be found in Nietzsche. The reduction of ethical conscious
ness to the superego arises out of the convergence between, on
the one hand, the clinical experience of the obsessional neurotic,
his melancholy and moral masochism, and, on the other hand,
a sociology of culture. It is in this manner that Freud was able
to elucidate what we might call a pathology of duty or con
science. In addition, the genesis of neurosis provided Freud
with a key to the genetic interpretation of the phenomena of
totem and taboo within the field of ethnology. These phenomena,
in which Freud thought he could discern the source of our
ethical and religious consciousness, emerge as the result of a
process of substitution that refers back to the hidden role of the
father figure within the Oedipus complex. Oedipus as an in
dividual in turn serves as a model for a sort of collective Oedipus
who belongs to the archaeology of humanity. The institution of
law is thus related to a primitive drama, the famous murder of
the father. It is difficult to say, however, whether this is really
only the psychoanalytic myth, the ^Freudian myth,Mor whether
Freud actually succeeded in uncovering the profound origin of
the gods. In any case, even if all we have here is Freud*s own
personal mythology, it still does express an intuition that is very
close to Nietzsche^ in The Genealogy of Morals, namely, the
idea that the concepts of good and evil are created by means of
projection within a situation of weakness and dependency. But
Freud had something of his own to say ；the Umwertung, the
transvaluation that we have called the reversal of a prior reversal,
not only involves the agonizing challenge to culture that
Nietzsche called nihilism but also involves a personal renuncia

tion that Freud referred to in his book on Leonardo as “the re-
nunciation of the father/* This renunciation can be compared to
the process of mourning, or the mourning work, which Freud
mentions elsewhere. Nihilism and mourning are thus the two
parallel ways in which the origin of values is restored to itself,
i.e., to the will to power, to Eros in its eternal battle with
Thanatos.
If we are now to Investigate the theological meaning of this
atheism, we must first say what sort of atheism is here in ques
tion. Everyone is familiar with the famous expression of the
madman in The Gay Science：£<God is dead." But the true ques
tion is to know, first of all, which god is dead；then, who has
killed him (if it is true that this death is a murder)；and finally,
what sort of authority belongs to the announcement of this
death. These three questions qualify the atheism of Nietzsche
and Freud as opposed to that of British empiricism or French
positivism, whose methods are neither exegetical nor genealogi
cal in the sense we have specified.
Which god is dead? We can now reply ：the god of meta
physics and also the god of theology, insofar as theology rests
on the metaphysics of the first cause, necessary being, and the
prime mover, conceived as the source of values and as the
absolute good. Let us say that it is the god of onto-theology, to
use the expression that was coined by Heidegger, following
Kant.
This onto-theology has found its highest philosophical ex
pression, at least with respect to ethical philosophy, in Kantian
philosophy. As we know, Kant makes a very close connection
between religion and ethics ：the first function of religion is to
consider the commandments of consciousness as the command
ments of God. Religion, of course, has other functions as well,
according to Kant, specifically in relation to the problem of evil,
the realization of freedom, and the totalization of the will and
nature within an ethical world. But because of the initial link
that is established between God, conceived as the supreme law
giver, and the law of reason, Kant still belongs to the age of
metaphysics and still remains faithful to its fundamental
dichotomy between an intelligible world and a sensible world.
The function of Nietzschean and Freudian criticism is to sub
mit the principle of obligation, onto which has been grafted the
ethical god of Kantian philosophy, to a regressive analysis that
strips this prtndpli of 1U a priori character. This reductive
hermeneutics opens the way to a genealogy of the so-called

a priori. At the same time, what seemed to be a strict necessity,
the formal principle of obligation, now appears as the result of
a hidden process, a process that refers back to an original act
of accusation rooted in the will. Concrete accusation thus ap
pears as the truth of formal obligation. Accusation cannot be
grasped within the kind of reflective philosophy that separates
the a priori from the empirical. Only the hermeneutic method is
capable of uncovering accusation at the root of duty. In replac
ing a simple abstractive methodology, such as the Kantian
categorial analysis, with a philological and genealogical meth
odology, reductive hermeneutics discovers behind practical rea
son the functioning of instincts, the expression of fear and de-
sire. Behind the so-called autonomy of the will is hidden the
resentment of a particular will, the will of the weak. Because of
this exegesis and this genealogy, the god of morality, to speak in
the manner of Nietzsche, reveals himself as the god of accusa
tion and condemnation. Such is the nature of the god who has
perished.
We are thus led to the second question：Who is the mur
derer? It is not the atheist but rather the specific nothingness
that lies at the heart of the ideal, the superego’s lack of absolute
authority. The murderer of the god of morality is nothing other
than that which Nietzsche described as a cultural process, the
process of nihilism, or what Freud referred to in psychological
terms as the mourning work that is carried out in relation to
the image of the father.
But when we turn to the third question — What sort of au
thority is invested in the words that proclaim this death of the
god of morality? — everything suddenly becomes problematical
once again. We believe that we know which god is dead；we
have said it is the god of morality. We also believe that we know
the cause of this death ：the self-destruction of metaphysics
through nihilism. But everything becomes doubtful again when
we ask ：Who is saying this? The madman? Zarathustra? The
madman as Zarathustra? Perhaps. At least we can say in
negative terms that this type of thinking does not prove anything
conclusively, one way or the other. 'The man with the hammer*1
has only the authority of the message that he proclaims, namely,
the sovereignty of the will to power. Nothing is capable of prov
ing it, unless it be the new form of life that this message makes
possible, or the affirmation of Dionysus, or the amor fati, the
surrender to the ''eternal return of the namo,H Thl« positive
Nietzschean philosophy, which alone is capable of conferring

authority on his negative hermeneutics, remains buried under
the ruins that Nietzsche has accumulated around him. It is
doubtful whether anyone can live on the level of ZaratJiustra.
Nietzsche himself, the man with the hammer, is not the super
man that he proclaims. His aggression against Christianity re
mains caught up in the attitude of resentment；the rebel is not,
and cannot be, at the same level as the prophet. Nietzsche’s
major work remains an accusation of accusation and hence
falls short of a pure affirmation of life.
For this reason, I do not think that anything has been defi
nitely decided；everything still remains open after Nietzsche. It
seems to me that only one path has been decisively closed off,
that of an onto-theology which culminates in the idea of a moral
god, conceived as the origin and foundation of an ethics of
prohibition and condemnation. I believe that we are henceforth
incapable of returning to an order of moral life which would
take the form of a simple submission to commandments or
to an alien or supreme will, even if this will were represented
as divine. We must accept as a positive good the critique of
ethics and religion that has been undertaken by the school of
suspicion. From it we have learned to understand that the com
mandment that gives death, not life, is a product and projec
tion of our own weakness.
2. The way in which the question is now posed is more
urgent and more disconcerting than ever. Can we recognize any
religious meaning at all in atheism? Certainly not, if we under
stand the word “religion” in the narrow sense of the primitive
relationship of man to the dangerous power of the sacred. But,
if it is true that “only the god of morality has been refuted,”
then a way still remains open though filled with uncertainty
一
and danger一which we shall now attempt to explore.

How shall we begin along this path? We might be tempted to
go directly to the goal and give a name— both an old name and
a new name— to this last stage of our itinerary：we might simply
call it “faith.” I have, in fact, already dared to do so in my
introduction, in which I spoke of a dialectic between religion and
faith, a dialectic mediated by atheism；but I have also said that
the philosopher cannot go so far, so quickly. Only a preacher,
or, I should say, a prophetic preacher, with the power and the
freedom of Nlot*«chc*s Zarnthustra would be able to make a radi
cal return to the orlglni of Jowlsh and Christian faith and, at
tho sumo tlma, mako of thli return an event which speaks to our
448 / RE LIG IO N AND FAITH
own time. Such preaching would be both origtnary and post

religious. The philosopher, however, is not this prophetic
preacher；at the most, he is what Kierkegaard called himself,
“the poet of the religious.” He dreams of a prophet who would
realize today the message of Exodus that exists prior to all law ：
ul am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of
Egypt, out of the house of bondage/1 He dieams of the prophet
who would speak only of freedom but would never utter a word
of prohibition or condemnation, who would preach the Cross and
the Resurrection of Christ as the beginning of a creative life,
and who would elaborate the contemporary significance of the
Pauline antinomy between the Gospel and the Law. In terms of
this antinomy, sin itself would appear less as the transgression
of a prohibition than as the opposite of a life ruled by grace.
Sin, then, would mean life ruled by law, i.e.3 the mode of being
of human existence which remains caught in the infernal circle
of law, transgression, guilt, and rebellion.
There are several reasons why the philosopher is not this
prophetic preacher. First of all, because the philosopher belongs
to a time of dryness and thirst in which Christianity, insofar
as it is a cultural institution, still remains 4<a Platonism for the
people,” a kind of law in Saint Paul’s sense of the word. Second,
the process of nihilism has not achieved its end, perhaps not
even its culminating point. The period of mourning for the gods
who have died is not yet over, and it is in this intermediate time
that the philosopher does his thinking. Third, the philosopher,
as a responsible thinker, remains suspended between atheism
and faith. For he cannot content himself with the simple juxta
position of a reductive hermeneutics, which would dethrone the
idols of the gods who have died, and a positive hermeneutics,
which would be a recollection, a repetition— beyond the death
of the god of morality— of the Biblical kerygma (the preachings
of the prophets and the primitive Christian community). The
philosopher's responsibility is to think, that is, to dig beneath
the surface of the present antinomy until he has discovered the
level of questioning that makes possible a mediation between
religion and faith by way of atheism. This mediation must take
the form of a long detour；it might even appear as a path that
has gone astray. Heidegger refers to some of his essays as
Holzwege, pathways in the forest that do not lead anywhere,
except perhaps to the forest itself and the work of the woodsmen.
I suggest that we take two steps along this winding path
which is thus, perhaps, a H olzw eg in tho Holdoggorlan sense.
First of all, I would like to consider my relationship to word

[la parole]1 to the word of the poet or thinker and, in fact, to
一
all forms of word that say something, that reveal something

about beings and about Being. In this relationship to word, to
every meaningful word, there is implied a kind of total obedience
that is entirely devoid of any ethical implications. It is this xion-
ethical obedience that can lead us out of the labyrinth of the
theory of values, which is perhaps the sore spot of philosophy
itself.
We must recognize the fact that philosophy at the present
time is entirely at an impasse concerning the problem of the
origin of values. We are condemned to vacillate between an
impossible creation of values and an impossible intuition of
values. This theoretical failure is reflected in the practical
antinomy between submission and rebellion that infects the
daily concerns of education, politics, and ethics. If no decision
can be made at this level, we must retrace our steps, extricate
ourselves from the impasse, and try to gain access, by means of
♦ a nonethical approach, to the problem of autonomy and obedi
ence.
The only way to think ethically is first to think nonethically.
In order to attain this goal, we must discover that place where
the autonomy of our will is rooted in a dependence and an
obedience that is no longer infected with accusation, prohibition,
and condemnation. This preethical situation is that of ^Tiearken-
ing” [rdcoute]. In hearkening there is revealed a mode of being
which is not yet a mode of doing and which thus avoids the
alternative of subjection and revolt. Heraclitus said ：“Do not
attach importance to my words, but heed the logos/* When word
says something, when it reveals not only something about the
meaning of beings but something about Being itself, as is the
case with the poet, we are then confronted by what could be
called the occurrence of word ：something is said of which I am
neither the source nor the master. Word is not at my disposition,
as are the instruments of work and production or the goods of
1. [In the theolo g ical and H e id eg g e ria n co n te x t o f this essay, p a role

h a s be en translated as ^word.** In this sense, “ w o r d ” is o fte n used b y
R icoeur as a “ third term ” be tw ee n l a n g u a g e and the “ s p ea k in g” o f the
subject. "Word'* 1a n ot at our d is p o s a l ； i t co m es to us. **Speechw or 4<dis-
c o u n e M would occmlonally ha ve made for a sm ooth er translatio n, but
w e have u«c»d "w o rd1* th rou gho u t for the sak e o f co n sisten cy. It should
be nntod (hut piirol# h a ri hnv quit* a different sense fro m the one It has
In Ricoûr'i tlfltv a on UniultUoH, w h m the S a u a su re an dla tln cd o n be-
mrrvi hh 〇u0 and pnrols li In qucillon.— E d .]
consumption. In the occurrence of word I do not have anything

at my command；I do not impose myself；I am no longer the
master；I am led beyond the feelings of anxiety and concern.
This situation or nonmastery is the origin of both obedience and
freedom. Heidegger says, in Being and Time：
W e c a n m a k e c l e a r th e c o n n e c t i o n o f d i s c o u r s e w i t h u n d e r s t a n d
in g and in te lligib ility by c o n sid e rin g an e x ls te n ia l p o ssib ility
w h i c h b e l o n g s to t a l k i n g i t s e l f 一 h e a r i n g . I f w e h a v e n o t h e a r d
^ a r i g h t / 1 it i s n o t b y a c c i d e n t t h a t w e s a y w e h a v e n o t " u n d e r
stood/* H e a r i n g i s c o n s t i t u t i v e f o r d i s c o u r s e . . . . D a s e i n h e a r s ,
b e c a u s e it u n d e r s t a n d s . A s a B e i n g - i n - t h e - w o r l d w i t h O t h e r s , a
B e i n g w h i c h u n d e r s t a n d s , D a s e i n is “ i n t h r a l l ” to D a s e i n - w i t h a n d
to i t s e l f ; a n d in this t h r a l d o m it “ b e l o n g s ” to t h e s e . 2
It is not by accident that in most languages the word for 4<obedi-

enceMis etymologically related to the word for <<hearing.>, Hear
ing (horchen in German) is the possibility of obeying (gehor-
chen)• Meaningful connections are thus established between
word, listening, and obedience：
It is o n th e b a s i s o f this p o t e n t i a l i t y f o r h e a r i n g , w h i c h is e x i s t e n
t ia lly p r i m a r y , t h a t a n y t h i n g l ik e h e a r k e n in g [ H o r c h e n ] b e c o m e s
p o s s i b l e . H e a r k e n i n g i s p h e n o m e n a l l y s till m o r e p r i m o r d i a l t h a n
w h a t is d e f i n e d “ i n the first i n s t a n c e ” as “ h e a r i n g ” i n p s y c h o l o g y
— the s e n s i n g o f t o n e s a n d the p e r c e p t i o n o f s o u n d s . H e a r k e n i n g
too h a s the k i n d o f B e i n g o f th e h e a r i n g w h i c h u n d e r s t a n d s ( p .
2 〇 7 )_
This hearing which understands is the crux of our problem.

Nothing, of course, has been said concerning word as the
word of God; and this is altogether fitting and proper. At this
point, the philosopher is far from being in a position to designate
a kind of word that would truly qualify to be called the word of
God. He is capable, however, of designating the type of being
that would make something like the word of God existentially
possible. <4Being-with develops in listening to one another
[Aufeinander-hdren], which can be done in several possible
ways ：following, going along with, and the privative modes of
not-hearing, resisting, defying, and turning away** (pp. 206-7).
Thus, for the first time and prior to all moral instruction and
all moralism, we perceive in the act of <,hearkening,> the founda
2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tram. John Maoquarrio and

Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, p. ao6, [Subaequent
page numberi in paronthc«o« refer to thia volume ]
tion of other modes of “listening” ：following and not-following_

This hearkening (horen) implies a ^belonging-to" (zugehoren)
which constitutes preethical obedience. This is the concept to
ward which I am now trying to direct myself.
This is not all. Not only is hearkening existentially prior to
obeying, but keeping silent is existentially prior to speaking.
Should we say silence*? Yes, if silence does not mean muteness.
Silence opens up a space for hearkening ；
Keeping silent is a n o t h e r e s s e n t i a l p o s s i b i l i t y o f d i s c o u r s e , a n d it
h a s the s a m e e x i s t e n t i a l f o u n d a t i o n . I n t a l k i n g w i t h o n e a n o t h e r ,
t h e p e r s o n w h o k e e p s s i l e n t c a n “ m a k e o n e u n d e r s t a n d ” ( t h a t is,
h e c a n d e v e l o p an u n d e r s t a n d i n g ) , a n d h e c a n do so m o r e a u t h e n
t i c a l l y t h a n th e p e r s o n w h o is n e v e r s h o r t o f w o r d s . S p e a k i n g at
l e n g t h [Viel-sprechen] a b o u t s o m e t h i n g d o e s n o t o f f e r the s l i g h t e s t
g u a r a n t e e t h a t t h e r e b y u n d e r s t a n d i n g is a d v a n c e d . O n the c o n
trary, talk in g e x te n s iv e ly about so m eth in g , c o vers it up and b rin gs
w h a t i s u n d e r s t o o d to a s h a m c l a r i t y — th e u n i n t e l l i g i b i l i t y o f the
t r i v i a l. . . . K e e p i n g s i l e n t a u t h e n t i c a l l y is p o s s i b l e o n l y i n g e n
u i n e d i s c o u r s i n g . T o be a b le to k e e p s i l e n t , D a s e i n m u s t h a v e
s o m e t h i n g to s a y — t h a t i s , i t m u s t h a v e at it s d i s p o s a l a n a u t h e n t i c
a n d r i c h d i s c l o s e d n e s s o f it s e lf . In t h a t c a s e o n e ’ s r e t i c e n c e [Ver-
schwiegenheit] m a k e s s o m e t h i n g m a n i f e s t , a n d d o e s a w a y w i t h
Mid le talk'* [^Gerede^]. A s a m o d e o f d i s c o u r s i n g , r e t i c e n c e A r t i c u
l a t e s t h e i n t e l l i g i b i l i t y o f D a s e i n in so p r i m o r d i a l a m a n n e r t h a t it
g i v e s r i s e to a p o t e n t i a l i t y - f o r - h e a r i n g w h i c h is g e n u i n e , a n d to a
B e i n g - w i t h - o n e - a n o t h e r w h i c h is t r a n s p a r e n t ( p . 2 0 8 ) ,
We are at the point where silence is the origin of hearkening and

obedience.
This analysis， and “the fundamental analysis of Dasein” to
which it pertains, reveals the horizon and opens up the way to
approximations, yet to be established, to a relation to God as
the word which precedes all prohibition and accusation. I am
prepared to recognize the fact that I shall not encounter the
occurrence of word that is known as the Gospel by means of a
simple extension of the categories of practical reason. The God
for whom we are searching will not exist as the source of
moral obligation, the author of commandments, the one who
places the seal of the absolute on man’s ethical experience. On
the contrary, this type of meditation would seem to suggest that
we not let the kerygma become trapped in the labyrinth of
obligation and duty.
Let us now take the second step. What sort of ethics is possi
ble on the basis of this existential relationship to word? If we
attend to the spirit of the mourning work developed by atheism,

and if we attend to the mode of nonethical understanding that
is implicit in hearkening and in silence, we are now ready to
pose the problem of ethics in terms that do not imply, at least
in the beginning, a relationship to prohibition. Such terms are
still neutral with regard to accusation and condemnation. Let
us try to elaborate the original ethical problem that is suggested
both by the destruction of the god of morality and by nonethical
instruction through word.
I shall call tiis ethics that exists prior to the morality of
obligation an ethics of the desire to be or the effort to exist. The
history of philosophy provides us with a valuable precedent in
this connection, that of Spinoza. It was Spinoza who referred to
ethics as the total process through which man passes from
slavery to happiness and freedom. This process is not governed
by a formal principle of obligation, nor by an intuition of ends
and values, but by the unfolding of effort, conatus, which is
determinate of our existence as a finite mode of being. We are
speaking here of effort； but we must also mention desire, so as to
establish at the source of the ethical problem the identity be
tween effort, in the Spinozistic sense of conatus, and desire in
the Platonic and Freudian sense of eros (Freud does not hesitate
to mention that what he calls libido and eros is related to the
concept of eros in Plato^ Symposium). By effort, I mean one's
situation in existence, the affirmative power to exist. Effort thus
implies an indefinite time span, a duration which is merely the
continuing process of existence. This situation within existence
is the foundation of the most fundamental affirmation: “I am,”
“je suis，” ‘Ich bin.” This affirmation, however, must be recovered
and restored, because (and here the problem of evil emerges)
it has been alienated in many ways. This is why it must be re
grasped and reinstated. The task of ethics is thus the reappro
priation of our effort to exist. Since our power to be has been
alienated, however, this effort remains a desire, the desire to be.
Desire, here as always, signifies lack, need, or demand. This
nothingness at the heart of our existence transforms our effort
into a desire and establishes an equivalence between Spinoza’s
conatus and the eros of Plato and Freud. The affirmation of
being within the lack of being is the most fundamental structure
in the foundation of ethics.
Ethics, in this radical sense of the word, Is the progressive
appropriation of our effort to be.
This radical dimension of the problem of ethics Is, as it were.
concealed by the consideration of obligation as the governing

principle of practical reason. Formalism in ethics conceals the
dialectic of human action or, to use a stronger expression, the
dialectic of human existence. The latter is recovered by means
of a problematic that is not original but derivative, the prob
lematic of the a priori foundation of practical reason. I refer to
this as a derivative problematic because it seems to me that it
is immediately derived from the Critique of Pure Reason. It is
here fully elaborated within the framework of a regressive analy
sis which leads back to the categorial structures that make all
knowledge possible. Can the same dichotomy between the em
pirical and the a priori, however, be extended to the internal
structure of human action, to what I have called the dialectic of
existence? I am doubtful. This transference to the realm of
practical reason of a distinction that was fully elaborated in the
first Critique is responsible for the opposition that Kant sets up
between obligation, considered as the a priori of the will, and
desire, as the empirical element in human action. The exclusion
of desire from the sphere of ethics has had disastrous conse
quences. The effort to achieve happiness is excluded from the
moralises field of consideration insofar as it is a material prin
ciple of will. The formal principle of obligation is thus isolated
from the process of action；ethical rigor is substituted for the
Spinozistic problem of happiness and freedom. The hermeneutics
of Freud and Nietzsche criticize this privileged status of for
malism as the foundation of ethics. Formalism, for them, ap
pears as a second-order rationalization, resulting from the in
troduction into the field of practical reason of a distinction that
is valid within the realm of theoretical reason.
Must we then say that the problem of duty has no ethical
meaning? I do not think so ；even prohibition has its place, but
its place is not originary or fundamental. At the most, it is a
criterion of the objective character of the goodness of our will.
The same thing could be said with regard to the concept of
value ；it also has its place, though it is in no sense primordial.
The concept of value emerges at a certain stage of ethical re
flection, when it becomes necessary for us to establish a harmony
between our powers and our existential situation, i.e., the institu
tions and structures of economic, political, and cultural life.
Value appears at the Intersection between our unlimited desire
to be and the flnltd condltlonn of Its actualization. This function
of value not nuthorlxe un to hypostasize th e Value or to
worship thvi Idul uf vnlu«. It la aufflclent to relate the process of
evaluation and value to the dialectic of action and to the his

torical conditions of human ethical experience.
It is not only the hermeneutics of Nietzsche and Freud that
encourages us to relate formalism in ethics and the creation of
values to the existential foundation of our effort and desire. The
kind of philosophy of word that we have just developed invites
us to take the very same step. When we speak of word as a
positive, vital reality, we are suggesting an underlying connec
tion between word and the active core of our existence. Word
has the power to change our understanding of ourselves. This
power does not originally take the form of an imperative. Before
addressing itself to the will as an order that must be obeyed,
word addresses itself to what I have called our existence as ef
fort and desire. We are changed, not because a will is imposed on
our own will；we are changed by the "listening that under
stands/* Word reaches us on the level of the symbolic structures
of our existence, the dynamic schemes that express the way in
which we understand our situation and the way in which we
project ourselves into this situation. Consequently, there is
something that precedes the will and the principle of obligation,
which, according to Kant, is the a priori structure of this will.
This something else is our existence itself insofar as it is capable
of being modiiied by word. This intimate connection between
our desire to be and the power of word is a consequence of what
we have referred to above as the act of hearkening, of paying
attention, of obeying. This articulation, in turn, makes possible
what we describe in ordinary terms as will, evaluation, decision,
and choice. This psychology of the will is only the superficial
projection of a more profound articulation between the meaning
of our existential situation, understanding, and discourse— to
take up the principal notions of the Heideggerian analysis of
Dasein.
Such is the second step along the long detour from atheism
to faith. I shall not go any farther in the present essay. I readily
admit that it falls far short of the goal. The discussion that
follows, concerning consolation and resignation, will perhaps
permit us, nevertheless, to take several new steps in the same
direction. Even after this new progression, however, a gap will
still remain between the philosopher's interminable exploration
of new beginnings and the powerful words of the preacher. In
spite of this gap, a certain correspondence may appear between
a theology which would remain faithful to ItN own origins and
a philosophical investigation which would huvo adopted a the
Religion, Atheism, and Faith / 4 55
ism*s critique of religion. I shall explain this correspondence In

the following section.
II. O n C o n so la tio n
1. T he c o n n e c t i o n between accusation and consola

tion is perhaps the most striking characteristic of religion. God
threatens and protects. He is the ultimate danger and the ulti
mate protection. In the most primitive theologies, traces of
which we find in the Old Testament, these two aspects of
divinity have been coordinated in a rational scheme in the form
of the law of retribution. The god who gives protection is the
god of morality；he corrects the apparent inequality in the
distribution of individual destinies by establishing the relation
ship between suffering and wickedness as well as the relation
ship between happiness and justice. By means of this law of
retribution, the god who threatens and the god who protects
becomes one and the same god, the god of morality. This primi
tive rationalization establishes religion not only as the absolute
foundation of morality but also as a Weltanschauung— — the moral
vision of the world framed within a speculative cosmology. As
Providence (in Greek, pronoia；in Latin, providentia)t the god
of morality is the organizing power in a world that operates in
terms of the law of retribution. Such is perhaps the most primi
tive and the most comprehensive structure of religion. This re
ligious vision of the world, however, has never exhausted the
field of possible relationships between man and God, and, in
fact, there have always been men of faith who have rejected it
as entirely blasphemous. Even in the Babylonian and biblical
literature known as wisdom literature (especially in the Book
of Job), true faith in God is violently contrasted with this law
of retribution. Such a faith might rather be described as an
essentially tragic faith, beyond all assurance and protection.
Hence, my working hypothesis：atheism means, at the very
least, the destruction of the god of morality, not only as the
ultimate source of accusation but also as the ultimate source of
protection, i.e., Providence.
If atheism is to have some religious meaning, however, then
the death of the god of Providence should point toward a new
kind of faith, a tragic faith, which would stand in the same
relationship to classical metaphysics to Job’s faith stood in
relation to the primitive law of retribution, professed by his

pious friends. By “metaphysics” I mean the closely woven tissue
of philosophy and theology that has taken the form of theodicy
in order to defend and justify the goodness and omnipotence of
God in face of the existence of evil. In this regard, the theodicy
of Leibniz is the paradigm for all attempts to understand the
order of this world as a providential order, i.e., as expressing
the subordination of physical laws to ethical laws under the sign
of the justice of God.
I do not intend to criticize theodicies on the level of their
own argumentation, that is, on epistemological grounds, as Kant
has done in his famous essays against theodicies, both Leibnizian
and post-Leibnlzian. This critique, as we know, is principally
concerned with teleological concepts in general and with the
notion of the final cause in particular；it deserves to be con
sidered in itself with the greatest of care. I prefer to consider,
in accordance with the preceding section, the atheism of Freud
and Nietzsche— and this for two reasons. First of all, because
the critique of the god of morality finds its completion in a
critique of religion as refuge and protection；second, because the
critique developed by Freud and Nietzsche goes much further
than any epistemological critique. It digs beneath the surface of
the argument so as to lay bare the underlying level of motiva
tions on which theodicy is based- This substitution of herme
neutics for epistemology relates not only to theodicies of the
Leibnizian genre but to all philosophies that pretend to go be
yond theodicy and still attempt to establish a rational recon
ciliation between the laws of nature and human destiny. Thus
Kant, after criticizing Leibniz, attempts in turn, with his famous
Postulates of Practical Reason, to reconcile freedom and nature
under the rule of a moral God. In the same manner, Hegel
criticizes Kant and his moral vision of the world but proceeds
to construct a rational system in which all contradictions are
reconciled ：the ideal is no longer opposed to the real；it has be
come the latter^ immanent law. For Nietzsche, HegeFs philoso
phy realizes the essence of all moral philosophy. Of course,
this violent reduction, to the realm of morality, of philosophies
as diverse as those of Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel is unacceptable
to the historian of philosophy. The historian of philosophy must
preserve the unique rational structure of each one of these
philosophies against a vulgar confusion of nil philosophies of
the classical age under the title of "morality." Hut by means of
this violence, which reduces and denies the m〇 it obvious dlf-
ferences, Nietzsche opens up the way to a hermeneutics that

perceives the common motif behind the most diverse styles of
philosophizing. What is significant in this hermeneutics is the
type of will that expresses itself as a search for a rational recon
ciliation, whether this be in the Leibnizian theodicy, in the
Kantian Postulates of Practical Reason, or in the absolute knowl
edge of Hegel. For Nietzsche, the will that is hidden behind
these rationalizations is always a weak will. Its weakness con
sists precisely in the recourse to a vision of the world in which
the ethical principle that Nietzsche calls the “ideal” comes to
dominate the process of reality. The interest and value of this
procedure lies in the fact that every epistemological critique of
teleology is transposed into a hermeneutics of the will to power.
The doctrines of the past are in this way related to the degree
of weakness or power of the will, to its negative or positive
tendencies, to its reactive or active impulses.
In the first part of this essay we interrupted our discussion
of the Nietzschean hermeneutics at the point where it remained
an “accusation of accusation.” It was legitimate to remain at
this point in a discussion that was devoted to the concept of
prohibition. Nietzsche^ style of philosophizing, moreover, en
courages us to emphasize this critical side of his work. In an
essential way, Nietzsche's style takes the form of an accusation
of accusation and to this extent remains tied to the kind of
resentment for which he reproaches the moralists.
We must now go further. Our critique of metaphysics and
its search for rational reconciliation must give way to a positive
ontology, beyond resentment and accusation. Such a positive
ontology consists in an entirely nonethical vision, or what
Nietzsche described as “the innocence of becoming"’ (die
Unschuld des Werdens), The latter is merely another name for
^beyond good and evil.” Of course, this kind of ontology can
never become dogmatic, or it will risk falling under its own
criticisms. It must remain an interpretation, inseparable from
the interpretation of all interpretations. There is no certainty that
such a philosophy can escape its own self-destruction. In addi
tion, such an ontology remains unavoidably caught up in the
network of mythology一whether a mythology in the Greek sense
of the word, such as the mythology of Dionysus, a mythology in
the language of modern cosmology, such as the myth of the
eternal return of the Same and its relation with amor fatif a
mythology in the language of the philosophy of history, such
a s the myth of the superman, or, finally, a mythology that exist丨
beyond the oppositions among these three other mythologies,

such as the myth of the world as game. All of these myths say
the same thing ：they all proclaim the absence of guilt, i.e., the
absence of the ethical character of all being.
Confronted with this hard doctrine, I by no means intend
to prove or refute it, nor do I intend to put it in the service of
some clever apologetics and thereby convert it into Christian
faith. I must rather leave it where it is, in a place where it re
mains alone and perhaps out of reach, inaccessible to any form
of repetition. It maintains itself in this place as my most formida
ble adversary, as the measure of radicality against which I must
measure myself. Whatever I think and whatever I believe must
be worthy of it.
But before taking up again the path that leads from atheism
to faith, in the manner In which we have attempted this above,
I would like to elucidate some of the implications of the
Nietzschean critique of religion with respect to Freud. The kind
of mythology that is represented by the Nietzschean conception
of the innocence of becoming finds it more prosaic counterpart
in what Freud called the reality principle. It is not by accident
that Freud sometimes refers to this principle by another name,
one that recalls the Nietzschean amor fati：the name of Ananke,
i.e., the concept of necessity, drawn from the tradition of Greek
tragedy. As we know, Freud always contrasted the reality prin
ciple with the pleasure principle and with all types of thinking
that are influenced by the pleasure principle, i.e., all the forms
of illusion.
It is at this point that a certain critique of religion appears
in Freud*s work. I have insisted several times on the fact that
religion for Freud is not essentially the source of absolute au
thority in regard to the requirements of moral consciousness；
it is rather a compensation for the harshness of life. Religion,
in this sense, is the highest function of culture；its task is to
protect man against the superior force of nature and to com
pensate him for the sacrifice of the instincts that is demanded by
social existence. The new aspect that religion turns toward the
individual is no longer that of prohibition but that of protection.
At the same time, religion addresses itself less to fear than to
desire.
This regressive-reductive analysis leads back a second time
to the notion of a collective image of the father, though the
father figure has now become more ambiguous, more ambiva
lent. Now he is not only the figure who accuses；he Is also the
figure who protects. Now he responds not only to our fear of

punishment but also to our desire for protection and consola
tion, and the name for this desire is nostalgia for the father.
Religion thus appears as one of the most cunning and most con
cealed forms of the pleasure principle. As a result, the reality
principle involves a renunciation of this nostalgia for the father,
not only on the level of our fears, but also on the level of our
desires. A vision of the world that no longer contains the image
of the father is the price that must be paid for this ascesis of
desire.
It is at this point that Freud comes together with Nietzsche
once again. The Freudian reversal, the move from the pleasure
principle to the reality principle, has the same meaning as the
Nietzschean reversal, the move from the moral view of the
world to the innocence of becoming and the notion of the world
as “game,” Freud’s tone is less lyrical than Nietzsche’s; his at
titude is also closer to resignation than to jubilation. Freud re
mains too well aware of the anguish of the human condition to
go beyond a simple acceptance of the immutable order of nature,
and he remains too attached to a coldly scientific view of the
world to give free reign to an uncontrolled lyricism. In his last
works, however, the theme of Ananke is deemphasized and
balanced by another theme, which is much closer in spirit to
Nietzsche. I am referring here to the theme of Eros, a theme
that leads back to the Faustian motif of Freud’s youth. This
motif was later suppressed, due to his scientific preoccupations.
In fact, Freudss philosophical temperament is perhaps deter
mined by the obscure struggle between a positivist conception
of reality and a romantic conception of life. When he is under
the sway of the latter, we listen to a voice that could be that
of Nietzsche："And now we can expect that the other of those
two celestial powers, eternal Eros, will affirm itself in the strug
gle against its equally immortal adversaryM— this adversary be
ing death. This great drama of Eros and Thanatos, underlying
the inexorable order of nature, is the echo of Nietzsche in
Freud. The scholarly discretion that prevails in Freud's mythol
ogy prevents it from attaining the lyrical and philosophical
power of Nietzsche's writings； but it brings Nietzsche somewhat
closer to us. Through FreudJs work, some of the dangerous
teachings descend to us from the heights of Sils-Maria.
a. What sort of faith is possible after the Freudian and
Nletiichaan critiques?
1鐮u薦 In the first part of this essay a prophetic preaching
460 / RELIGIO N AND FAITH
that would return to the roots of Judeo-Christian faith and

would also be a new beginning for our time. With regard to
the problem of accusation, this preaching would speak only in
terms of freedom and would elaborate the contemporary mean
ing of the Pauline antinomy between the Gospel and the Law.
With respect to the problem of consolation, this prophetic
preaching would be heir to the tragic faith of Job. It would
adopt the same attitude in regard to the teleological metaphysics
of Western philosophy that Job adopted in regard to the pious
words of his friends concerning the god of retribution. It would
be a faith that moves forward through the shadows, in a new
“night of the soul”一to adopt the language of the mystics— before
a God who would not have the attributes of ^Providence,Ma God
who would not protect me but would surrender me to the dangers
of a life worthy of being called human. Is not this God the
Crucified One, the God who, as Bonhoeffer says, only through
his weakness is capable of helping me? The night of the soul
means above all the overcoming of desire as well as fear, the
overcoming of nostalgia for the protecting father figure. Beyond
this night, and only beyond it, can we recover the true meaning
of the God of consolation, the God of the Resurrection, the
Byzantine and Roman Pantocrator.
I can imagine such a prophetic preacher；at times, I hear
his voice. But again, it is not the voice of the philosopher. The
philosopher thinks in the intermediate time between nihilism
and purified faith. Above all, his task is not to reconcile, within
a feeble eclecticism, the hermeneutics that destroys the idols
of the past and the hermeneutics that restores the kerygma. To
think is to dig deeper until one reaches the level of questioning
that makes possible a mediation between religion and faith by
means of atheism. This mediation appears as a long detour, or
even as a road that has gone astray. Perhaps we shall go farther
in the same direction, since the overcoming of the fear of pun
ishment and the desire for protection constitute one and the
same process, a process that goes beyond what Nietzsche called
the “spirit of vengeance.”
The first step ：Let us recall that we have discovered in our
relationship to word— whether it be the word of the poet or
that of the thinker or any sort of word that reveals something
about our situation within the totality of being— the point of
departure, the origin and the model for an M obcdicncc to beingM
beyond all fear of punishment, beyond all prohibition and
condemnation. Perhaps we shall even be able to discover In
this obedience the source of a kind of consolation that would be

just as far removed from the infantile desire for protection as
obedience is from all fear of punishment. My initial relation
ship to word, when I receive it in the fullness of its significa
tion, not only neutralizes all accusation and thereby all fear ；it
also serves to effectively bracket my desire for protection. It puts
out of play, so to speak, the narcissism of my desire. I return to
a realm of meaning in which there is no longer a question of
myself but only of being as such. The totality of being is mani
fested in the forgetting of my own desires and interests.
It is this impersonal unfolding of being, in the absence of
personal concerns and through the fullness of word, that was
already operative in the revelation that comes at the end of the
Book of Job："Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind,
and said . . . But what did he say? Nothing that could be con
sidered as a response to the problem of suffering and death；
nothing that could be used as a justification for God in a theodicy.
On the contrary, he spoke of an order that was alien to man,
of that which is beyond the limits of human finitude：""Where
wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if
thou hast understanding." The path of theodicy has here been
closed off ；even the vision of the Behemoth and the Leviathan,
which is the culmination of the revelation, has no relationship
to Job^ personal situation. No teleology emerges from the whirl
wind ；no intelligible connection is established between the
physical order and the ethical order； what remains is the unfold
ing of being within the fullness of word；what remains is only
the possibility of an act of acceptance which would be the first
step in the direction of consolation, the first step beyond the
desire for protection.
I call this first step resignation.
In what sense does this resignation to a nonethical order
constitute the first step toward consolation? In the sense that
this nonethical order is not alien to word and in spite of the fact
that it is alien to my own narcissistic interests. Being can be
brought to word.
For Job, the revelation of the whole is not originally a
spectacle but a voice. The fact that the Lord speaks is what is
essential. He does not speak of Job；he speaks to Job；and that
alone is sufficient. The occurrence of word as such creates a
link; dialogue is in itself a mode of consolation. The occurrence
of word In being become word；the hearkening to word makes
poialblc th« vi«w of tho world as an ordered whole. ul have heard
of thee by the hearing of the ear ； but now mine eye seeth thee."
But even so, Job's question concerning himself receives no resolu
tion； it suffers dissolution due to the displacement of the center
that word performs.
At this point, we are led back from Job to the pre-Socratics.
The pre-Socratic thinkers also perceived the displacement of the
center that word effects：*To be and to be thought are one and
the same thing.MSuch is the fundamental possibility of consola
tion. The unity of being and logos makes it possible for man to
belong to being insofar as he is a speaking being. Because my
own speech belongs to word, because the speaking of my own
language belongs to the saying of being, I no longer demand that
my desire be reconciled with the order of nature. In this sort
of belonging resides the origin, not only of obedience beyond
fear, but of consent beyond desire.
Let us elaborate this concept of consent. This will be our
second step. We shall not do this in psychological terms；the
philosopher is not a therapist；he cures desires by changing
ideas. As a result, to move from the desire for protection to the
act of consent, it is necessary to take the difficult path of a cri
tique applied to the type of metaphysics that is implicit in the
desire for protection.
The type of metaphysics that is involved here is that which
tries to relate value and fact within a system that we would
like to call the meaning of the universe or the meaning of life.
In such a system the natural order and the ethical order are
unified in a higher totality. The question is to know whether this
attempt does not itself proceed from the forgetfulness of the
kind of unity that the pre-Socratics recognized when they spoke
of the identity of being and logos. As we know, this is the ques
tion that Heidegger poses to metaphysics. Even the concepts of
value and fact, which we employ as a fundamental division of
reality, already imply the loss of the primordial unity in which
value, fact, ethics, and physics do not yet exist. If this is so,
we must not be surprised if we are unable to join together again
the broken fragments of the lost unity. I myself take Heideggers
question seriously. It may be that all the constructions of clas
sical metaphysics, concerning the subordination of causal laws
to final laws, represent a desperate attempt to recreate a unity
at a level which is itself the result of a fundamental forgetting of
the question of being. In the essay called HDie Zeit des Welt-
bildes” Heidegger characterizes the age of metaphysics as the
age in which ''being Is placed at the disposal of an explicit
representation": M[in Descartes^ metaphysics] being is deter

mined for the first time as the objectivity of the representation,
and truth, as the certainty of the representation.M3 At the same
time, the world becomes a spectacle ：
W h e n th e w o r l d b e c o m e s c o n c e i v e d a s a n i m a g e , t h e t o t a l i t y o f
B e i n g is u n d e r s t o o d a n d f i x e d as t h a t i n r e l a t i o n to w h i c h m a n c a n
o r i e n t h i m s e l f , as t h a t w h i c h m a n t h u s w i s h e s to p r e s e n t a n d h a v e
i n f r o n t o f h i m , h o p i n g t h e r e b y to d e c i s i v e l y a r r e s t B e i n g i n the
f o r m o f a r e p r e s e n t a t i o n ( i b i d . , p. 8 2 ) .
The representative character of Being is thus correlated with

the emergence of man as subject. Man pushes himself to the
center of the picture；hence, Being is placed in front of man
as something objective, at his disposal. Later, with Kant, with
Fichte, and finally with Nietzsche himself, man as subject be
comes man as will. The will appears as the origin of values,
while the world retires into the background as simple fact,
deprived of all value. Nihilism is not far distant. The gap can
no longer be bridged, the gap which exists between a subject
who posits himself as the origin of values and a world which
unfolds itself as a collection of appearances stripped of all
value. As long as we continue to regard the world as an object
for representation and the human will as the locus of value,
reconciliation and integration will be impossible. Nihilism is the
historical verification of this impossibility. In particular, nihilism
reveals the failure of the God of metaphysics to effect this
reconciliation, the failure of all attempts to fulfill causality
within a teleological scheme. Insofar as the problem of God is
posed in these terms and at this level, even the question of
God emerges from that forgetfulness which has given rise to
the conception of the world as an object of representation and
the conception of man as a subject who posits values.
For this reason, we must now return to a point that is
situated prior to the dichotomy between subject and object if
we wish to overcome the antinomies that proceed from it ：the
antinomy of value and fact, the antinomy of teleology and
causality, the antinomy of man and the world. This regression
will not take us back to the dark night of a philosophy of identity；
it will rather lead us to the manifestation of Being as the logos
that gathers all things.
3. M i r d n Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt a.M. ： Klostermann, 1957).

p lo .
If this is truly the case, then the foundation of any response

to Nietzsche must lie in a meditation on the gathering force of
the logos rather than in the emergence of the will to power. For
the will to power perhaps still belongs to the age of metaphysics,
in which man was precisely defined as will. For Heidegger, the
logos is that aspect or dimension of our language which is
linked to the question of Being. By means of the logos, the ques
tion of Being is brought to language；thanks to the logos, man
emerges, not only as a wiU to power, but as a being who inter
rogates Being.
This is the radical path of thought which opens up the hori
zon onto a new understanding of consolation and which would
make of atheism a real mediation between religion and faith. If
man is fundamentally posited as man only when he is “gathered”
by the logos which itself ^gathers all things/7 then a kind of
consolation is possible which is nothing less than the happiness
of belonging to the logos and to Being as logos. This happiness
first emerges in primordial poetry (Urdichtung) and then in
thought. Heidegger says somewhere that the poet sees the
sacred while the philosopher sees Being, that they reside on the
tops of different mountains, whence their voices echo and
respond.
Let us take one more step toward this function of the logos
as consolation.
Heidegger employs other expressions which suggest such a
functioning；he says that the logos of the pre-Socratics is the
same as physis. Physis is not nature as opposed to convention,
history, or mind. It is something which, in its gathering, pre
dominates over all；it is that which ^surpasses" (das Vberwrilti-
gende). Once again we are brought back to the connection be
tween Job and the pre-Socratics. Already in the revelation of
the Book of Job we find an expression of that which surpasses
and the experience of being joined to that which surpasses. This
experience is not the result of a physical, spiritual, or mystical
process; it is something that occurs only within the clarity of
"'saying*5 (Sagen).
The logos signifies not only the power which makes things
manifest and gathers them together；it is also that which links
the poet to this gathering power under the sign of that which
surpasses. The power to gather things together by means of
language does not originally belong to man as a speaking sub
ject. Gathering and revealing belong first of all to that which
surpasses and predominates, that which wan Mymbollzed by the
original Greek notion of physis. Language is less and less the

work of man. The power of saying is not something that we
appropriate but that which appropriates us ；and it is because
we are not the masters of our own language that we can be
“gathered,” that is, joined to that which gathers. As a result, our
language becomes something more than a simple, practical
means of communicating with others and a means of controlling
nature. When speaking becomes saying or, rather, when saying
resides within the speaking of our language, we experience lan
guage as a gift, and we experience thought as a recognition of
this gift. Thought gives thanks for the gift of language ；in this
manner, language once again gives birth to a form of consola
tion. Man finds consolation when, through language, he lets
things be, lets them be revealed. Because Job understands word
as that which gathers, he sees the world as gathered.
Kierkegaard calls this sort of consolation “repetition.” In the
Book of Job he sees this repetition expressed in the mythical
form of an act of restitution: “and Yahweh restored Job to his
former situation because he had interceded in behalf of his
friends: and Yahweh increased Job’s possessions twice over.” If
“repetition,” according to Kierkegaard, is not simply another
name for the law of retribution (which Job had rejected, and
which would have been an ultimate justification of his pious
friends, whom the Lord had condemned), then it can mean only
one thing ：the fulfillment of hearkening in seeing. Such a con
cept of repetition can thus appear as the counterpart of a pre-
Socratic theme；it is itself essentially similar to the pre-Socratic
understanding of both logos, as that which gathers, and physis,
as that which surpasses and prevails. Once again we find that
the Book of Job and the Fragments of Heraclitus say one and
the same thing.
To more fully understand this point, let us go back one last
time to Nietzsche. Nietzsche also gave the name “consolation”
(Trost) to the great desire, uthe greatest hopeM：that man might
overcome himself. Why did he refer to this hope as consolation?
Perhaps because consolation bears in itself the notion of de
liverance from feelings of revenge (Rache). "Tor that man be
delivered from revenge is for me the bridge to the highest hope,
and a rainbow after iong storms.” 4 Deliverance from vengeance
is at the heart of our meditation on consolation, for vengeance
means: ‘"Where once was suffering, punishment must appear.”
4. Thus Spake Zarathustra, Pt, II, "The Tarantulas.*'

Heidegger comments in the following manner：vengeance is an

activity which opposes itself and is degrading— though not
primarily and fundamentally in a moral sense. The critique of
vengeance is not itself a moral critique. The spirit of vengeance
is directed against time, against that which passes. Zarathustra
says ：“This，yes, this alone is vengeance itself, resentment of
the will against time and its this was*'5 Vengeance is the will
in self-opposition (des Willens Widerwillens), and hence, resent
ment against time. The fact that time passes is the catastrophe
which causes the will to suffer and on which the will takes
revenge by denouncing that which passes because it passes. To
overcome vengeance is to overcome the negation within the
affirmation.
Is not Zarathustra’s “recapitulation” very similar to the act
of “repetition” which Kierkegaard finds in the Book of Job and
to the “gathering” which Heidegger finds in the pre-Socratic
writings? Though the relationship cannot be denied, the re
semblance would be even greater were it not for the fact that
Nietzsche^ work itself is infected with the spirit of vengeance
to the very extent that it remains an accusation of accusation.
We read in the last lines of Ecce Homo：KHave I been misunder
stood? Dionysus versus the Crucified.wHerein lies the limitation
of Nietzsche’s work. Why is he incapable of answering Zara-
thustra’s call to overcome vengeance? Is it not because, for
Nietzsche, the creation of the superman capable of overcoming
vengeance is dependent on the will and not on word? For this
reason， does not Nietzsche’s will to power remain both an act of
acceptance and an act of vengeance? Only the kind of Gelas-
senheit which marks the submission of individual language to
discourse is beyond vengeance. Consent must be joined to poetry.
Heidegger comments on Hdlderlin’s poem which contains
the line ^dichterisch wohnt der Menschn (poetically . . . dwells
Man on this earth"*) ：to the extent to which the poetic act is not
a pure extravagance but the beginning of the end of a wander
ing by means of an act of creation, poetry makes it possible for
man to dwell on earth. This occurs when my normal relation
ship to language is reversed, when language speaks. Thus, man
responds to language by listening to what it says to him. At the
same time, dwelling becomes for us mortals a M poetic,>dwelling.
T)we]Iing” is another name for Kierkegaard’s “repetition” ；it is
the opposite of fleeing. In fact, Holderlin says ："Full of merit,
5. Ib id ., Pt. Ill, M
Tbe Great Nostalgia/'
and yet poetically, dwells man on this earth.” The poem suggests
that man dwells on earth insofar as a tension is maintained
between his concern for the heavens, for the divine, and for the
rootedness of his own existence in the earth. This tension confers
a certain dimensionality and assigns a locus to the act of dwell
ing. In terms of its total extension and radical comprehension,
poetry is what locates the act of dwelling between heaven and
earth, under the sky, but on the earth, within the domain of
word.
Poetry is more than the art of making poems. It is poi^sis,
or creation in the largest sense of the word. It is in this sense
that poetry is equivalent to primordial dwelling； man dwells only
when poets exist in the world.
This philosophical investigation into the religious meaning
of atheism has led us from resignation to consent and from
consent to a mode of dwelling on earth that is governed by
poetry and thought. This mode of being is no longer “the love of
fateMbut a love of creation. Such a fact suggests a movement
from atheism toward faith. The love of creation is a form of
consolation which depends on no external compensation and
which is equally remote from any form of vengeance. Love finds
within itself its own compensation； it is itself consolation.
We have thus indicated a certain correspondence between
this philosophical analysis and an interpretation of the kerygma
which is faithful to the origins of the Judeo-Christian faith and
at the same time bears a contemporary significance. Biblical
faith represents God, the God of the prophets and the God of the
Christian Trinity, as a father； atheism teaches us to renounce the
image of the father. Once overcome as idol, the image of the
father can be recovered as symbol. This symbol is a parable of
the foundation of love；it is the counterpart, within a theology
of love, of the progression that leads us from simple resignation
to poetic life. I believe that such is the religious meaning of
atheism. An idol must die so that a symbol of being may begin
to speak.
Fatherhood: From Phantasm
to Symbol
F i r s t I s h a l l p r e s e n t in abbreviated form the working

hypothesis which I propose to test. It can be stated in three
parts:
1. The father figure is not a well-known figure whose mean
ing is invariable and which we can pursue in its avatars, its dis
appearance and return under diverse masks；it is a problematic
figure, incomplete and in suspense. It is a designation that is
susceptible of traversing a diversity of semantic levels, from the
phantasm of the father as castrater, who must be killed, to the
symbol of the father who dies of compassion.
2. In order to understand this symbolic mutation, we must
resituate the paternal image within the milieu of the other
paradigms of the interhuman relation. According to my hy
pothesis, the internal evolution of the paternal symbol results
from the attraction, of an external kind, exercised by the other
figures, which rescue it from its primitive character. The father
figure owes to its insertion in the rule-governed game of kinship
an initial limitation, an inertia, indeed a resistance to sym
bolization, which is surmounted only by action of a lateral kind,
exerted by other figures which do not belong to the kinship rela
tion. These are the nonparental figures, which, by their action of
breaking in, crack the shell of literalness of the father figure
and liberate the symbols of fatherhood and sonship.
3. But if the symbolism of fatherhood must undergo a cer
tain reduction of the initial image, which might even appear as
a certain renunciation, indeed a mourning, the terminal expres-
Translated by Robert Sweeney.
[468]
Fatherhood From Phantasm to Symbol
： / 469
sions of this symbolism do not lose their connection with the

initial forms, of which they are, in a way, a repetition on a higher
level. This return of the primitive figure after its own death
constitutes in my opinion the central problem of the process of
symbolization which is at work in the father figure. For this re
turn, to the degree that it is susceptible of several actualizations,
opens the field to several interpretations which belong in their
turn to the designation of the father.
Such is, in its schematic articulation, my working hypothesis.
It designates fatherhood as a process rather than a structure,
and it proposes a dynamic and dialectical constitution of it.
I propose submitting this thesis to the test by successively
considering three registers, three ^fields,** which can provide an
analogical constitution of the process of fatherhood. The first
field is delineated by psychoanalysis, which articulates an ttecon-
omy of desire.MIn the second, a phenomenology of spirit sketches
out a felt or reasoned history of basic cultural figures. The third
relates to the philosophy of religion, which develops here an in
terpretation of the ^divine names^ and the designations of God.
I shall not make a pronouncement here on the respective
status of these three fields；I shall limit myself to stating that
they have been delimited by different methodologies and that
they imply in each case a conceptual framework and specific
procedures. Instead of radically justifying the right to existence
of several problematics and several readings of reality, I shall
rather take advantage of the diversity of approaches to justify
the soundness of my working hypothesis. If something like an
identical constitution of fatherhood, an identical structural
rhythm, an identical return of the initial figure throughout the
network of other figures, can be discerned in three different reg
isters, then there whl be some chance that the analogy, or better,
the homology of constitution, will reveal a single schema of
fatherhood.
L T h e F a t h e r F ig u r e i n a n E c o n o m y o f D e s ir e I
I d e f i n e t h e f i r s t f i e l d by the fate of the instincts, to

use Freud*s expression, thus giving the lead to economic explana
tion over all others. I cannot justify this here. I think it is the
most fundamental intention, and in addition the most explicit,
in Freudianism；it is also the most interesting explanation for
the philosopher by reason of the shift it imposes with respect to

the field of consciousness. I am therefore assuming that the
sphere of competence of psychoanalysis is defined by the pres
ence and the interplay of life and death instincts, along with the
figures that are dependent upon their vicissitudes.
It seems possible to me to retain from Freuds work concern
ing the father figure three themes which correspond to the three
moments of my working hypothesis； these are the very ones that
will permit us to construct the schema of fatherhood further
along, when we shall have traversed the three other schemas of
articulation of the father figure. I am calling these three themes
( i ) the formation of the Oedipus complex, (2) the destruction
of the Oedipus complex, and (3) the permanence of the Oedipus
complex.
First, there is the formation of the Oedipus complex as the
obligatory landmark. As Freud has said on many occasions：with
the Oedipus complex, psychoanalysis stands or falls. It is a mat
ter of taking it or leaving it. The Oedipus complex is in a certain
sense the crucial question posed by psychoanalysis to its public.
I assume here, as well known, the essentials of the theory of the
Oedipus complex. What I shall retain from it for what follows is
this ：the critical point of the Oedipus complex is to be sought for
in the initial constitution of desire, namely, its megalomania, its
infantile omnipotence. From this proceeds the phantasm of a
father who would retain the privileges which the son must seize
if he is to be himself.
This phantasm of a being who retains power and withholds
it in order to deprive his son of it is, as we know, the basis of the
castration complex, on which is articulated the desire to murder.
It is no less important to know that it is from this same megalo
mania that the glorification of the killed father, the search for
reconciliation and propitiation with the interiorized image, and
finally the building-up of guilt proceed. Death of the father and
punishment of the son are thus placed at the origin of a single
history, which is quite real in respect to instinct, although quite
unreal in respect to representation. Formation of the Oedipus
complex； then destruction of the Oedipus complex.
We have learned from Freud that there are several ways of
getting out of the Oedipus complex；more specifically, the great
question for what follows in the history of the psyche, and there
fore for the history of the whole culture, is Indeed not only how
one gets into the Oedipus complex but how one gets out of it. In
a relatively late essay, "The Passing of the Oedlpui Complex,"
： / 471
Freud introduces the concept of the destruction or demolition of

the Oedipus complex, the parallels to which in the two other
registers we will point out shortly. In the Freudian register it is
an economic concept, just like repression, identification, subli
mation, desexualization. It is concerned with the fate of the
instincts, the reworking of their depth distribution.
But let us understand the destruction carefully. It is insofar
as it structures the psyche that the Oedipus complex is destroyed
as a complex. We can come to understand the relation between
the destruction (of the complex) and the structuration (of the
psyche) in the following way: the stake involved in the dissolu
tion of the Oedipus complex is the replacement of an identifica
tion with the father which is literally mortal— and even doubly
mortal, since it kills the father by murder and the son by re
morse— by a mutual recognition, where difference is compatible
with similarity.
The recognition of the father ：that is what is at stake. There
will be other examples of it in the two registers that we will con
sider further on. In particular, it will be the task of a history of
figures to set up mediations— of having, of power, of valuing,
and of knowing— which articulate this structuring destruction.
This is not the task of psychoanalysis. But it is its task to spot the
trace of these mediations in the instinctual reshufflings at the
level of a history of desire and of pleasure. In the successful Oedi
pus complex, if we may express it thus, desire is rectified in its
most profound avowal of omnipotence and immortality；what is
destroyed is the economy of all or nothing. The proof par excel
lence in this respect is the power to accept the father as mortal
and, finally, to accept the death of the father, just as his im
mortality was only the fantastic projection of the omnipotence
of desire. It is in terms of this meaning of mortality that there
will be articulated a representation of fatherhood distinct from
physical begetting and less attached to the very person of the
father. Begetting is a matter of nature, fatherhood of designa
tion. It is necessary that the blood tie be loosened, be marked by
death, in order that fatherhood be truly instituted；then the
father is father because he is designated and called father.
Mutual recognition, reciprocal designation：with this theme
we touch on the frontier that is common to psychoanalysis and
to a theory of culture. We enter psychoanalysis by the concept of
instinct, at the boundary line between biology and psychology；
we leave It by other limit-ideas, at the boundary line between psy
chology and the sociology of culture. Identification is such a
concept, and Freud exerts himself to repeat that he has not

resolved the problem that such a concept introduces. To resolve
it will require a change of field.
But before changing field, it is crucial to take into considera
tion the third theme, which, if I may say so, sets the tone— the
psychoanalytic tone— — for what precedes. This third theme is
this ：in a certain respect, the Oedipus complex is insurmount
able. In a certain respect— or rather in several senses.
In the sense, first of all, of repetition：psychoanalysis has
remained attentive to the regressions, to the new paths of the
Oedipal conflict, to the revivals of the archaic complex occa
sioned by new ôbject choices/' On a number of occasions Freud
has written that new choices of sexual objects are based ines
capably on the model of the primary fixations. Everything in
Freudianism tends to a certain pessimism with respect to the
capacity for sublimation, as if the Oedipus complex condemned
the psychic life to a sort of running-in-place, indeed, of perpetual
recommencement. In this sense the Oedipal heritage is indeed a
destiny. It is certain that the principal weight of Freudian doc
trine leans to this side；it is to this notion of Repetition that the
concepts of latency and return of the repressed are attached,
which, as we know, hold the decisive, if not exclusive, role in the
interpretation of the religious phenomenon. Freud remained at
tached to it in an obstinate fashion from Totem and Taboo to
Moses and Monotheism.
But, if the Oedipus complex were nontranscendable in this
sense only, there would remain but one alternative for under
standing not only religion but all the facts of culture where a
certain sublimation is expressed ：it would be necessary either to
disregard them, by attributing them without further ado to the
return of the repressed, or to attempt to inscribe them outside the
field of the Oedipus complex, in some sphere that is nonlibidinal
and free of conflict. But what we said above about the structuring
function of the Oedipus complex permits us to risk another sense
of its nontranscendability, another sense of its repetition, ac
cording to which it is by the same Eros, the same instinctual
depths, that we are impelled toward new constellations of ob
jects and new instinctual organizations. What psychoanalysis
teaches us, then, is this ：we do not have to deny our desire；we
can unmask it and recognize it. Agape is nothing else than Eros.
It is by the same love that we love the archaic objects and those
that the education of desire discloses to us, There is only one
： / 473
economy of desire, and repetition is the great law of this econ

omy. It is therefore within this single economy of repetition that
we must regard as identical and different the neurotic organiza
tions of desire and the nonneurotic organizations；the transfig
uration of the father in culture and in religion is the same thing,
and not the same thing, as the return of the repressed：the same
thing In the sense that everything continues to take place in the
field of the Oedipus complex；not the same thing to the degree
that our desire, by renouncing omnipotence, assents to the repre
sentation of a mortal father whom it is no longer necessary to
kill but who can be recognized.
If such is indeed the future of the Oedipus complex, we un
derstand that all of psychic life can be interrogated in relation to
the Oedipus complex and that there is no place, as Father Pohier
has stated emphatically, M to institute religion outside the field
structured by the Oedipus complex.w
It is this same dialectic of repetition that we are going to find
again, in an analogous mode, in the field of the phenomenology
of the spirit. But before taking leave of psychoanalysis, we should
understand that it is the same reality that is going to be inter
rogated, in a different perspective. In leaving psychoanalysis, we
do not mean that it has missed half or two-thirds of the human
reality；we willingly believe that nothing human is foreign to it
and that it apprehends the totality truly, but under an angle of
vision that is limited by its theory, by its method, and, above all,
by the analytic situation itself. As Leibniz put it concerning the
vision of the monad, psychoanalysis sees the whole, but from one
point of view. That is why it is the same elements, the same
structures, and especially the same processes which return in the
two other fields but in another perspective.
II. T h e F a t h e r F ig u r e in a Ph enom enology

of the S p ir it
T h e s e c o n d “ f i e l d ” we are taking into consideration is

the one in which is deployed and delimited the method I have
called, on several occasions, “concrete reflection. The method is
reflective, in that it is concerned with a repetition of the acts,
operations, and productions in which the self-consciousness of
humanity is constituted. But the reflection is concrete, in that it
attains to subjectivity only by the long detour of the signs that

subjectivity has produced from itself in the works of culture. The
history of culture is, even more than the individual conscious
ness, the great matrix of these signs. But philosophy is not lim
ited to a chronology of their production；it attempts to order
them in intelligible series which permit us to sketch out an
itinerary of consciousness, a path on which an advance of self-
consciousness occurs. This procedure is neither psychological nor
historical；it imposes on the psychological consciousness_ in
itself too short— the detour through the texts of a culture in
which the self is documented；and it imposes on event-oriented
historicity the constitution of a meaning which is a true work of
the concept. It is this work of meaning which constitutes the
philosophical character of reflection and of the interpretation in
which reflection is invested.
These brief remarks on method suffice to establish the dif
ference in level between concrete reflection and the economy of
desire. But more noteworthy than the difference in methods is
the homology of the structures and processes which are encoun
tered there. This is what the privileged example of the father is
going to demonstrate.
Let us then begin our “second voyage,” as Plato put it!
No one will be surprised that here I take as my guide Hegels
philosophy of spirit, just as I did in Freud and Philosophy.1 But I
hope to go further, particularly beyond phenomenology properly
so called, whose insufficiency Hegel has pointed out in the En
cyclopaedia；that is why I shall look for only one impulse, one
primary starting point in the Phenomenology of the Spirit. If
we pursue this— in effect the movement which leads from con
sciousness to self-consciousness— by way of the experience of
the restless and unlimited life, everything seems to happen as in
Freud； as in Freud, self-consciousness is rooted in life and desire.
And the history of self-consciousness is the history of the educa
tion of desire. As with Freud also, desire is first of all infinite,
extravagant:
And self-consciousness is thus only assured of itself through sub-
lating this other, which is presented to self-consciousness as an in
dependent life ； self-consciousness is Desire. Convinced of the noth
ingness of this other, it definitely affirms this nothingness to be
for itself the truth of this other, negates the independent object,i,
i, Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Esgay on Interpretation,

trana. Denis Savage (New Haven： Yale University Press, 1970).
： / 475
and thereby acquixea the certainty of its own self, as true cer
tainty. . . .a
We could once more interpret in strictly Oedipal terms the first
phases of duplicated reflection or of the doubling of self-con
sciousness. The father and the son, is this not a history of the
doubling of consciousness? Is it not also a struggle to the death?
Yes, but only up to a certain point. For it is important that the
educative dialectic, for Hegel, is not that of father and son but
rather that of master and slave. It is this which has a future and
which_ let us say it immediately— gives a future to sexuality. It
would appear to me absolutely fundamental that the movement
of recognition originates in another sphere than fatherhood and
sonship. Or, if one prefers, fatherhood and sonship enter into
the movement of recognition only in the light of the master-slave
relation. That is what I had in mind in the introduction, when I
said that it is from the other figures of the cultural field that the
figure of the father draws its dynamism and its capacity for sym
bolization.
Why this privilege of the master-slave relation? Above all,
because it is the first which incorporates an exchange of roles：
“the action of one,” says Hegel, “is the act of the one as well as
of the other*' (p. 230). As unequal as the roles are, they are
reciprocal.
But above all, the winning of mastery proceeds by way of the
risk of one's own life ；the master has staked his life and thus has
shown himself to be more than life ：€4it is only by the risk of life
that we preserve freedom.MIt would appear retrospectively that
the cycle of birth and death, to which natural fatherhood and
sonship belong— begetting and being begotten— is closed on it
self ：the growth of the children is the death of the parents. In
this sense, natural fatherhood and sonship remain caught in the
immediacy of life, in what Hegel would call, in his Jena period,
'life of the kind that does not yet know itself/* For that life,
^nothingness does not exist as such." This is what the master
inaugurates by risking his life. Now, as we have said with Freud,
the great challenge is to renounce the vital immortality of desire,
to accept the death of the father and one*s own death. This is
2. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baiilie
(New York: Humanities Press, 1964), p. 2 2 5 .【All page citations for this
and aubsequent quotations are to this volume. Throughout thlfl book wc
have tramlated Ricoeur s êsprit*' (Hegel'a ''Gelsf1) as ^spirit" rather than
înd,** and in harmony with this the title of Hegel's work appears in the
text •• Tht Phenomenology of th§ SpirU.— Ed.]
precisely what the master does：what Hegel calls the supreme

test by way of death, the conquest of the independence of spirit
with respect to the immediacy of life. What Hegel describes here
is therefore quite precisely what Freud has called sublimation
and desexualization.
Finally, and above all— and now we pass immediately to the
side of the slave— the dialectic of master and slave encounters
the category of labor：if the master is raised above life by the
risk of death, the slave is raised above formless, unshapen de
sire by the rude schooling of thingness — in Freudian language,
by the reality principle. Whereas extravagant desire would sup
press the thing, the slave is rubbed raw by the real ：
[He] takes up a negative attitude to things and cancels them； but
the thing is, at the same time, independent for him, and, in conse
quence, he cannot, with all his negating, get so far as to annihilate
it outright and be done with it ；that is to say, he merely works
on it (p. 235).
A BiZduwg is set in motion; in “formi ng” the thing, the
individual is formed himself. “Labor,” says Hegel， “is desire re
strained, and checked, evanescence delayed and postponed ;
labor shapes . . (p. 238).
Thus the Phenomenology of the Spirit presents a dialectic be
tween desire and labor for which Freud has designated only the
empty mold by speaking of the dissolution of the Oedipus com
plex. This dialectic permits the introduction of fatherhood itself
into a process of recognition；but the recognition of the father
and the son takes place by the double mediation of the mastery
of men and things and the conquest of nature by labor. This is
why the Phenomenology of the Spirit no longer fits neatly with
psychoanalysis— or with the father and the son— beyond the
turning from life to self-consciousness. For it unfolds henceforth
in the great empty interval which stretches between the dissolu
tion of the Oedipus complex and the final return of the repressed
on the higher levels of culture. For the economy of desire, this
great interval is the time of subterranean existence, the period
of latency. For the Phenomenology of the Spirit, this time is filled
in by all the other nonparental figures which build human cul
ture. We must extend this great interval boundlessly and multi
ply the intermediary thresholds. I have mentioned the whole first
threshold, that of the savage struggle for recognition. I shall
mention only one other, a much later one— at least for a genesis
of meaning— that by which two wills, struggling for possession,
： / 4 77
enter into a contractual relation. I choose this moment, which is

omitted from the Phenomenology of the Spirit and which opens
the Philosophy of Right,s because it constitutes the fundamen
tally nonparental relation, starting from which fatherhood can
be rethought.
The contract repeats the dialectic of master and slave but on
another level；desire is still implied in the moment of the taking
of possession；the arbitrary will is as extravagant there as vital
desire：there is nothing, indeed, which it cannot in principle ap
propriate, make its own ："'man's right to appropriation bears on
every thing" (Philosophy of Right, § 44). Confronted by another
arbitrary will, my will must compromise：this is the contract.
And what is noteworthy about the contract is that another will
mediates between my will and the thing and that a thing medi
ates between two wills. Thus is born, from the negotiation be
tween wills, a juridical relation to things：this is property；and
a juridical relation between persons：this is the contract. The
moment whose constitution we have just briefly reviewed defines
the juridical person, the subject of right.
Now, we can very well say that neither fatherhood nor son-
ship could take on a consistency beyond simple natural genera
tion if they were not mutually bound together, one in relation to
the other, not only as two self-consciousnesses, as in the dialectic
of master and slave, but as two wills, objectivated by their rela
tion to things and by their contractual ties. I say two wills pur
posely. The word Kw iir should stop us, for it is unknown to
Freud. We understand why ：the will is not a category of the
Freudian “field” ；it does not relate to an economy of desire; not
only can one not find it there, but one ought not to look for it
there, under pain of committing a category mistake, a mistake
concerning the laws of the field considered. The will is a category
of the philosophy of spirit. It takes shape only in the sphere of
right, in the broad sense which Hegel gives to it, one which is
broader than the juridical order, since it extends from abstract
right to moral conscience and to political existence. Prior to for
mal right there is not yet a person or respect for the person； and
this abstract right must be taken for what it is : not only along
with the idealism of the contract but along with the realism of
property. There is no Personenrecht which is not a Sachenrecht.
As in the dialectic of master and slave, things are the interme-
3 ， Q. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Rightt trans. T. M. Knox (New

York 1 Oxford University Press, 194a).
diaries. Thus the reality principle continues to educate the pleas

ure principle. Hegel did not hesitate to say that my body is mine
— that I possess a body一only subsequent to a relation of right,
that is, of contract and of property："as person, I possess my life
and my body, like other things, only insofar as it is my property*1；
and he adds：€il possess the members of my body, my life, only
so long as I will to possess them. An animal cannot maim or
destroy itself, but a man can” （ § 47) ;4 to the degree that I can
give up my life, it belongs to me. Thus the body is taken into
possession, in Besitz genommen, by the spirit.
The conclusion now imposes itself: if the person is posterior
to the contract and to property, if even the relation to the body
is posterior to these, then the same holds for the mutual recogni
tion of father and son； it is as free wills that they can now con
front each other. The passage from an exclusive identification to
a differential identification— an enigma that is not resolved in
the dialectic of desire —-is effected in the dialectic of the will
(§§ 7 3 - 7 4 ).
Let us stop here. The point we have reached is what Hegel
calls independence ：independence with respect to desires and to
life, independence with respect to the other. Independence with
respect to desires, Hegel calls self-consciousness；independence
with respect to the other, Hegel calls the person. It appears that
at this point we have dissolved kinship into nonkinship.
This is not the case.
For the second time, we are going to see true kinship rein
stated, beyond the simple continuity of generations, by the medi
ation of nonkinship.
At what level, in fact, can the properly familial bond be in
scribed? Not before but after, long after, the dialectic of wills,
which has left only proprietors in league, subjects of independ
ent rights, facing one another— persons, certainly, but stripped
of all concrete bonds. In two short remarks, Hegel has alerted us
to this. First, with respect to the right of persons (§ 40)：
“[whereas] in Kant, family relationships are the jura realiter
personalia," Hegel expressly excludes family relations from the
sphere of abstract right; “further on,” he says, “it will be shown
that the substantial basis of family relationship is rather the
sacrifice of personality•” Second example: after having declared
( § 7 5 ) t h a t t h e t w o p a r t ie s t o a c o n t r a c t a r e “lmmedlateseIf-
subsistent persons,” he remarks: M to subsume marriage under
4. [Wording flightly altered.一 T iu n b .]

： / 4 79
the concept of contract is thus quite impossible；this subsump

tion though shameful is the only word for it is propounded
一一
in Kant•” These two remarks quite agree with each other, as is

attested by the double horrified reference to Kant. And indeed,
in the ascending dialectic, we must look for the family relation
quite beyond abstract right；we must leap beyond the Moralitdt
which posits a subjective and moral will, i.e., a subject capable
of a purpose for which he takes responsibility, in short, a schul-
dig subject, accountable for an action which can be imputed to
him as the fault of his will. Yes, it is necessary to pass through
all that density of the mediations of abstract right and morality
to reach the spiritual and carnal kingdom of Sittlichkeit, the ethi
cal life. Now the threshold of this kingdom is the family. Let us
understand this precisely：there is a father because there is a
family, and not the reverse. And there is a family because there
is Sittlichkeit, and not the reverse. It is necessary first, therefore,
to posit this spiritual and living bond of Sittlichkeit in order to
rediscover the father. What characterizes this bond is that it
envelops its members in a relation of belonging which is no
longer voluntary and which in this sense repeats something of
the immediacy of life. This famous repetition, which has occu
pied us in Freud, is signaled in Hegel by a word: the word M sub-
stance"; the family relation, we said above, has for its “substan
tial basis . . . the sacrifice of the personality.” Equivalently
(§ 144), the family is a concrete totality, which recalls organic
totality, but only after having traversed the abstract mediations
of right and of morality. It demands "'the abandonment of the
personality” ；the individual is there bound anew, caught in a
network, in a system of felt, rational, intelligible determinations：
Mthe substantial order," says Hegel, "in the self-consciousness
which it has thus actually attained in individuals, knows itself
and so is an object of knowledge” （ § 146); and again: “It is
mind living and present as a world, and the substance of mind
thus exists now for the first time as mind ( § 151). Sittlichkeit
is the individual surmounted in the concrete community. That
is why the family does not proceed from a contract.
It is against this background of Sittlichkeit that the father
figure returns. And he returns by way of that concrete commu
nity that Hegel calls “the immediate substance of spirit” （ § 158).
He returns as master, of course, hut primarily as a member.
As member of . . . j that in, "not as an independent person’’
(§ 158). Moroovrr, to ha rtcognlzed by way of the Sittlichkeit of
the living family communlly, th« father can be recognized only
as the spouse of the spouse. What I first recognize in the sub

stance of the family community is what marriage establishes. Let
us compare this point with Freud. To recognize the father is to
recognize him with the mother. It is to renounce the possessing
of one through killing the other. It is to accept the fathers being
with the mother and the mother^ being with the father. Thus,
sexuality is recognized— the sexuality of the couple that has
begotten me ； but it is recognized as the carnal dimension of the
institution. This reaffirmed unity of desire and spirit is what
makes the recognition of the father possible.
Or rather, the recognition of fatherhood, for in this astonish
ing text on the family the father as such is never mentioned.
What is mentioned are the Penates, that is, the representation of
fatherhood in the absence of a father who is dead. The sittlich
spirit— the spirit of the concrete community— is itself extricated
only from the exterior diversity of its appearances, hence freed
from its support in individuals and their interests；the spirit of
the ethical community “emerges in a shape for representative
thinking and has been revered as Penates, etc.；and in general
it is in this spirit that the religious character of marriage and
the family, or pietas, is grounded>, (§ 163). In this sense the
family is the religious element, but not yet the religious as Chris
tian ： it is the religious of the Penates. Now what are the Penates?
They are the dead father raised to a representation；it is when
he is dead, when he is absent, that he passes into the symbol of
fatherhood. It is a symbol in a double sense: first as a significa
tion of the ethical substance；then, as the tie which binds the
members, in accordance with another meaning of the word sym
bol；for it is before the Penates that every new union is con
tracted ："instead of continually reserving to itself the contin-
gency and caprice of bodily desire, it removes the marriage bond
from the province of this caprice, surrenders to the substantive,
and swears allegiance to the Penates” （ § 164, note).
Let us end our “second voyage” here. What is its result? The
analysis we have just completed is homologous with the pre
ceding one. It is homologous only, because these are two quite
distinct discourses. The figure appears first in the framework of
an economy of desire, second in the framework of a spiritual
history. This is why the relations of one framework to the other
aie not one-to-one relations. The figures which separate the
world of desire from its repetition in the concrete community
correspond rather to the great apparent silence of the instincts
which Freud calls the latency period. But the two frameworks
： / 481
present analogous articulations. The chief articulation is that of

the repetition of the initial figure in the terminal figure the 一
Penates— beyond all juridical and moral mediations. We can

now say ：from phantasm to symbol；put differently, from non-
recognized fatherhood, mortal and mortifying for desire, to rec
ognized fatherhood, which has become the tie between love and
life.
III. T h e D ia l e c t ic of D iv in e F a th er h o o d
T h e t h i r d f i e l d in which we now undertake to discern

the structure of fatherhood is that of “religious representation广
I take the word “representation” in the sense which Hegel
gives it continually, whenever he speaks of religion, not only in
the Phenomenology of the Spirit but in the Encyclopaedia and in
the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion：<<Representationw is
the shaped [figuree] form of the self-manifestation of the abso
lute. I am equally in accord with saying that the investigation of
religious representation no longer relates to a phenomenology
properly speaking, that is, to the sequence of the figures of self-
consciousness. It is no longer a matter of self-consciousness but
of the deployment, in representation, of speculative thought
about the divine as such.
Contrariwise, I am less in accord with saying with Hegel that
the reign of representation can be surmounted in a philosophy of
the concept, in an absolute knowledge. Absolute knowledge can
only be the never-achieved aim of representation itself. This
question is inseparable from the definition of religion. For my
own part I feel myself closer to Kant finally— — to the Kant of Re
ligion within the Limits of Reason Alone— than to Hegel and
would gladly, like Kant, define religion by the question：What
can I hope for?
This place given to hope is not unconnected with the status
of representation in general and with the representation of the
father in particular. If representation can never be discarded,
this is because religion is constituted less by faith than by hope.
For if faith falls short in comparison with vision, and hence
representation in comparison with the concept, hope is in excess
by comparison with knowing and acting. It is of that excess that
thora cannot be any concept— but always only representation.
The quflitlon will be to know whether the schema of fatherhood
482 / R E LIG IO N AND FAITH
does not connect also with this theology of hope. We can see
what is at stake in this third course.
I now propose, like Father Pohier,5 to take up again the prob
lem of God M the Father/* in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But
my method will be somewhat different from his. I shall not take
theology for my guide, but exegesis. Why exegesis rather than
theology? Exegesis has the advantage of remaining on the level
of representation and of delivering up the very process of repre
sentation, its progressive constitution. In deconstructing theology
right to its original representative elements, exegesis plunges us
directly into the interplay of the designations of God, it ventures
to deliver up to us their originary intention and proper dynamics.
I like to say that the philosopher, when he reflects on religion,
should have for his partner the exegete rather than the theolo
gian. Another reason for having recourse to exegesis rather than
theology is that it invites us not to separate the figures of God
from the forms of discourse in which these figures occur. By
form of discourse I understand the narrative or the “saga，” the
myth, the prophecy, the hymn and psalm, wisdom literature, etc.
Why this attention to the forms of discourse? Because the desig
nation of God is in each case different according to whether the
narrator mentions him in the third person, as the agent in a
great deed, such as the Exodus from Egypt, or whether the
prophet announces him as the one in whose name he speaks in
the first person, or whether the believer addresses God in the
second person in the liturgical prayer of the cult or in solitary
prayer. Now theology itself, when it strives to be biblical the
ology, is too often content with extracting from all these texts a
conception of God and man and of their relations from which
the specific traits that pertain to the forms of discourse have
been removed. We shall not ask, then, what the Bible says about
God by way of theological abstraction but how God occurs in the
various discourses which structure the Bible.
Such being the method, what does it achieve?
Well, the finding that is most important and at first glance
most confusing is that, in the Old Testament (we reserve judg
ment on the New Testament), the designation of God as father
is quantitatively insignificant. Specialists in Old and New Testa
ment scholarship are in agreement in emphasizing一and at first
being surprised at— this great reserve limiting the use of the
5. [Works by Fr. Pohier and other author麄 mcmlon«d but not foot
noted in the text will be found in the Bibliography 屬 t thi of the
book.— T ran «.]
： / 483
epithet “father” in the writings of the Old Testament. Marchel

and Jeremias count less than twenty instances in the Old Testa
ment.6
It is this reserve that will concern us first. I would like to set
it in relation to the hypothesis that has guided me throughout
this work, namely, that the father figure, before making its re
turn, must in a certain way be lost, and that it can return only
as reinterpreted by means of other figures— figures that are non-
parental, nonpatemal. The refinement which leads from the
phantasm to the symbol requires— on the three levels which we
have considered, the instinctual level, the level of cultural fig
ures, the level of religious representations— a sort of reduction
of the initial figure by means of the other figures.
The initial figure, on the level on which we now place our
selves, is well known. All the people of the Near East designate
their gods as father and even invoke them by the name of father.
This appelation is not simply the common property of the Sem
ites；comparative history of religions teaches us that it is found
in India, China, Australia, Africa, and among the Greeks and
Romans. All men used to call God their father— this is the initial
given； it is even an immense banality, which, as such, is quite
insignificant. Here it is like the positing of the Oedipus complex
on the instinctual level. Entering into the Oedipus complex is the
common datum； what is important is the consequence, whether
it is neurotic or not; it is the dissolution of the Oedipus complex
and its return. Here, likewise, the fact of the designation of God
as father is still nothing； it is the meaning attached to this desig
nation which creates the problem. Or rather, it is the meaning
process, for it is the process which contains the schema of fa
therhood.
Now, exegesis of the Old Testament shows us that the re
serve of the Hebrews with respect to the designation of God as
father is the counterpart of their positive manner of apprehend
ing Yahweh as the sovereign hero of a singular history, punc
tuated with acts of salvation and deliverance, of which the people
of Israel, taken as a whole, is the beneficiary and witness. It is
here that the categories of discourse intervene and that theii
incidence in the naming of God is decisive. The first kind of dis
course in which the biblical writers tried to speak of God is the
narrative. The acts of salvation and deliverance are avowed by
fl, W, Marche], Dieu-Pdre dans le Nouveau Testament (Parli ： Cerf,

i 〇 nfl)j J, Jaremlas, Abba (Gottingen, 1965).
means of the “sa g a, which recounts the dealings of Yahweh with

Israel.
This narrative has as its center of gravity the avowal of the
Exodus from Egypt； this is the act of deliverance which institutes
the people of Israel as a people. The entire theological work of
the schools of writers to whom we owe the Hexateuch consisted
in ordering the fragmentary tales, of sometimes varied and dis-
parate origin, within the intervals of this great narrative and in
extending this back to the great ancestors and even to the myths
of creation, which are thus taken into the gravitational space of
the avowal of the historical faith of Israel and receive from it a
very specific historicization. This joining of the kerygmatic con
fession to the form of the narrative governs the theological as
pect which dominates the Hexateuch and which Gerhard von
Rad calls €<the theology of historical traditions/* to which he op
poses wthe theology of prophetic traditions,** which we shall re
discover shortly with the return of the father figure. It is this
theology of historical traditions which is the crucible of the first
biblical representations of God. Now, in this first structure— that
of the narrative— Yahweh is not in the position of father. If we
complete the exegetical method of von Rad by the structural
analysis of the tales, derived from Propp and the Russian for
malists and applied in France by Greimas and Barthes, we will
say that the dominant categories here are those of action and
agent, that is, of the hero defined by his function in the narra
tive. More precisely, the analysis of the action into hierarchized
segments causes the appearance, corresponding to the logic of
the narrative, of an interplay of personages or agents. The
whole theology of traditions consists in articulating the ultimate
agent, Yahweh, the principal and collective agent, Israel, taken
as a unique historical personage, and various individual agents,
with Moses in the top rank, in a dialectic which is never re
flected on but is simply narrated. It is this dialectic of actions
and agents that is the dramatic support of the theology of the
Hexateuch.
In this dialectic of actions and agents, the relation of father
hood and sonship is nonessential. If there is a father, it is Israel
itself: father was an Aramaean etc”” and Yahweh Is
wGk)d of our fathers^ before being father. Likewise, the dialectic
of action is deployed on the scale of a people and a history, If
the relation of agents will, in a second instance, be able to enter
Into the category father-son, it will be bocauic it has first been
Initiated in another category. Which category?
Fatherhood: From Phantasm to Symbol / 485
As we know, the theology of the Hexateuch rests on the rein

terpretation of the great tales of the acts of Yahweh and Israel,
beginning with the relation of the Covenant. Moreover, it must
be said immediately：covenants. These are not first and pri
marily represented as covenants of kinship；on the contrary, it is
the Covenant which gives meaning to kinship before this latter
adds its own note (we shall see what). It is not necessary, in
fact, to interpret the Covenant by fatherhood but by beginning
with the clauses and roles which the Covenant develops and
articulates； and these can be interpreted within neither the cate
gories of kinship nor juridical categories. In his studies on the
Hexateuch, von Rad shows how an original theology of the Cove
nant is constituted little by little, through a multiplicity of cove
nants— the covenant with Noah, the covenant with Abraham,
he covenant of Sinai— and through different interpretations of
these covenants— covenant of one pole, covenant of unequal
poles, reciprocal covenants. The Priestly Document (source P)
articulates this theology around three themes：Israel will be con
stituted as a people； Israel will receive the gift of land ；Israel will
enter into a privileged relation with God. The theology of the
Covenant is at the same time a theology of the promise. This
point is clearly crucial for fatherhood, which will be able to be
reinterpreted on the basis of the third theme of the Covenant：M I
shall be your God ”
But before reintroducing fatherhood, we must still consider
three points, and first the role of the Torah, of instruction,
of the law, in this constitutive genesis of meaning. If Israel has
a privileged relation with Yahweh, it is because it has the Law ：
Yahweh is the prime agent, Yahweh is the active pole of the cove
nant, Yahweh is the one who gives the law. And, here again, it is
Israel taken as a whole, as an individual and collective person
age, which is the vis-a-vis： wHear, 0 Israel, I am the Eternal, your
God， etc.”
A final point, before introducing the father figure ：it is cru
cial that Yahweh be designated by a name before being desig
nated as father. In certain psychoanalytic contexts, it is fashion-
able to speak of the name of the father. But we must distinguish,
if not, indeed, dissociate. The name is a proper name. Father is
an epithet. The name is a connotation. Father is a description. It
is essential for the faith of Israel that the revelation of Yahweh
be raised to that torrlblo level where the name is a connotation
without denotndon, not even that of the father. Let us reread the
story of the burning bu_h (Ex_ 3 :1 3 -1 5 ): “【 If] they say to me,
486 / RELIGION AND F AITH
What is his name [of the God of your fathers], what shall I say
unto them? And God said unto Moses：1 am that 1 am, Ehyeh,
asher ehyeh"；and in the remainder of the text 4<I amMbecomes
the subject: “You shall say to them: l am hath sent me unto
you.MThis revelation of the name is central to our reflection. For
the revelation of the name is the dissolution of all anthropo
morphisms, of all figures and figurations, including that of the
father. The name against the idol. All nonmetaphoric sonship,
all literal descent, is thus reduced, This dissolving action of the
theology of the name has been masked for a long time by efforts
at harmonization with Greek ontology, as if ul am that I am,>
were an ontological statement. Is it not necessary, rather, to un
derstand it in an almost ironic sense ：what I am, I am for me ；
but you have my fidelity and my guidance：‘"You will say to
them ： 1 am hath sent me unto you?,?
This reduction of the idol, and therefore also of the paternal
figure, in the theology of the name should not be lost from view
when we consider the stories of the Creation. It is noteworthy
that on this occasion God is not designated as father and that a
specific verb— bora— is used to tell about the creative act; any
trace of begetting is thus eliminated. The Creation— a mythic
theme borrowed from surrounding peoples and introduced
tardily and with infinite prudence is not a piece of paternal
一
theology； it is rather reinterpreted on the basis of the theology of

historical traditions and is placed as a preface to the history of
the acts of salvation, as the first act of foundation. It is not there
fore because he is a father that he is a creator. The theology of
the Creation will be, rather, the key to the reinterpretation of the
father figure when this latter will return. We must say the same
about the qualification of man in the Creation narrative of the
priestly school (Gen. 1 -2 )；there it is said that man has been
created in the image and likeness of God. The word son is no
more pronounced than the Creator is called father. It is rather
sonship that will be able to be reinterpreted on the basis of this
relation of similitude (in addition, corrected, doubtless, by that
of resemblance, which reestablishes the distance); this simili
tude raises man above created things and institutes him as mas
ter and controller of nature. The theology of the name is here
denied in no way ； we should say, rather, that it is the name with
out image and without idol which is given as image of the very
transcendence of man.
Thus the evolution of the father figure toward a superior
symbolism is dependent on other symboli, which do not belong
Fatherhoodt From Phantasm to Symbol / 487
to the sphere of kinship: the Uberator of the Hebraic primitive

“saga,” the lawgiver of Sinai, the bearer of the Name without
image, and even the Creator of the Creation myth, none of which
has anything to do with kinship. We could even say, in a way
that is scarcely paradoxical, that Yahweh is not primarily father；
on this condition, he is also father.
It was indeed necessary to take this route；it was necessary
to go to what one could call the zero degree of the figure of the
一
figure in general, of the paternal figure in particular to be able

一
to designate God as father.

Now— but only now— we can speak of the return of the
father figure, that is, interpret, on the level of the biblical text,
the designation— not explicit but at the same time very signifi
cant— of God as father. This journey of the representation of
God corresponds, on the biblical level, to the return of the re
pressed on the instinctual level or to the institution of the family
as a category, following the institution of abstract right and
moral consciousness, in the philosophy of the spirit.
This repetition of the father figure itself presents a signifi
cant progression, which we can set down schematically as fol
lows ：first the designation as father, which is still a description
in the sense that linguistic analysis gives to this word；then the
declaration of the father； and finally the invocation to the father,
which is properly the address to God as father. This movement
terminates only in the Lortfs Prayer, in which the return of the
father figure and the recognition of the father are completed.
We see very well how the designation of God as father pro
ceeds from the other designations of Yahweh in the Covenant;
the key here is the relationship of election. Israel has been
chosen among the peoples； Yahweh is completely devoted to this
people； they are his concern. TMs election is equivalent to adop
tion；thus Israel is a son, but it is a son only by a word of desig
nation. By the same stroke, fatherhood itself is entirely dla-
sociated from begetting.
What does the representation of fatherhood add, then, to the
historical categories which determine it? If we consider the in
frequent occurrences of the designation of God as father, it would
appear that it always happens at a moment when the relation
in some way exteriorized by the story Yahweh is He— is ln-
一
teriorized, I take the word Hlnteriorlzew in the sense of Erinne-

rung, which I0 both memory and Interlority— recollection. Entry
Into Erinn^runp 1■丨t tho time entry Into feeling; the af
fective connotations uro, m〇r«ov_r, ixtrenidy complex, ranging
from sovereign authority to tenderness and pity, as if the father

were also the mother. Thus fatherhood is deployed in a vast
range of feelings ：^feelings of dependence, of necessity, of pro
tection, of trust, of gratitude, of familiarityw (Marchel, p. 33):
* * . . . 0 foolish people and unwise? is not he thy father that hath
gotten thee? hath he not made thee and established thee?”
(Deut. 32:6). God, who has only a name, who is only a name,
receives a face, at the same time as that figure achieves its move
ment from phantasm to symbol.
It is thus that the designation is inflected toward invocation,
but without quite crossing the threshold: “He shall cry unto me,
Thou art my father, my God, and the rock of my salvationw；this
is not yet an invocation. Nowhere else in the Old Testament is
Yahweh Invoked as father；the appellations of Jeremiah 3:4 and
19, which we shall consider below, are not invocations, Marchel
notes, but simple statements that God pronounces about himself
through the voice of the prophets.
What is signified by this incomplete movement toward in
vocation of the father, which I have called the declaration of the
father? Here we must take into account the distinction, evoked
earlier, between the two forms of discourse, the story and the
prophecy, and the two theologies that are attached to them, the
theology of historical traditions and the theology of prophetic
traditions, to use von Rad's terms. Indeed, if we scrutinize the
texts where God is named father, it would appear that these are
the prophetic texts 2 Hosea, Jeremiah, and the third book7 of
Isaiah, to which we can add the Deuteronomy derived from pro
phetic contexts. What does this tie between the name of father
and prophecy signify? Prophecy marks a break both in the form
of discourse and in the theological intention：the story tells the
acts of deliverance with which Israel has been favored in the
past. Prophecy itself does not tell, but announces, in the per
formative mode of the oracle；the prophet announces in the first
person, in the name of God in the first person. And he announces
what? He announces something other than what has been
avowed in the framework of the great recounting：first, the ex
haustion of this very history, its imminent ruin, and, from its
ruin, a new Covenant, a new Zion, a new David. We understand
henceforth that, in the prophetic texts, Yahweh is not only desig
nated as father but is declared to be the father (Marchel, p. 41 )；
7. [Biblical scholars refer to a group of chapters In the book of
Isaiah as the “third Isaiah," as the literary and hlitorlct】 _vldcnco poJnts
to multiple authors.— E d _】
： / 489
and this declaration of God as father would appear inseparable

from the direction toward the future that prophecy contains.
Three times Jeremiah pronounces；ul am a father for Israel, you
shall call me my father and you shall not be separated from me/*
If we follow the suggestion that prophecy is turned toward and
looks for the fulfiUment to come, toward the eschatological ban
quet, is it not necessary to go so far as to say that the figure of
the father is itself entailed by this movement and that it is not
only the figure of the origin^the God of our fathers, within the
realm of the ancestor— but the figure of the new creation?
It is on these terms that the father can be recognized.
Not only is the father no longer in any way an ancestor, but
he is indiscernible from the spouse, as if the figures of kinship
burst forth and changed places；when the prophet Hosea rein
terprets the Covenant, he sees God much more as a spouse than
as a father. All the metaphors of fidelity and infidelity, of evil
as adultery, are metaphors of a conjugal nature, as are also the
feelings of jealousy, of wounded tenderness and the appeal to
come back. Jeremiah again says ：4<and I said, Thou shalt call me,
My father；and shalt not turn away from me. Surely as a wife
treacherously departeth from her husband, so have ye dealt
treacherously with me, 0 house of Israel” (Jer. 3:19-20). By
means of this strange mutual contamination of two kinship fig
ures, the shell of literality of the image is broken and the symbol
is liberated. A father who is a spouse is no longer a progenitor
(begetter), nor is he any more an enemy to his sons； love, solici
tude, and pity carry him beyond domination and severity. To this
reversal in the relations of feelings the magnificent text of the
“third” Isaiah testifies: “thou art our Father” （ Isaiah 64:8).
In the phrase “thou art our Father，” we are at the threshold
of invocation. Again it is with that modesty which makes the
invocation appear in a sort of indirect language, as in Psalm
8g ： 26 ：wHe shall cry unto me, Thou art my father, my God, and
the rock of my salvation.”
In the New Testament, the movement of the return of the
father figure is completed by the invocation of Jesus：Abba.
Again it is necessary to understand the audacious and unprece
dented character of this invocation by setting it against the back
ground of the whole Gospel. If we take into consideration the
whole of the Gospel and not some isolated quotations, we must
acknowledge that the New Testament retains something of the
reserve and modesty of the Old Testament. If John includes more
than one hundred occurrences of the designation of God as father,
49〇 / RE LIGIO N AND FAITH
Mark includes only four, Luke fifteen, and Matthew forty-two.

This is to say that the designation of God as father is Ini
tially rare and results from a later expansion, which must not be
unrelated to the permission given by Jesus to call God father.
But first of all, we must admit that fatherhood has not been the
initial category of the Gospels； the melodic theme of the Gospels,
as we see in Mark, is the coming of the kingdom, the eschatologi
cal notion par excellence. Here, as in the Old Testament, it is
because there is the Covenant that there is fatherhood； more ex
actly, the kindgom which is coming, preached by the evangelical
kerygma, is the inheritor of the new economy announced by the
prophets. It is on the basis of this category of the kingdom that
we must interpret the category of fatherhood. Eschatological
royalty and fatherhood remain inseparable right into the Lord’s
Prayer；this begins with the invocation of the Father and is con
tinued by the 4tpetitionsMconcerning name, kingdom, and will
which are understandable only in the perspective of an escha
tological fulfillment. Fatherhood is thus placed in the realm of
a theology of hope. The Father of the invocation is the same as
the God of the preaching of the kingdom, into which one enters
only if one is like a child. Thus the figure of the father, insepara
ble from the preaching of the kingdom, relates, as Jeremias puts
it, to the sich realisierende Eschatologie.
Put back into this perspective of eschatological preaching,
the title of father stands out in a special way, at the same time
that sonship receives a new meaning, as we see in the words of
Jesus that include the expression "My Father.*5 Let us read Mat
thew 11:27, which contains the core of the future Johannine
theology. A unique relation of mutual knowledge, of recognition,
constitutes henceforth true fatherhood and true sonship. M A11
things are delivered unto me of my Father：and no man knoweth
the Son, but the Father；neither knoweth any man the Father,
save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.**
It is against this background that we can understand the
Lord’s Prayer: Abba, which we could translate by “dear father.”
Here is completed the movement from designation to invocation.
Jesus, in all probability, was addressing himself to God in say
ing M Abba.w This invocation is absolutely unprecedented and
without parallel in all the literature of Jewish prayer. Jesus dares
to address himself to God as a child to his father. The reserve to
which the whole Bible testifies is broken at this proclw point. The
audacity is pofislble because a new tlmo ha« b«gun.
Far, therefore, from the addressing of God «■ father being
： / 491
easy, along the lines of a relapse into archaism, it is rare, diffi

cult, and audacious, because it is prophetic, directed toward ful
fillment rather than toward origins. It does not look backward,
toward a great ancestor, but forward, in the direction of a new
intimacy on the model of the knowledge of the son. In the exe
gesis of Paul, it is because the Spirit witnesses our sonship (Ro
mans 8:16) that we can cry Abba, Father. Far, therefore, from
the religion of the father being that of a distant and hostile tran
scendence, there is fatherhood because there is sonship, and
there is sonship because there is community of spirit.
To complete the constitution of this paradigm of fatherhood
according to the spirit, we still have to say how death— the death
of the son and eventually the death of the father一is inserted
into this genesis of meaning. We recall in what terms Freudian
psychoanalysis poses the problem：on the level of the phantasm,
there is a death of the father, but it is a murder；this murder is
the work of omnipotent desire, which dreams of itself as iin-
mortalj it gives birth, by the interiorization of the paternal im
age, to a complementary phantasm, that of the father immortal
ized beyond the murder. This is the phantasm which returns,
through the murder of the prophet, in Hebraic religion. As to
Christianity, it invents a religion of the Son in which the Son
plays a double role ：on the one hand, he expiates, for us all, the
crime of having killed God； but, at the same time, by taking over
the guilt, he becomes God at the side of the father and thus re
places the father， providing an outlet for the resentment against
the father. Freud concludes：Christianity, offspring of a religion
of the father, becomes a religion of the son.
That the death of Christ can be inscribed in the lineage of
the offspring of the phantasm of paternal murder, that it adds
to this phantasm the additional trait of realizing, at the same
time, the vow of submission to the father and that of rebellion
of the son, does not create any misgivings for us who admit that
the Oedipal structures constitute a level of instinctual articula
tion for the entire life of man. But the question is to know what
sort of repetition is thus effected by the death of the Just One in
Christianity and doubtless already in the prophetic theme of the
"'Suffering Servant,w which Freud did not take into considera
tion.
Now, psychoanalysis offers us perhaps a second way. An
other meaning of the death of the father— we have already sug-
gaitfld It— belongs to the nonneurotic outcomes of the Oedl-
|nift complex；this is the counterpart of the mutual recognition
between father and son in which the Oedipus complex may be

resolved happily. If it is true that the omnipotence of desire is
the source of the projection of an immortal father, the rectifica
tion of desire occurs through acceptance of the fathers mortality.
The philosophy of basic cultural figures helped us to take
one step further in that direction. The true kinship bond, we said
with the Philosophy of Right of Hegel, is that which is estab
lished on the level of Sittlichkeit, of the concrete ethical life ；now
this bond raises fatherhood above the contingency of individuals
and is expressed in the representation of the Penates；the death
of the father is thus blended into the representation of the bond
of fatherhood which dominates the sequence of the generations.
This death has no further need of being a murder； it is only the
suppression of particularity and of the êxterior diversity of ap
pearances^ (§ 163) which the establishment of the spiritual bond
implies.
There is, therefore, somewhere a death of the father which is
no longer a murder and which belongs to the conversion of the
phantasm into the symbol.
My hypothesis is that the death of the Just Sufferer leads to
a certain meaning of the death of God which corresponds, on the
level of religious representations, to what has begun to appear on
the two other levels of symbolization. This death of God would
be situated in the extension of the noncriminal death of the
father and would achieve the evolution of the symbol in the
sense of a death by compassion. A dying for would come to take
the place of a being killed by. As we know, the symbol of the
Just One who offers his life is rooted in Jewish prophetism and
finds its most pathetic laical expression in the chants of the
“Suffering Servant” of “second” Isaiah. Certainly the “‘Suffering
Servant” of Isaiah is not God; but if Freud is correct in holding
the murder of the prophet— of Moses, first, and then of every
prophet who plays the role of Moses redivivus— to be a reitera
tion of the murder of the father, then we can certainly say that
the death of the Suffering Servant belongs to the cycle of the
death of the father. The Just One is killed, certainly, and thereby
the aggressive impulse against the father is satisfied by means of
the offspring of the archaic paternal image； but at the same time,
and this is the essential point, the meaning of the death is re
versed：by becoming 4<dead for another/ the death of the Just
One achieves the metamorphosis of the paternal image in the
direction of a figure of kindness and compaailon. The death of
Christ stands at the end of this development! It ll tti an oblation
： / 493
that the Epistle to the Philippians celebrates it in its litur

gical hymn ：wHe humbled himself, . . . obedient unto death*
(Phil. 2:8).
Here is completed the conversion of death as murder Into
death as offering. Now this meaning is so much beyond the ex
pectation of natural man that the history of theology abounds in
purely punitive and penal interpretations of the sacrifice of
Christ which make Freud entirely right, so tenacious is the phan
tasm of the murder of the father and the punishment of the son.
For my part, I would believe that the only truly evangelical
Christology is one that would take entirely seriously the word of
the Johannine Christ: "'No one takes my life. I give it."
Is it not, then, this death of the son which can furnish us the
final schema of fatherhood, to the degree that the son is also the
father? As we know, this last development, initiated only in
Scripture— in particular, in the text of Matthew that we have
seen above— belongs rather to the epoch of the great trinitarian
and theological interpretations. It is at the outer limits of com
petency of an exegetical method of the kind I have practiced
here. I shall say two words about it, nevertheless, in relation to
Freud and to Hegel.
Freud indeed was right to say that Jesus ^by taking sin onto
himself has himself become God at the side of the father and is
thus set in his place'*； but if Christ is here the Suffering Servant,
does he not reveal, in taking the place of the father, a dimension
of the father to which death by compassion belongs primordl-
ally? In this sense, we could speak truly of the death of God as
the death of the father. And that death would be at the same
time a murder on the level of the phantasm and of the return of
the repressed, and a supreme abandonment, a supreme dispos
session of self, on the level of the most advanced symbol.
This is what Hegel has seen perfectly. Hegel is the first mod
em philosopher to have adopted the formula "God himself is
dead*' as a fundamental proposition of the philosophy of religion.
The death of God for Hegel is the death of separated transcend
ence. We must shed an idea of the Divine as Wholly Other to
reach the Idea of the Divine as spirit immanent in the commu
nity. The cruel words, as Hegel put it, the cruel words M God him
self is dead/* arc words not of atheism but of true religion, which
is a religion not of God above but of the Spirit among us.
But these words can b« uttered on different levels and thus
take on different rnMnlngfl. With Hegel himself they resonate
on two levela. They «r« flrtt of aU the words of M the unhappy
494 / RELIGIO N AND FAITH
consciousness,” which, seeking to attain absolute and immutable

certitude of itself, drives this certitude into the beyond. Hegel
recalls this at the beginning of his chapter on revealed religion,
in the recapitulation of anterior figures. Here are the terms in
which he recounts that “total loss” ：
w e see t h a t th is “ u n h a p p y c o n s c io u s n e s s ” c o n s t it u t e d th e c o u n t e r
p a r t a n d th e c o m p le m e n t o f th e p e r f e c t l y h a p p y c o n s c io u s n e s s ,
t h a t o f c o m e d y . . . . It is c o n s c io u s n e s s o f th e lo s s o f e v e r y t h in g
o f s ig n if ic a n c e in th is c e r t a in t y o f i t s e l f , a n d o f th e lo s s e v e n o f
th is k n o w le d g e o r c e r t a in t y o f i t s e l f 一 th e lo s s o f s u b s t a n c e a s w e ll
a s o f s e l f ； it is th e b it t e r p a in w h ic h fin d s e x p r e s s io n in th e c r u e l
w o r d s , ^God is dead** ( T h e P h e n o m e n o l o g y o f t h e S p ir it , p. 7 5 2 ) .
But the unhappy consciousness is still the tragic conscious

ness；as such, it belongs to the presuppositions of revealed re
ligion and corresponds to the end and general collapse of the
ancient world ；it is not on the level of the concept of revealed
religion, in which, Hegel says, the spirit is going to know itself
under the form of spirit. According to this concept, it is spirit
itself that alienates itself:
O f t h is s p ir it , w h ic h h a s l e f t th e fo r m o f s u b s t a n c e b e h in d , a n d
e n te r s e x is t e n c e in th e s h a p e o f s e lf- c o n s c io u s n e s s , w e m a y s a y ,
t h e r e fo r e — i f w e w is h to u s e te r m s d r a w n f r o m th e p r o c e s s o f
n a t u r a l g e n e r a t io n — t h a t i t h a s a r e a l m o t h e r b u t a p o te n t ia l o r
im p lic it f a t h e r . F o r a c t u a l r e a lit y , o r s e lf- c o n s c io u s n e s s , a n d im
p lic it b e in g in th e s e n s e o f s u b s t a n c e are its tw o m o m e n t s ； a n d b y
th e r e c ip r o c it y o f th e ir k e n o s is , e a c h r e lin q u is h in g or " e m p t y in g "
i t s e l f o f i t s e l f a n d b e c o m in g th e o th e r , s p ir it th u s c o m e s in to e x
is t e n c e a s th e ir u n it y ( i b i d . , p. 7 5 6 ) .
And, a little further on:

S p ir it is k n o w n a s s e lf- c o n s c io u s n e s s , a n d to th is s e lf- c o n s c io u s
n e s s i t is d ir e c t ly r e v e a le d , fo r i t is t h is s e lf- c o n s c io u s n e s s it s e lf .
T h e d iv in e n a t u r e i s th e s a m e a s th e h u m a n , a n d i t is th is u n it y
w h ic h is i n t u it iv e l y a p p r e h e n d e d ” （pp. 7 5 9 - 6 0 ) .
It is in this movement of manifestation as alienation that

death takes on its ultimate meaning, not only as death of the son,
but as death of the father. First, death of the son ：
T h e d e a th o f th e D iv in e M a n , q u a d e a t h , is a b s t r a c t n e g a t iv it y , th e
im m e d ia t e r e s u lt o f th e p r o c e s s w h ic h t e r m in a t e s o n ly in th e u n i
v e r s a lit y b e lo n g in g to n a t u r e . . . . D e a th then ceases to s ig n if y
w h a t it m e a n s d ir e c t l y — the n o n - e x is t e n c e o f thii in d iv id u a l 一 a n d ,
： / 495
b e c o m e s t r a n s fig u r e d in to th e u n iv e r s a l it y o f th e s p ir it, w h ic h liv e s

in its o w n c o m m u n io n , d ie s th e re d a il y , a n d d a ily r is e s a g a in (p .
78〇 ).
Thus death itself changes meaning on each level of actualiza

tion of spirit；like Freud, Hegel speaks of transfiguration, but in
the sense of a dialectic which passes several times by the same
point, on different levels. We must also say that the final mean
ing that the death of the son is capable of assuming is the key to
the final meaning that the death of the father is in its turn capa
ble of receiving, by a sort of remodeling of paternity along the
lines of sonship.
T h e d e a th o f th e m e d ia t o r is d e a th n o t m e r e ly o f h is n a t u r a l a s
p e c t, o f h is p a r t ic u la r s e lf - e x is t e n c e ： w h a t d ie s is n o t m e r e ly th e
o th e r c a s e m e n t , w h ic h , b e in g s trip p e d o f e s s e n t ia l B e in g , is e o ip s o
d e a d , b u t aJso th e a b s t r a c t io n o f th e D iv in e B e in g . T h e d e a t h o f
th is p ic t o r ia l id e a im p lie s a t th e s a m e t im e th e d e a th o f th e a b
s t r a c t io n o f D iv in e B e in g , w h ic h is n o t y e t a ffir m e d a s a s e lf . T h a t
d e a th is th e b it t e r n e s s o f f e e lin g o f t h e u n h a p p y c o n s c io u s n e s s ,
w h e n it f e e ls t h a t G o d H im s e lf is d e a d ( p p . 7 8 1 - 8 2 ) .
The formula of the unhappy consciousness is thus reassumed,

only it no longer pertains to unhappy consciousness but, rather,
to the spirit of community. What is sketched here could be a
theology of the weakness of God, like that which Bonhoeffer en
visaged when he said ：l<Only a weak God can bring help^ If this
theology were possible, the analogy would be complete between
the three levels which we have traversed ：between psychoanaly
sis, philosophy of spirit, and philosophy of religion. The final
theme, for each of these three disciplines, would be the inclusion
of the death of the father in the final constitution of the symbol
of fatherhood. And this death would no longer be a murder but
the most extreme abandonment of self.
I n c o n c l u s i o n , let me make a brief balance sheet of

the questions that are resolved and those that are not resolved.
Among the resolved questions I shall count the following points：
1. The comparison between the first analysis, in the field of
desire, and the last one, in the field of religious symbols, causes
a sort of analogy to appear between the instinctual organizations
and the chain of symbolic figures of faith. Moreover, this analogy
bears less on Nlructurrn than on processes; its discovery would
appear suHCcptlblr of ongondering a spirit of equity, as we
say, between pNycboanalyiilii and religion. Certainly, nothing Is
settled for all that； and everything remains open and even unde
cided at this stage of reflection. In any event, the right of psycho
analysis to deal with the religious phenomenon remains
complete ：all the analyses of our third part are inscribed in the
^field^ of instinctual formations； in a certain way, the history of
the divine names belongs to the adventures of the libido. This
conclusion ceases to surprise us if we remain attentive to the
diversity of ways out of the Oedlpal crisis and to the species of
discontinuous continuity which reconnects the organizations of
the nonneurotic outcome to those of the neurotic outcome. This
is why the notion of the return of the repressed must remain
quite open and problematic. Conversely, psychoanalysis does not
have the power to reduce the meanings of the religious sphere
or to deprive them of their proper sense, whatever be their de
gree of libidinal investment. In this respect we can reproach
Freud, above all in Moses and Monotheism, with having wished
to proceed directly to a psychoanalysis of the believer without
making the detour of an exegesis of the texts in which his faith
is documented.
But this first conclusion is of less interest to me today than
the following ones. After all, the armistice which it proposes
expresses at best the diplomatic virtues of a good arbiter in the
war of the hermeneutics. I will emphasize, rather, the second
and the third conclusions.
2. The second conclusion is this ：the center of gravity and
the pivot of the whole investigation is the phenomenology and
the philosophy of the spirit developed in the second part；there
lies the philosophical strength of the analysis. The two other
panels are connected with this central panel in the direction, on
the one hand, of what I called an archaeology and, on the other
hand, in the direction of a teleology, which points toward a the
ology of hope without, however, necessarily implying it. Remove
this middle panel and the analysis is undone or destroys itself in
insoluble conflicts； many confrontations between psychoanalysis
and religion are badly directed and badly controlled for lack of
this philosophical instrument and the mediation exercised by
what I call concrete reflection.
3. My third conclusion is, in my view, even more important；
it bears on the precise result of this investigation, namely, the
schema of fatherhood. If I resume the summary description
given in the introduction, it would appear that it Is enriched in
some important traits. In my working hypotheili I laid emphasis
on the passing from phantasm to symbol, on the role of 兵 gures -
： / 497
other than kinship in the emergence of the symbol, and, finally,

on the return of the initial phantasm in the terminal symbol. The
triple analysis to which this process of symbolism has been sub
mitted has brought to light traits which give us much to think
about. First, the retreat of physical generation in favor of a word
of designation；then, the replacement of a doubly destructive
identification by the mutual recognition of father and son; fi
nally, the access to a symbol of fatherhood detached from the
person of the father. It is perhaps this last trait which is the most
exacting for thought, for it introduces not only contingency but
death into the building-up of the symbol. We saw something of
this on the instinctual level, with the understanding of the death
of the father and the death of desire；then, on the level of basic
cultural figures, with the Hegelian theme of the family commu
nity reassembled under the sign of the Penates；finally, on the
theological level, with the "death of God1*in one or another of the
meanings that this theme is susceptible of assuming. This link
between death and the symbol is what has not yet been suffi
ciently thought out.
With this last remark we have already moved into the area
of unresolved problems. It is on this point that I shall finish. One
fundamental problem remains in suspense. What does the dis
tribution into three fields, which has governed this analysis, sig
nify? I see very well that they are delimited by different meth-
odologies ：an economics, a phenomenology, and a hermeneutics.
But one cannot hide indefinitely behind this kind of response,
which avoids the crucial question, namely, what about the reali
ties themselves? For, finally, economics is an economics of de
sire, phenomenology a phenomenology of spirit, hermeneutics
an exegesis of religious figures. How are desire, spirit, and God
connected? Put differently, what is the reason for the analogies
of structure and process among the three fields considered?
What that question demands of the philosopher is nothing else
but this ：to undertake again, with renewed energy, the task as
sumed in the last century by Hegel, of a dialectical philosophy
which would take up the diversity of the schemes of experience
and reality into a systematic unity. Now, it is indeed with re
newed energy that we must take up this task once again, if it is
true that, on the one hand, the unconscious ought to be assigned
another place than the categories of reflective philosophy and
that, on the other hand, hope Is destined to open what system
tends to cl〇 Nr up. That U the task. But who today could as-
flume It?
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Paul Ricoeur

THE ATHLONE PRESS

English translation © Northwestern University Press 1974

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN o 485 30061 3 PB

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Editofs Introduction, by Don Ihde / ix

Existence and Hermeneutics, translated by

Structure and Hermeneutics, translated by Kathleen

Consciousness and the Unconscious, translated by

Nabert on Act and Sign, translated by Peter McCormick / 211

"Original Sinw：A Study in Meaning, translated by

Preface to Bultmann, translated by Peter McCormick / 381

T h e VECTORS AND LINES OF FORCE of Paul Ricoeur’s

1. See Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology： The Philosophy of

start and, within the strictest confines of a structuralist analysis,

already polysemic, as Ricoeur underlines. Within itself word

This • ■ . trait of freedom in the light of hope removes us . . .

There is in this displacement of faith from the center through

Eschatology takes precedence over ethics in the “new ethics.”

R i c o e u r ’ s m a s s i v e b i b l i o g r a p h y — which now consists

which is an act of man speaking. Ricoeur^ use of multiple con­

I t is o u r h o p e that this long process of minute decisions will

To E nrico C a ste lli

My p u r p o s e h e r e is to explore the paths opened to con­

T h e h e r m e n e u t i c p r o b l e m arose long before Hus­

T h e r e a r e t w o w a y s to ground hermeneutics in phe­

III. T he Level of Semantics

It is f i r s t o f a l l a n d a l w a y s in language that all

these meanings overlap, that the spiritual meaning is ^trans-

related forms, such as metaphor, allegory, and simile. What is

of language which we lack today. We have at our disposal today

IV. T he L evel of Reflection

T h e p r e c e d i n g a n a l y s i s , dealing with the semantic

A t t h e e n d o f t h is i t i n e r a r y , which has led us from

philosophical reflection on psychoanalysis. What can we expect

that language is deeply rooted in desire, in the instinctual im­

Consciousness is thus drawn outside itself, in front of itself, to­

It is in this sense, beginning with our introduction, that we have

Hermeneutics and Structuralism

T h e s u b j e c t of the present conference1 is hermeneu­

I intend to look for a third temporality, a profound time

hermeneutics to structuralism, the historicity of the one to the

As w e k n o w , structuralism proceeds by applying a

sign is arbitrary, insofar as it represents an isolated relation of a

4. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade

15. Roman Jalcobson, ‘"Prlncipien der historischen Phonologie,”

to the relation of understanding. The relation is objective, in­

II. T he T ransposition of the Linguistic Model in

O n e c a n f o l l o w this transposition in L^vi-Strauss^s

an alliance and not a biological modality：marriage rules repre­

The entire program of The Savage Mind is contained here,

It is indeed in the idea of a general language, or code,

religion; here we no longer have only “a kind of language,” as in

III. The Savage Mind

W i t h The Savage Mind,12Levi-Strauss proceeds to a bold

savage thought. Nevertheless, the reader who goes from Struc­

high price with the totemists, the counterpart being so great,

There perhaps exists another pole of mythical thought where

of the great civilizations of Europe and Asia there is a remarkable absence

Of course, L6vl-Strauss opposes myth and science only to

Mythical history is itself In tho service of the struggle of

. . . so-called primitive peoples have managed to evolve not un­

which is an act of man speaking. Ricoeur^ use of multiple con

My p u r p o s e h e r e is to explore the paths opened to con

T h e h e r m e n e u t i c p r o b l e m arose long before Hus

T h e r e a r e t w o w a y s to ground hermeneutics in phe

that language is deeply rooted in desire, in the instinctual im

Consciousness is thus drawn outside itself, in front of itself, to

T h e s u b j e c t of the present conference1 is hermeneu

to the relation of understanding. The relation is objective, in

an alliance and not a biological modality：marriage rules repre

savage thought. Nevertheless, the reader who goes from Struc

. . . so-called primitive peoples have managed to evolve not un

The myth's function, thus presented in terms of structure, ap

The connection between them is not casual but metaphorical. Sex

their relating. This system of symbolics is nowhere more ap

of language ；polysemy and symbolism are part of the constitu

A new concept of structure is thus required to take into ac

cumulative entity, capable of acquiring new dimensions of mean

For perhaps we are always on the way toward language, al

company of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. Anyone who ar

allowed itself to be decentered from consciousness through re

Hence psychoanalytic method and doctrine cannot be distin