The Conflict of Interpretations Essays in - Paul Ricoeur
The Conflict of Interpretations Essays in - Paul Ricoeur
Edited by
The Conflict
of Interpretations
Essays in Hermeneutics
DON IHDE
Reprinted 2000
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
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
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
[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
V. R e l i g i o n a n d F a it h
Bibliography / 499
Index / 507
Editor’s Introduction
[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
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.
II
Don Ihd垮
State University of New York
Stony Brook
December, 1973
The Conflict
of Interpretations
I. T h e O r i g i n o f H e r m e n e u t i c s
[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
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
T he L inguistic Model
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
Structure and Hermeneutics / 39
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.
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.
4〇 / STRUCTURALISM
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.).
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
Structure and Hermeneutics / 53
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
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
Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin.
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
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
【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
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
[Ml
100 / P S Y C H O A N A L Y S IS
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
II. C r it iq u e of F r e u d ia n C o n c e p t s
6 . [C*. = conaciou丨
nes«; U c i = the unconscious; Pcs. = preconscious-
nets.]
I〇 6 / PSYC H OA N A LYSIS
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
Consciousness and the Unconscious / 109
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
Iiax]
122 / PSYC H O A N A LYSIS
I A H e r m e n e u t ic s of C ulture
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).
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).
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,
Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Culture / 133
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
^Egyptian 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
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
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
Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Culture / 147
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.
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).
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.
can change our ethic in the long run because he is not a moralist
for the immediate future.
E x p o s it io n
[160]
A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud / 161
D evelopm ent
a. Ibid., p. 65.
3. Ibid., p. 395.
A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud / 16 9
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
172 / P S YCHOANALYSIS
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
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
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
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 :^Analytic treatment should be
carried through as far as possible under privation in a state
一
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
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
Technique and Nontechnique / 187
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
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
Technique and Nontechnique / 195
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
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 ”
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
II. I n t e r p r e t a t io n s of th e W ork of A rt
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).
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
Hermeneutics
and Phenomenology
Nabert on
Act and Sign
[aiil
212 / PHENOMENOLOGY
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. ^Every 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.]
226 / PHENOM ENOLOGY
II
I ll
IV
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 ^externaF 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
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 .
The Question of the Subject / 241
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
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 ”
8. Signs, p. 85.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.§ p. Q〇 .
The Question of the Subject / 249
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.
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-
The Question of the Subject / 255
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.
256 / P H E N O M E N O L O G Y
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 ”
The Symbolism
of Evil Interpreted
“Original Sin ” :
A Study in Meaning
II
Ill
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
“Original Sin ” : A Study in Meaning / 283
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
284 / THE SYMBOLISM OF EVIL
[a87l
288 / THE SYMBOLISM OF EVIL
I. T h e O r d er o f S y m b o l
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
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,
The Hermeneutics of Symbols I : / 299
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
T ragic
8. Ib id .3p. 38.
9. Ib id .
The Hermeneutics of Symbols I : / 309
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
The Hermeneutics of Symbols I : / 311
[3 !sl
316 / THE S Y M B O L I S M OF EVIL
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
The Hermeneutics of Symbols II : / 323
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 ^ahead" 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
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
The Hermeneutics of Symbols II : / 331
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
338 / THE S Y M B O L I S M OF EVIL
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
Ill, E v il as a K e r y g m a t ic P roblem
I. D i f f i c u l t i e s and P a r a d o x es
【354】
Interpretation of the Myth of Punishment / 355
(§ 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 :
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).
368 / THE SYMBOLISM OF EVIL
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
Interpretation of the Myth of Punishment / 369
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
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
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.
376 / THE SYMBOLISM OF EVIL
I. T h e H e r m e n e u t i c Q u e s t i o n
[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
II. D e m y t h o l o g i z a t i o n
III. T h e T a s k o f I n t e r p r e t a t i o n
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.
400 / RELIGION AND FAITH
[4 〇al
Freedom in the Light of Hope / 403
I. T h e K e r y g m a o f F r e e d o m
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
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
4. Ibid., p. 36.
436 / RELIGION AND FAITH
III. T he R e l ig io u s D im e n s io n
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-
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
I. O n A c c u sa tio n
II. O n C o n so la tio n
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
Religion, Atheism, and Faith / 463
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 ) .
5. Ib id ., Pt. Ill, M
Tbe Great Nostalgia/'
Religion, Atheism, and Faith / 467
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
[468]
Fatherhood From Phantasm to Symbol
: / 469
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
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 ^esprit*' (Hegel'a ''Gelsf1) as ^spirit" rather than
^ind,** and in harmony with this the title of Hegel's work appears in the
text •• Tht Phenomenology of th§ SpirU.— Ed.]
476 / RELIGION AND FAITH
III. T h e D ia l e c t ic of D iv in e F a th er h o o d
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 «.]
Fatherhood From Phantasm to Symbol
: / 483
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
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 ,
Fatherhood From Phantasm to Symbol
: / 495
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 -
Fatherhood From Phantasm to Symbol
: / 497
[499]
5 〇〇 / BIBLIOGRAPHY