On 2 Apr 1996, Karlson Ronald wrote:
>
> Since I don't know where everyone else is in their reading, I'll just
> pose a few questions concerning the first two sections of "The Prose
> of the World."
>
> 1) On the distinction between hermeneutics and semiology - Perhaps
> its because the two fields are superimposed in the analysis, but I'm
> having trouble understanding this distinction. For example: "
> 'Nature' is trapped in the thin layer that holds semiology and
> hermeneutics one above the other." Can anyone clear this up a bit?
>
> I was going to add a few more questions, but I'll see what responses
> come from this before moving on.
>
>
I don't know if this will actually clear anything up even a little bit,
but here's my take on the hermeneutics-semiology thing. Just a bit
further on from where you quoted, at the end of the paragraph, it goes
"...because the similitudes that form the graphics of the world are one
'cog' out of alignment with those that form its discourse, knowledge and
the infinite labor it involves find here the space that is proper to
them: it is their task to weive their way across this distance, pursuing
an endless zigzag course from resemblance to what resembles it."(OT
p.30) So here the graphics of the world is the effect of hermeneutics
and its discourse is the effect of semiology, and in that it is one cog
off, one step behind, semiology is always chasing, never quite becoming
the thing that it resembles such that it could exhaust it by speaking,
yet maintaining a close enough affinity that produces knowledge through
its reference, or through the dual interchange of reference between
semiology and hermeneutics. That is, hermeneutics delimits the
ontological boundaries of 'nature', establishes firmly the limits of its
possibility, while semilogy instantiates it within a known, or at least a
knowable frame. This at any rate holds for the relation between
hermeneutics and semiology in the sixteenth century.
At the end of "Nietzsche, Freud, Marx" it says -- "The life of
interpretation...is to believe that there is nothing but interpretation.
It seems to me that one must understand well that which many of our
contemporaries forget, that _hermeneutics and semilogy are two ferocious
enemies_. A hermeneutic that in fact winds itself around a semiology,
believing in the absolute existence of signs, gives up the violence, the
incompleteness, the infinity of interpretations, so as to create a reign
of terror where the mark rules and suspects language -- we recognize here
Marxism after Marx. On the other hand, a hermeneutic that envelopes
around itself this intermediate region of madness and pure language
enters into the domain of languages that never stop implicating
themselves -- it is there that we recognize Nietzsche."
There's an interesting juxtaposition here between the statement from OT
where 'knowledge is an infinite labor' (carried out as an exegesis
between hermeneutics and semiology), and the suggestion that semiology is
incapable of engaging in such a task precisely because it stifles
knowledge, reducing it down to the pin-point of an apprehendible quantity,
a mark which requires neither language to attest to its efficacy. At
this piont it seems to me that the jib at marxism is somewhat of a ruse
in that it tends to shadow the play between semiology and hermeneutics.
In the nineteenth century hermeneutics and the infinit play, or maybe
its the infinit violence of language _once again_ becomes possible. In
the intervening period between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries
the posibility of interpretation was held in suspence and semilogy and
hermeneutics ceased to function in concert with one another. That is,
with the Cartesian cogito knowledge takes on sharp edges, it is clear and
distinct without ambiguity at the fringe, resemblance and that which it
resembles no longer chase each other becasue there is no distance, or
difference, between these two, rather things simply are without
resembling. Or, as Foucault would have it, "If the techniques of
interpretation of the sixteenth century were left suspended by the
evolution of Western thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
if the Baconian and Cartesian critique of resemblance certainly played a
large part in there being put in parentheses, the nineteenth century, and
quite singularly Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, placed us once again in the
presence of a new possibility of interpreation. They founded anew the
possibility of a hermeneutic."
Flannon