Double Hermeneutic

The "Double Hermeneutic" as deployed in Rollins's text names a two-directional interpretive practice in which the reading subject simultaneously engages (1) the inherited religious tradition — its texts, symbols, and doctrines, which function as a sedimented Symbolic Order — and (2) the concrete, singular situation of encounter with the other. This doubled movement is not a simple balancing act between two equally weighted poles; it is governed by what Rollins calls a "prejudice of love" oriented toward the singular other, which introduces an asymmetry. The tradition is never read in abstraction from the encountered situation, and conversely the situation is never read without the interpretive resources tradition provides. Together these two axes constitute a reading practice that is neither purely foundationalist (grounded in a closed textual authority) nor purely situationist (dissolved into contextual particularity).

Crucially, the hermeneutic operates within a "transfinite" rather than merely infinite range of legitimate readings — a formulation that draws on the mathematical concept of the transfinite to insist that the field of valid interpretations is genuinely bounded, even if it exceeds any finitely enumerable set. This prevents the double hermeneutic from collapsing into arbitrariness or relativism while simultaneously refusing to reduce meaning to a single authoritative reading. The paradox at its core — that fidelity to the tradition may demand the abandonment of the tradition — aligns with the Lacanian logic of the Act: a genuine ethical response to the singular other can rupture the very symbolic framework that made the response possible, without thereby becoming mere transgression.

Within the source peter-rollins-how-not-to-speak-of-god-paraclete-press-2006, the Double Hermeneutic sits at the intersection of several cross-referenced concepts. It presupposes the concept of Transfinite Reading as its formal constraint: the range of readings produced by the double movement is transfinite rather than infinite — bounded yet inexhaustible — which prevents the hermeneutic from licensing any interpretation whatsoever. It also implicates the concept of Singularity: the "prejudice of love" is oriented not toward a universal or abstract neighbour but toward the irreplaceable, un-substitutable singular other encountered in a specific situation. This echoes the Lacanian framing of the Neighbour as a figure who exceeds imaginary identification and demands ethical response precisely because of the opaque, undomesticatable core they carry.

The Double Hermeneutic additionally engages the Symbolic Order in a distinctive way: rather than treating tradition as a closed, self-sufficient system of signification, it reads the Symbolic Order as always already incomplete and therefore requiring supplementation by the lived encounter. This incompleteness is the formal condition that makes the double movement necessary in the first place — a fully totalized tradition would need no situational corrective. The concept also resonates with The Act insofar as the hermeneutic may demand a paradoxical rupture: remaining faithful to the tradition by abandoning it. This mirrors the Lacanian Act's logic of a gesture that suspends the very symbolic coordinates from which it emerges in order to respond to the real of the situation. Finally, the reference to a bounded rather than bad-Infinite range of readings aligns the Double Hermeneutic with the Hegelian true infinite — a self-limiting structure — rather than the spurious infinite of unconstrained interpretive play.

How (Not) to Speak of GodPeter Rollins · 2006 (page unknown)

The end result is a faith that engages in a double hermeneutic by which we read both our religious tradition and the situation we find ourselves in.

The phrase "read both" makes explicit the structural duality of the hermeneutic — "our religious tradition" (the inherited Symbolic Order as sediment of the big Other) and "the situation we find ourselves in" (the singular, contingent encounter with the real other) — and the conjunction "both" insists that neither pole can be reduced to or dissolved into the other, which is precisely what distinguishes this from either fundamentalist textualism or situationist pragmatism.