Hermeneutics as Philosophical Neutralization

Hermeneutics as Philosophical Neutralization names the theoretical operation by which Ricoeur's hermeneutic framework — in Lacan's reading — appropriates the Freudian discovery of the unconscious and defuses its radical, structural force. The "neutralization" consists in rendering the unconscious legible as a system of meanings available for interpretive recovery: by translating the cut of the signifier, the irreducibility of desire, and the discontinuous gap that is the unconscious into a philosophy of interpretation, hermeneutics reabsorbs what is most scandalous in Freud — the fact that the unconscious is not a hidden treasury of latent sense but a structural locus constituted by lack — back into the horizon of philosophical meaning-giving. Ricoeur, as philosopher, claims the unconscious for hermeneutics and thereby "monopolizes" it: he neutralizes the Freudian libido as effective presence of desire by converting it into something a reflective subject can interpret, understand, and appropriate.

This move is structurally allied, in Lacan's argument in Seminar XI, with Jung's archetypalism: both operations dissolve the specificity of the Freudian cut by restoring a ground of meaning — whether archetypal images or hermeneutic symbol — where Freud had installed a radical absence. Hermeneutics thus neutralizes the key Lacanian-Freudian insistence that the unconscious is not a depth but an extimate otherness structured like a language, that desire has no recoverable object or originary sense, and that the signifier produces the subject precisely by generating an irreducible lack rather than a plenitude of significance awaiting interpretation.

This concept appears once in jacques-lacan-seminar-11 (p. 168) and belongs to Lacan's sustained polemic, across Seminar XI, against theoretical competitors who would domesticate the Freudian unconscious. It stands in direct relation to all five cross-referenced canonicals. Against the canonical concept of the Unconscious — defined as a structural-linguistic locus that is "neither being nor non-being," pre-ontological and extimate, not a reservoir of recoverable contents — hermeneutics as philosophical neutralization is precisely the move that converts that structural gap into interpretable depth, flattening the discontinuity of the unconscious into a philosophical horizon of meaning. Against Desire (whose cause is the objet a, a void, not a retrievable object) and Lack (a constitutive structural gap, not a contingent absence), hermeneutics restores the illusion of a fullness of sense — as if desire aimed at a recoverable signification and lack could be overcome through reflective interpretation. The concept thus functions as a critical foil: it names what the Lacanian theory of the Signifier and of Structuralism must not become. Structuralism, in Lacan's appropriation, insists that meaning is differential and that the symbolic order always contains a hole (S(Ⱥ)); hermeneutics, by contrast, treats the symbolic as transparent to interpretation. Hermeneutics as Philosophical Neutralization is therefore a specification — a named negative example — that helps sharpen what is properly Lacanian about each of these canonicals by contrast: the unconscious cannot be hermeneuticized without losing its structural, desiring, and lacking character. The concept extends Lacan's broader critique of any approach (Jungian, ego-psychological, or phenomenological) that would suture the radical cut of the signifier.

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoanalysisJacques Lacan · 1964 (p.168)

philosopher that he is, he monopolizes it for himself. He calls it hermeneutics.

The phrase "monopolizes it for himself" is theoretically loaded because it names a gesture of philosophical appropriation — Ricoeur captures the Freudian unconscious and re-registers it under a concept ("hermeneutics") that belongs to the philosopher's own disciplinary horizon, thereby stripping it of its Freudian specificity as a structural gap irreducible to interpretation; "he calls it hermeneutics" marks the renaming as the act of neutralization itself, as if the mere act of philosophical nomination were enough to dissolve the radical cut Lacan attributes to the unconscious and to desire.