The Ideal of the Redoubtable
The Homeric hero never escaped the merely reactive project of investing
himself in a quasi- imaginary posture. In this sense, the stance of the hero
quite conspicuously assumed the aspect of a symptomatic compromise, at once
obsessed with the anxiety- producing void, almost compulsively needing to
exaggerate its threatening aspects, while also defensively distancing itself
and seeking consolation in the reassuring approval of the tribe. The
fundamental structure embodied by the archaic ethos thus emerges as precisely
homologous with the bifold structure of the “perceptual complex” of the
Freudian Thing. The hero invested him-self in a commanding imago in order to
steel himself in the face of the anxious unknown of the Thing. The pagan cult
of worshipful devotion to the redoubtable hero can thus be interpreted as a
defensive formation. The pose of epic courage was in fact a symptomatic
compromise, divided between courageous exposure to an abyssal darkness and an
essentially imaginary investment in a shining, compensatory persona. If the
hero’s stature was a reflection of his self- possession in the eyes of
others, he also functioned as an inspiring model for that very crowd, thereby
allowing them to stabilize their own relation to the abyssal char-acter of
existence. The Everyman, too, could in his own humbler way seek to imitate
the redoubtable. The heroes of legend were thus the ethi-cal models by means
of which everyday life stabilized itself in the face of anxiety, pain, loss,
deprivation, and death.44 Perhaps it is from this point of view that we can
recognize in a more complete way how and why the pagan Greek culture invented
theater. To live even an ordinary life was to play a role for which the model
was larger than life. The very basis of the archaic ethos was a kind of
drama. Quite literally, life imitated art.
Christ’s appearance
The contrast of Christianity with both paganism and Judaism is strik- ing in
a number of ways. The first concerns appearances. The pagan gods evidenced
themselves in the appearances of things, typically appearances that were in
appropriate proportion to the enormity of the forces the gods personified.
Yet those divine forces themselves ultimately emanated from an inaccessible
beyond. In this limited respect, the Jewish God is akin to the pagan gods in
that he remains in principle invisible, unimageable. In Jesus, by contrast,
we have a God who unreservedly appears, and who appears precisely in his very
humble and degraded condition. Christ is the only god who, as he does when he
holds open his wounds to allay Thomas’s doubts about his identity, willingly
shows everything in plain sight. He has absolutely nothing to hide.5 In this
way, the Christian god might even be said to reverse the core principle of
the Judaic prohibition of idol- atry.6 Precisely because the Christian God
very purposefully assumes the form of a poor wanderer, Jesus is the God who
must appear. Christ is thus the God of revelation par excellence, though only
by way of an infinite paradox. What is revealed is the very opposite of
everything anyone ever thought about the nature of the divine. In Christ, the
strength and maj-esty of God is inseparable from his shockingly obvious
weakness.
Commandment to Love
Another of Jesus’s most famous quotations may also be taken to im-ply that
his essential teaching brings divinity wholly down to earth, plac-ing it not
between the terrestrial valley here below and a heavenly beyond but rather
wholly between loving persons. “For where two or three are gathered in my
name,” he says, “there am I in the midst of them.”12 The implicit
reference here would seem to be to the Jewish minyan, the re-quirement for
certain prayers and rites to be performed only among a quorum of ten
observant Jews. Yet Jesus appears to skip the requirement of a minimum- size
group, asserting instead that God may be fully present among any two or more
right- hearted people. What is at stake is related to the essential reality
that is Christ: the intersection of the divine and the human, the Word made
flesh. The radical message of Jesus appears to for-swear appeals to a
transcendent God in favor of a wholly immanent one. As Jesus says, “The
Kingdom of God is within you.”13 The same theme is audible in Jesus’s words
from Matthew about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting the
imprisoned: “Truly, I say unto you, as you did it to one of the least of
these my brethren, you did it to me.”14
The upshot of this discussion for my primary argument may by now be obvious.
From a Lacanian point of view, the groundbreaking event en-acted by the
teaching of Jesus is to locate the divine directly and without qualification
in the embrace of the neighbor- Thing— the person who is standing right in
front of you. This radical move enjoins the followers of Jesus to drop the
defensive posture toward what is unknown and anxiety producing in the Other
in favor of a radical opening, an unhesitating and fully vulnerable
acceptance of the Other. If Judaism succeeded in “making space for the Other,
” the revolutionary breakthrough of the young rabbi from Nazareth was to
insist that the realization of divinity occurs when we positively engage the
immediately present Other- Person and lovingly accommodate ourselves to them.
The Christian subject must suspend all defensive barriers toward the Other,
opening oneself even toward what appears to be threatening, alien, and
anxiety producing. This posture of fearlessly reaching out to the strange is
what grounds the Christian definition of love. Here we arrive at the
explanation of the bon mot of Lacan in which he plays on the homophony of é
trange and être- ange. For Lacan, the angelic arises in our welcoming
reception of the strange Other- Person. In the course of Civilization and Its
Discontents, Freud famously re-jects the Christian admonition to love the
neighbor, which he judges to be a kind a thoughtless and even profligate
squandering of one’s affec-tion. Freud thus writes: My love is something
valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection. It imposes
duties on me for whose fulfillment I must be ready to make sacrifices. If I
love someone, he must deserve it in some way. (I leave out of account the use
he may be to me, and also his possible significance for me as a sexual
object, for neither of these two kinds of relationship comes into question
where the precept to love my neighbor is concerned.). He deserves it if he is
so like me in important ways that I can love myself in him; and he deserves
it if he is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my
own self in him.15 For Lacan, the problem with Freud’s position is that it
reduces love to an exchange in the imaginary, a relation that merely reflects
my image of myself or of my ideal ego. Ironically, what is missed by Freud’s
approach is nothing less than Freud’s own discovery of the unconscious. As
Lacan says, “Freud makes comments about this that are quite right. . . . He
reveals how one must love a friend’s son because, if the friend were to lose
his son, his suffering would be intolerable. . . . But what escapes him is
perhaps the fact that precisely because we take that path we miss the opening
on to jouissance.”16 For Lacan, the embrace of what is like myself merely
flatters my narcissism. “It is a fact of experience,” he says, “that what
I want is the good of others in the image of my own. That doesn’t cost too
much.”17 By contrast, what is demanded by Jesus is a gesture that exposes me
to something beyond my own reflection in the mirror, some-thing that speaks
to the threatening prospect, beyond mere pleasure, of jouissance.18
From a Lacanian point of view, the key to understanding the true meaning of
Jesus’s message about loving the neighbor thus resides in how we interpret
the end of the phrase. When we are enjoined to love the neighbor as thyself,
what is at stake is the truth of thyself. The appeal to “thyself” should be
taken to indicate that a genuine opening toward the Other is inevitably tied
to an opening to what is other, alien, and threatening in oneself.
Psychoanalytically, that means an opening to the unconscious. What is strange
in the neighbor calls up what I myself have repressed, what threatens the
stability of my own ego. What is unknown in the neighbor therefore presents
itself as tinged with evil, the most fearsome prospect of which is its
correspondence with the “evil” that lies unacknowledged in myself. Thus
Lacan concludes that “every time that Freud stops short in horror at the
consequences of the commandment to love one’s neighbor, we see evoked the
presence of that fundamental evil which dwells within this neighbor. But if
that is the case, then it also dwells within me. And what is more of a
neighbor to me than this heart within which is that of my jouissance and
which I don’t dare go near?”
Love Thine Enemy
The Christian commandment, by contrast, is more substantively positive,
laying down the challenge of an act of love that does not stop at refusing
encroachment but calls for actively engaging the neighbor. What is called for
is not merely refraining from harm (renouncing murder, theft, adultery, lies,
and covetousness) but actively embracing the Other, extending oneself toward
the Other in love.
If Jesus’s commandment to love calls for more open and positive action
toward the Other, it also calls for action that transcends all practical
considerations. The love involved cannot be reducible to any mere service of
utility. To fully acknowledge both these dimensions requires that we read
Jesus’s demand for love of the neighbor in conjunction with its almost
impossibly challenging complement: love of the enemy. The true radicality of
Jesus’s teaching is thus to be located in Matthew 5:43– 47: “You have
heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’
But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. . .
. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the
tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more
are you doing than others?”
Jesus’s injunction to love the enemy has little antecedent in Jew-ish law.
One passage of the Hebrew Bible that comes close is again from Leviticus: “
The stranger who sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.
The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you,
and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of
Egypt.”21 But it is precisely here that a Lacanian perspective becomes most
decisive. If we allow that the jouissance of the Other is what is truly at
stake, then the love of the neighbor overlaps with the challenge of loving
the enemy. By the measure of the unknown jouis-sance of the Other— by the
measure of das Ding— the neighbor is an enemy. As Lacan puts it, “Perhaps
the meaning of the love of one’s neighbor that could give me the true
direction is to be found here. . . . [M]y neighbor’s jouissance, his
harmful, malignant jouissance, is that which poses a prob-lem for my love.”
22 What is meant here is that even when I am dealing with people I know and
trust, it is likely that I will at some point have to contend with something
deeply strange in them, something beyond my comfort zone, even something
threatening.
The challenge of loving the neighbor consists in accepting the Oth-er’s
undomesticated jouissance, which inevitably means accepting some portion of
one’s own. This linkage between the jouissance of the Other and that of the
subject— a linkage that forms the very spine of Lacan’s cardinal dictum
about human desire as the desire of the Other— enlarges upon the absolute
heart of the Christian outlook: the emphasis on for-giveness. That is to say,
we begin to see not only how forgiveness must be involved in extending love
to the enemy— accepting what is weak, failed, or evil in the enemy— but
also how such forgiveness must include an acknowledgment of one’s own
weakness, failure, and evil. Indeed, with-out such an acknowledgment of one’
s own kinship with the enemy, the gesture of love risks becoming at best an
act of empty condescension, at worst a disguised and hypocritical form of
self- congratulation.
Narcissistic Masochism
But what does such willing acceptance of suffering mean? For the mainstream
Christian tradition, its significance aligns with the Pauline interpretation
of Jesus’s death as a redemptive sacrifice. Faithful followers are invited
to follow the Messiah in offering their own lives in the cause of universal
atonement. True disciples must throw themselves on the great funeral pyre
whose purifying flames will finally redeem humanity and win immortal life.
This interpretation is attested by many monastic traditions, for which the
voluntary acceptance of pain and deprivation becomes in itself an index of
saintliness. The history of Christianity has thus spawned myriad cults of
pure- minded suffering in the service of salvation. Viewed
psycho-analytically, however, the phantasmatic structure of this ascetic
trend risks merely blending narcissism with masochism. At one point, Lacan
analyzes the dynamic involved by suggesting that Christian piety is a mode of
iden-tifying oneself with the scrap of severed foreskin. That scrap
represents the inexorable remainder, the leftover of the signifying process:
the objet a. The Christian masochistically identifies in toto with this “
waste object,” sacrificing itself to the greater glory of God. What is the
remainder? It is what survives the ordeal of the division of the field of the
Other through the presence of the subject. . . . [T]he Christian solution was
. . . none other than the mirage that is attached to the masochistic outcome,
inasmuch as the Christian has learnt, through the dialectic of Redemption, to
identify ideally with he who made himself identical with this same object,
the waste object left be- hind out of divine retribution. . . . [T]he crux of
masochism, which is an attempt to provoke the Other’s anxiety, here become
God’s anxiety, has become second nature in the Christian.
“But wait,” protests the critic, “isn’t the objet a Lacan’s definition
of the object- cause of desire? In identifying with that object, don’t
Christians effectively offer themselves as a special object of desire?”
That is exactly the point. Insofar as saintly Christian martyrs become caught
up in this structure, they embody the very blend of narcissism and masochism
we just referred to. In this self- flagellating identification with the objet
a, Christian ascetics offer themselves as the privileged object of desire.
Yet for that very reason the underlying structure becomes essen-tially
perverse. As Slavoj k compellingly argues, the basic strategy is
comparable to that of the fireman who deliberately sets a house on fire so
that he may play the hero who arrives just in time to put it out.30
The irony is that the amalgam of narcissism and masochism that often passes
for saintliness may function to sidestep Jesus’s exhortation toward love of
the Other. Can we not glimpse such a refusal of real en-gagement with the
Other in the famous story told about Saint Catherine of Siena? Disgusted by
the pus that flowed from the festering wound of a soldier she was nursing,
Catherine gathered a cup of the pus and drank it. It is almost impossible not
to suspect that this gesture of extravagant self- punishment derived more
from Catherine’s fervent desire to stage a spectacular demonstration of her
own piety than from any real concern for the patient she tended.
Embracing the Cross
So is there another, somehow more authentic function performed by the fantasy
of crucifixion that better symbolizes the essential spiritual mean-ing of the
Jesus gospel? Lacan does not expressly provide an answer to this question,
but we can venture a hypothesis on the premises that we have been unfolding.
The crucial thing is to recognize in the image of crucifixion an emblem of
the subject’s embracing precisely what is for-eign and threatening in the
Other, not just as occasion for forbearance or forgiveness of that Other but
as an opening to what is foreign and threatening in the subject her- or
himself. In this embrace, the subject “dies” away from its accustomed
understanding of itself as it is opened toward what is other in itself. Such
“dying away” can be understood as relinquishing the claims of the ego in
favor of an opening toward the unconscious. In this way we can reread the
famous passage from Matthew in which Jesus calls his fol-lowers to achieve
new life by dying. “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and
take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose
it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
The paradox expressed in the saying runs parallel with Lacan’s rereading of
Freud’s epigram Wo Es war, soll Ich werden. Where the defensive ego was,
there the subject (reliant on what is alien in the Other as the clue to what
is unknown and alien in oneself) shall come to be. If the defended ego
succeeds in fully preserving itself, the desiring subject never comes to
life.
Hegel, whose thought is everywhere profoundly informed by a Chris-tian
sensibility, fully endorses the view that the distinctive core of
Chris-tianity is the commandment to love one’s neighbor, while also
insisting that true love must engage precisely what is most other in the
Other. The all- important consequence of such loving is the way the opening
to the Other is inevitably challenging for the established identity of the
self. To truly love is to be transformed, as the engagement with the Other
allows for the subject’s encounter with what is other and unknown in itself.
In a superb book on Hegel, Todd McGowan provides a succinct account of this
crucial dimension of Hegel’s thought. In Hegel’s conception, Mc- Gowan
observes, Christianity becomes the most revolutionary religion ever
conceived. It embraces love as the actualization of the law, an actualization
that makes possible a new way of communal living. Rather than relying purely
on the restrictiveness of the law to bind us together, we recog- nize the
bond that occurs through love. Love reveals that our relation to the other is
never an external relation but always an internal one that shapes our own
identity. Love announces the subject as divided in itself and thereby invaded
by the other. The Christian commandment of universal love becomes in Hegel’s
eyes the enactment of contradic- tion. I am both myself and other. It enables
subjects to engage with the disturbance of the other as constitutive of their
own identity.
McGowan is right to see that the true core of Hegel’s philosophy resides in
the embrace of contradiction, the willingness to submit one-self, in Hegel’s
words, to “the tremendous power of the negative.”33 Mc- Gowan compellingly
shows that Hegel’s appeal to rationality, ridiculed by generations of
critics as a ham- fisted attempt to cram the complexity of life into the
straitjacket of the universal concept, is in fact intended to retain the
tension of contradiction and Otherness that animates every moment of the life
of the spirit. Hegel’s ultimate category— variously called the Absolute,
the Idea, the Concept— not only includes Otherness but is radically founded
upon it. McGowan draws the correct implication for Hegel’s concept of love,
which in Hegel’s view is the best single name for the subject’s relation to
the Absolute. Love for Hegel has nothing to do with narcissistic self-
affirmation through the other. It is rather a profound disturbance for the
subject’s identity. Hegel’s definition of love has a radicality that he
would sustain in his love- inspired definition of the concept. He writes, “
Love can only occur against the same, against the mirror, against the echo of
our essence.” When the subject loves, it doesn’t just seize the other but
encounters the other as a disturbance of the self. In this way, love defies
the mirror relation to which critics would want to confine it.
Interpreted in the spirit of Hegel’s conception of love, crucifixion becomes
the most extreme image of the suffering the subject must accept in truly
loving the Other. What is revealed by the dance of identity and difference
that love enacts is the otherness of the subject to itself. In this way, the
meaning of crucifixion ceases to be a mere fantasy. It becomes something one
actually goes through. With this necessity of subjective destitution and
rebirth in mind we can now read the famous lines from the preface to Hegel’s
Phenomenology, granting them a fuller portion of their true meaning: “The
life of the Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself
untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains
itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds
itself.”
…Hegel focuses on this second meaning when he points to the in-ner wisdom
reflected in the German word for judgment, Urteilung, built around the root
word Teil, or “part.” The trap to be avoided is think-ing that judgment is
merely a matter of dividing things up into neat categories— these things go
in this box and those in the other box. True judgment refers instead to
discerning the way each thing is always already internally divided. Judgment
is the act of assessing the tensions internal to the thing itself. In order
to follow the Christly admonition and resist the first, categorizing usage of
judgment, we need to employ the second, more dialectical meaning.
The True Religion Is Atheism
“There is one true religion and that is the Christian religion.” It is now
possible to make sense of Lacan’s provocative remark. In different ways,
both Greek paganism and Judaism were centrally engaged with the un-known
Thing, but both avoided too direct a confrontation with it. Pagan-ism
projected the vortex of the unknown outward into the field of great and
unpredictable forces that animate the external world, then invested itself in
adopting a heroic posture of redoubtable self- possession in the face of that
unknown. By contrast, Judaism located the Thing in the fear-ful intervention
of a single deity who proposed a law- governed covenant with the Jewish
people but remained himself shrouded in mystery. The elaborate regime of the
halachic law demanded by the covenant then served to stabilize the social
link, pacifying relations between subjects by reassuringly referring them to
a third position, the divine big Other.
The teaching of Jesus focuses religious life directly and unflinch-ingly upon
the Other- Thing itself. Where other religions spared a direct encounter with
the neighbor- Thing by triangulating the relation to it by reference to one
or another deity, the gospel of Jesus directly identifies divinity with
accepting the threatening unknown in the fellow human being and, by
extension, in oneself. The core intention of Jesus’s teach-ing can thus be
summed up in two unprecedented formulas: (1) embrace with love precisely what
makes you anxious in the Other, and (2) revere that very embrace as the entry
of the divine into the world.
The Christian god is the deity who, motivated by the power of love,
will-ingly abdicates his transcendent status. God now becomes coterminous
with the quintessential movement of Hegelian dialectic. Only by closing the
distance between the transcendent and the immanent, the divine and the human,
does God become what he truly is. As J. N. Findlay summa-rizes this central
point, “To be conscious of himself in a finite, sensuous, human individual
does not represent a descent for God but the consum-mation of his essence.
For God is not merely an abstract being, remote from concrete sensuous
instantiation: he is only fully and completely himself in an instance.”40
What distinguishes Christianity for Hegel is its radical embrace of God’s
self- abdication. In the language of Christian theology, the Christ event
marks the self- emptying or kenosis of God. To take this kenotic movement
fully seriously is to be faced with the paradox-ical result that Christianity
is the religion that gives birth to atheism from out of its own conception of
God. While Lacan seldom refers his own conception of Christianity to that of
Hegel, usually preferring to keep a guarded distance from Hegel’s dialectic,
he clearly offers a parallel view.41 One of the unique things about
Christianity, Lacan writes, is that “there is a certain atheistic message in
Christianity itself, and I am not first to have mentioned it. Hegel said that
the destruction of the gods would be brought about by Christianity.”42 And
elsewhere: “Christ is a god,” Lacan says, “but in the end, he’s not just
any god. . . . This is the true dimension of atheism. The atheist would be he
who has succeeded in doing away with the fantasy of the Almighty.”43
The atheistic turn of Christianity is rooted in its teaching of love. In
defining devotion to God in terms of love for the neighbor, insisting that
the truly divine act is consummated in the love one human subject risks for
another, Christianity collapses the defensive triangulation that was effected
by both pagan and Jewish religiosity. The middleman— God himself— gets cut
out. In Christianity, one loves God by loving one’s fel-low human being.
…The crucial thing is to see how the Christian love of the neighbor breaks
the mold of the Judaic law. The distinctiveness of the Christian message
resides first of all in the way it transcends the merely negative injunctions
of the Decalogue, passing beyond the com-mandments’ repeated formula of “
thou shalt not.” The Christian teach-ing calls upon us to do something
positive. In fact, Jesus’s exhortation to love one another is not really a
commandment at all. Jesus doesn’t bring a new law but rather the “good news
” of the gospel. The reason is that love is not something demanded by God.
Love is God.44 Love is the very heartbeat of the divine, its living essence.
In loving the Other as oneself, human beings bring God into the world.
Belief
Belief is less a mode of knowledge than a psychical means of compensating for
the lack of it. Indeed, far from replacing ignorance with knowledge, belief
appears on the contrary to cover over and defend against a baseline
unknowing. It is as if the unacknowledged yet archetypal claim of all belief
is something like “Precisely where I don’t understand, I decide to believe.
”
…The answer to this crucial question about the essential push back that
gives belief its center of gravity is that belief is ultimately less an
intel-lectual stance than a social one. At the most basic level, belief is a
mode of positioning oneself in relation to one’s fellow human beings. What
is pushed back against is other people. In a world composed of a single
per-son, belief would not exist. The posture of belief is ineluctably
dependent upon an assumption concerning others who do not believe as I do. To
put the point in parallel to Lacan’s characterization of the analyst as the
subject supposed to know, believers position themselves in relation to the
subject(s) supposed not to believe or to believe otherwise. Belief introduces
an implicit line of division into the social body. It segregates the
believing subject from some group of Others who are supposed to lack it.
When belief rises to the level of an express credo, belief takes the
crucial step in the direction of an explicit opposition to those who fail to
believe. That throng of unbelievers can be referred to as infidels, as those
who have no faith, no fides. As such, the infidel becomes the excep-tion that
proves the rule, the truly other Other, whose existence in the world helps
define and stabilize the very being of the believer. That we are here dealing
with something purely supposed is indicated by the fol-lowing consideration.
Just as belief need not be fully clear about exactly what is believed, so,
too, belief typically postures itself in opposition to Others who are very
typically only vaguely specified. Indeed, the fact that the counterbeliefs of
such Others may remain largely undefined and in-distinct, far from
disqualifying them from serving as a foil that fortifies the believers’ own
conviction, outfits those shadowy Others all the more effectively for the
role they perform.
Belief is a fortification at the limits of knowledge, a defense against the
threat of unknowing. At some level belief is nothing more than an arbitrary
assertion in the face of not really knowing at all. The unavowed form of
belief is “I don’t really know, but for that very reason I assert
emphatically and unequivocally that I believe.” It is a formula that not
accidentally recalls that of Tertullian, derided by Freud in The Future of an
Illusion: Credo quia absurdum. The Latin phrase does not mean “I believe
something absurd” but rather “I believe because it is absurd.”60
In the context of our approach to Christianity, centered on Jesus’s
exhortation to lovingly embrace what is unknown in the Other, it be-comes
possible to read these strange and contradictory features of belief in a
consistent way. Belief all too easily becomes a means by which the unknown in
the Other is psychically defended against. By the measure of belief,
potentially threatening Others are domesticated insofar as they may be
divided into one of two camps: those who share my beliefs versus those who do
not. The first group ceases to be threatening to me because their beliefs are
the same as mine. This Other is assumed to be a replica of myself. But in the
case of the unbeliever, the threatening otherness of the Other is reinforced.
The “Other” is thus whatever fails to align with my own position of belief.
All such Others thereby cease to have any claim to my love. Either way, in
relation to either group, Jesus’s challenge to embrace what is unknown in
the Other is defused.
The Religious Symptom
The ethos of Greek polytheism deserves to be called imaginary in the properly
Lacanian sense. The Greek hero’s comportment of honor and nobility was
essentially a struggle for recognition, a game premised on the goal of
impressing other people. In effect, the hero painted him-self into the
magnificent tableau of myth, the dazzling veil that helped conceal the abyss.
The resulting regime was a culture of sublime egoism, embodied in legendary
figures but available even to the common man through identification.
Judaism is unquestionably the great religion of the symbolic, the wor-shipful
sublimity of the Word. That apotheosis of the symbolic function was set in
motion by an unnerving proximity of das Ding, made audible by the covenant
with a solitary, imperious, and inscrutable deity. Mas-sively expanded
regulation of behavior protected believers from the un-nerving approach of
the God- Thing. In Judaism, the confrontation with unknowing tends, like a
fluid drawn into a sponge, to be absorbed within the warp and woof of the
law. The cultural product of this symptomatic compromise was a new and more
stable configuration of the social link. Judaism offers a reassuring, even
mildly ecstatic, fraternity of obedience.
The revolutionary event of Christianity consisted in Jesus’s direct
solicitation of the real in the neighbor- Thing. This event presupposed the
background of the Jewish regime of halachic law to the extent that it
effected a measured rejection of the prescribed rules governing social life
in favor of demanding direct vulnerability to the fellow human being,
emphatically including an exposure to the Other’s foreign and threaten-ing
potential. This fulfillment of the law in love was unavoidably trauma-tizing.
The teaching of Jesus turns every person we meet into a burning bush. It was
this radical exhortation to directly embrace das Ding that prompted Lacan to
call Christianity the one true religion, the religion of the real.
…In tandem with this transcendentalizing trend, Christianity adopted new
defensive investments in both imaginary and symbolic forms. On the side of
the imaginary, Christian piety blossomed forth a veritable forest of
fascinating images and icons, from the predominantly Catholic figure of the
tortured and crucified body of Jesus, to the Christ pantokrator icons of the
Eastern church, to the more general explosion of images of the Ma- donna,
with or without child. This theater of visions functions to displace Jesus’s
challenge of embracing the unknown Other in front of me in fa-vor of one or
another mesmerizing representation of the divine family.
On the other, symbolic side arose an unprecedented investment in the posture
of belief, accompanied by a correlative elaboration of doc-trinal orthodoxy.
This massive inflation of the subjective value of dog-matically informed
belief represented a new and extensive elaboration of the symbolic, leading
not, as in Judaism, toward renewed devotion to the contested meaning of the
law, but rather toward a spiritual heroism of faith. In this way, the
Christian religion transformed the authority of the symbolic big Other,
extending its surveillance beyond outward obedience toward an unparalleled,
inwardly directed self- consciousness.
It is with a view to this proliferation of defenses against its own
breakthrough that Christianity deserves to be considered the most
ex-travagantly symptomatic religion, the religious formation that most
spec-tacularly displays the tension of opposing trends.
…Insofar as the unknown Thing forms the central, if hidden, focus of the
passion of worship, against which some sort of defensive reaction becomes
almost unavoidable, it becomes possible to venture the conclu-sion that
religion is the most elemental and ubiquitous symptom of the human condition.
Human beings can wean themselves from the reli-gious symptom only through
other forms of sublimation— one or an-other means of “raising the object to
the dignity of das Ding”— the most dependable of which are to be found in
making love, art, science, or war.
Moksha
In moksha, the subject achieves the ultimate sublimation, the sub-lime
transformation of the ego itself. In the experience of oneself in kin-ship
with Brahman, or even identical with it, some trace of the subject’s own ego
is raised to the dignity of das Ding. The unknowable ground of one’s own
being, the way we remain a mystery to ourselves, is taken up into the
relation with a supreme Self, the locus of the infinite mystery.
Buddhism, one of the primary offshoots of the Hindu tradition, is commonly
interpreted as rejecting selfhood altogether, regarding all at tachment to
self as a source of dukkha— suffering, pain, and dissatisfac-tion. The
Buddhist doctrines of anatta or anatman thus reject all reten-tion of self in
the achievement of nirvana, the rough Buddhist analogue of moksha. From a
Lacanian standpoint, this Buddhist twist of the Hindu sensibility might be
interpreted as a matter of stripping away from the subject’s orientation
toward the Other- Thing all vestiges of its imaginary husk. Personification
of any sort is expressly resisted. In nirvana, all traces of separation and
discreteness dissolve into an experience of perfect cos-mic unity in which
all things have their integral part and place.
Money God
On the side of their defensive function, virtually all conventional gods
provide some safe distance from our fellow human beings. Gods triangulate our
relation with Others by taking up into divinity itself the anxious potential
of das Ding. In this sense, money is the most powerful god that has ever
existed. It assumes the position of an overmastering force whose power
transcends the world of finite objects by virtue of its capacity to buy them.
Moreover, money succeeds in individuating the mass of persons, establishing
to an unprecedented degree the rule of “to each its own.” Isolation is the
flip side of the blessing of freedom, at least when freedom is understood in
its crudest, most individualistic sense.
Christianity/Femininity
Lacan’s notion of the feminine non- all can be read as a gender- linked
update of
his earlier concept of das Ding. The Thing is the internal excess, the
uncanny leftover. Moreover, the Thing is expressly identified with the
jouis-sance of the Other. The masculine logic of exception then appears as
es-sentially defensive, in fact, as the very paradigm of symptomatic
defense.7 As Lacan says of it, “Jouissance, qua sexual, is phallic— in
other words, it is not related to the Other as such.” As we saw in our
examination of the appeal to the big Other in the dynamics of perversion, the
game of trans-gression is at every point dependent upon some prior assertion
of the law. In posing himself as the dutiful servant of the big Other, the
pervert merely appears to violate the existing order. He has only to insert
himself into that order, making of himself and his own act the exception that
proves the rule.
The logics of the “exception” and the “non- all” that inform the
dichotomy between phallic and feminine jouissance can be seen to in-habit
Christianity in a particularly striking way, not because Christianity is to
be linked to one side or the other but rather precisely because of the way it
uncomfortably straddles the two. The reason is that the figure of Christ
himself is deeply ambiguous. From one point of view, Christ can be taken to
stand for the ultimate exception, the perfected human subject by whose
measure all others are to be judged. The Pauline inter-pretation depends upon
identifying Christ as this exception. The Christ exception stabilizes the law
— not, to be sure, by the negative measure of transgression, but rather by
offering an impossible exemplar of moral perfection. Of course, this
inversion of the role of the exception from its more familiar form of
violation or transgression is anything but trivial. It is by means of that
inversion that Christianity achieves the universaliza-tion of moral failure,
establishing a democracy of sin. Compared with the Lamb of God, we are all
tainted. It is also by this means, as Nietzsche recognized, that Christianity
brings to completion the Judaic invention of bad conscience.8 Mindful of
Christ’s perfection, we are all condemned to ceaseless self- recrimination.
Nevertheless, the logical form of the rela-tion between the universal and the
exception is precisely that described by the masculine formula of sexuation.
…What makes this second view distinct from the first is the way it unfolds
the full implications of the Christian notion that every human being is
inhabited by infinity. The radical equality of all persons is less a matter
of the sinfulness of every human being than of the fact that every human
incarnates something of the divine. This new assertion of the universal,
asserting the sublime unity of the divine and the human alluded to by the
mystics, is to be aligned with Lacan’s logic of the femi-nine. Christ
becomes what is “in me more than me,” a tincture of the divine.
Paradoxically, what makes us all human is less a limitation than a kind of
constitutive excess.
Jesus’s injunction to embrace the enemy as the friend is the per-fect
embodiment of the feminine logic of the non- all. The force of that
injunction faces us with an intrinsically excessive demand, a demand to
extend oneself into a zone of surplus, to forgive what is excessive in the
Other and in oneself. Perhaps it is on this basis that Lacan intimately links
the divine with the feminine. “Why not interpret one face of the Other, the
God face, as based on feminine jouissance,” he asks. “It is in the opaque
place of jouissance of the Other, of this Other insofar as woman, if she
existed, could be it, that the Supreme Being is situated.”9 It is also in
the context of this discussion that we can make sense of Lacan’s evocation
of a God who doesn’t know. On the side of Christian doctrine that links
Christ with the masculine logic of exception, God re-mains omniscient. God is
fully sujet supposé savoir. “God only knows,” as the familiar saying puts
it. Christ’s crucifixion was all part of the divine plan, foreordained from
eternity. But according to a more radical no-tion of incarnation, the
suffering God is identified with all who suffer, and Christianity marks an
opening upon the feminine logic of excess, an Other jouissance that is not
knowable.10 The big Other is no longer identifiable with a subject supposed
to know, but is, on the contrary, found to be inhabited by an irradicable
vacuity or gap. From this point of view, Christian divinity ceases to be
immutable or impassible.
It is for this reason that Lacan’s twentieth seminar continually flirts with
the notion of an unknowing God, a suffering and kenotic being whose maj-esty
consists precisely in a sublime form of weakness. Lacan thus risks a radical
reassessment of divinity, provoking us with the conclusion that “one can no
longer hate God if he himself knows nothing.”11 As Slavoj k has
argued, this assertion of a God who does not know can be seen as a necessary
correlate of identifying God with love.
…For what it may be worth, we might note that the Lacanian theory presented
in these pages need not necessarily lead to an atheistic conclusion. While
there is no positive evidence for doing so, there is also nothing whatever
preventing the wholly psychological argument unfolded here from being carried
over into the ontological domain. Were one inclined to draw the most extreme
conclusion from the Lacanian view I have presented, the result might fairly
be called the most radical possible theology. Such an extrapolation would
take a quantum leap beyond the merely unknowable character of God supposed by
negative theology toward identifying the divine with negativity itself. Such
a leap would intersect with the most shocking conclusion of Eckhart’s
mystical intuition, in which the Godhead is identified with perfect
Nothingness, an infinity of kenotic Non- being. There is more than one
indication that Hegel agreed with such a view. On that reading, the role of
the negative in Hegel’s thought, what he called “the tremendous power of
the negative” that underlies the dialectical interconnectedness of
everything, is ultimately to be identified with what has traditionally been
called God.
The relation between religion and science
1. While it doesn’t wholly set aside Freud’s charge of wish- fulfilling
illusion, a Lacanian perspective grounds religion in something much more
fundamental. To be sure, Freud’s notion of wish fulfillment is much more
nuanced than the banality of our ordinary conception. What Freud meant by
Wunsch touches the most obscure depths of the human psyche. One might even
say that there is room in the Freudian sense of wishing to accommodate
everything we have compassed in this book. Nevertheless, the sense of wish
fulfillment foregrounded in The Future of an Illusion— that of a collection
of childish fictions that flatter our fondest wishes with saccharine fantasies
— is certainly not the origin of the religious impulse as Lacan interprets
it. On the contrary, for Lacan the reassurance of such fictions should itself
be interpreted as a defense from the openness to the real that constitutes
the more elemental tropism of the religious. For Lacan, the experience of the
sacred echoes what is unknown and uncanny in the Other. But on that view,
religion is not a tissue of wish-ful fantasy that veils the terrifying depths
of existence. On the contrary, the door to the religious is opened by an
obscure longing for those very depths. The compulsive force of the religious
urge emanates from the ec-static core of the human being, the most primitive
ground of subjectivity, which derives from the archaic experience of the
Other as a perpetually unsettling enigma.
2. The religious phenomenon is tensed by powerful defenses against its own
deepest motive. A key assertion of this book is that Lacan’s con-ception of
das Ding positions it as the originary pivot point of ambiva-lence. On the
one hand, we are drawn to the unknown Thing. Precisely that unnerving and
anxiety- producing unknown, the unthinkable jouis-sance of the Other, is what
most ineluctably lures us. The religious posture is thus inseparable from
longing for a destabilizing jouissance. Religious fervor always reaches into
what is beyond the pleasure principle. The religious passion is always linked
with a passion for a transcendence of self, a passion for death. But if we
are attracted to that ecstatic locus, we also defend ourselves against it.
The Lacanian view is thus able to explain quite precisely why the Godhead is
regarded simultaneously as an object of love and fear. It also accounts for
the massive symptomatic architecture that protects the religious enthusiast
from too close an encounter with the dreadful Thing.
3. In light of the interpretation I’ve tried to articulate, the relatively
simple opposition Freud posed between religion and science should
berevisited. In Freud’s view, that opposition was a stand- off between the
dog-matic certainty of religious faith and the resolute fallibilism of
science, relying as it does on empirical evidence and probabilistic judgment.
A Lacanian interpretation of the religious doesn’t flatly reject that
assess-ment. And how could it? We are daily reminded of the ways religious
faith obstinately refuses scientific rationality. But it is also possible to
argue that Lacan’s perspective significantly qualifies the tension between
religion and science, hinting at a deep point of contact between them. A
relation to the Other- Thing orients the subject toward an enduring sense of
some-thing more, of an as- yet- undiscovered excess, originally encountered
in the disturbingly open question of the Other’s desire. The fact that this
originary sense of unknowing does not corre-spond to any material,
substantial reality does not diminish its power over us. On the contrary, the
purely supposed and virtual character of das Ding only increases its
fascination. Lacan can be said to pose the Thing as the most elemental
dimension of what Freud called psychical reality. The Thing establishes the
primal field of the virtual. Said otherwise, the Thing is the empty frame of
fantasy, a void that begs to be filled with content but can never be
satisfied. That insistent void is active even in our experience of everyday
physical objects. We cannot avoid anticipating something around the corner,
something surprising, for example, that might be hid-den behind the couch
opposite me in the room.
Scientific Position
At least on first look, the scientist appears by contrast to be the true hero
of the real, intrepidly facing the traumatic force of the questionable. Let
there be no excuses, no shielding ourselves from the hard lessons of truth!
Yet science, too, deploys very effective means of psychical de-fense. They
consist primarily of strict adherence to empirical method and mathematical
calculation, both of which provide means for sidestepping the specifically
subjective position of the investigator. The scientist always works from the
safe side of observation, in which the personal stakes of encounter are
neutered in favor of a purely “objective” standpoint. The scientific ideal
of experimental repeatability assumes the anonymous, indifferent character of
the observer while at the same time being forti-fied by procedures of
abstract calculation, mediated by the cold logic of mathematical
quantification. We here reencounter Heidegger’s critique of modern natural
science as “enframing” our relation to Nature, and of domesticating a
wilder, potentially traumatic Otherness of existence by means of “
calculative thinking.”15 Science, as Heidegger put it, “wants to know
nothing of the nothing.”16
The upshot of these final reflections is to challenge us anew with our
relation to unknowing, the question of our openness to something abyssal. In
an extraordinary two- page essay titled “The Last Chapter in the History of
the World,” Giorgio Agamben adumbrates an unheard- of art of unknowing. “It
is possible,” he proposes, “that the way in which we are able to be
ignorant is precisely what defines the rank of what we are able to know and
that the articulation of a zone of nonknowl-edge is the condition— and at
the same time the touchstone— of all our knowledge.”
Das Ding
The Thing is not a content of fantasy but, we might say, the empty frame
that begs to be filled out by fantasy.
Feuerbach
The account here elaborated of the unknown Thing in the human Other projected
into the space of one or another divinity bears more than a little
simi-larity to the theory of religion put forward by Ludwig Feuerbach. In The
Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach argues not only that the gods are
externalizations of essen-tially human powers, but also that the broad
historical development of religion displays a tendency toward returning those
powers to their human origin. Feuer-bach therefore argues that in the
prehistory of religion, the objects of divinity are at the farthest remove
from the human and that Christianity, with its doctrine of incarnation,
decisively brings the Godhead back down to earth.