Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred. By Richard Boothby. Evanston:  Northwestern University Press, 2023,  241 pp., $100.00 hardcover, $32.00 paperback. Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Eastern Orthodox Christian Anthropology in Dialogue. By Carl Waitz and Theresa Clement Tisdale. New York:  Routledge, 2022,  182 pp., $170.00 hardcover, $42.95 paperback. Lacan in the End Times: In the Name of the Absent Father. By Rob Weatherill. New York:  Routledge, 2023,  238 pp., $170.00 hardcover, $42.95 paperback.

In the preface to Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred, Richard Boothby is clear that Freud approached the topic of religion with “unrelenting hostility” (p. 1). At the same time, Boothby writes that “the religious impulse is uniquely illuminated by the lessons of psychoanalysis,” while acknowledging that psychoanalysis is itself facing unrelenting hostility from many parts of the clinical and academic worlds. Boothby's introduction focuses on what cannot be known by the human subject, an issue he sees as fundamental to Lacanian theory, as well as to religious experience. As Boothby notes, Freud's emphasis, in oedipal theory, on the infant's desire for the mother and resentment of the father assumes that the subject has some grasp of what matters to him. What Lacan emphasizes, in contrast, is the mystery of the desire of the mother, that is, what the infant does not and can never understand regarding both what the mother wants and what he makes of his own desire for her. “In every entry into language, in every iteration of signifying material,” Boothby writes, “there resounds some echo of the unanswered and unanswerable question of the Other” (p. 58). He goes on: “If we allow that the primal ‘name’ does not merely point to an object-referent but also refers to something unknown, the beyond of the Other-Thing, the

conclusion to be drawn is that the original function of language is not merely indicative but also interrogative. At the most elementary level, every utterance implicitly poses a question” (p. 58). Boothby quotes Simone Weil on this point: “even for the most fervent believer, every prayer is an echo in a Void” (p. 67).

The central premise of Boothby's argument is that “the religious impulse is uniquely illuminated by the lessons of psychoanalysis” (p. 1). But he is also aware that there is a sense in which his book can be read as paradoxical, since it “answers the question, ‘Is nothing sacred?’ with a resounding ‘Yes!’—though not in th