The resurgence of religion in recent decades seems to many to mark a moment of retrogression, a falling away from the goal and ideal of secularisation and the project of transforming society in the light of reason. It would probably have appeared that way to Freud who, in his vision of religion, saw it as a necessary illusion for many—the mechanism by which a common morality and social structure might be justified and maintained—and as a necessary illusion, that is, a mode of misperception of the world more accurately perceived through the categories of science, within which psychoanalysis found its place. The réclame of religion, its bid to outflank science, would have seemed to him testimony to the increasing burdens of civilisation in a technological age and the failure of consolation as science expands its explanatory purview.
Freud here sees religion as a form of explanatory account and his melancholy approach to religion presumes a sort of Whiggish developmentalist account of the divine that sees it as merely an epistemological problem. Religion is the same sort of discourse as science, contending over the same phenomena. But Freud also sees religion as a normative resource, a way of grounding morality: civilisation is in need of control mechanisms on the drive, which find a useful sanction in the divine. However his own scientific account of the super-ego militates against such a sanction as in any way to be taken on its own terms. God may speak in and through the voice of the superego, but it is clear which has ontological priority for Freud. As Lacan points out in the Ethics seminar, Freud separates macrocosm and microcosm, removing Sovereign Good from its place out there to a location within (incidentally destroying any form of naturalist ethics, even one such as utilitarianism that seem to flow from his own thinking). In other words, the phenomena of religion have to be considered not as revelatory of the world but as expressions of the subject qua subject: conceivably psychological, pathological or structural. This means that religion ceases to be a unitary category—marked by what Ricoeur figures of the sacred—but rather a heteroclite, historical assemblage
which mixes claims about knowledge, normative injunctions and articulations of multiple experiences. As such it is open to different analytical perspectives.
Peter Sloterdijk (2009), for one, sees religion in historical-biological terms, at one point functional in terms of the demands for transcendence of finite subjects and their communities. Here God or the gods become the guarantee of historical transmission and transgenerational co-operation, a form of transcendental planning of ‘slow phenomena’ (Sloterdijk, 2009: 5-6). This function goes into desuetude with the rise of other forms of transcendental archives. But Sloterdijk notes how resistant certain religious formations are to such historical replacement, in part because of the investment of secular arrangements of power in the descrying of such planning. In a way, this is the Enlightenment critique in new language. However, it raises the complex question of identity, which shifts the debate in a sociological and psychoanalytic direction. It is clear that religious insignia provide a powerful form of identification in part because they are means to deployments of power or resistance. The question of the veil is perhaps one such sign that shifts continuously between configurations of power. On the one hand, as Fethi Benslama argues, the veil is a means of control of an Other jouissance, a mechanism by which the threat of the limitless and uncontrollable is managed, in turn subordinating the ‘vessels’ of that jouissance. On the other, it can be the mode in which a subordinated or derogated allegiance is affirmed and made visible. Or it can be the sign which provokes a phobic response towards otherness, demanding the full panoply of state repression to eliminate it from public view, or the object of a demand that would annul certain freedoms that are deemed antithetical to a ‘traditional’ order.
Yet identification may be more or other than a matter of belief or specular entrapments. Watching the ways in which communities in the Andes affirm their identity through a peripatetic tracing of lines across a difficult terrain in the bringing down of figures of the Virgin from mountain sanctuaries to sites where they are honoured and celebrated during Holy Week and then their arduous return to the summit fastnesses, it becomes obvious that identity here is as much a collective performance as assertion of particular propositions. In its active unification of sacred object, community, territory and time (its repetition
of previous pilgrimages) this displays a form of the religious that is both close to Durkheim's speculations about religion as the way in which societies represent themselves as social and something more sui generis, echoing an older linkage of (collective) subject and world as it brings a new form into being in the now.
But these depend on the ways that religious forms both allow and limit certain types of jouissance. Sloterdijk names the primordial experience ‘vehemence’, or citing Heiner Mehlman, and more bathetically, ‘stress reaction’. Viewed from one optic as endogenous, quasi-biological processes, such experiences, in part because of their sheer intensity, are attributed in other accounts to external forces: from the wrath of Achilles, to shamanic possession, to prophetic revelation, certain experiences are taken to be so intense and anomalous that they must betray some other agent. The symbolic coding and articulation through religious discourse preserves the specificity, intensity yet explicability of otherwise terrifying phenomena. ‘The transcendental misunderstanding of vehemence’ (8) also allows for its replicability and encouragement, as in the festivals which Bataille studies in his Theory of Religion, where a social apparatus is in place to allow anomalous vehemence (to mix jargons) to have full play but also to be limited: Bakhtinian carnival always gives ground to the reimposition of order. But it is noteworthy that institutional religion, with its hierarchical access to the detail of transcendental planning, finds ‘vehemence’ problematic, from the Catholic Church's condemnation of mystical heresy to Anglicanism's suspicion of ‘enthusiasm’. Yet, this same ‘vehemence’ can be mobilised in pursuit of religious exclusivity: the claim to uniqueness of revelation and the unique origin of permissable vehemence leads to a violence against false witness and the other's jouissance, excluded at the level of belief and the flesh. Sloterdijk is astute in seeing the battle lines between religions as equally important to their truth claims, a reflection that also flows from seeing religion as a fantasmatic response to the facts of finitude and contingency: death, disease, suffering, disorder and chance. Meaning is given to the meaningless through a form of symbolic cure that consolidates the individual and the collective: religion here is form of immune response that embodies ‘the expectation of injury’ (11). Here the epistemic claims of religion(s) are tied tightly to existential investments, again bringing with them the risk of conflict
with other symbolic systems of cure and prevention. ‘Faith’ which is the intradiscursive name for such immune responses, always carries the risk of zeal and intolerance, as well as the elaboration of heterotopias beyond death and history.
The very analytic disarticulation of religion yields a more cautious prognosis for the survival of religious forms in a supposedly secularising world. Despite the extension of science as a form of explanation, these other moments of religion—as schema of jouissance, mode of identification, fantasy in the face of finitude—persist. Long ago Ernest Gellner (1979) argued that the relentless disenchantment of the world under science and technology generated a counter-movement of the intensification of myth, and it may well be that the demise or waning of other schemata that served to articulate meaning and vehemence such as the nation and transnational political formations (fascism, communism, ‘Western democracy’) cede the ground to revitalised and reworked forms of religious belief and practice. Yet in the spirit of Freud against Freud these must be seen as contemporary responses to modern phenomena, not the persistence of older forms that have failed to be moved by the ineluctable march of science. Rather they are forms of living in a world utterly transformed by science and by the new fissures in being such a world creates.
This issue of Sitegeist, then, looks at religion as both symptom and site of intellectual labour. Anastasios Gaitanidis's paper examines the fundamental fault in being that constitutes the subject and the ways in which this fault is sutured through particular signifiers to ameliorate the anxiety of uncausedness and the enigma of individual being. His account links religion with other forms of relation to the Thing in nationalism and various political pathologies. Mary-Ann Crumplin's piece is more recuperative in that she wishes to defend a version of monotheism seen now as a response to the philosophical demand that thought think unity beyond the thought of difference and multiplicity. She sees in the work of Emmanuel Levinas the means to think ‘monotheism after atheism’. Barbara C. provides a beautifully written account of some of the dynamics of religion in the consulting room, where ‘a cat's-eye view’ provides an intriguing as well as helpful perspective. Kirsty Hall looks at the papers from a conference that questioned the connections between religion and the public sphere and Philip Derbyshire
reviews two books, the work of Fethi Benslama, a noted Lacanian and critical scholar of Islam and Rubén Gallo's Freud's Mexico. The next issue of Sitegeist will be devoted to the question of nature and environmentalities, one perhaps not so far from the issues that drive this volume.