In this paper, I intend to explore how Lacan actively engages with the question that is at the core of all Western religions: What is the origin of the subject and how are his/her desires and ethical conduct instituted and regulated?' I will argue that although Lacan claims to be against any kind of religious reply to this question, his ideas could still provide the basis for the construction of an aporetic theology.
Let us begin by stating that Lacan realises that modernity's attempt to break out of the context of traditional, religious authority by freeing the subject from God's Law is extremely problematic for the following two reasons:
First, for Lacan modernity's establishment of an autonomous subject which is not limited by the ‘Law of the Father’ gives rise to the omnipotent, narcissistic illusion that ‘I’ can utter my own truths and can be, ‘… an interpreter of what is presented to me in words and deeds, … [to] choose my own oracle and articulate it as I please, sole master of my ship after God’ (Lacan, 2002: 491).
Second, modernity's promotion of the idea of a self-governing subject attempts to hide the fact that this subject is formed through a process of mirroring—an ‘imaginary’ process of taking on an image of the other in the mirror and ‘appropriating’ it as if it represents the self. This mirroring produces two equally perilous outcomes: 1) it is ‘both you and me as one’—an unconditional merger as a way of losing oneself in the other—and 2) it is ‘either you or me’—an aggressive response which implies that in my struggle to be (or to become) myself (i.e., to acquire an ‘identity’) the other should be annihilated. This is how Lacan (2002: 75-81) interprets Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic. It cannot be overcome as a result of the acceptance of slavery and then gradual liberation from it through work, but only through the activation of the symbolic dimension, that is to say, a third dimension which exists outside any dyadic relationship and prevents it from collapsing into a monadic state of being (i.e., from becoming One).
However, Lacan is equally critical of the religious attempt to explain the origin of the subject and the regulation of his/her desire and ethical conduct towards others through the existence of God. For him, all Western religions attempt to replace through the presence of God a missing Vorstellung or primordially repressed/excluded signifier, particularly that which concerns the causality, the origins, of the subject and its inscription within a symbolic system. In other words, all Western religions tend to abolish the link between the demands of a symbolic system that produces a shared knowledge and a ‘something missing’ in the beginning that is necessary for the very functioning of that symbolic system. The idea of a prohibition or sacrifice that Levi-Strauss (1966) understands as necessary for the symbolic organisation of society and the establishment of a shared knowledge can be compared to the ‘something missing’ which Lacan believes is a prerequisite in order to produce the space for a set of differentiated signifying elements.
For this reason, Lacan adopts a radical interpretation of Freud's (1912-1913) Totem and Taboo and the ‘myth’ of the murder of the primal father to expand on Levi-Strauss's ideas of prohibition or sacrifice. Instead of a reading in which the father is murdered for real, Lacan suggests that the murder designates that which man mourns in relation to some-Thing missing (das Ding), a missing representation of what it might be to possess the primal object (representing an imagined pre-discursive enjoyment). Of course, Lacan critiques this assumption every step of the way together with those therapies and religions that partake in the very same fundamental fantasy.
This embroils us in a dilemma around logical causality, in that what is yearned for, like the truth of the origin of the subject's cause is always already ‘absent’. And, Lacan suggests, because there can be no conception of what went before, it can be argued that at the origin of all Western ethical or religious systems there is a recognition of a crime or sin that instigates it, the morally-flavoured reincarnation of the missing representation, or ‘absent’ cause. Interestingly, the prerequisite of a ‘something missing’ or ‘absent cause’ in the field of epistemology shifts to the field of ethics, invariably as a transgression, as for instance in the ‘myth’ of the murder of the primal father. Early on in his Ethics seminar, Lacan (1992) draws our attention to the attraction to transgression and the expectation of punishment as a prelude to his notion of jouissance
and explicitly links this to the ‘obscure’ transgression that Freud alludes to in the death drive (‘to the extent that man finds himself anchored deep within to its formidable dialectic’ (Lacan, 1992: 2)). It is perhaps not surprising that Christianity comes up with the notion of ‘Original Sin’ to create a narrative around our lost origins, a narrative that may well appeal to jouissance. (I will revisit the notion of the ‘Original Sin’ later on in this paper).
But what I believe is all the more revealing in this gloss on Lacanian theory is the fact that myth is still necessary to articulate a ‘truth’ that resists explanation as a proposition. Lacan is inclined to suggest that mythical analogies must still remain fictions—in the sense that ‘every truth has the structure of fiction’ (Lacan, 1992: 12)—even if they do allow us to envisage a series of relations between subjects or between the subject and his/her own intimate object. As such, Lacan invokes the relationship between fiction and ‘reality’ in Freud to argue that fiction does not necessarily signify ‘deception’ or ‘illusion’ (Lacan, 1992: 12), but is the only way in which truths can begin to be presented.
Yet Lacan is to move increasingly away from an exploitation of myth to what he considers to be its underlying structure. Myth, it is suggested, only ‘gives epic form to that which works from structure’ (Lacan, 1990: 34), it is ‘simply a shelter against the threat of castration’ (Lacan, 1981: 27). In this schema, logical structure cuts out the middle man. Lacan might insist that the subject's (self) fiction has, as it were, a particular structure, but it seems to me that he is still required to give mythical form to the ‘object’ that remains repressed and the objects that resonate with the quality of the subject's das Ding.
For instance, Lacan (1981: 197-8) borrows from myth, from Aristophanes' fable in Plato's Symposium, in order to capture something of the indestructible, life substance, or libido, with the image of the lamella. This is a curious creature, an amoeba-like, non-existent yet immortal ‘organ’ (or primordial object) that should be understood as representing that which the subject loses, metaphorically speaking, at birth. The separation or individuation the subject suffers allows, however, for an individuated existence within the human sexual cycle, effectively wrenching him/her away from Otherness and infinity, into an existence that leads to death. The subject's impossible relation to this ‘organ’ is designated by the horror of the image of this piece of life/death, scuttling
around and twitching, pulsating, with life no matter what. If we understand the lamella as the substance of enjoyment, its non-eradicability becomes evident when we consider that there is still a surplus of enjoyment in asceticism or martyrdom. This ‘plus de jouir’ functions even in suffering and the so-called ‘renunciation’ of pleasure.
Essentially, it is in the clash or division between a symbolised reality and, what Lacan theorises as a surplus, with his category of the real, where the jouissance of the subject feels most at home. It is here that the subject's self-impediments, the particular and peculiar way in which the subject regulates his pleasure/pain limits, reside. With this disconcerting relationship to the repressed traumatic meanings of the body—in a piece of the real that upsets psychic functioning—there is a real order of impasse, the knot of castration, whose structuring is the causal event, so far as Lacan is concerned, in the creation of an unconscious subject.
It is vital for psychoanalysis that the subject's impediments are not understood as external obstacles that emanate from a reality out there. This also ties in with the idea that any subjective reality is a production or construction that has taken a detour via unconscious signification. But Lacan is saying more than this, that the psyche, in its traumatic relation to the sexual, inevitably suffers/enjoys a certain displeasure in the circuit of the drive. It is just the terms (or mode of jouissance) that work for each individual which differ and carry each individual's signature.
It is with the experience of this traumatic kernel, irreducible element or libidinal excess (the way in which the lack or cut becomes represented as a positive factor, perhaps at best as anxiety), that remains irreducible to representation, where Lacan starts to play around with a dialectic of absence and presence, negative and positive. This traumatic kernel is attributed to the void at the centre of the psyche-soma (also in the Other and in language) issuing from the infant's somewhat premature birth and incapacity to provide for his or her own fundamental needs. It is construed as a tortured lack, experienced as a ‘misere originelle’ in birth and weaning, and serves as a prototype for further separation and loss. Significantly, these primary separations are, Lacan argues, felt as a cut in bodily consistency, or primary jouissance, a traumatic cut that words fail to compensate for in language. There is no piece of language that will finally represent this traumatic real, although
in an imaginary form, the objet a comes to positivise the void, a void that bears the trace or scar of a relation to an unknowable Other, (conceived as what it was the Other wanted from me).
Lacan comes to argue that it is only in trauma, anxiety and the symptom that this qualitative lack will be felt, expressed as affect or anxiety that is imbued with jouissance, the meaning of which is invariably repressed in the symptom. Lacan thus discovers within the symptom something more (something Other) than the compromise formation that Freud posits (Freud, 1908: 162). The symptom's enigmatic quality is evocative of the ‘navel of the dream’—the unknowable kernel within the representational dream thoughts—that Freud continued to be fascinated and yet baffled by (Freud, 1900: 182, 671). As such, the remainder of non-sense is understood as a materialised or positivised lack, assuming a surplus value in Lacan. I think that this can again be accounted for by taking seriously the relation to and sensations experienced in the body, felt as suffering. Indeed, it is not for nothing that Freud's image of the ‘nombril anatomique’, in his analysands’ speech productions and/or dream thoughts, both designates the body and the physiological origin of that body. The argument here is that this unknowable part pertaining to the body resonates with the subject's unknowable origins or signifying causes, felt to subsume that subject's truth.
The task at hand it seems in the Lacanian argument is to turn this life substance of the body that can never be fully symbolised into a surplus of desire rather than a surplus of jouissance—although both maintain a relation to the fundamental fantasy. What always remains to be said by the subject is this surplus of meaning, experienced as jouissance, residing in an unassimilable, internal object. It is representative of a Thing that perturbs. This intimate/extimate object is always somewhat out of kilter with the language that one believes will represent oneself to oneself. Lacan surmises that the subject's relation to his/her own (sexual) enjoyment is always somewhat elusive and foreign for its terms are constructed by way of an ‘inmixing of otherness’, the relation to (the unknowable) desire of the Other (what am I for the Other?) as well as located and sought by the subject on the side of the Other.
As Jacques-Alain Miller (1994) indicates, the object, in the position of ‘extimacy’, is a subset of the Other, pointing in the first instance to
the notion of the radical inter-subjectivity of the unconscious, the rather porous boundary that divides the subject and his/her significant others. Miller directs us to Lacan's Seminar VIII on transference to remind us that the Other comes to be understood to include this extimate object (the Other no longer occupies purely the place of the signifier), an object of enjoyment by which the subject is divided. Lacan understands the subject as one who contains conflicting ‘knowledges’ in a singular way, whose ‘inside’ discourse is construed from material absorbed from ‘outside’. Once the effect of primordial repression on the subject bites, the inside/outside distinction is, at an unconscious level, blurred.
Freud (1919) had already intuited something of the uncanny experience the subject feels in relation to his/her unconscious, or shadowy Other, devoting a paper, The Uncanny, to the concept just one year before he articulated the notion of that something that motivates human beings beyond the comfort of the pleasure principle. Like Lacan, Julia Kristeva (1991) also picks up and dwells upon the implications of the subject's residual foreignness, the field of the strangely familiar that wells up in moments of ineffable anxiety. She describes these uncanny effects as that which ‘ought to have remained secret’, yet is secretly familiar and functions as a moment of deathly recognition. And this strangeness is understood as saying something about our relation to, or our ‘being with others’ (Kristeva, 1991: 189-192).
In psychosis, however, it is theorised that there is not the same intimate/extimate relation to the object, this internalised relation to alterity that creates the possibility of a speaking (as opposed to a ‘spoken’) subject at all. For those designated psychotic, it is supposed that there is a different mode of relating to Otherness—the equivalent of these uncanny effects are perhaps the horrifying surfacing of hallucinations in the real that infiltrate a person's subjective reality.
The notion belongs to a narrative that runs throughout psychoanalysis—the subject's intimate, often perturbing, relation to one's repressed Other—as a product of the embodiment of a repressed unconscious knowledge. It is an index of the notion that desire, predicated upon a relation to the subject's traumatic but desirable ‘Thing’, is inherently transgressive, inverting, by way of fantasy, the very terms that constituted the subject in the first place.
By way of example, Jonathan Dollimore's (1991) essentially materialist account of Sexual Dissidence is a sensitive and intelligent litany of the points of contradiction in homophobia, offering clues to what might be at stake in the paranoid instabilities that haunt dominant cultural identities. Dollimore's conclusions about a ‘perverse dynamic’ echo the psychoanalytic ones, when he suggests that ‘the (cultural) outlaw turns up as inlaw and the other as proximate proves more disturbing than the other as absolute difference’ (Dollimore, 1991: 15).
Moreover, as a commentary on Miller's seminar on Extimacy, Slavoj Žižek (1990) also speaks of a similar mechanism at play in nationalism and other phobias of difference, with the suggestion that what is unacceptable about the other is the peculiarity of their other mode of enjoyment. In a testimony to the subject's own traumatic relation to his own intimate yet foreign way of enjoyment, the relationship of extimacy to das Ding, the other is deemed to enjoy either an unacceptable and distasteful excess of enjoyment, or worse, is understood to want to steal the subject's own enjoyment, our ‘way of life’. Žižek elaborates this as a projection of the fear of castration, but of course it is all somewhat too late: ‘What we conceal by imputing to the other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us: the lack (castration) is original’ (Žižek, 1990: 62).
Given that human beings seek consistency of meaning, especially in that which concerns identity, due to the gap that manifests itself as the subject's signifying cause (for s/he is divided by an object, the truth of which remains barred to him/her) the subject is ripe for religious or ideological plugging. As the subject's own signifying cause, or ‘truth’ is naturally assigned to the locus of the Other, as Marc Du Ry (1996: 4) suggests, we can see how the notion of God easily occupies this position of this Other. Invoking the writings of St. Augustine, the potential is there for the religious register to worm its way into, to take up residence in and have relevance for the subject, as s/he grapples with his/her own traumatic coming-to-be. God, the Creator of the subject's signifying cause, acts as symbolic guarantor, all the more comforting in that He, as deity, is not made himself and therefore is not perceived to suffer the same intolerable lacks—or castration—that the non-divine suffer.
Evidently, in Western religious discourses, the fracture in the structure (both within the subject and therefore also within philosophical/psychoanalytic theory) can be accounted for, sutured, by the concept of God. Thus, God becomes an almost necessary response to the lack in the Other. God represents an (imaginary) closure for the lack. Heaven becomes a place of jouissance which is as such inaccessible for the subject. The belief in the reality of heaven reconciles the subject with the existence in an imperfect world.
Du Ry continues by suggesting that all the major Western religions are able to substitute the unknowable truth of the subject's cause, his/her non-coincidence with self, with the notion of ‘Original Sin’. The latter is another word for the state in which access to jouissance is forbidden, in which the human being is excluded from paradise and deprived from the primary object of satisfaction. To frame it as ‘Original Sin’ is, however, already a questionable hypothesis: it implies that the subject assumes the responsibility for the lack of jouissance in order to make it possible for the Other to exist. That is on the proviso that the subject assumes a new status—becomes a figure of redemption—read a figure of suffering. We are also informed that St. Augustine chooses an object of Faith over wanting to know the truth ‘about an object that divided him’. For, in his fantasy of perfect unity with the Other, St Augustine's de Trinitate, ‘treats of the One Thing that is indivisible’ (Du Ry, 1996: 5). This fundamental fantasy will be defended at all cost (including the subject's life) because it is a form of enjoyment. This explains the stability of neurotic structures and the overwhelming force of repetition which is observable in people who repeat the traumas of their lives over and over again. Herein lies the reason for Freud's assumption of a death drive.
However, the funny thing about repetition is that, with the repetition of acts (new versions of the same) that produce traumatic jouissance effects, one gets the impression of an eventful life, moving swiftly from one set of circumstances to another only to re-create the ‘same’ death-driven impasses elsewhere. It makes for (the impression of) ‘living’ in the fast lane. And yet if we only slow down for long enough, we might realise these repetitions are more about stasis. The case Lacan makes is that, in the haste to sustain the fantasy of narcissistic unity, to avoid the unbearable and traumatic anxiety of lack, human beings are tempted to
aim for illusory (fetishistic) objects that tend towards the fixity and the stasis of what is known—no matter what subjective cost this might entail. This picture of narcissistic ego ideals the subject aspires to is actually opposed to the flux that constitutes ‘life’ and the change and movement inherent to it.
It can be argued that the fantasy of stasis has become a rather disconcerting metaphysical vision in Western political and religious discourses, with a concomitant abhorrence of that which is perceived to represent change (unless of course ‘change’ is understood as progress in the cause of Science, or that old chestnut, ‘economic growth’). By the process of signifying displacement, if the same/stasis is deemed good, then that which or those who represent movement (immigrants perhaps?), divergence or change can come to signify ‘bad’, or even ‘evil’. Like Du Ry, Dollimore (1991: 118) similarly appeals to the writings of St. Augustine in order to fathom how and why the concept of evil, heresy or insurrection enters into discourse and especially why a notion belonging to the semantic field of ethics might be conceived as connected to movement and change. Dollimore quotes from Augustine's City of God, XIV (xvi-xvii) suggesting how human desire is understood to manifest itself in the form of ‘aberrant movement’. Indeed, the phenomenon of the involuntary movement of the male erection is considered testimony to a ‘fallen human nature out of control of itself’ (1991: 118). Augustine draws some familiar conclusions vis-à-vis desire and its intimate relation to transgression and death, albeit around a notion of Original Sin, when he writes that ‘Man's first transgression was what brought death into the world and because it was the movement of desire which led to that transgression, desire itself is intimately bound up with death’ (cited by Dollimore, 1991: 118).
In Lacan's book, however, inertia and repetition of the ‘same’ and of the symptom, are revelatory of the serving of old narcissistic ideals that are actually opposed to life and movement and the change inherent to it. Lacan goes on to argue that the subject who lives (and moves on) with the dialectical notion of desire accepts not knowing, the unknown of the unconscious, the lack at the heart of being and language which conversely provides the impetus for a want-to-be. In other words, by accepting desire as pure negativity, as a primordial ‘lack-of-being’, the subject is able to transcend his/her narcissistic ideals.
And yet Lacanian theory is rather more complex, suggesting that desire hankers after both the ‘same’ and the ‘different’. In this respect, desire, requiring the resonance of a relation to the subject's ‘Thing‘, needs the excitement of the new, but only as a new version of the traumatic but desirable primordial object to which it remains transfixed. In other words, desire is caused by (and directed to) the same primordial object that produces jouissance. Thus, the object (vis-à-vis cause) of desire bears witness to the morbidity of enjoyment and its origins in the death drive
However, despite the fact that desire and jouissance share the same object(s), Lacan does intimate that there is an engagement with and absorption of alterity in the former that is missed in the latter—linked to the notion that desire evaporates if the subject makes a straight bee-line for the object in the drive circuit. For instance, in the scopic drive, the gaze (as an object a) becomes the part from which the subject is separated and is therefore located on the side of the Other—what is lost in individuation, in the splitting of ‘being’ (1981: 106), the subject imputes as belonging to the Other. If the aim of drive is not the object per se but simply the circuit around the object and back again, Lacan suggests that the performance is elevated to desire once there is an active engagement in ‘making oneself seen’, in other words that there is an eliciting of the Other's gaze, a making of oneself visible by way of the Other that introduces heterogeneity into the drive circuit. It is by including the desire/gaze of the Other that the subject guarantees s/he will miss the aim of the object, thereby assuring the emergence of culture, and in a sense delaying death. Reminiscent again of the long detour, by way of life, to death that Freud (1920) recommends.
Lacan surmises, therefore, that the key to the access to desire is by way of the desire/gaze of the Other. But in order for this to work, the Other's gaze should arrive as something that is strange to the subject and that s/he cannot see. When s/he feels looked by the Other, the subject finds him/herself facing something that does not allow him/her to subsume it under his/her identity. For Lacan, the claim that there is a gaze that comes from the Other means to insist that the subject can recognize him/herself in an object (the Other's gaze) that is no longer based on the logic of narcissistic appropriation. Within this context, the gaze is not the source of expression of the desire in its phantasmatic search for a narcissistic object. Rather, the gaze is the
non-specular object that is beyond the expressive claims of the ‘I’.
I believe that it is in the subject's encounter with the Other's gaze that Lacan comes close to formulating a ‘theology’ that is not positive or confessional but rather one that is ‘aporetic’ as it begins with the ethical demand of this ‘Thing’ (i.e., the Other's gaze) which is at the heart of the subject yet foreign to it. In other words, there is something about the Other's gaze, a Thingly secrecy that escapes the subject's comprehension and demands his/her ethical response. However, Lacan refuses to draw this conclusion because, as we have mentioned above, he believes that adherence to any theological discourse, even an ‘aporetic’ one, will eventually suture the fracture in the structure of the subject by reinforcing his/her fundamental fantasy of union with the primordial object. Thus, it is Jacques Derrida (1995: 83-4) who, through his analysis of the Other's gaze implicit in the gospel's assurance that ‘your father who sees in secret will reward you’, accounts for the radical character of the subject's ethical responsibility. According to Derrida, within the order of the gaze in which one is seen by the radically Other, there is first and foremost an absolute asymmetry. The gospel, therefore, gives an account of ethics founded on an unequal and irreducibly asymmetrical relation. As he puts it:
God sees me, he looks into me in secret, but I don't see him, I don't see him looking at me … And it is on the basis of this gaze that singles me out (ce regarde qui me regarde) that my responsibility comes into being. (Derrida, 1995: 91)
What is suggested here by the logic of ‘God who sees in secret’ is something in me that is revealed to the Other but which I myself cannot know. The secret is that in me which is other than me and which is also, for that reason, the ‘origination’ of me. The economy of the secret cannot respond to the logic of narcissistic appropriation and exchange because the secret is instead inscribed within the asymmetry of gazes that cannot be exchanged.
For Derrida, this economy of irreversibility is the essence of ethical responsibility. This narrative of responsibility is one of relinquishing ethical calculability by refusing to add up and function smoothly. Thus, the request that is made to each one of us is to give without knowing,
calculating, reckoning, or counting on anything. And Derrida has argued that the suspension of ethical universality which signals a break with exchange and reciprocity opposes forms of circulation founded on reprisal, vengeance, and settling scores, on self-redemption implicit in calculable forms of giving, and on the logic of giving in exchange for payment (Derrida, 1995: 102, 107, 112).
Is this not also the paradox of salvation formulated by all Western religions that one must lose or give up one's life in order to save it? Salvation is only constituted in this aporetic way, where the other side of what is can only be approached and brought to bear on the here and now as an impossible experience. This does not mean that the impossibility of salvation condemns us to an endless repetition of the ‘same’. As long as salvation maintains the significance of an unobtainable limit rather than that of a positive, realised condition, we can still work with the idea of a not-yet-known justice. As Matt Waggoner (2005) states:
This impossible justice is only ‘gained’ when ‘given’, i.e., ‘given up’ (though not ‘given up on’); it is a justice whose incomprehensibility enables it to exceed and exhaust existing [ethical] frameworks… (Waggoner, 2005: 82).
Lacan would have found this ‘impossible’ justice to be too abstract and ‘phantasmatic’. He would have also warned us against the dangers of establishing links between political and ethical action and quasi-utopian, otherworldly ideas. However, as Terry Eagleton (2011: 159) states: ‘Anyone who isn't otherworldly in this sense has obviously not taken a good hard look around them’.