I love Terry Eagleton. His new book Trouble with Strangers starts like this: “The argument of this book is…the claim that most ethical theories can be assigned to one of Jacques Lacan’s three psychoanalytical categories of the imaginary, the symbolic and the Real, or to some combination of the three…[and] to contrast them with what seems to me the richer ethics of socialism and the Judaeo-Christian tradition.” (vi).
He says some interesting things about the relation between the Christian and Lacanian visions of the human situation. One of his points is that the latter is tragic, the former not so. A few of his comments also made Lacan sound a) like an existentialist, and b) as if he’d substituted desire as a transcendent figure in place of God.
This is a really long quote but it’s quality exceeds its length.
The crucifixion is traditionally regarded as the moment in which Christ assumes and redeems human guilt. The guilt in question springs from the lethal collusion of law and desire, as the law or superego drives us not only to punish ourselves for our illicit yearnings but to reap an obscene pleasure from the process, a pleasure which in turn provokes a deeper guilt and thus a more savage self-laceration. If the death of Christ is meant to break open this spiral, it is because, we have seen, it reveals the law of the Father to be the law of love and justice rather than a death-dealing power. It proclaims the law as grace – as love, ecstasy, liberation, joyful abundance of life – rather than as a yoke of oppression.
Lacanian thought sees a tragic rift between the subject and the Other – between what we are as subjects, and what the inscrutable Other may demand of us. To say that Jesus is the ‘Son’, by contrast, is to claim that what he is for the Other known as God is also what he is for himself. The source of love, and the source of his personal existence, are identical. He is at one with the law of the Father, a transparent signifier (or ‘Word’) of it, born wholly of love rather than of the flesh; and it is because of this faithful identification with the roots of his identity, this refusal to give up on his loving trust in the ground of his being, that he is tortured and murdered. His fidelity to the law of the Father is itself an example of limitless love, and thus a revelation of the Father himself. God is not simply the object of his desire, but the source of it; so that the ‘bad’ infinity of Lacanian desire, whose object perpetually gives it the slip, yields to a desire for the good which is only possible if the good is somehow already enjoyed….In this sense, the infinity of desire gives way to an eternity of abundant life. It is charity which is most importantly limitless, not desire. Desire is no longer perpetual loss, once it has assumed the form of faith. Since, however, our morbid clamour is for the Other to chastise rather than forgive us, we are reluctant to relinquish the jouissance we reap from such self-punitive fantasies. It is hard to accept the scandal that there could be an Otherness which was actually on our side. To acknowledge this would mean forgoing the masochistic delight which binds us to the law, and would thus require a root-and-branch transformation of the self.
To claim that Jesus is the ‘Son’ of the Father, then, is to say that he is the authentic image of the Father, revealing him as a friend, lover, and fellow-victim rather than as a patriarchal Nobodaddy, Satanic judge or bloodthirsty despot…
The idolatrous, superegoic image of the law is consequently toppled from its pride of place. Because of this, it is now possible in principle to love and desire without guilt. The lack of being which is desire can be seen as a trace of that deeper negativity which is God. We are thus set free from the tragic condition in which desire provokes the malicious sadism of the law, and thus nurtures in us that festering culture of guilt for which the classical Christian term is original sin. Astonishingly, a non-obscene form of jouissance or ecstasy now becomes possible…[Love is now revealed as] the Janus-faced Real. If desire is no longer illicit – if we can now love one another without guilt – it is because we have accepted the intolerable fact that the source of this love has always-already forgiven us, accepts us just as we are in all our moral squalor, and demands nothing from us other than that he should be allowed to love us. There is, astonishingly, a form of the Real which desires our welfare rather than disrupts it, and which will not let us founder. We are thereby rudely robbed of the obscene pleasure of our remorse, which at least assures us that we exist.
Recent Comments