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. --

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