Customer Reviews

Lacan and Theological Discourse (S U N Y Series in Philosophy)

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This is an academic book aimed primarily at an academic audience in theology and religious studies. I was drawn to the title as a general reader, with more than a casual interest in Lacan and religion. From that perspective, the book was not entirely what I had hoped. Although Lacan presented himself as a confirmed atheist, his focus on the human subject's relationship to the "symbolic order" and "Other" has obvious theological resonances, which Lacan frequently made explicit in his work. For example, Chapter VIII of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Vol. Book VII) (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan) is entitled "The death of God," and focuses on such themes as God's eruption as "Other" in his revelation to Moses in the burning bush at Exodus 3:13, where God enigmatically tells Moses "I am who I am." I had hoped that this volume might address directly the theological implications of Lacan's own use of religious materials. Instead, it addresses itself to narrower questions of academic theology and religious studies.

This volume is a series of essays, drawing on Lacanian themes, by scholars of religion. The essays are very disparate in their approach. How much religion or explicitly religious thought is a subject of the essays varies tremendously from author-to-author. This leads to a lack of coherence in the work as whole: in some of the essays, religion and religious themes are less explicit than in much of Lacan's work itself; while others are hyper-focused on theological questions of a particular faith, such as Anselm's "ontological argument" for the existence of God. The essays are mostly presented in the language of "post-modernist" academia, and, in my view, suffer thereby from a certain coyness about whether they are making positive assertions.

Nonetheless, I found the book interesting and worthwhile. For example, Professor Edith Wyschogrod's application of Lacanian concepts to the "ontological argument" was quite fascinating, as was Professor Mark Taylor's less explicitly religious essay on the situation of the human subject between desire and the symbolic order in "The Refusal of the Bar." Just be advised that this is not a place to start with Lacan and religion, and the book requires a degree of toleration for the "inside baseball" of post-modernist academic "discourse."