If, once upon a time, we publicly pretended to believe while privately we were skeptics or even engaged in obscene mocking of our public beliefs, today we publicly tend to profess our skeptical, hedonistic, relaxed attitude while privately we remain haunted by beliefs and severe prohibitions. Therein resides, for Jacques Lacan, the paradoxical consequence of the experience that "God is dead": The Father can efficiently prohibit desire only because he is dead, and, I would add, because he himself doesn't know it - namely, that he is dead. Such is the myth that Freud proposes to the modern man as the man for whom God is dead - namely, who believes that he knows that God is dead.
Why does Freud elaborate this paradox? In order to explain how, in the case of father's death, desire will be more threatening and, consequently, the interdiction more necessary and more harsh. After God is dead, nothing is anymore permitted.
In order to properly understand this passage, one has to read it together with (at least) two other Lacanian thesis. These dispersed statements should then be treated as pieces of a puzzle to be combined into one coherent proposition. It is only their interconnection plus the implicit reference to the Freudian dream of the father who doesn't know that he is dead that enables us to deploy Lacan's basic thesis in its entirety:"The true formula of atheism is not God is dead - even by basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder, Freud protects the father - the true formula of atheism is God is unconscious."
"As you know... Ivan leads [his father Karamazov] into those audacious avenues taken by the thought of the cultivated man, and in particular, he says, if God doesn't exist then everything is permitted. Quite evidently, a naive notion, for we analysts know full well that if God doesn't exist, then nothing at all is permitted any longer. Neurotics prove that to us every day.
The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead, what he doesn't know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God. What characterizes modernity is no longer the standard figure of the believer who secretly harbors intimate doubts about his belief and engages in transgressive fantasies. What we have today is a subject who presents himself as a tolerant hedonist dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, but whose unconscious is the site of prohibitions - what is repressed are not the illicit desires or pleasures, but prohibitions themselves. "If God doesn't exist then everything is prohibited" means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment. (One should not forget to supplement this thesis with its opposite: "if God exists, then everything is permitted" - is this not the most succinct definition of the religious fundamentalists predicament? For him, God fully exists, he perceives himself as his instrument, which is why he can do whatever he wants, his acts are redeemed in advance, since they express the divine will...)
It is against this background that one can locate Dostoyevsky's mistake. Dostoyevsky provided the most radical version of the "If God doesn't exist, then everything is permitted" idea in "Bobok" his weirdest short story, which even today continues to perplex its interpreters....
- Slavoj Zizek, "God in Pain: Inversions of the Apocalypse"
This explains why most of the atheists I know are miserable.
ReplyDeleteP.s. the video is creepy x 10
The implication here seems to be that God is an imaginary construct that we may choose either to accept as real or reject as a mere figment of ancient, outmoded superstition -- as though the existence of God were entirely up to US.
ReplyDeleteThe joke, if such there be, is on anyone who has such arrogant, unwavering faith in his own meager perceptions and limited understanding of what is and is not, and what can and cannot be.
If God is real, then certainly those who would deny Him are bound to find themselves continually out of phase and out of harmony with Reality -- diametrically opposed to all that's Right and Good, and, therefore, cynical, continually perplexed, dyspeptic, in an agony of perpetual doubt and discord, and thus incapable of experiencing the joy of serenity and deep appreciation for the abundant gifts Life continually offers.
Who and what is God? Everyone talks about Him either in an attempt to affirm their faith in Him, or to deny the wisdom of making even an attempt to cultivate such faith, yet few have the slightest idea of what they are talking about when they refer to God -- ESPECIALLY those who profess -- often quite loudly -- that THEY are the ones who love Him most and are closest TO Him.
Orthodox Jews and Christians would insist that God is a PERSON.
I think that concept is naive, shallow, manipulative and tragically misleading.
God is REALITY.
God is TRUTH.
God is PRINCIPLE.
God is SPIRIT (defining essence).
God is MIND (Intelligence)
God is SOUL (character, personality)
God is LOVE (affection that encourages, nourishes, aids, teaches, makes desirable healthy growth and development -- and SURVIVAL -- possible)
God is LIFE, itself.
God IS All-IN-All, and, therefore, utterly inescapable.
I would add that God is also BEAUTY and ORDER.
God is the embodiment and perfect expression of each of these elements all of which a synonymous and interchangeable.
All strife and agony stems from the (perverse) desire to DENY God, and make the hopeless attempt to replace Him with our puny little selves.
I use the ancient terms "God" and refer to God as "Him" simply for the sake of convenience.
Was Jesus Christ God?
Jesus was UNIQUE. I have no idea whether He was literally born of a virgin or that He literally rose from the dead. Frankly, I don't think those things matter all that much. That makes me a heretic, and in former times, I would doubtless be carted off by Ecclesiastical Authority to be publicly reviled, bullied, insulted, tortured, and burned at the stake.
That only strengthens my faith in the God (Truth) in whom I believe, because I know that those Authorities, like the Scribes and Pharisees before them, were -- and remain -- the true heretics, the truly evil ones, the most ungodly and insolent of all.
I believe that Jesus came to show us how to live in harmony with Life, in such a way that we may grow closer to Truth, more inclined to abide by Principle, become ever more loving in our day to day transactions on every conceivable level, ever more charitable towards our enemies, and ever more grateful for the Gift of Life under any and all circumstances.
God is Affirmation of Life.
Denial of God demonstrates a perverse desire for bitterness, dissatisfaction, cynicism, cruelty, illness, disabiity and death.
The implications of this post are intended to reveal the effects of non-believing on the non-believer. Contrary to the naive assumption that lead some to believe that a perception of G_d's non-existence would mean that everything was "permitted", the opposite is the case... as since there would be no "authority" available to "grant permission" to him that "seeks" it... as there are many area's in which the individual subconsciously seeks "permission" outside of themselves in daily life
ReplyDeleteie - When I encounter a bearer of symbolic authority (a father, a judge…), my subjective experience of him can be that of a corrupted weakling, yet I nonetheless treat him with due respect because this is how he "objectively appears to me." , a "symbolic" authority figure.
ReplyDeleteBelief can only thrive in the shadowy domain between outright falsity and positive truth.
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The Foucauldian motif of the interconnection between discipline and subjective freedom thus appears in a different light: by submitting myself to some disciplinatory machine, I, as it were, transfer to the Other the responsibility to maintain the smooth run of things, and thus gain the precious space in which to exercise my freedom…
The one who originally "does it for me" is the signifier itself in its external materiality, from the "canned prayer" in the Tibetan prayer wheel to the "canned laughter" on our TV: the basic feature of the symbolic order qua "big Other," is that it is never simply a tool or means of communication, since it "decenters" the subject from within, in the sense of accomplishing his act for him. This gap between the subject and the signifier which "does it for him," is clearly discernible in common everyday experience: when a person slips, another person standing next to him and merely observing the accident, can accompany it with "Oops!" or something similar. The mystery of this everyday occurrence is that, when the other does it for me, instead of me, the symbolic efficiency of it is exactly the same as in the case of my doing it directly. Therein resides the paradox of the notion of the "performative," or speech act: in the very gesture of accomplishing an act by way of uttering words, I am deprived of authorship, the "big Other" (the symbolic institution) speaks through me. It is no wonder then, that there is something puppet-like about the persons whose professional function is tessentially performative (judges, kings…): they are reduced to a living embodiment of the symbolic institution, i.e. their sole duty is to "dot the i's" mechanically, to confer on some content elaborated by others, the institutional cachet. The later Lacan is fully justified in reserving the term "act" for something much more suicidal and real than a speech act.
- Slavoj Zizek, "The Interpassive Subject"