Have a Good Day!

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"