The true religion is the Roman Catholic religion—in it the function of analogy prevails, »[i]t will find correspondences between everything and everything else.«[2] What does this religion actually do in its exercise of this function? How is Lacan utilising the concept of analogy?
He warns (after 1968) against the »religion of the body,«[3] which came into being through the abolition of the father and can be seen as a »society of brothers.«[4] Whereas he deems this fraternity among humans (of bodies, of flesh) ›fatal,‹[5] it is based on exclusion and has a fundamental effect in the exclusion of the enjoyment of others.
Where we speak of the fraternity of bodies, the bodily enjoyment also resonates, through which this fraternity—even if it cannot define itself, i.e. we do not know about our jouissance—also excludes itself via the body. The truth of Lacan’s statement »The true religion is the Roman one« corresponds to the truth of Laurent’s statement »our history has shown in particular, behind each guise of racism, the central place of anti-Semitism as both a precursor and a horizon.«[6] We find confirmation in the first Gospel: »For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ« (John 1:16–17). The religion of the Son, and thus the brethren, triumphs (grace upon grace) over the Father (with grace and truth). Just as John 1:1 itself abolishes Gen 1:1, or »[w]hile one religion takes truth away from another,«[7] so too does this fraternity that Lacan and by extension Laurent address, take the Aletheia away from the Other. A-Letheia (to borrow from Heidegger) resonates with the un-hiddenness of jouissance. The jouissance only remains unconcealed to us in the Other, therefore it can be seen there as an unconcealment, just as our jouissance is revealed to the Other, but not to ourselves.
He warns (after 1968) against the »religion of the body,«[3] which came into being through the abolition of the father and can be seen as a »society of brothers.«[4] Whereas he deems this fraternity among humans (of bodies, of flesh) ›fatal,‹[5] it is based on exclusion and has a fundamental effect in the exclusion of the enjoyment of others.
Where we speak of the fraternity of bodies, the bodily enjoyment also resonates, through which this fraternity—even if it cannot define itself, i.e. we do not know about our jouissance—also excludes itself via the body. The truth of Lacan’s statement »The true religion is the Roman one« corresponds to the truth of Laurent’s statement »our history has shown in particular, behind each guise of racism, the central place of anti-Semitism as both a precursor and a horizon.«[6] We find confirmation in the first Gospel: »For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ« (John 1:16–17). The religion of the Son, and thus the brethren, triumphs (grace upon grace) over the Father (with grace and truth). Just as John 1:1 itself abolishes Gen 1:1, or »[w]hile one religion takes truth away from another,«[7] so too does this fraternity that Lacan and by extension Laurent address, take the Aletheia away from the Other. A-Letheia (to borrow from Heidegger) resonates with the un-hiddenness of jouissance. The jouissance only remains unconcealed to us in the Other, therefore it can be seen there as an unconcealment, just as our jouissance is revealed to the Other, but not to ourselves.
How much of this problem is already laid down in the analogia entis itself as a culture-forming figure of thought? The analogia entis postulates an analogy of being between God and man, a principle with which the subordinate can align itself by similarity. This upper and therefore last principle is recognizable by reason. The analogy relation grants a bottom-up movement: to think as the analogia entis is structured, will lead to the line of thought ›enjoying of enjoying as absolute enjoying.‹[8] The place of absolute enjoying can easily be conceptualized as the place of the God of religion.[9] Ontologically, the absolute and the human principle are similar, because they are both being. A cultural justification as it’s made on the basis of the analogia entis in Christianity leads structurally to the racially charged concept of brotherhood and the crusade against the jouissance and A-Letheia of the Other (›grace upon grace‹).In both cases, we’re on the same level of being, hence both present a problem of potentiality put into the world. An (inner-)worldly last principle can only be reached because of its same ontological status. Hereby the problem of this way of thinking is formulated on the basis of analogy. Such a potential (inner-)worldly primacy can only be overcome by a radical separation of world and God—as it was carried out by Karl Barth.[10] Every formulation and fledgling attempt even merely to think God, to claim him for oneself, is necessarily in vain. No longer is the ultimate principle the Other, but the world and man is the absolute Other. We can speak here of a similarity of the dissimilar. This opens up the space as it renounces the dream of the »universalization of the mode of jouissance«.[11] Further Miller: a possible solution to the unsustainability of the difference between ourselves and the Other would be to recognize ourselves as the subject of jouissance in the Other.[12]
In this radical separation of the ultimate principle as such and the world/man, each and every one becomes the Other. The potentiality of jouissance is recognized from the ground up in everyone, the question of actualization of a certain defined jouissance does not arise. The religious behavior is ever to itself and is not subject to any historically conditioned (chosen-jouissance-)dogmatics. What I see in this gradual dismantling of a fixed religion and God in Lacan, only to resurrect them both at a later stage is nothing else than an explication of the urgent actus, which provides a reason why history runs the way it runs—on the basis of the interpretation of the analogia entis—and will run again (as Lacan already warned in the early 70s), as it has run.
[1] Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, 1993, cited in: Herman Westerink, »Eine Wende des Denkens. Jacques Lacan und die kulturelle Vaterschaft zwischen Psychoanalyse und Reformation« [Turn of Thought. Jacques Lacan and the Cultural Paternity between Psychoanalysis and Reformation], PSYCHE 66, no. 6 (2012), 507.
[1] Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, 1993, cited in: Herman Westerink, »Eine Wende des Denkens. Jacques Lacan und die kulturelle Vaterschaft zwischen Psychoanalyse und Reformation« [Turn of Thought. Jacques Lacan and the Cultural Paternity between Psychoanalysis and Reformation], PSYCHE 66, no. 6 (2012), 507.
[2] Jacques Lacan, »The Triumph of Religion« in The Triumph of Religion preceded by Discourse to Catholics, transl. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity, 2013 [2005]), 66. [3] Eric Laurent, Racism 2.0, 2014: http://ampblog2006.blogspot.com/2014/01/lq-in-english-racism-20-by-eric-laurent.html
[4] ibid.[5] Jacques Lacan, ...or Worse: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xix, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A.R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 210–211.
[6] Eric Laurent, Racism 2.0, 2014: http://ampblog2006.blogspot.com/2014/01/lq-in-english-racism-20-by-eric-laurent.html
[7] Klaus Heinrich, wie eine religion der anderen die wahrheit wegnimmt, Reden und kleine Schriften—Neue Folge 1 [how one religion takes away the truth from another, speeches and small writings—new series 1] (Freiburg/Vienna: ça ira, 2020 [1997]), 9–46.
[6] Eric Laurent, Racism 2.0, 2014: http://ampblog2006.blogspot.com/2014/01/lq-in-english-racism-20-by-eric-laurent.html
[7] Klaus Heinrich, wie eine religion der anderen die wahrheit wegnimmt, Reden und kleine Schriften—Neue Folge 1 [how one religion takes away the truth from another, speeches and small writings—new series 1] (Freiburg/Vienna: ça ira, 2020 [1997]), 9–46.
[8] Alain Juranville, Lacan und die Philosophie [Lacan et la philosophie], transl. Hans-Dieter Gondek (Munich: Klaus Boer, 1990 [1984]), 495.[9] ibid.
[10] Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, transl. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968 [1922]), 400–407.[11] Jacques-Alain Miller, »Extimate Enemies«, The Lacanian Review, no. 3 (2017): 37.
[12] ibid. 39.