Richard Boothby : 'Yes! Nothing IS Sacred! Toward a Lacanian Theory of Religion'

For all his myriad references to religious figures, concepts, and traditions, Lacan never put forward any overarching theory of religion of his own, indeed he disparaged the whole idea of a general theory of religion. This talk risks filling that gap, linking the sense of the sacred with the Lacanian concept of das Ding, the anxiety-producing, unknown dimension of the fellow human being. This notion of an uncognizable excess, originally encountered in the figure of the mother, is a key part of what led Lacan to break with Freud’s formulation of the Oedipus complex and to venture a distinctive conception of unconscious dynamics centered on the paradoxes of jouissance. Leaning on this account, the sacred becomes recognizable as an echo of the unanswerable question of the Other-Thing. The bulk of the analysis unfolds interpretations of Greek polytheism, Judaism, and Christianity. Those interpretations correspond to three cardinal Lacanian quotations: “The gods are a mode by which the real is