The world today suffers from serial, devastating crises, often attributed to either religion or secularism, ‘fundamentalist’ exclusion or ’tolerant’ inclusion, theism or agnosticism/atheism, prohibition or permissiveness: contemporary catastrophe results from too much or too little faith in some ‘thing' outside our ‘selves', whether that 'thing’ is God or otherwise. 

 

The subject of this course is the psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan and his analyses of religion. Lacan saw these alternatives (religion vs. secularism) to tackling contemporary crises as false, two sides of the same coin: both are worse, he argues, and the proof is in that choosing either faith or not has only deepened the crises, which adherents of either side claim to overcome. 

 

In this course, we’ll read carefully Lacan’s analyses of religion, throughout his Écrits and Seminar, which offer rigorous interpretation of at least the first two Abrahamic religions on their own, internally contested terms: Judaism's struggle with the question of too much vs. too little faith (e.g. God’s testing of Abraham) but without resolution (e.g. God ‘somehow’ saves Isaac). Christianity's emergence in response: the incarnation of 'Christ, Jesus’ as man-God who actually comes to our world and dies for our sins. Lacan argues that what comes to be official Christianity fails — let’s us off the literal ‘hook’ — paving the way for his reconstructed ‘psychoanalysis’, what Eric Santner aptly calls a ’psychotheology of everyday life’: we must constantly create while justifying that which must be revered. 
 

The course follows these trajectories of Lacan’s thought without, however, forgetting the third Abrahamic religion — Islam — which emerged to redress precisely the failures of Christianity’s response to Judaism that Lacan takes up with his psycho-analysis/theology. Less work has been done on this topic, but we’ll take assistance from Joan Copjec’s magisterial new book, Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran, Fethi Benslama’s Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam, as well as Norman O. Brown’s lectures, The Challenge of Islam, to conclude the course: a rigorous conversation between the Lacanian and Islamic critique of Judeo-Christianity.