{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://jcrt.org/archives/02.1/lupton/",
  "path": "/archives/02.1/lupton/",
  "publishedAt": "2000-01-01T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:e24okfpxr7ctcbmruijop5gp/site.standard.publication/jcrt",
  "tags": [
    "god-and-human-beings",
    "1901-1981",
    "jacques",
    "lacan",
    "psychoanalysis-and-religion",
    "franz",
    "creation-history-of-doctrines",
    "1856-1939",
    "freud",
    "sigmund",
    "1886-1929",
    "rosenzweig",
    "revelation-on-sinai",
    "redemption-comparative-studies"
  ],
  "textContent": "Religion and Psychoanalysis: Three Fundamental Concepts\n=======================================================\n\nIntroduction\\\nJulia Reinhard Lupton\\\nThe University of California at Irvine\n\n    \n\nLacan's seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, delivered in 1964, defines the \"fundamentals of psychoanalysis\" as those points of praxis which \"place man in a position to treat the real by the symbolic.\" For Lacan, then, a \"fundamental concept\" is primarily practical rather than a theoretical construct, and designates those primary modes of psychic functioning that orient human subjects within the social universe while also linking them, through repression and negation, to the traumatic limits of the symbolic world, to \"the real\" as the excluded horizon of the signifying systems that constitute every day reality. As mechanisms by which the symbolic order is founded and maintained in response to the real, Lacan's four fundamental concepts -- the unconscious, repetition, transference, and the drive -- serve at once to keep the traumatic core of the real at bay and to bring subjects into productive contact with its pressure points and avatars.\n\nThe following essays assemble a different set of fundamental concepts -- Creation, Revelation, and Redemption -- in order to locate these points of resistance and interchange that link the fields of religion and psychoanalysis. These three concepts have historically defined the exegetical and existential foundations of Judaism and Christianity as lived bodies of thought, discourses which, like psychoanalysis, have the capacity to \"treat the real by the symbolic,\" to become modes of ethical and interpretive praxis capable of redirecting as well as confirming the norms of social life. Creation, Revelation, and Redemption have also had tremendous resonance in psychoanalysis, not only in the moments of Freudian discovery and in Lacan's definitive return to the originality of that discovery, but also in the exegetical dynamics that one can find in both bodies of work. These dynamics are not simply interdisciplinary or intertextual -- implying an exchange between separate discourses -- let alone a question of cultural \"application\" -- placing a theoretical master text in relation to an aesthetic or historical object. Instead, what makes these concepts \"fundamental\" is the way in which something primary to psychoanalysis arises and coalesces in response to them, a response that arises both to and within the field of religion as a chance for ethical intervention and revision rather than a purely theoretical or mythopoetic debt.\n\nThe three essays included here, by addressing each of these fundamental concepts, also initiate a reading of Lacan's seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis. Lacan's commentaries on creation ex nihilo, the Ten Commandments, and the Sabbath point to vital junctures between Biblical and psychoanalytic discourses that move beyond the lure of secular demystification. These junctures count as \"three fundamental concepts of religion and psychoanalysis\" insofar as they force the comparison of these two fields beyond a merely hermeneutic or cognitive enterprise towards productive, even emancipatory, paradigms for human action encrypted within apparently normative or disciplinary modes of thought.\n\nCreation, Revelation, and Redemption received systematic analysis in Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption (1921), a work which attempted to organize -- in a Hegelian style though running counter to the spirit of idealism -- the heterogeneous, largely unphilosophical body of Jewish exegesis and practice. The \"star\" of the book's title is made up of two superimposed triangles, representing the three historico-theological moments of Creation, Revelation, and Redemption in relation to the existential themes of God, world, and man.\n\nCreation is primal and foundational, a first configuration of world, God and humanity in relation to each other. Rosenzweig's creation resembles the primary process in Freud: \"This wealth, this chaos, is the first-born of creation, the perpetual renewal of its existence ... chaos is within creation, not prior to it\" (Star 134). Like the world of the primary processes, the basic grammar of creation is that of the affirmative judgment: God signs the first five days of creation with the simple affirmative, \"It is good.\" This positive evaluation is nothing more than the arch-yea become audible .... shown by the possibility, in many languages, of saying 'well!\", 'good!' or the like for 'Yes'\" (126-27). \"Affirmation places a Thus freely into the infinite ....\" Yet, creation is not pure plenitude either; surrounding or made from nothing, it forces a certain arrest and fixation, an initial symbolic transcription, of the chaos maintained within it, even though the primitive signposts of this transcription are often susceptible to fall, flood and fire, to pre-covenantal catastrophe. Lacan's revision of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo in terms of the primitive signifier he calls das Ding is visited in the first paper by Richard Halpern, which reevaluates the claims of evolutionism and creationism in the original context of Lacan's seminar and in the current moment.\n\nRevelation is traditionally linked to the giving of the law at Sinai and hence with the institution of an historical order defined by law, text, and nation. In Rosenzweig's analysis, revelation is that which gives structure to creation: creation is \"suspended within the inner framework of necessity which revelation has constructed\" (118); revelation \"frees the things from their state of being merely created ... revelation is thus the means for confirming creation structurally\" (161). In our psychoanalytic star, if creation represents the construction of primitive signifiers within the pre-symbolic landscape of the primary processes, revelation can be co-aligned with the advent of the symbolic order, with the structuration, signification, and repression of the chaotic, creaturely fullness of creation and the organization of its initial primitive signifiers through the intervention of a tabulated Law. The second essay, by Kenneth Reinhard and myself, explores the symbolizing function of the Ten Commandments, the historic core of Jewish and Christian revelations. The Decalogue, we argue, maps the formation of the subject of religion in relation to the alterities represented by God's unspeakable name, on the one hand, and by the jouissance of the neighbor on the other.\n\nRosenzweig associates creation with the past tense, with the modality of radical origination, since creation has always taken place at some distant point in the archaic past even while it continues to have currency in later moments.Revelation,on the other hand, by providing structure, allows the present as such to occur. Prefaced by \"the summons to hear, the address by the given name,\" its primary grammar is not that of the affirmative judgment, but rather that of the commandment: \"The 'Love me!' is wholly pure and unprepared-for present tense ... The imperative of the commandment makes no provision for the future; it can only conceive the immediacy of obedience\"(176-77). Redemption, the third point of Rosenzweig's triangle, belongs by definition to the future that command does not imagine, to a beyond that is always only anticipated through prophesy and dream. Rosenzweig identifies redemption with a final Sabbath, in which God himself is released from both the work of Creation and the laws of revelation: \"Redemption is [God's] day of rest, his great Sabbath ... Redemption redeems God by releasing him from his revealed name\" (383).\n\nIf we want to link creation with the imaginary world of the primary processes and revelation with the symbolic order of signification, redemption charts the traversal of fantasy, understood as the \"end\" of analysis, its goal and its termination, through a subjectivizing reclamation of one's place in the symbolic order vis à vis the real. Psychoanalysis does not aim to expose, demystify, or dissolve fantasy but rather to reconfigure it, shaking up and rearranging its damaging points of fixation so that the subject can \"treat the real via the symbolic.\" Like the dream of Messianism, the traversal of fantasy implies a certain utopian encounter with the real as the time of enjoyment and freedom, understood both subjectively and politically. The third paper, by Gregg Lambert, links the Sabbath injunction of absolute rest, of a complete suspension in the laws of utility, to the Marxist vision of emancipated labor and a general strike. Both Marxism and psychoanalysis, as epochal encounters with Jewish Messianism in its secular afterlife, posit a time in which humanity is not fully alienated in the laws of utility and signification.\n\nRosenzweig ends his analysis of Creation with a final commentary on the affirmative judgments with which God closes the sixth day of the world's existence:\n\n> For the last time, God regards what he has created. And this time: lo! -- \"very good.\" The root-word of creation emerges from itself. It remains an adjective, remains within the framework of its own essence. But it ceases to designate the simple, individual, uncompared attribute. It becomes a comparative; it compares. Within the general Yea of creation, bearing everything individual on its broad back, an area is set apart that is affirmed differently, which is 'very' affirmed. Unlike anything else in creation, it thus points beyond creation. This 'very' heralds a supercreation within creation itself, something more than worldly within the worldly, something other than life which yet belongs to life and only to life, which was created with life as its ultimate, and which yet first lets life surmise a fulfillment beyond life: this 'very' is death. The created death of the creature portends the revelation of a life which is above the creaturely level. (155)\n\nThe \"very good\" introduces a moment of symbolic differentiation into the abundance of creation, a decisive cut linked to the birth of humanity and the possibility of death, taken as a definitive feature of the human condition. As such, it forms a bridge to the next point in Rosenszweig's star: to Revelation as the structural elevation of man above the creation that will continue to cradle him. Yet the \"very good\" also serves as a synapse from the sixth day to the seventh, from the vivid hexameron of God's creative energy to the sublime silence of the first Sabbath, when what God creates is his own cessation from all activity. The Sabbath links Creation (which the Sabbath crowns and terminates) to Revelation (where the institution and regulation of the Sabbath forms a cornerstone of ritual law) to Redemption, as the promised release of humanity from the creaturely servitude of mere life and the alienating effects of signification.\n\nAs such, the Sabbath proffers an opportunity to traverse -- to reconfigure and repunctuate -- the signifying sequence of the week, breaking up the endless repetition of the day-to-day with the possibility of a rest that embraces the created and social worlds, extending to \"you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns\" (Ex 20:10). In the weekly redemption opened up by the Sabbath, the nihil at the heart of creation ex nihilo is separated out from the orders it constellates, becoming the nucleus of sublimation and subjectivization beyond the pleasure principle, beyond both the workday demands of capital and the creaturely necessities of life. The rest mandated by the Sabbath is linked to the death drive not in its capacity as relentless repetition but in its dimension as a final punctuation, both a crown and a limit to life in its quotidian functioning. Taken in its fullest psychic and social dimensions, the Sabbath in its redemptive mode has the potential of becoming, in Lacan's phrase, a \"praxis,\" or, in Rosenzweig's, \"very good.\"\n\n    \n\nNotes\n\n    \n© 2000 Julia Reinhard Lupton. All rights reserved.\\\nUpdated 07/28/21.\n\n---",
  "title": "Religion and Psychoanalysis: Three Fundamental Concepts"
}