The Triumph of Religion preceded by Discourse to Catholics
Jacques Lacan
Language: English
Pages: 98
ISBN: 2:00279363
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"I am the product of priests", Lacan once said of himself. Educated by the Marist Brothers (or Little Brothers of Mary), he was a pious child and acquired considerable, personal knowledge of the torments and cunning of Christian spirituality. He was wonderfully able to speak to Catholics and to bring them around to psychoanalysis. Jesuits flocked to his school.
Freud, an old-style Enlightenment optimist, believed religion was merely an illusion that the progress of the scientific spirit would dissipate in the future. Lacan did not share this belief in the slightest: he thought, on the contrary, that the true religion, Roman Catholicism, would take in everyone in the end, pouring bucketsful of meaning over the ever more insistent and unbearable real that we, in our times, owe to science.
- Jacques-Alain Miller
The Triumph of Religion preceded by Discourse to Catholics Jacques Lacan Translated by Bruce Fink polity Fil5t pubUshed in French as u Trillmplw tk Ill religion © :&iitions du SeuU, 1oOS This English edition 11:1 Polity Press, 1013 Polity Press 6s Bridge Street Cambridge CB11UR. UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 01148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of shon passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no pan of this pub lication may be reproduced,
"Analyzing, " "governing, " and Freud added "educating. " Candidates are even less scarce in this last arena. It is a position that is even reputed to be advanta geous. I mean that, not only are candidates in no way lacking, but there is no shonage of people who receive the stamp of approval - that is, who are authorized to educate. This does not mean they have the slightest idea what is involved in educating. People don't perceive very clearly 55 THE T RIUMPH OF RELIGION what they are
REUGION VI. Getting Used to the Real If human relations have become so problematic because the real is so invasive, aggressive. and haunting. shouldn r we . . . The real we have thus far is nothing compared to what we canno t even imagine, precisely because the defining characteristic of the real is that one cannot imagine it. Shouldn r we, on the contrary. deliver man from reality [reel] ? 1hen psychoanalysis would have no further reason for being. If reality [ree[j becomes sufficiently
snnblable evokes rivalry and jealousy first and foremost. "Counterpart" suggests parallel hierarchical structures within which the two people take on similar roles - that is, symbolic roles - as in "The Chief Financial Officer's counterpart in his company's foreign acquisition target was Mr. Juppe, the Dir�cteur financier." I have revived the somewhat obsolete English "semblable" found, for example, in Hamlet, Act V, scene II, line 124: "his semblable is his mirror; and who else would trace him,
innumerable and chang ing like the figures of desire, that they are living DISCOURSE TO CATHOLICS metaphors. But this is not the case for the only God. If Freud seeks out the prototype thereof in a historical model, the visible model of the Sun, from the first Egyptian religious revolution, that of Akhenaten, it is in order to link back up with the spiritual model of his own tradition: the God of the Ten Commandments. He seems to adopt the first by making Moses into an Egyptian in order to