Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

Interstices of the Sublime represents a powerful theological engagement with psychoanalytic theory in Freud, Lacan, Kristeva and Zi zek, as well as major expressions of contemporary Continental philosophy, including Deleuze, Derrida, Marion, and Badiou. Through creative and constructive psycho-theological readings of topics such as sublimation, schizophrenia, God, and creation ex nihilo, this book contributes to a new form of radical theological thinking that is deeply involved in the world. Here the idea of the Kantian sublime is read into Freud and Lacan, and compared with sublimation. The sublime refers to a conflict of the Kantian faculties of reason and imagination, and involves the attempt to represent what is intrinsically unrepresentable. Sublimation, by contrast, involves the expression and partial satisfaction of primal desires in culturally acceptable terms. The sublime is negatively expressed in sublimation, because it is both the "source" of sublimation as well as that which resists being sublimated. That is, the Freudian sublime is related to the process of sublimation, but it also distorts or disrupts sublimation, and invokes what Lacan calls the Real. The effects of the sublime are not just psychoanalytic but, importantly, theological, because the sublime is the main form that "God" takes in the modern world. A radical postmodern theology attends to the workings of the sublime in our thinking and living, and provides resources to understand the complexity of reality. This book is one of the first sustained theological readings of Lacan in English. Frontmatter Acknowledgements (page xi) Introduction (page 1) 1 On Sublimation: The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Study of Religion (page 18) 2 We Are All Mad: Theology in the Shadow of a Black sun (page 37) 3 Desiring the Thing: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (page 51) 4 Foreclosing God: Heidegger, Lacan, and Kristeva (page 68) 5 Anxiety and the S(ub)lime Body of God (page 81) 6 Ages of the World and Creation ex Nihilo, Part I: Tillich and Schelling (page 97) 7 Ages of the World and Creation ex Nihilo, Part II: Žižek and Lacan (page 117) 8 God Without Being (God): A Lacanian Critique of Jean-Luc Marion (page 133) 9 Expressing the Real: Lacan and the Limits of Language (page 148) 10 Processing the Real: Sub-stance (page 165) Conclusion (page 181) Notes (page 189) Index (page 215)