Overview

A radical reinterpretation of the origin of religion through a psychoanalytic theorization of the unknown   Renowned psychoanalytic philosopher Richard Boothby puts forward a novel theory of religion inspired by Jacques Lacan’s theory of das Ding, the disquieting, inaccessible dimension of fellow human beings. This notion of an unfathomable excess, originally encountered in the figure of the mother, led Lacan to break with Freud’s formulation of the Oedipus complex and underlies Lacan’s distinctive conception of unconscious dynamics. Leaning on this account, Boothby shows how our sense of the sacred arises from our relation to what we do not know.   Embracing the Void lays out the range of Freud’s attempts at a psychoanalytic theory of religion and then sketches the rough contours of Lacan’s contrasting approach. From there, Boothby offers the theoretical tools for interpreting the religious impulse and analyzes key religious traditions, from ancient Greek polytheism to Judaism and Christianity, and from Hinduism and Buddhism to Islam, finally turning to modern capitalist culture and the seductive deity that dominates it—money. Lucid, accessible, and compelling, the book provides a cogent intervention in one of the psychoanalytic tradition’s most contentious topics and offers a new approach to our understanding of religion.

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9780810145399

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Reviews

A novel and unusually perceptive work. Richard Boothby charts a new path for our thinking about politics and what it means to be human--a path in which religion and notions of the sacred are not dismissible but inescapable. This book's insights have genuine theoretical and political salience and are conveyed with distinctive clarity. --Paul Eisenstein, coauthor of Rupture: On the Emergence of the Political (Northwestern University Press, 2012) This brilliant and original book offers a crystalline explanation of one of Lacan's key concepts and of his structural revision of Freud. Neither a history nor a genealogy, the discussion creates a kind of taxonomy of religious approaches to the problems generated by our nature as subjects in a psychoanalytic sense. It is a tour de force. --Molly Anne Rothenberg, author of The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change

Author Information

RICHARD BOOTHBY is a professor of philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. He is the author of Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan's Return to Freud; Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology after Lacan; Sex on the Couch: What Freud Still Has to Teach Us about Sex; and the memoir Blown Away: Refinding Life after My Son's Suicide.

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