Skip to main content
punctum books

The Other Face of God: Lacan, Theological Structure, and the Accursed Remainder

  • Levi R. Bryant (author)
Chapter of: Speculations 3(pp. 69–98)

Export Metadata

  • ONIX 3.0
    • Thoth
      Cannot generate record: No publications supplied
    • Project MUSE
      Cannot generate record: No BIC or BISAC subject code
    • OAPEN
      Cannot generate record: Missing PDF URL
    • JSTOR
      Cannot generate record: No BISAC subject code
    • Google Books
      Cannot generate record: No BIC, BISAC or LCC subject code
    • OverDrive
      Cannot generate record: No priced EPUB or PDF URL
  • ONIX 2.1
    • EBSCO Host
      Cannot generate record: No PDF or EPUB URL
    • ProQuest Ebrary
      Cannot generate record: No PDF or EPUB URL
  • CSV
  • JSON
  • OCLC KBART
  • BibTeX
  • CrossRef DOI deposit
    Cannot generate record: This work does not have any ISBNs
  • MARC 21 Record
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 Markup
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 XML
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
Metadata
TitleThe Other Face of God
SubtitleLacan, Theological Structure, and the Accursed Remainder
ContributorLevi R. Bryant (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0010.1.05
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/speculations-iii/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
CopyrightBryant, Levi R.
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2012-09-03
Long abstractReading the work of Christo-pher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, one gets the impression that questions of religion and theology revolve around whether or not these beliefs are accurate represen-tations of the world. However, as Levi-Strauss shows in The Savage Mind, the difference between mythological thought and scientific thought is not to be understood in terms of whether it is an accurate representation of the world, but rather both are variations of a common structural order. As Levi-Strauss understands it, both myth and scientific thought are characterized by identical mental operations, but are merely applied to different materials. While not wishing to follow Levi-Strauss all the way in arguing that structures are ahistorical invariants of the human mind, in this paper I do wish to argue—drawing heavily on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory—that religion is a particular structure of thought and human social formations. From this I will draw some struc-tural or systemic consequences that follow from this structural organization. In particular, I wish to identify some structural features characteristic of a particular type of religious thought and social organization pertaining to monotheism in terms of the subject’s precarious relationship to language, masculine sexuation, and the role that objet a plays in our economy of desire. I will argue that these features are not accidental by-products of unique historical conditions, but rather properties of a particular structural organization. While these structures might themselves be products of particular socio-historical conditions, these features will be seen to be part and parcel of these particular forms of structural organization, such that where these structural organizations are present, these features will be present as well in much the same way that the hypotenuse of a right-triangle is a ratio of its relation to the other two sides.
Page rangepp. 69–98
Print length30 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Levi R. Bryant

(author)