There is no religious relationship — Lacan’s formulas of sexuation applied onto Kierkegaard’s leap of faith
‘Common sense’ would guide us to believe that identity precedes difference — to understand the difference between two things we must first know the things themselves: first we define A, then we define B and finally we can understand the difference between A and B by comparing them.
Gilles Deleuze in “Difference and Repetition”, Chapter III (The Image of Thought) explained his skepticism over any ‘common sense’ notions such as this (notions that start with “everyone knows…”) as having undefended assumptions. His project lies in prioritizing difference before identity: what if we can conceive of a concept of difference that does not subordinate itself to identity? This is compatible with Lacan and Zizek: when we have an opposition between two things, difference, paradoxically seeming, comes first. To understand A and B properly, first we must define the difference between A and B, and that difference looks different from the perspective of A and then B.
This is the key to understanding Lacan’s formulas of sexuation: it’s not that first we have the masculine, and then the feminine, and finally we compare them to understand the difference between masculine and feminine. The difference comes first and looks different depending on the two perspectives: first we have the difference between masculinity and femininity, and that difference looks different from the masculine or the feminine perspective.
I previously used the following optical illusion as an analogy for this concept of difference:
To understand the above picture we must prioritize difference, that is, the difference between white and black. If we view the difference between white and black from the perspective of white, then that difference is the difference between two white faces on a black background. But the difference between white and black from the perspective of black is the difference between a black vase on a white background. So, like in Lacan’s formulas of sexuation, the difference looks different from the perspective of each identity: we have the masculine way of conceiving the difference between masculine and feminine, and the feminine way of conceiving the difference between masculine and feminine, and the two perspectives are irreconcilable.
According to Zizek, we could say the same thing for political difference (the difference between left-wing and right-wing looks different from the left-wing than from the right-wing perspective). But could we say the same thing for religious difference¹? According to Kant, there is no substantial motive for believing in God, he abandoned giving logical reasons for believing in God in order to make room for faith. To have faith means to believe in something in the absence of reasons to believe in it. Soren Kierkegaard took this one step further: his leap of faith consists in positing how comparison is the killer of faith. It is not that first we analyze each religion, and then we do a comparative analysis and believe in the religion with the best logical arguments. This is not faith, but heresy: to have faith means to first believe in the absence of reasons, and only after that retroactively posit the reasons for believing. In other words, there are reasons to believe in God, but to understand them you must first believe, not the other way around. This is the leap of faith for Kierkegaard: one must make a ‘leap of faith’ and choose between religion or atheism without having any substantial guidance on how to make the choice.
If this sounds similar to our prior discussion about difference and identity, it’s because it is. The difference between religions comes prior to their identity: the difference between two religions looks different to each religion. It’s not that first we understand each religion in isolation and only after compare them to discover their differences: this task would be doomed to fail since to understand their differences would first require from us a subjective standpoint from which to observe them. Instead, we must first ‘blindly’ pick one of the religions, and only after that leap of faith we can do the comparative analysis.
This notion becomes the clearest when we observe the trajectory of a person who changes their belief depending on a certain factor, and then retroactively engages in meta-thinking (thinks about how they think) to understand the reasons for the changes. Let’s say our subject prays to God in times of desperation, when they are not doing well in life, and later loses faith when they start being in a good place in life. If they are currently in a desperate place in life (and thus religious) they will look back upon the times they were atheist as a place of hypocrisy (“I only pray to God when I need something from him! The moment I don’t need him, I lose faith.”). However, if they are currently in a good place in life (and thus atheistic/agnostic), they will look back upon the times they were desperate as their mind playing tricks on them because of the incapacity to reason under pressure (“My mind makes better judgements when I am in a good mood and it’s harder to think clearer when I am in a bad mood, this is why I had religious delusions when I had many problems.”).
We can notice from the above example that there is no neutral standpoint from which to start the analysis of meta-thinking, we can analyze the difference between faith and atheism from the perspective of faith, or we can analyze that difference from the perspective of atheism, and neither one is the neutral or ‘objective’ standpoint. In each case, the current position asserts itself as the superior one.
We can compare the atheist viewpoint to the masculine formula of sexuation from Lacan, and the religious viewpoint to the feminine one. The masculine standpoint introjects identity and projects contradiction: it displaces symbolic castration upon the other in order to create the illusion of a whole, and consistent self without contradictions. The masculine formula itself is “there is a universal, and there is an exception to this universal”, the exception lying in the place of the other. This is the logic behind ‘scientific atheism’: it uses a method which presents itself as objective and neutral in order to explain the other positions which do not use it (religion), thus utilizing a universal method with the exceptions (contradictions) being projected outside. Scientific atheism can explain the causes behind every belief other than itself: it explains everything but itself.
The feminine standpoint projects identity and introjects contradiction: it posits a self-divided self and respects the identity of the other. This is the logic behind Christianity: the omnipotent God is self-divided himself, coming down onto earth in human form.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
1: This idea was revealed to me during a dream.
