Abstract
The Name of the Father is one of those terms that people bandy about intentionally ignoring the apparent Christian bias in the phrase. Yes, Lacan was convinced it was a phrase that signified the universality of the master signifier; Lacan’s convictions did not stop the critics from accusing him of Christianizing Freud’s science. Perhaps, Lacan was responding to those critics when, in “Science and Truth,” he redefines Freud’s science on the question of truth. Science forecloses truth-as-cause, religion names it as belonging to God, and psychoanalysis is all about truth-as-cause. Lacan’s reflection on religious discourse in this essay suggests he is indirectly defending his choice of a master signifier. In this chapter, Principe explores the implications of Lacan’s choice and suggests it has something to do with his return to thinking about the Name of the Father throughout his career, including in his work on James Joyce, in Seminar XXIII.
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Notes
- 1.
It is tempting to see the abbreviation as a kind of disappearing of the Christian association with the phrase—and even a secular profaning of the sacred expression.
- 2.
Miller notes that Lacan’s relationship to the Name of the Father lecture hinges on the fact that the lecture coincided with him being ousted from the French Psychoanalytic Society: “So, from then until now and forever there was a hole in his teaching, in the series of his seminars, which over the years Lacan liked to interpret … as if to give that seminar would have been in some way impossible, as if it were prohibited to touch on the Name-of-the-Father in psychoanalysis” (“The Names-of-the-Father” in Lacanian Ink, 2006, p. 27, 65).
- 3.
As early as The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud claims an affinity between psychoanalysis and science: “I must affirm that dreams really have a meaning and that a scientific procedure for interpreting them is possible.” In “The Question of Weltanschauung,” he describes psychoanalysis as being interested in the scientific Weltanschauung and against the religious Weltanschauung.
- 4.
As Lacan states, the scientist “does-not-want-to-know-anything about the truth as cause” (Lacan 1965, p. 742).
- 5.
In The Future of an Illusion, Freud argues that religion is a childish illusion.
- 6.
The following is one of many examples of Lacan’s criticism of religion: “ecclesiastical power makes do very well with a certain discouragement of thought” (1965, p. 741).
- 7.
As Lacan claims, “There’s no such thing as Woman, Woman with a capital W indicating the universal” (Lacan 1972, p. 72).
- 8.
He introduces Lacan’s claim in “Meprise du Sujet suppose Savoir” that “the place of God the Father is the one I designated as the Name of the Father” (Sharpe 2009, p. 268). That statement, in Sharpe’s perspective, is not a confession of faith; in fact, Lacan is a secular atheist. That atheism, Sharpe observes, is apparent when Lacan claims in his first session of Seminar XI (and thus his first public statement after the “On the Names-of-the-Father” lecture in 1963) that it “is not ‘God is dead,’ But that God is unconscious” (Lacan 1964; Lacan 1970 p. 59). Sharpe proposes that one can read a kind of equivalence between Freud’s “Jewish science” and Lacan’s revision to that science as a “Christianization.” Moreover, he saw Lacan as offering a much more nuanced and much less reductive approach to the relationship between the “science of the psyche and religion” (Sharpe 2009, p. 270).
- 9.
I note that Sharpe is the one who introduces a Muslim, the philosopher Averroes, to clarify what Lacan seems to observe about religion. It seems Sharpe chooses to use this philosopher since he does not observe that it is a philosopher Lacan references in his work. As it stands, Sharpe’s reference is an indirect example of Lacan’s exclusion of Islam in his thought.
- 10.
“I cannot fail to emphasize here the full import of a condition that I’m surprised no commentator has brought out: Freud’s meditations on the function, role, and figure of the Name-of-the-Father, in addition to his entire ethical reference revolving around the properly Judeo-Christian tradition, to which they are thoroughly linked in his work” (1960, p. 22).
- 11.
The belief that Christianity replaces Judaism is rooted in the teachings of the early church fathers, such as Tertullian in his Adversus Iudeos (Against the Jews) of the fourth century CE, and prior to him, Justin the Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho (155–160 CE). In the former, Tertullian addresses a debate between a convert to Judaism and a Christian about why the convert has made a mistake: God transferred his favour to the Gentiles (Christians) with a new covenant because the Jews had rejected God’s grace. Tertullian uses evidence from biblical narratives, such as the Book of Daniel, to prove that Jesus was the very messiah the Judeans were expecting. In Dialogue with Trypho, Justin recounts his efforts to change the mind of a Judean named Trypho, who does not believe that Jesus was the Messiah. As with Tertullian, Justin uses references from the Bible to prove Jesus was the Messiah. He claims that Jesus was the “suffering servant” foretold in the Book of Isaiah and that his messianic status would be confirmed with his return. The supersessionist ideology in Justin’s and Tertullian’s works, among others, was so deeply folded into Christian eschatological expectations that it has become something equivalent to an unconscious conviction by most practicing Christians, as well as among atheists like Lacan.
- 12.
For a fuller explanation of how Badiou and Žižek inadvertently maintain a supersessionist ideology in their work, see John D. Caputo, After the Death of God (2007, p. 81); see also my monograph, Concetta Principe, Secular Messiahs and the Return of Paul’s Real: A Lacanian Approach (2015).
- 13.
Lacan looks at this in depth in his 1963 essay when he critiques Augustine’s translation of the Septuagint, which itself was a better-rendered version of the original Aramaic (pp. 79–80).
- 14.
“Further, it is difficult to contemplate and fully know the substance of God; who fashions things changeable, yet without any change in Himself, and creates things temporal, yet without any temporal movement in Himself. And it is necessary, therefore, to purge our minds, in order to be able to see ineffably that which is ineffable; whereto not having yet attained, we are to be nourished by faith, and led by such ways as are more suited to our capacity, that we may be rendered apt and able to comprehend it” (Augustine, 1:1, para. 3).
- 15.
Notable about Isaiah 2 is that it became a source for early Christian fathers in proving Jesus’s messianic status.
- 16.
Translations from The Jewish Study Bible: Tanakh Translation (2004).
- 17.
“The symbolic father is indeed the dead father” (Lacan 1970, p. 97).
- 18.
Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is a philosophical consideration of the paradoxes of faith that is motivated by the specific theological dilemma raised by God’s sacrifice of Jesus, using Abraham’s sacrifice as the first point of query. Johann de Silencio is Kierkegaard’s fictional persona that interrogates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son for God. Johann asks not as a believer of the faith, but simply as a son questioning his father: how can such an action (killing one’s son) be considered seriously, asks the son? Kierkegaard introduces “anguish” into the Judean narrative. This anguish, Johann de Silencio observes, points to the faith underlying the first approach to divine truth: “Through faith, Abraham did not renounce his claim on Isaac; through his faith he received Isaac” (Kierkegaard 2003, p. 77). Implicit in Kierkegaard’s reading of this story is that Abraham is God, which is very much a Christian reading of this narrative.
- 19.
It is interesting to note how this compromised relationship to the master signifier beautifully exemplifies Lacan’s claim that “the unconscious is structured like a language.”
- 20.
Paul Verhaeghe and Frederic Declercq offer a compelling argument in “Lacan’s goal of analysis: Le Sinthome or the feminine way” that the sinthome can be organized either by faith in the Other (that there is an Other to communicate with and so the Oedipal NOF) or in identification (that there is no other except the “me” of psychosis), which explains how all subjects, and all pathologies, have a “sinthome.”
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Principe, C.V. (2022). The Truth of Lacan’s Name of the Father: A Reconsideration of the “Truth” in “Science and Truth”. In: Wallace, M.A., Principe, C.V. (eds) From Cogito to Covid. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99604-8_5
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