I grew up in the shadow of icons and for a long time observed the faith of my father, an Orthodox Christian and seminarian; he cultivated this faith, it seemed to me, as an intimate revolt against Communist atheism and as an aesthetic religion. Two months before the fall of the Berlin wall, he died at seventy-seven, killed by “socialist” medicine, which would not administer costly medications to aged persons but transformed them into guinea pigs for their surgical experiments. The horror of this atheism requires no commentary. The debates with my father, necessarily oedipal, left me with an interest at once passionate and critical in an experience of faith that continues to be informed, and tends to be refined, by contact with scientific, philosophical, and, above all, psychoanalytic thought.
Since Freud, and even more after him, the speaking being appears irreducible to his biology, but capable, starting from it and with it, of representing and symbolizing his functioning and activities with others, sexuality being the hinge of this metaphysical dualism, its unimagined artifice and necessary refashioning. Human beings’ apperception of their complex aptitude for representation and symbolization is at the basis of what has been imagined, since the dawn of the hominid, as a “beyond,” “spirituality,” or a “divinity.” Generally, we call atheism the fact of denying this metaphor of the “divine,” which was hypostatized as a “supreme cause” or “supreme good,” or simply the fact of attacking the institutions that celebrate it, whether flexible or dogmatic. Such an attitude often hides an even more brutal denial, that of the capacity of representation-symbolization that Christianity celebrates in its own way by proclaiming, “In the beginning was the Word.” In addition, supposedly militant atheists often proceed by the same causalist and creativist religious logic, erecting a biological or political ideal in place of the “divine.”
On the contrary, true atheist thought would suppose, as Sartre suggested,
1 a depletion of transcendence from and in transcendence. In other words, it would be a meticulous and painstaking analysis of the aptitude itself to represent, symbolize, and think. The psychoanalytical experience, on the one hand, the construction/deconstruction of meaning by arts and letters, particularly in their modern incarnation, on the other, can trace the royal road of this particular atheism. How does
id think? What are the variants and modalities of our capacity for representation? What damages them? These are the questions that mark the thought of an atheism without nihilism.
Religions have explored this heterogeneous continent in their own ways. They have accumulated vast stores of knowledge on the human soul and its relationship to the world and to others, notably and especially in the form of fables, illusions, or imaginary constructions. This pantheon can only be interpreted by considering the internal logic of the facts, commentaries, and logical consolidations and then addressing them in light of the modern knowledge of the speaking being and his world—necessarily provisional and in progress.
And so I was interested in the various purification rituals of religions in societies without writing as well as in Hindu food taboos, Levitical food taboos and defilements (“Thou shalt not cook a kid in its mother’s milk,” Exodus 23:19), and finally in the Christian revolution that situates abjection in the word, the symbolic, and the link to the other (“It is not what enters the mouth that defiles the man; but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles the man,” Matthew 15:11).
2 What emerges is a veritable genealogy of the psychical construction of men in their environment, the sacred appearing as a celebration of the passage, of the border between two structures or two identities (inside/outside, woman/man, child/mother: the list of taxonomies is endless, but these practices and their evolution are always structured by a concern for coherence and identity).
Similarly, a deeper study of theology, notably Marian, allowed me to note how Christendom went on to truly construct the maternal experience—in the guise of what some consider a “goddess-mother” in Christianity and others deplore as a “victimization” of femininity—at the intersection of biology and meaning. Recognition of virginity as an unthinkable externality, a challenge to the logics of beginnings, causes and effects; valorization of maternal love with its ecstatic as well as painful latencies; recompense for feminine paranoia, avid for power and sovereignty; encouragement of the infra-verbal, “semiotic” link between mother and child, on which the incestuous experience of art is built, and whose patron is Mary, mother of Art: these are a few of the advances of Marian worship, on which the subjectivity of men and women in the West was built and without comprehension of which this subjectivity would remain inaccessible.
3Finally, and to conclude for now, certain fundaments essential to modern humanism, such as notions of “freedom” or “personal dignity,” go back to theology. We have to rethink freedom as self-initiation (self-beginning), as rooted ontologically in the initium of birth according to St. Augustine and haloed with the superiority of contingency in Duns Scotus’s haecceitas, to meditate on the risks that freedom is running in a modern world of robotization, programmed births, and mass production.
Religions, in short, seem to be a recognition of what Freud calls
das höhere Wesen in Menschen, “the higher side of man” in which the subject’s freedom is inscribed.
4 This recognition guarantees religions a function of truth beyond the consoling fascination they provide, at first, in any case. Religions recognize human beings’ capacity to create meaning while at the same time denying this intra- and extraphysical dynamic its value as open and renewable knowledge, so as to erect it in a hierarchical system of values. As protective and consoling value systems, religions assure certain human freedoms, but this conquest comes not only at the price of a persecuting exclusion of others (other religions and dissidents) who do not share the same system of values. Graver still, it comes at the price of sexual repression reinforced by the divine threat, and that leads in the end to the inhibition of critical thought, i.e., thought plain and simple. Generating neurosis on the personal level, religion also reclaims it, by way of belief itself:
credo, to give one’s heart in exchange for a reward, the supreme version of which is Eternal Life granted by the heavenly Father.
5 Especially since the neurosis favored by religious prohibition is accompanied by authorized transgressions, in which the perversion (
père-version?) of the believer is satisfied. Christianity excels at swinging between inhibition-repression and freedom-perversion. In the favorable economic context of Western democracies, and especially with current evolutions of Protestantism and Catholicism, it makes its way toward a moralism that tolerates difference and is concerned about exclusion. On the social level it is not radically distinguishable from humanist moralism, but in addition has the advantage of benefiting from tradition, from its security and comfort. Which is to say that atheism, if not confined to the unrest of elites, has a long road ahead of it to rise to the challenge.