UC Irvine

Despite Freudʼs Nietzschean unmasking of religion as ideology, psychoanalysis has frequently been attacked as itself a religion, a cabal of analyst-priests dedicated to the worship of a dead master. Such critics “do not believe in Freud” in much the same way as atheists “do not believe in God,” and their rejections of psychoanalysis in the name of the secular partake in the very structure of religious thought they claim to repudiate. In Seminar XXI: Les non-dupes errent, Lacan comments on the blindness of the atheistic insight concerning religion: “I know that youʼre not believers, right? But that doesnʼt mean that you arenʼt all the more conned . . . because even if you are not believers, you still believe in that aspiration [for the love of God]. I wonʼt say that you suppose it; rather, it supposes you” [Dec. 18, 1973; our trans.]. In Lacanʼs analysis, it is not that secular intellectuals suffer from unexamined religious “suppositions” or assumptions, to be swept away through a little ideology-critique or time on the couch. The case is rather, in Lacanʼs strong formulation, that religious discourse supposes us—supports and underwrites our very structures of being, subjectivity, and social interaction. That is, the secular subject is produced by the religious discourses that precede and continue to speak through it; the challenge for the contemporary critic is not to silence or debunk those discourses, but rather to bring the modern subject to assume responsibility for their enunciation.