Interstices of the Sublime Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory

by Crockett, Clayton

• ISBN13: 9780823227228
• ISBN10: 0823227227
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-05-15
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
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Summary

Interstices of the Sublime represents a powerful theological engagement with psychoanalytic theory in Freud, Lacan, Kristeva and Zi zek, as well as major expressions of contemporary Continental philosophy, including Deleuze, Derrida, Marion, and Badiou. Through creative and constructive psycho-theological readings of topics such as sublimation, schizophrenia, God, and creation ex nihilo, this book contributes to a new form of radical theological thinking that is deeply involved in the world. Here the idea of the Kantian sublime is read into Freud and Lacan, and compared with sublimation. The sublime refers to a conflict of the Kantian faculties of reason and imagination, and involves the attempt to represent what is intrinsically unrepresentable. Sublimation, by contrast, involves the expression and partial satisfaction of primal desires in culturally acceptable terms. The sublime is negatively expressed in sublimation, because it is both the "source" of sublimation as well as that which resists being sublimated. That is, the Freudian sublime is related to the process of sublimation, but it also distorts or disrupts sublimation, and invokes what Lacan calls the Real. The effects of the sublime are not just psychoanalytic but, importantly, theological, because the sublime is the main form that "God" takes in the modern world. A radical postmodern theology attends to the workings of the sublime in our thinking and living, and provides resources to understand the complexity of reality. This book is one of the first sustained theological readings of Lacan in English.

Author Biography

Clayton Crockett is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Central Arkansas

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
On Sublimation: The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Study of Religion	p. 18
We Are All Mad: Theology in the Shadow of a Black Sun	p. 37
Desiring the Thing: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis	p. 51
Foreclosing God: Heidegger, Lacan, and Kristeva	p. 68
Anxiety and the S(ub)lime Body of God	p. 81
Ages of the World and Creation ex Nihilo, Part I: Tillich and Schelling	p. 97
Ages of the World and Creation ex Nihilo, Part II: Zizek and Lacan	p. 117
God Without Being (God): A Lacanian Critique of Jean-Luc Marion	p. 133
Expressing the Real: Lacan and the Limits of Language	p. 148
Processing the Real: Sub-stance	p. 165
Conclusion	p. 181
Notes	p. 189
Index	p. 215
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