Ambivalence Toward Das Ding

Ambivalence Toward Das Ding names the structural condition in which the subject's relation to the Thing is irreducibly split between attraction and terror — love and fear held together not as psychological contradictions to be resolved but as the constitutive double-bind installed by das Ding itself. Because das Ding is the "beyond-of-the-signified," the void around which desire orbits without ever reaching it, the subject can neither approach nor abandon it: to draw near is to risk the annihilation of desire (since desire requires the Thing's absence), and to turn away is to lose the very gravitational centre of one's being. This double impossibility is what Boothby's analysis names ambivalence — not mere ambiguity of feeling, but the structural necessity that any encounter with das Ding will simultaneously generate love (the pull of originary plenitude) and fear (the dread of proximity to the Real). Religious experience, on this reading, is one of the primary cultural arenas in which this structural ambivalence is given organised, ritualized form.

In the specific case of Judaism as treated in the source, this ambivalence is crystallised in the figure of Yahweh: the covenant installs the worshipper in permanent, unanswerable relation to the unknown desire of an Other who commands without fully revealing, who elects without explaining. This maps directly onto the Lacanian logic whereby the subject cannot know what the Other wants (the desire of the Other remains opaque), and the very unknowability is what sustains both the bond and the dread. The structure is therefore not contingent to a particular theology but generic to the subject's relation to das Ding — Judaism is here positioned as the religion that, uniquely, refuses imaginary domestication of the Thing and instead holds the ambivalence open as a permanent structural feature of religious life.

This concept appears in diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred (p.116) as part of a broader argument that sacred experience is structured by the Lacanian Real rather than by imaginary consolation. As an elaboration of das Ding, it extends the Seminar VII account of how desire keeps the Thing "at the right distance" into the domain of religious phenomenology: the ambivalence is precisely what the subject must sustain when it cannot install a point de capiton that would finally tame or name the Thing. The concept is therefore also in implicit dialogue with anxiety — which, in Lacanian theory, arises when the gap that sustains desire threatens to close. Ambivalence Toward Das Ding can be read as the chronic, affectively doubled condition that precedes any acute outbreak of anxiety: it is the standing orientation of the subject toward the Thing, whereas anxiety is the acute signal when that orientation is destabilised.

The concept also implicitly positions itself against the register of the Imaginary: "imaginary domestication" is precisely what ambivalence resists. Where imaginary religion would resolve the tension into a reassuring, mirror-stage Father-figure, the Judaism described here refuses that suture — there is no point de capiton that would fully bind and pacify the relation to Yahweh's desire. This connects to Lack as well: the covenant keeps the lack operative, refusing closure. In this sense, Ambivalence Toward Das Ding functions as a specification and religious-phenomenological application of the broader Lacanian account of how desire, anxiety, and lack are co-constituted by the irreducible alien kernel of the Thing.

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the SacredRichard Boothby · 2023 (p.116)

the subject's relation to das Ding is the very ground and heartbeat of ambivalence. In agreeing to worship the daunting figure of Yahweh, Judaism centers religious life on the paradox of a loving fearfulness and a fearful loving.

The phrase "ground and heartbeat" is theoretically loaded because it refuses to relegate ambivalence to the level of a secondary psychological effect — instead positioning it as the very foundation and animating rhythm of the subject's relation to das Ding. The chiasmus "loving fearfulness / fearful loving" formally enacts the inseparability of the two affects, making the syntactic structure itself a demonstration of the paradox it names.