Art of Unknowing

The "art of unknowing" is a phrase Boothby uses to name what he takes to be the implicit telos of Lacan's entire theoretical career: a disciplined, rigorous orientation toward das Ding as the void at the heart of the Other, one that neither fills that void with imaginary content nor abolishes it through scientific mastery. Rather than treating religion as infantile wish-fulfilment (Freud's canonical charge) or treating science as its sober cure, Boothby argues that both discourses are ultimately modes of relating — devotionally and defensively — to the same unknown Thing. The "art" in question is therefore not aesthetic but ascetic and structural: it is a practice of sustaining the constitutive distance from das Ding rather than collapsing it through fantasy, ideology, or the positivist suturing of the void.

In Lacanian terms, this aligns the art of unknowing with the ethics of Seminar VII, where the analyst's task is precisely fidelity to the level of das Ding — refusing the "service of goods" and refusing to bear false witness against the Thing. If sublimation "raises an object to the dignity of the Thing" without pretending to possess the Thing itself, then the art of unknowing is the meta-operation that holds that gap open as such: a second-order sublimation in which the entire apparatus of Lacanian theory becomes the cultural object that marks, rather than fills, the void. It is also implicitly a response to anxiety in Lacan's sense — not a management of anxiety but a learned tolerance of the proximity of the Real that anxiety signals.

The concept appears once, in Boothby's "Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred" (diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred, p. 211), where it serves as a culminating characterization of Lacan's project. It is an extension — or a retrospective re-description — of das Ding (canonical cross-reference), whose definition as a "locus of pure lack" and "excluded interior" provides the ontological ground for what any such art would be oriented toward. The art of unknowing is the subjective and practical face of the structural fact of das Ding: if the Thing is irrecoverable by definition, then the only ethical response is a cultivated capacity to dwell with that irrecoverability.

The concept also intersects meaningfully with Anxiety and Fantasy (both cross-referenced). Where fantasy papers over the void of das Ding and makes reality cohere, and where anxiety signals the terrifying proximity of the Real when fantasy wavers, the art of unknowing names a position beyond ordinary fantasy management — closer to what Lacan calls the traversal of fantasy, a willingness to remain exposed to the void rather than suturing it. In the argument of the source text, it further dissolves Freud's binary between religion (illusion) and science (reality-testing) by showing both as defenses against the same primordial Thing — placing Lacan in an ambivalent, maeontological space (the void as such, referenced by the cross-ref Maeontology) that exceeds either pole. The concept thus functions as a synthetic capstone within Boothby's text, gathering das Ding, anxiety, and the beyond-of-the-pleasure-principle into a single ethical-methodological stance.

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the SacredRichard Boothby · 2023 (p.211)

can we not say that Jacques Lacan dedicated his entire career to imagining the elements of such an art? In the light of the Lacanian notion of das Ding, we can put the point more clearly.

The phrase "imagining the elements of such an art" is theoretically loaded because it frames Lacan's output not as a finished system or a science but as an open, provisional, constitutively incomplete practice — and the explicit anchor to "the Lacanian notion of das Ding" immediately identifies what the art must remain oriented toward: not a positive object of knowledge but the void itself, which by definition cannot be fully articulated, only circled.