Becoming-Subject

Becoming-Subject names the structural condition by which subjectivity is never a completed state but an ongoing, constitutively incomplete process of formation. In Rollins's theological argument (peter-rollins-how-not-to-speak-of-god-paraclete-press-2006), the phrase "always involves becoming" dissolves the binary between journey and destination: authentic Christian identity is not something achieved at an endpoint but is constituted by the very movement of departure itself — "away-from-here" becomes the destination. This is a structural claim, not merely a spiritual metaphor. The subject never arrives at a fixed identity; subjecthood is the perpetual deferral of arrival.

Read through the Lacanian frame the corpus provides, this maps precisely onto the logic of alienation and lack. The subject is not a substance that pre-exists its formation but an effect produced in the gap — in the encounter between being and meaning that the vel of alienation renders permanently lossy. To be a subject is to be constituted by the signifier, which simultaneously eclipses (aphanisis) what it represents. The "becoming" that Rollins names is therefore not a temporal journey toward completion but the structural truth of a subject whose identity is always also "a mistaken identity," formed through the Other, driven by desire that circles around a constitutive lack. Becoming-Subject formalizes the insight that any claim to have "become" — to have fully arrived at Christian identity, at selfhood, at salvation — would itself be the misrecognition (méconnaissance) that closes off the very openness that constitutes authentic subjectivity.

Within peter-rollins-how-not-to-speak-of-god-paraclete-press-2006, Becoming-Subject functions as the hinge between theological anthropology and a Lacanian-inflected critique of religious identity. It extends and applies the cross-referenced canonical concepts rather than inventing a new formal apparatus. Most directly, it is a specification of Lack: if the subject is constituted by a constitutive void such that "if one eliminates this lack, one eliminates the subject," then any theology that promises complete arrival — full salvation, fully achieved Church — eliminates the subject in the very act of consoling it. Becoming-Subject names the subjective condition that makes such closure structurally impossible and theologically suspect.

The concept also operates as a re-application of Alienation and Desire. Alienation establishes that the subject is produced only by entering a signifying chain it cannot fully inhabit, always losing something in the exchange; Desire confirms that this loss is not a defect but the engine that keeps the subject in motion. Becoming-Subject takes these structural necessities and relocates them in a theological register: perpetual becoming is not a failure to reach God but the very form that authentic relation to an irreducibly Other God must take. Against Identity as "an image of wholeness" that compensates for self-division (McGowan's critique), Becoming-Subject affirms self-division as the condition of fidelity. The Dialectics cross-reference is also operative: the journey/destination binary is not resolved but negated into a higher unity — the movement of departure is itself the arrival, enacting a dialectical structure that refuses Hegelian sublation in favor of permanent, irresolvable tension.

How (Not) to Speak of GodPeter Rollins · 2006 (page unknown)

being a Christian always involves becoming a Christian... we are becoming Christian, becoming Church and being saved

The triple iteration — "becoming Christian, becoming Church and being saved" — is theoretically loaded because it converts three traditionally completed, institutionally fixed categories (Christian identity, ecclesial membership, salvation) into present-progressive, open-ended processes, enacting at the level of grammar the structural claim that subjectivity and theological identity are constituted by ongoing lack rather than achieved fullness. The word "always" is decisive: it forecloses any future tense in which becoming would give way to having-become, making perpetual incompletion not a temporary condition but the permanent structure of the subject.