Moksha

Moksha, as deployed in Boothby's Lacanian reading of Hinduism, names the structural operation by which the subject achieves what the text calls "the ultimate sublimation" — not the elevation of an ordinary object to the dignity of das Ding (the classical Lacanian formula), but rather the dissolution of the ego itself as the object that is sublimated. The Hindu ideal of liberation (moksha) is read here not as a positive mystical union with the Absolute, but as a radical severing of attachment to the imaginary formations that constitute selfhood — the ego's specular coherence, its narcissistic identifications, its imaginary consistency — in order to expose the subject to "a more transcendent level of reality." In Lacanian terms, this transcendent level is das Ding: the irreducibly alien, pre-symbolic Thing at the heart of the subject that resists all symbolisation and remains an "excluded interior," an extimate void. Moksha is thus the religious name for the traversal of the ego's imaginary architecture toward an encounter with this constitutive opacity.

The concept belongs to Boothby's broader argument that the world's major religious traditions instantiate a single fundamental structure: the encounter with the unknowable neighbour-Thing through the sublimation or dissolution of the ego. Moksha is distinguished by its radicalness — where other forms of sublimation raise an object to the dignity of the Thing while leaving the ego in place, moksha stages the ego itself as the thing to be relinquished. This is a "sublime transformation of the ego itself," a formulation that saturates the concept with the ambivalence Lacan assigns to sublimation: the ego is not simply annihilated (which would be psychosis or death) but transformed — taken up and refigured in relation to the Real it had previously screened.

Within the source (diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred, p. 176), moksha functions as a cross-cultural instantiation of a thesis developed throughout Boothby's Lacanian account of the sacred: that religion is the "master symptom" organised around das Ding, the irreducible opacity that Lacan also names the neighbour-Thing. Moksha is placed alongside Buddhist sunyata and Nishitani's Zen phenomenology as converging confirmations of this structure, suggesting that the concept is offered typologically rather than as a detailed reading of Hindu soteriology. Its theoretical weight falls entirely on the Lacanian side of the comparison.

In relation to the cross-referenced canonicals, moksha sits at a productive intersection. It engages the ego and the imaginary by taking their dissolution as its very content: the mirror-stage's founding specular image — the imaginary consistency that constitutes the ego — is precisely what moksha targets. It engages das Ding as the structural "beyond" toward which the dissolution of ego opens the subject; the Thing's character as extimate void (neither positive object nor subjective fantasy) maps onto what Boothby calls "a more transcendent level of reality." It engages sublimation implicitly — moksha is framed as "the ultimate sublimation," extending Lacan's definition (raising an object to the dignity of the Thing) by making the ego itself the object thus raised and transformed. And it resonates with the mirror stage insofar as the severance of attachment to the ego means undoing precisely the founding misrecognition that the mirror stage installed. Moksha thus functions in the corpus as an extreme or limiting case of the Lacanian-sacred logic: the point at which the ego, normally the agent of imaginary screening, becomes the very stake of sublimation.

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the SacredRichard Boothby · 2023 (p.176)

The objective is to sever attachment to the ego... in favor of encountering a more transcendent level of reality... In moksha, the subject achieves the ultimate sublimation, the sublime transformation of the ego itself.

The phrase "the ultimate sublimation, the sublime transformation of the ego itself" is theoretically loaded because it pushes Lacan's own definition of sublimation — raising an object to the dignity of the Thing — to its limit by designating the ego as the object so raised; this collapse of the sublimating subject and the sublimated object into a single term (the ego) marks moksha as a structural extreme within the Lacanian economy of das Ding, where the imaginary formation that normally mediates the Real becomes itself the thing to be traversed and transformed.