Original Sin as Originary Lack
ELI5
Think of "Original Sin" not as doing something wrong, but as the deep feeling every person has that something is missing or incomplete in them — and the idea here is that this feeling of incompleteness is actually what it means to be human, not a flaw to be fixed.
Definition
Original Sin as Originary Lack is the concept, advanced in Rollins's theo-Lacanian argument, that what Christian theology calls "Original Sin" is not a moral transgression inherited from a primal ancestor but rather the structural mark of the subject's constitutive incompleteness — its irreducible lack of being. In this reading, Original Sin ceases to be a punishment or a stain imposed from outside and becomes instead the experiential register of the gap, the manque-à-être, that is inseparable from human subjectivity as such. Far from being something to be overcome or redeemed in the sense of restoration to a prior wholeness, this lack is what makes genuine transformation possible: accepting rather than repressing or disavowing the "cosmic joke" of incompleteness is the condition of ethical and spiritual authenticity.
The concept is sharpened by its Christological inversion: the early church's declaration that Jesus was "without sin" is reread not as moral perfection but as the portrait of a subject "without lack" — that is, a being occupying the structural position of fullness, the fantasy of a complete, unbarred subject. This inverts standard theological categories: the "sinless" Christ paradoxically figures the fantasy of closure, while Original Sin — the universal human experience of incompleteness — is relocated as the very ground of genuine humanity. The "God" who is contrasted with the Idol is not an object filling the lack but, like Das Ding, the groundless ground that calls existence and meaning into being without being reducible to them. In this frame, repressing the lack (through idol, fantasy, or fetishistic disavowal) is the true spiritual failure, while acknowledging it is the condition of authentic life.
Place in the corpus
This concept appears in rollins-peter-the-idolatry-of-god-breaking-our-addiction-to-certainty-and-satisf (p.133) and sits at the intersection of several canonical Lacanian structures. Most directly, it is an application and theological re-specification of the Gap (béance, manque-à-être): Original Sin names the experiential-theological surface under which the structural gap in the subject — its constitutive non-completion — is registered and lived. Rather than a contingent absence to be filled, the lack is affirmed as the very condition of human subjectivity. The concept equally inverts the logic of Fantasy: the fantasy of a subject "without lack" (the sinless Christ as Rollins rereads it) is precisely the structure fantasy manufactures — a screen that conceals the Real of the gap. Accepting Original Sin as originary lack is thus structurally homologous to the traversal of fantasy, the moment when the subject ceases to seek the object that would complete it.
The concept also implicates Das Ding and Fetishistic Disavowal. The Idol that theology is warned against functions like the fetish: it disavows the lack by installing a positive object in the place of the void, promising fullness and self-sufficiency. The "God" Rollins opposes to the Idol resembles Das Ding — not an object within the world but the extimate, excluded ground around which desire orbits without resolution. Jouissance and Identification are implicated insofar as the addiction to certainty and satisfaction (the book's subtitle) names the drive to recover jouissance through identification with an idealized, complete Other — exactly what Original Sin as Originary Lack dismantles. The concept thus functions as a theological extension and re-application of Lacanian lack-theory, translating structural psychoanalytic concepts into a critical theological register.
Key formulations
The Idolatry of God: Breaking Our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction (p.133)
By saying that Jesus was without sin, the early church gave us the portrait of one who lacked the lack... Original Sin marks one of our most fundamental experiences. Yet it is precisely this experience of Original Sin that makes us inhuman, or pre-human.
The phrase "lacked the lack" is the theoretical hinge: by doubling the negation, it reveals that sinlessness is not a positive moral quality but a structural condition — the absence of the absence that constitutes the subject — making the sinless Christ a figure of fantasy-closure rather than ethical exemplarity. The final inversion, that Original Sin "makes us inhuman, or pre-human," radically revalues the lack: the pre-human is not the animal below us but the fantasized complete being above us, the idol-subject who has not yet entered the gap that is subjectivity.