Secondary literature 2023

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred

Richard Boothby

by Richard Boothby (2023)

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Synopsis

Richard Boothby's Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred (2023) argues that Lacan's concept of das Ding—the irreducibly unknowable dimension at the core of the Other, first encountered in the primordial relation with the mother—provides the conceptual foundation for a genuinely new psychoanalytic theory of religion. Where Freud reduced the religious to wish-fulfillment, superego masochism, or neurotic symptom-formation, Boothby contends that these critiques capture only the defensive face of religion and miss its deeper positive engagement: an orientation toward the void in the fellow human being that Lacan identifies as the most elemental structure of desire itself. The book proceeds in two movements: Part 1 reconstructs the theoretical apparatus—mapping the precise relationship between the big Other and the little other through das Ding, tracing the objet petit a as the Thing's trace, and articulating the bifold "elementary matrix" of the signifier as simultaneously defensive and disclosive of that void; Part 2 deploys this apparatus in extended analyses of Greek polytheism, Judaism, and Christianity, with briefer notes on Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and capitalism. Each religious formation is read as a distinct structural relationship to the anxiety of the neighbor-Thing, arranged in a quasi-historical progression of increasing directness: paganism stabilizes the void through the imaginary veil of myth and heroic self-possession; Judaism approaches it through the symbolic architecture of the Law; and Christianity, in Boothby's culminating argument, directly solicits the real by identifying divinity with love of the enemy—the embrace of what is most threatening and unknown in the Other. The book closes by rereading Freud's "oceanic feeling," Lacan's formulas of sexuation, and the question of religious futures in light of this framework, proposing that beneath all religion's variety lies a single bifold dynamic: a symptomatic orbit around the unknowable No-thing in the Other.

Distinctive contribution

Boothby's most distinctive contribution is the sustained, architecturally coherent argument that das Ding—rather than the Name-of-the-Father, the big Other of the symbolic, or a vague equation of God with the Real—is the single most productive Lacanian concept for a theory of religion. Most treatments of Lacan and religion either identify God with the transcendent Real (apophatic theology), with the symbolic Other (God as master signifier or guarantor of meaning), or follow Žižek's Hegelian-Christian pathway. Boothby's move is to insist that the key lies in the intersection of the big and little Other—the neighbor as the locus of das Ding—and to use this to generate a structural typology of religious formations rather than a single equation of God with any one register. This allows him to produce differentiated readings: Greek polytheism as imaginary (the heroic ego before the void of force), Judaism as symbolic (the Law as mediation of the Thing's anxiety), and Christianity as the religion of the real (the direct solicitation of the neighbor-Thing through love of the enemy). The progressive structure gives the argument genuine comparative-religious traction that purely Hegelian or purely apophatic readings cannot achieve.

A second distinctive contribution concerns the "elementary matrix of the signifier"—Boothby's argument that the signifier performs a primordial Aufhebung with respect to das Ding, simultaneously canceling and preserving it, making every speech act both defensive and disclosive of the void. This bifold structure collapses the distinction between pathological symptom-formation and the ordinary operation of language, and allows Boothby to claim that the human being qua speaking being is already implicitly religious. The claim is developed with unusual concreteness through cross-linguistic evidence (the phonemic structure of "mama/papa," the interrogative function of "ma" in Chinese), Heidegger's vase, Jakobson on phonemic repetition, and the topology of the ceded object. This integrates the clinical, the linguistic, and the anthropological dimensions of Lacan's thought in a way that purely theological appropriations rarely attempt, making the book useful not only for philosophy of religion but for Lacanian theory of language and for the ethics of psychoanalysis more broadly.

Main themes

Das Ding as the primordial unknown in the Other and the structural origin of religion
The neighbor-Thing: the fellow human being as locus of abyssal anxiety and desire
The bifold elementary matrix of the signifier: simultaneously defensive and disclosive of the void
A structural typology of religious formations (imaginary/symbolic/real) across Greek polytheism, Judaism, and Christianity
The progressive trajectory from polytheism through Judaism to Christianity as increasing proximity to das Ding
Sublimation, symptom-formation, and the compromise structure underlying religious practice
The big Other and the little other: their intersection as the organizing problem of subjectivity and worship
Love of the enemy as the most radical Christian solicitation of the neighbor-Thing
Capitalism as a fourth religion of the West: money as das Ding and ideological interpellation
The reformulation of Freud's critique of religion from a Lacanian standpoint

Chapter outline

Preface: Is Nothing Sacred? / Introduction: Reposing Freud's Final Question — p.1-7
Chapter 1: Religion from Freud to Lacan — p.9-32
Chapter 2: The Abyss of the Other — p.23-66
Chapter 3: The Ex Nihilo of the Signifier — p.47-66
Chapter 4: Greek Polytheism: The Worship of Force — p.69-103
Chapter 5: Judaism: The Worship of Law — p.103-129
Chapter 6: Christianity: The Worship of Love — p.130-172
Chapter 7: Other Paths, Other Gods — p.163-200
Chapter 8: Conclusions — p.191-202

Chapter summaries

Preface: Is Nothing Sacred? / Introduction: Reposing Freud's Final Question (p.1-7)

The preface frames the book's governing question with Simone Weil's epigraph—'The soul has to go on loving in the void'—and surveys the anthropological universality of worship. The introduction positions Lacan's attitude toward religion as crucially distinct from Freud's: where Freud issued a 'final verdict,' Lacan treats the sacred as 'somehow consubstantial with the distinctiveness, even the very definition, of the human being.' Boothby announces the book's thesis: that Lacan's rethinking of the Freudian unconscious—centered above all on the concept of das Ding—supplies resources uniquely suited to a radical reinterpretation of worship.

Key concepts: Das Ding, The big Other, Unconscious, Religion and psychoanalysis, Lacanian vs. Freudian theory of religion Notable examples: Simone Weil epigraph

Chapter 1: Religion from Freud to Lacan (p.9-32)

This chapter surveys Freud's 'three-pronged spear' against religion: wish-fulfillment (the infantile prototype of paternal protection), superego masochism (Nietzsche's bad conscience reread through Freud's account of civilization's discontents), and—the deepest and most broadly applicable prong—the 1907 account of obsessive neurosis as a 'private religion,' in which the symptom's double function as simultaneously repressive and gratifying of primitive drives explains the stubborn attachment of worshippers to ritual practice. Boothby argues this third prong, Freud's earliest psychoanalytic interpretation of religion, is also his most profound, and is the one most amenable to Lacanian elaboration.

The chapter then introduces Lacan's RSI triad (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) via a rereading of the Rat Man case: the imaginary grounds ego-formation through the mirror stage and the body image's compensatory role; the symbolic rewrites the unconscious as structured like a language, with the signifier's excess over the signified generating the subject's constitutive split; the real names the traumatic kernel that ordinary reality functions to ward off. The seminar title 'R.S.I.'—which in French sounds like 'heresy'—signals both Lacan's departure from Freudian orthodoxy and the promise of a new angle on religion. The chapter closes by surveying the two most common approaches to Lacan and religion (God as Real; God as Symbolic) before arguing that the true key lies in the relationship between the big Other and the little other—a problematic that is 'all too often merely taken for granted by commentators.'

Key concepts: Das Ding, Imaginary, Symbolic, Real, Symptom, Oedipus Complex, Sublimation, Repression, Obsessional neurosis Notable examples: Rat Man case (Freud); Freud's 'Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices' (1907); Freud, The Future of an Illusion; Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents; Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

Chapter 2: The Abyss of the Other (p.23-66)

This is the theoretical heart of Part 1 and of the book as a whole. Boothby introduces das Ding via Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology, where the Nebenmensch (neighbor/fellow human being) splits into a recognizable imaginary component and an irreducible, 'new and non-comparable' zone that Freud calls das Ding. Lacan radicalizes this: the Thing is not a Kantian noumenal kernel of objects but the inaccessible core of the mother's desire, making her the paradigmatic encounter with the Other's unknowable void. This reframes the entire primal drama from Oedipal rivalry to the challenge of the mother's desire—casting her in the role of the Sphinx rather than the object of prohibited desire.

Boothby marshals multiple forms of indirect evidence for this counterintuitive thesis: stranger anxiety as a displacement that inverts and conceals the maternal origin of primal anxiety; the 'uncanny valley' in robotics; Sartre's phenomenology of the Other's look (revised by Lacan to locate the void in the Other rather than in the for-itself); Hegel's famous passage on the 'Night' of the human interior encountered in another's eyes; and the biological uniqueness of the human white sclera as an evolved apparatus for tracking the Other's gaze. The chapter then develops the concept of 'extimacy'—the paradoxical locus where the most intimate and the most alien coincide—as the structural formula for das Ding in the Other.

The later sections of the chapter trace the relationship between das Ding, objet petit a, and the signifier. After the intensive focus of Seminar VII, das Ding recedes in Lacan's discourse but is progressively replaced by objet a as 'the trace of the Thing.' The analyst's position embodies das Ding at one level (the silent, unseen presence that raises the specter of the Thing) and the subject supposed to know at another (the big Other of symbolic understanding). The progress of analysis moves from the patient's identification of the analyst with the big Other toward the dissolution of that Other and the return of the subject to the abyss of the Thing as the core of the unconscious—what Lacan elsewhere calls 'subjective destitution.'

Key concepts: Das Ding, Neighbour, Objet petit a, Extimacy, Anxiety, Jouissance, Subject Supposed to Know, Imaginary, Big Other, Splitting of the Subject Notable examples: Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology; Sartre phenomenology of the Other; Hegel 'Night' passage (Jena manuscripts); Robotics 'uncanny valley'; Slavoj Žižek, 'The Thing from Inner Space'; Stranger anxiety in early childhood; Social media / 'alone together' digital behaviour

Chapter 3: The Ex Nihilo of the Signifier (p.47-66)

This chapter asks: what is the precise relationship between das Ding and the signifier? Boothby argues that the signifier performs a primordial Aufhebung with respect to the Thing—simultaneously canceling it (by distancing the subject from the threatening unknown in the Other) and preserving it (by marking it as a locus of open, indeterminate meaning). This bifold function he calls the 'elementary matrix of the signifier.' The signifier is not merely indicative but also interrogative: at its most elementary level, every utterance implicitly poses a question about the unknowable beyond of the Other-Thing. Evidence for this is drawn from Jakobson's analysis of the phonemic structure of parental names (mama, papa) and, obliquely, from the double function of the morpheme 'ma' in Chinese (signifying both 'mother' and the interrogative mood).

Boothby develops the defensive dimension: the big Other names the regularization of the symbolic function that defends against the unknown Thing. The primal articulation of 'You!' (Toi!) is itself a sonic object emitted to put the Other at safer distance; everyday social routines and the 'falsely false' of polite conventions constitute a second layer of symbolic defense; the law in its Greek sense (nomos as 'feeding place,' partition) constitutes a third layer. Žižek's formulation is cited: the ultimate function of the Law is not to retain proximity to the neighbor but to keep the neighbor at a 'proper distance,' protecting against the monstrosity of the neighbor's jouissance.

Yet the signifier also constitutively reopens the pathway to the Thing through signifiance—the indeterminate, open horizon of meaning that Lacan distinguishes from signification. This is illustrated through the Nietzschean observation that 'it thinks' (rather than 'I think'), the slip of the tongue, and Heidegger's vase as the originary signifier that creates ex nihilo by enclosing emptiness. The chapter concludes that human discourse is 'symptomatic through and through'—the ordinary operation of language and pathological symptom-formation share the same structure of Aufhebung with respect to das Ding, collapsing any sharp distinction between neurosis and normalcy.

Key concepts: Das Ding, Signifier, Signifiance, Aufhebung, Objet petit a, Big Other, Symbolic Order, Repression, Symptom, Name of the Father Notable examples: Jakobson on phonemic repetition; Chinese morpheme 'ma' (mother/interrogative); Heidegger's vase; Nietzsche, 'it thinks'; Freudian slip of the tongue; Hannah Arendt on Sputnik

Chapter 4: Greek Polytheism: The Worship of Force (p.69-103)

Part 2 opens with Greek polytheism read through the single, enigmatic Lacanian claim that 'the gods are a mode by which the real is revealed.' Boothby argues that the archaic Greek ontology is one of 'no things, only forces'—an agonistic hierarchy of cosmic powers of which the gods are the highest representatives. The pantheon does not explain the world but stages the Real: Lacan's analysis of sacrifice as the primal 'murder of the thing' (the word displacing the living animal) is applied to Greek ritual, where the temple encloses a primal void (following Heidegger on the origin of the work of art), and sacrifice re-enacts the birth of the signifier. The gods themselves are modes of revealing, not merely screening, the Real.

The chapter's central move is the analysis of 'the primacy of appearances' in the Homeric worldview: truth is readable off the surface of things (augury, physiognomy, the soothsayer's art), yet behind those appearances lies an irreducibly unknowable force—moira, fate—that no appearance can fully capture. Myth's true function was not proto-scientific explanation but the aesthetic preservation of inscrutability: 'every myth,' as Lacan says, 'is related to the inexplicable nature of reality.' To demand consistency or credibility from myth is to misunderstand it entirely. The Gorgon head—displayed on dinner plates, armor, and household goods—is read as the ur-image of das Ding: the abyss of death and nothingness that the archaic ethos simultaneously wards off and keeps in view.

The archaic ethical ideal of the 'redoubtable' hero is then decoded as a symptomatic defensive formation: Homeric virtue is defined by self-mastery and self-possession in the face of overwhelming counterforce, but this very pose is ultimately an imaginary investment—a narcissistic bid for recognition in the Other's gaze—rather than a genuine engagement with the abyss. The transition from epic to tragic hero (Odysseus to Oedipus) marks a structural shift from external conflict to internal destitution: Oedipus exemplifies Lacan's account of 'subjective destitution,' the mortifying rupture of imaginary ego-identity required for the subject to access its desire. The chapter closes with brief analyses of the Greek 'woman problem'—the Gorgon, the Sphinx, Pandora—as projections of what the masculine heroic ideal most fears: an occult, feminine knowledge of the dark forces that undermine heroic self-possession.

Key concepts: Das Ding, Real, Imaginary, Sublimation, Jouissance, Anxiety, Subject, Oedipus Complex, Symptom, Extimacy Notable examples: Homer, Iliad (Achilles, Odysseus, Diomêdês, Dolon episode); Hesiod, Theogony; Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art'; The Gorgon (Medusa); Nikos Kazantzakis, sequel to the Odyssey; Oedipus / subjective destitution; de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Greek misogyny)

Chapter 5: Judaism: The Worship of Law (p.103-129)

The chapter on Judaism argues that the crucial novelty of Abrahamic monotheism is the introduction of a single deity who presents himself not as a quantum of force but as a subject of desire—a God whose will is inscrutable and whose demands are therefore inexhaustible. The bizarre asymmetry of the covenant (circumcision in exchange for making Abraham 'father of many nations') signals the exigency of a desire whose motive remains obscure. Circumcision is read in Lacanian terms as the 'mark of the cut'—a symbolic mutilation of the organ of procreation that establishes the signifier of the phallus (pointing toward a signified that cannot be fully specified) and institutes the regime of signification itself. The subsequent test of Isaac's sacrifice is then decoded as a 'double inscription' that radicalizes the original covenant by demanding pure willingness to sacrifice without any quid pro quo, converting the formal exchange structure into genuine spiritual obedience.

Lacan's reading of the burning bush ('I am what I is' / 'Je suis ce que je est') receives extended treatment as the most profound statement of the divided subject: the voice from the flames declares non-coincidence between the subject of statement and the subject of enunciation. This grounds the entire linguistic interpretation of the Ten Commandments that follows. The Decalogue is read as the 'laws of speech': the second commandment's prohibition of graven images insists on the irreducibility of the symbolic to the imaginary; the Sabbath commandment creates a void in the service of utility within which signifiance can operate. The last five commandments (concerning the neighbor) are read as mandating the sacral character of the Other's being—'making room for the neighbor-Thing.'

The chapter's Lacanian diagnosis of Judaism is that the increased proximity to das Ding generated by the single, inscrutable deity produces an inevitable rise in anxiety, which is then managed by its conversion into guilt and the deployment of the 613 laws (mitzvoth) as a massive symptomatic compromise formation. Like any symptom, halakha performs two opposing functions at once: it protects the subject from traumatizing exposure to the God-Thing while simultaneously affording a gratifying intimacy with God through the performance of the law. Judaism is the great religion of the symbolic—the Word as mediation of an unknowable divine desire—and its symptomatic product is a stable social link: a 'reassuring, even mildly ecstatic, fraternity of obedience.'

Key concepts: Das Ding, Name of the Father, Signifier, Symbolic, Symptom, Anxiety, Big Other, Lack, Jouissance, Splitting of the Subject Notable examples: Abraham and Yahweh / circumcision; Sacrifice of Isaac; Burning bush / 'Eyeh asher eyeh'; Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling; The Ten Commandments / Decalogue; Jewish tallith and kippah; The 613 mitzvoth / halakha; Reinhard and Lupton, 'Lacan and the Ten Commandments'

Chapter 6: Christianity: The Worship of Love (p.130-172)

Boothby opens with Lacan's astonishing declaration in The Triumph of Religion that 'the true religion is the Roman one... there is one true religion and that is the Christian religion,' and sets out to make sense of it. The crucified Christ is decoded as 'the most unlikely god ever conceived'—the God who unreservedly appears, shows everything, and appears precisely in his degraded condition—thereby reversing the core principle of the Judaic prohibition of idolatry. Paul's interpretation of crucifixion as redemptive sacrifice is noted but complicated: Boothby argues for another, more authentic function of the crucifixion fantasy as an emblem of the subject's embracing what is foreign and threatening in the Other—and thereby in itself. 'Where the defensive ego was, there the subject (reliant on what is alien in the Other as clue to what is unknown in oneself) shall come to be.'

The chapter's pivotal argument turns on Jesus's commandment to love the enemy. Boothby distinguishes this sharply from the Levitical commandment to love the neighbor: the Christian injunction is not merely negative non-encroachment but a positive, active opening toward the Other that cannot stop at the neighbor and must extend to the enemy—precisely because, by the measure of das Ding, the neighbor is an enemy. Lacan is cited: 'my neighbor's jouissance, his harmful, malignant jouissance, is that which poses a problem for my love.' Love of the enemy is thus the most radical possible solicitation of the real in the Other. Hegel's philosophy is invoked (via Todd McGowan) as the philosophical crystallization of this Christian insight: true love engages precisely what is most other in the Other, revealing the self as always already invaded by the other and inaugurating personal transformation.

The chapter then develops two further dimensions: the invention of credo (Christianity's introduction of belief as a structural feature of religion, making the formal act of believing more fundamental than any particular doctrinal content) and the Manichaean temptation (Augustine's solution to the problem of evil as privation rather than substance, and Lacan's reading of Augustine's formula—'sin is a perverse imitation of God'—as the structure of perversion). The chapter ends with the mystical theme: Lacan's comparison of his own Écrits to 'mystical jaculations,' his reference to Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, and Hadewijch of Brabant's letter linking love, freedom, and unknowing as 'a bottomless abyss in which God suffices to himself.' Christianity is ultimately the religion of the real because it directly identifies divinity with love of the enemy—the embrace of das Ding.

Key concepts: Das Ding, Jouissance, Real, Desire, Sublimation, Symptom, Fantasy, Beyond, Anxiety, Subject Notable examples: Lacan, The Triumph of Religion; Crucifixion / Pauline interpretation; Jesus's commandment to love the enemy (Matthew 5:43-47); Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling; Hegel on Christian love (via Todd McGowan); Bernini, Ecstasy of Saint Teresa; Hadewijch of Brabant; Augustine on evil / Manichaeism; Nicene Creed; Lacan, 'Je suis ce que je est'

Chapter 7: Other Paths, Other Gods (p.163-200)

Chapter 7 extends the framework briefly to non-Western traditions and capitalism. Hinduism is approached through the concept of moksha—liberation from ego-attachment in favor of the Atman-Brahman identity—and Lacan's own citation of 'Tat Tvam Asi' at the close of his mirror-stage essay. The Advaita Vedanta tradition, which conceives the self as ultimately identical with cosmic reality, is read as a doctrine of paradoxical selfhood—both self and nonself, knowing and nonknowing—that resonates with the Lacanian subject's constitutive dependence on the unknown in the Other. Boothby draws on Nishitani (Kyoto School) for the Buddhist parallel: Zen satori as 'a knowing of non-knowing, a docta ignorantia,' and the Buddhist recognition that even one's most intimate others remain 'essentially unknown.' Islam is treated through its rigorous insistence on God's ineffability (al-Ghaib, 'the unseen/hidden/unknown'), the Kaaba as a near-perfect material embodiment of das Ding (an almost empty black box concealed beneath a black shroud festooned with signifiers), and Sufi mysticism (Rumi) as a direct orientation toward the unknowable dimension of love.

The chapter's most extended analysis is of capitalism as a 'fourth great religion of the West' (Walter Benjamin). Boothby argues that money incarnates das Ding by embodying the paradox of sensuous supra-sensuous substance: utterly incidental to the things it purchases yet the ultimate substance that commands all others; ostensibly concrete yet infinitely liquid and indeterminate. The social link of capitalism is structured by money's function as the universal medium of exchange that simultaneously separates subjects (Graeber on debt as the destruction of reciprocal obligation) and interpellates them into ideology (Althusser: the hailing of individuals as subjects of the imaginary). The chapter closes with a critique of capitalist ideology's fundamental 'bait and switch': the rhetoric of freedom and equality that actually protects the freedom of capital at the expense of the majority.

Key concepts: Das Ding, Jouissance, Real, Imaginary, Symptom, Subject, Fantasy, Extimacy, Unconscious, Big Other Notable examples: Hinduism / Advaita Vedanta / Tat Tvam Asi; Nishitani Keiji (Kyoto School); Buddhism / Zen satori; Islam / al-Ghaib / Kaaba; Rumi; Walter Benjamin, 'Capitalism as Religion'; Althusser, 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses'; Graeber, Debt; George H. W. Bush inauguration speech (1989)

Chapter 8: Conclusions (p.191-202)

The concluding chapter synthesizes the book's argument and opens several extensions. Boothby returns to Freud's exchange with Romain Rolland about the 'oceanic feeling' to show that Lacan's framework connects what Freud kept separate: the maternal dimension of fusion (Rolland's oceanic feeling as the infant's original undifferentiation from the mother) and the paternal dimension of separation (the deployment of the signifier to ward off the anxiety of the mother's desire). Religion, on this account, is always uncomfortably stretched between a 'maternal' pole (the pull of oceanic reunion with the Other-Thing) and a 'paternal' counterpart (the defensive architecture of law and symbolic mediation). The Nag Hammadi 'Thunder, Perfect Mind' text—in which the rolling din of thunder speaks as a distinctly feminine power—is cited as confirmation of the maternal dimension's persistence in heterodox Christianity.

The chapter's section on sex and the sacred brings Lacan's formulas of sexuation to bear: the masculine structure (founded on external exception) tends toward prohibition and the fantasy of violation; the feminine structure (non-all, internally excessive) tends toward a more direct orientation toward the jouissance of the Other. The symptomatic conflict between opening onto das Ding and defensive closure thus has a sexual dimension, with feminine jouissance aligned with the maternal pole and phallic jouissance with the paternal. The final pages address the question of whether religion gains legitimacy from a Lacanian standpoint, noting Lacan's qualified atheism ('God doesn't exist—but the good old God does exist in some sense') and the possibility of a 'most radical possible theology' that identifies the divine with negativity itself (Eckhart's Godhead as perfect Nothingness, Hegel's 'tremendous power of the negative'). The book ends with open questions about the future of religion and its relation to science, proposing that a Lacanian account grounds religion in something more fundamental than wish-fulfillment and invites a broader, more consciously ambivalent embrace of unknowing.

Key concepts: Das Ding, Jouissance, Real, Anxiety, Unconscious, Symptom, Name of the Father, Subject, Fantasy, Ethics of Psychoanalysis Notable examples: Freud / Romain Rolland exchange on oceanic feeling; Nag Hammadi Codex / 'Thunder, Perfect Mind'; Lacan's formulas of sexuation; Eckhart on the Godhead as Nothingness; Hegel's 'tremendous power of the negative'; Lacan, The Triumph of Religion

Main interlocutors

Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar X (Anxiety)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX (Encore)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar VIII (Transference)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVI (From an Other to the other)
Jacques Lacan, Écrits
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals
Slavoj Žižek
Todd McGowan
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Walter Benjamin, 'Capitalism as Religion'
Louis Althusser, 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses'
Martin Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art'
Homer, Iliad
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Roman Jakobson
Nishitani Keiji

Position in the corpus

Embracing the Void occupies a distinctive niche in the secondary Lacanian literature as the most comprehensive attempt to build a unified Lacanian theory of religion centered on das Ding rather than on the Name-of-the-Father, the Symbolic, or the formulas of sexuation. Its closest neighbors are Žižek's theological works (The Fragile Absolute, The Puppet and the Dwarf, The Monstrosity of Christ), which pursue a broadly similar Hegelian-Lacanian trajectory with respect to Christianity, and Lorenzo Chiesa's The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan, which approaches the question more formally through Lacan's late logic. Boothby's work is more structurally systematic than Žižek's and less logically technical than Chiesa's; it excels in comparative religious breadth (Greek polytheism, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, capitalism) while remaining anchored in close reading of Seminar VII. It should be read after Boothby's earlier Death and Desire (1991) and Freud as Philosopher (2001), which provide the general theoretical backdrop for his deployment of the death drive and sublimation, and alongside Marcus Pound's Theology, Psychoanalysis, and Trauma and the Davis/Pound/Crockett collection Theology after Lacan for the broader field of Lacanian theology.\n\nFor readers primarily interested in Lacanian theory rather than religion, the book is most valuable for its extended reconstruction of the relationship between das Ding, objet petit a, and the signifier (chapters 2-3), and for its argument that the elementary matrix of the signifier constitutes a kind of primordial religiosity. This makes it a useful companion to readings of Seminar VII's ethics of psychoanalysis alongside Joan Copjec's Imagine There's No Woman and Alenka Zupančič's ethics-focused work. Readers approaching from philosophy of religion will benefit from reading Freud's The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents first, and from familiarity with Rudolf Otto's concept of the mysterium tremendum, which Boothby explicitly retains as structurally continuous with his Lacanian account.