Secondary literature 2013

The Triumph of Religion

Jacques Lacan

by Jacques Lacan

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Synopsis

This volume collects two related oral texts by Jacques Lacan: the "Discourse to Catholics" (two lectures delivered in Brussels in March 1960, contemporaneous with Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) and "The Triumph of Religion" (a press conference held in Rome in October 1974). Together they prosecute a single argument across fourteen years: that psychoanalysis has produced a genuinely novel, post-religious ethics grounded in the structural function of Das Ding, the Name-of-the-Father, and the irreducible Real — but that this ethics is historically fragile and will in all likelihood be absorbed, neutralized, and repressed by religion's inexhaustible capacity to manufacture meaning. The "Discourse to Catholics" develops the ethical stakes of the Freudian unconscious against both Ego Psychology's normalizing ideals and the moral traditions of the church, showing through St. Paul's account of law and sin, through narcissism and the mirror stage, and through the commandment to love one's neighbour that desire has no proper object except the impossible Thing around which all human passion circles. "The Triumph of Religion" then projects this argument into a civilizational forecast: science will continuously expand the Real and thereby multiply human distress; religion — particularly Roman Christianity — is structurally equipped to suture every gap between the Real and experience with meaning; and psychoanalysis, which arose as a symptom of scientific modernity and which is uniquely committed to the Real as that which "doesn't work," will be drowned in religious signification rather than superseded by it. Lacan's answer to whether psychoanalysis will survive is deliberately measured: it can only persist as a symptom, and humanity will eventually be "cured" of it.

Distinctive contribution

What this volume does that virtually nothing else in the Lacanian corpus does in quite the same way is present Lacan's ethics and his civilizational pessimism in a single compressed arc, moving from the technical theoretical ground of Seminar VII toward a large-scale sociological and theological prognosis — all in texts addressed to non-specialist audiences and therefore unusually direct in register. The "Discourse to Catholics" offers one of the most accessible and sustained expositions of why the Freudian ethics of desire is irreducible to any morality of the sovereign good, utility, or honesty — a position Lacan normally develops in the dense seminar format — while the press conference delivers what amounts to a prophetic thesis: that the expansion of the scientific Real will not liberate humanity from meaning-hunger but will intensify it, and that it is Roman Christianity, not secular modernity, that will prove the beneficiary. The volume thus stages a confrontation between psychoanalysis-as-symptom and religion-as-meaning-machine that no single seminar or Écrits article presents with quite this directness.

A further distinctive contribution is the introduction of the term parlêtre (speaking-being) as Lacan's reformulation of the unconscious — distancing his own project from Freud's vocabulary while insisting on the radical novelty of what the unconscious names — and the explicit defence of the opacity of the Écrits as a structurally necessary formal feature rather than a personal idiosyncrasy. The extended wordplay on foi/foire/forum is not incidental but programmatic: it models the very "key to psychoanalysis" that Lacan claims for plays on words. Nowhere else does Lacan so plainly articulate the thesis that the analyst exists only as a symptom of the Real, that the analyst's function can "only last as a symptom," and that the triumph of religion is precisely the repression of that symptom through an excess of meaning — making the volume an indispensable complement to Seminar XVII's discourse theory and Seminar VII's ethics.

Main themes

Religion as inexhaustible meaning-machine versus psychoanalysis as symptom of the Real
Das Ding as the impossible horizon of desire and the foundation of a Freudian ethics
The structural novelty of analysis among the three impossible professions (governing, educating, analyzing)
The Real as that which 'doesn't work' — irreducible to ontology, to Kantian epistemology, and to scientific formalization
Narcissism, the mirror stage, and the inadequacy of Ego Psychology's ethics
The commandment to love one's neighbour and the irreducible ambivalence (love/hatred) it exposes
St. Paul's account of law, sin, and desire as psychoanalytic ur-text
Psychoanalysis as symptom of civilizational discontent arising correlatively with scientific discourse
The parlêtre (speaking-being) and language as the source of both suffering and jouissance
Science's expansion of the Real as the condition of religion's future triumph

Chapter outline

Lecture Announcement — p.10-11
I. Regarding Morality, Freud Has What it Takes (Discourse to Catholics) — p.12-35
I. Regarding Morality, Freud Has What it Takes (continued) — p.24-38
II. Can Psychoanalysis Constitute the Kind of Ethics Necessitated by our Times? (Discourse to Catholics) — p.39-59
II. Can Psychoanalysis Constitute the Kind of Ethics Necessitated by our Times? (continued) — p.51-59
I. Governing, Educating, and Analyzing (The Triumph of Religion) — p.62-65
II. The Anxiety of Scientists (The Triumph of Religion) — p.66-69
III. The Triumph of Religion (The Triumph of Religion) — p.70-73
IV. Closing in on the Symptom (The Triumph of Religion) — p.75-79
V. The Word Brings Jouissance (The Triumph of Religion) — p.80-82
VI. Getting Used to the Real (The Triumph of Religion) — p.83-86
VII. Not Philosophizing (The Triumph of Religion) — p.87-92

Chapter summaries

Lecture Announcement (p.10-11)

This brief prefatory announcement frames the ethical ambition of the two Brussels lectures. It positions Lacan's seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis as a challenge to the analytic community's drift toward normalization, to ego-psychological ideals of adjustment, and to the religious monopoly on moral discourse. The announcement telegraphs the key structural pivots that the two lectures will develop: Das Ding as the 'Thing around which desire's nostalgia revolves,' the Name of the Father as the voice that survives death, and the commandment to love one's neighbour as the site where Freudian ethics surpasses hedonism, altruism, and phenomenological critique. Notably, the announcement addresses several audiences simultaneously — philosophers, moralists, libertines, and 'spiritual men' — each of whom will be asked to revise their presuppositions in light of what Freud has articulated at 'its true lofty level.'

Key concepts: Das Ding, Name of the Father, Desire, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Ego Psychology, Neighbour

I. Regarding Morality, Freud Has What it Takes (Discourse to Catholics) (p.12-35)

The first lecture opens with Lacan's autobiographical staging: decades of listening to confessed lives have produced in him not a clinician's complacency but a persistent scandal — an innocent questioning of how human beings systematically miss their desire and allow their essence to escape through the mirages of the imaginary. Against those who send parishioners to analysts as though analysis were merely psychiatric first aid for the sick, Lacan insists on the ethical dimension of analytic practice as something categorically different from pastoral care or religious guidance.

Key concepts: Unconscious, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Desire, Name of the Father, Signifier, Oedipus Complex Notable examples: St. Paul, Romans 7:7-11; Freud, Totem and Taboo; Freud, Moses and Monotheism

I. Regarding Morality, Freud Has What it Takes (continued) (p.24-38)

Lacan enters the central ethical argument by citing Romans 7:7–11 — St. Paul's account of how the law produces sin by prohibiting covetousness, thereby inciting the very desire it forbids. Lacan insists this text illuminates a psychoanalytic mechanism that is 'alive and well, perfectly perceptible and tangible to a psychoanalyst': the law (prohibition, the Name-of-the-Father) does not eliminate desire but constitutes it by naming what must not be enjoyed. This is the Freudian ontological tradition, running from the Oedipus complex through Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, and its mechanism is Judeo-Christian before it is psychoanalytic. The lecture then turns to the three classical levels of morality — sovereign good, honesty, utility — and demolishes each: for Freud, pleasure is not the sovereign good, the good cannot be represented, guilt is rooted at the unconscious level in a structural (not individual) crime, and desire is articulated through language including its negations. Lacan's reading of the French 'ne' discordancier ('je crains qu'il ne vienne') shows how negation itself stems from the unconscious, making the unconscious not a zone without logic but the very source of the 'want-to-be' that marks the subject. Freud refuses both the Jungian route to pagan religiosity and the ego-psychological route to adaptation, insisting instead on the knot of truth where desire and its rule are co-extensive.

Key concepts: Oedipus Complex, Name of the Father, Desire, Unconscious, Signifier, Truth Notable examples: St. Paul, Romans 7:7-11; Freud, Civilization and its Discontents; Freud, Totem and Taboo; Freud, Moses and Monotheism

II. Can Psychoanalysis Constitute the Kind of Ethics Necessitated by our Times? (Discourse to Catholics) (p.39-59)

The second lecture begins by approaching the commandment 'Love thy neighbour as thyself' through Freud's investigation of narcissism. Lacan argues that self-love is always love of an imaginary other — the mirror-stage ego is not the body but the Gestalt, the form, the 'little other' (autre with a lowercase a). This means altruism, philanthropy, and educational devotion are all forms of amour-propre in disguise, transferring nothing but self-love. The methodological distinction between the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real is introduced here as necessary precisely to navigate this dialectic — and as a tool for understanding why 'Love thy neighbour' exposes the irreducible ambivalence (love and hatred) at the heart of the relation to the semblable.

Key concepts: Imaginary, Symbolic, Real, Jouissance, Sublimation, Das Ding Notable examples: Freud, Civilization and its Discontents; Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

II. Can Psychoanalysis Constitute the Kind of Ethics Necessitated by our Times? (continued) (p.51-59)

Lacan dismantles Ego Psychology's object-relations schema — the oral, anal, genital libidinal stages and the fantasy of the 'ablative' or genital relation as the telos of analysis. Against this orthopedic teleology, he insists that desire has no proper object but only the Thing (Das Ding) as its impossible horizon: 'Desire has no object, if not, as its singularities show, the accidental one… that happens to manage to signify… the confines of the Thing — in other words, of this nothing around which all human passion tightens its spasm.' The phallus functions not as a real object but as the most secret metonymic operator of fantasy, and the subject's identification in the unconscious chain constitutes him as truth without consciousness. Sublimation and the death drive are therefore inseparable from any genuine ethics of psychoanalysis — not because of a moralistic preference for the good object but because the structure of desire demands it. Lacan's critique of Ego Psychology here converges with his rejection of any ethics of the sovereign good: the commandment to love one's neighbour is ultimately a confrontation with das Ding in its most unmanageable, non-sublimable form.

Key concepts: Das Ding, Desire, Sublimation, Phallus, Castration, Neighbour Notable examples: Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Freud, Civilization and its Discontents

I. Governing, Educating, and Analyzing (The Triumph of Religion) (p.62-65)

Opening the 1974 press conference, Lacan revisits Freud's triad of 'impossible' positions — governing, educating, analyzing — to establish the structural novelty and the structural impossibility of the analyst's function. Unlike governing and educating, which have existed since time immemorial and are everywhere supported by tradition and authorization, the analyst has no tradition and barely a century behind him. This very novelty makes its impossibility more acute: analysts had to discover the impossibility of their position from scratch, and in doing so they cast a 'glancing light' on the equivalent impossibilities of governing and educating. Lacan frames the analyst as someone who must know how to remain rigorous precisely because the temptation to 'skid' — to slide into philosophy, pedagogy, or pastoral care — is constant. The Four Discourses are the formal apparatus behind this distinction, though they are not named explicitly here.

Key concepts: Psychoanalysis, Real, Subject, Analysand, Identification, Language Notable examples: Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

II. The Anxiety of Scientists (The Triumph of Religion) (p.66-69)

Lacan extends the list of impossible positions to include the scientist's — with the irony that science, unlike analysis, does not yet know it occupies an impossible position, and this ignorance is precisely 'lucky for science.' The occasion is contemporary scientists' anxiety about engineered bacteria capable of destroying all life. Lacan reads this anxiety with characteristic irony: it is a 'hollow and worthless' anxiety attack, but it is symptomatic of the scientist's nascent encounter with the Real — the very domain that psychoanalysis has always inhabited. Lacan then produces one of his most cited definitions: 'The real is the difference between what works and what doesn't work. What works is the world. The real is what doesn't work.' The world 'goes round — that's its function as a world'; the analyst's peculiar vocation is to attend to what makes the world revolting (immonde), to what exceeds the world's smooth functioning. Analysis is therefore 'an even more impossible profession than the others' precisely because it deals exclusively with the Real.

Key concepts: Real, Real [lacan], Psychoanalysis, Symptom, Jouissance, The big Other

III. The Triumph of Religion (The Triumph of Religion) (p.70-73)

A journalist asks whether people now go to analysts as they once went to confessors. Lacan's answer is sharp: confession and free association are categorically different — in analysis, the first step of the art is explaining to people that they are not there to confess but to talk about anything at all. The question of how religion triumphs over psychoanalysis is then answered with the crystalline thesis: 'Religion does not triumph by means of confession. If psychoanalysis won't triumph over religion it is because religion is invincible.' The argument then unfolds: science expands the Real, and every expansion of the Real produces new forms of distress; religion — above all Roman Christianity — is constitutively equipped to give meaning to absolutely anything, including the most distressing outcomes of scientific experimentation. 'Somebody is going to have to give meaning to all the distressing things science is going to introduce. And they know quite a bit about meaning.' The analyst, by contrast, is in a 'moment of molting' — he is there as a symptom, can only last as a symptom, and humanity will eventually be cured of psychoanalysis by drowning it in religious meaning. The 'true religion' is identified unambiguously as Roman Christianity, distinguished from the comparative-religion flattening that puts all faiths in the same basket.

Key concepts: Real, Psychoanalysis, Symptom, Truth, The big Other, Symbolic

IV. Closing in on the Symptom (The Triumph of Religion) (p.75-79)

Responding to a journalist's complaint about the obscurity of the Écrits, Lacan offers a considered defence of their formal opacity. He did not write them to be understood but to be read — the distinction is structural rather than perverse. The concentration of the articles was a consequence of circumstance: each was a distillation of an entire year's seminar into a single text, like a Japanese flower that must be placed in water to unfold. The opacity does something to readers even when they do not understand, and Lacan has observed that articles sometimes become transparent after ten years. More theoretically, Lacan insists on the radical novelty of the Freudian unconscious — it has 'nothing whatsoever to do with what anyone else had said before' and is not the philosophers' 'Unbewusste.' He then introduces the parlêtre (speaking-being) as his own reformulation of the unconscious, tying language and sexuality together in a way that is prior to any biological or philosophical account. The concept carries the implication that the speaking being is structurally ill ('a sick animal'), and it is precisely this illness that psychoanalysis addresses — before religion re-absorbs the symptom.

Key concepts: Unconscious, Psychoanalysis, Language, Symptom, Subject, Real [lacan] Notable examples: Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Écrits

V. The Word Brings Jouissance (The Triumph of Religion) (p.80-82)

A journalist suggests that Lacan has added nothing to St. John's 'In the beginning was the Word.' Lacan accepts the provocation and refines it: not 'in the beginning' but 'before the beginning' — the Word precedes the creation, it is the condition of possibility of the human drama. What this means clinically is that the Word is not merely an instrument of communication but the very source of human suffering ('Man is ravaged by the Word') and simultaneously of jouissance. Analysands return to the couch not because they are confessing but because each session gives them 'a slice of the Word' — the Word brings jouissance, and that jouissance is the motor of the transference and of repetition. This reformulation of John 1:1 in clinical terms is Lacan's most direct statement of the unity between his theological-anthropological reading of language and his clinical practice. The Word that 'ravages' man is the same Word that makes analysis possible and that makes the speaking being irreducibly different from any animal.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Language, Signifier, Repetition, Unconscious, Desire Notable examples: Bible, Gospel of John; Bible, Genesis

VI. Getting Used to the Real (The Triumph of Religion) (p.83-86)

A journalist proposes that if the Real becomes sufficiently invasive, the only escape would be a collective severing from reality — a 'collective schizophrenia' that would render psychoanalysis obsolete. Lacan accepts the structural description but reframes its name: this is not collective schizophrenia but the triumph of the true religion. The move is diagnostic rather than pious — it reframes a psychiatric category as a theological-structural observation. Lacan then distinguishes two registers of the Real: the symptomatic Real (how the Real impinges on living speaking beings — 'we are eaten away at, bitten by the symptom') and the scientific Real (accessible through mathematical formulas, equations, but producing only 'gadgets'). The irreducibility of the sexual non-relation — the fact that we will 'never get to the bottom of the relationship between speaking beings that we sexuate as male and … as woman' — is identified as the engine of symptomatic proliferation. The extended wordplay on foi/foire/forum (faith/bedlam/fair) is explicitly defended as 'the key to psychoanalysis,' not mere decoration, and Lacan's refusal to be pessimistic is grounded not in optimism but in a structural analysis: gadgets will eventually produce their own saturation, and humanity will turn to 'the true things — namely, what I call religion.'

Key concepts: Real, Symptom [general], Jouissance, Language, Lack, Real [lacan]

VII. Not Philosophizing (The Triumph of Religion) (p.87-92)

The final section of the press conference turns on Lacan's repeated refusal of the philosophical and ontological labels journalists attempt to attach to his concept of the Real. He denies that his Real is ontological, Kantian, or transcendent, insisting instead that it is 'not graspable in a way that would constitute a whole' — an anticipatory notion that must remain formally open. The reference to Poincaré's dispute with Boutroux over whether natural laws can evolve is used to make a methodological point: just as Comte thought we could never know stellar chemistry and was proven wrong by the spectroscope, the Real may one day be formalised in ways currently unimaginable, and one should be wary of premature systematisation. The RSI triad (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) is presented here in its most anti-philosophical register as 'the three little ropes that alone allow me to remain afloat' — not philosophical propositions but guardrails for analytic practice. Lacan defends the 'Kant with Sade' article as a genuine theoretical intervention that went entirely unrecognized — 'I make Kant into a flower of sadism' — and concludes with the paradox that remaining rigorous as an analyst means resisting the temptation to philosophize even when rigour looks philosophical from the outside.

Key concepts: Real, Symbolic, Imaginary, Knowledge, Metaphor, Sublimation Notable examples: Lacan, Kant with Sade; Poincaré on the evolution of laws

Main interlocutors

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism
Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology
St. Paul, Romans 7:7-11
Bible, Gospel of John
Bible, Genesis
Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
Lacan, Écrits
Lacan, Kant with Sade
Lacan, Seminar XVII
Lacan, Seminar XX
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason
Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom
Heidegger
Henri Poincaré

Position in the corpus

This volume occupies a distinctive hinge position in the Lacanian corpus: the "Discourse to Catholics" is the most accessible public exposition of the arguments Lacan was developing in Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60), and readers who find Seminar VII dense will benefit from reading these two lectures as a compressed and rhetorical précis of its central moves — especially the analysis of Das Ding, the critique of Ego Psychology's object-relations ethics, the reading of St. Paul, and the structural account of sublimation. "The Triumph of Religion" functions as a late supplement to Seminar XVII (The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969–70) and to Seminar XX (Encore, 1972–73): it applies the discourse theory's account of the master and science discourses, and the sexuation formulas' account of the non-relation, to a civilizational prognosis that those seminars do not themselves make explicit. Together, the two texts stage the transition from Lacan's ethical period to his late topology-and-symptom period, with the parlêtre concept bridging the two. The volume should be read after Seminar VII and alongside Seminar XVII; it is a useful companion to Television (1973) and "Science and Truth" (in Écrits) for understanding Lacan's account of science, religion, and the position of the analyst in modernity.

Readers coming from the wider Lacanian corpus will recognise that no other single published text brings together, with this economy and directness, the three nodes of ethics (Das Ding, the neighbour, desire), the impossible professions, and the civilizational thesis about religion's triumph. The volume is therefore also a natural companion to Žižek's engagements with Christianity and the Real (The Fragile Absolute, The Puppet and the Dwarf) and to Eric Santner's work on the neighbour, since both draw heavily on precisely the junction of Lacanian ethics and theology that this volume most directly inhabits. It is among the most readable of Lacan's primary texts and serves well as an introduction to his mature ethics for non-specialist audiences.