Secular Messiahs and the Return of Paul's 'Real': A Lacanian Approach (Repost)
Secular Messiahs and the Return of Paul's 'Real': A Lacanian Approach By Concetta V. Principe
2015 | 257 Pages | ISBN: 113752166X | PDF | 8 MB
2015 | 257 Pages | ISBN: 113752166X | PDF | 8 MB
The use of the messiah in secular texts is a phenomenon that has gone mainly unquestioned. Why would a religious trope recur in a system designed to erase religion for the sake of social equality unless we see this repetition as a symptom psychoanalysts identify as trauma? According to Jacques Lacan, trauma indicates the 'encounter with the real', where the 'real' is so inexplicable it is visible only in what is left behind to haunt the subject: the objet a. If the messiah may be seen as the objet a of some trauma, what is its source? This project does not attempt to seek an answer to this question so much as to circumscribe a field of exploration: is there a relation between the modern messiah and the earliest witness to the term in Paul's encounter with his 'Christ'? What is the relation between Paul's Christianity and secularism? In other words, what of Paul's 'real' returns in the twentieth century?