The Profane Temple
Peter Rollins
1 January 2025
Nothing Lives
One of the most famous depictions of our relationship with non-being is found in the ancient Islamic parable about a servant who works for a merchant in the city of Bagdad. The story begins with a merchant sending his servant to the markets on an errand. While pushing through the crowds, the servant happens to brush up against a figure who he recognises as Death. As death sees who bumped into him a look of surprise comes over his face, and he points his bony finger in the direction of the servant.
“He knows who I am” thinks the servant, “he must be here for me”.
Dropping everything, he left the market and ran back to the merchant’s home, before telling him everything and pleading for help to escape the city.
“Take my fastest horse” replied the merchant, “if you gallop at full speed, without stopping, you’ll reach the neighbouring city of Samarra by midnight”.
Once his servant has left, the merchant found himself becoming increasingly irritated by the way that death had acted.
Going down to the market, he found Death, and confronted him, “why would you scare my faithful servant in the way that you did, he simply brushed up against you?”
“What do you mean,” he replied, “I wasn’t trying to scare him. I was just shocked.”
“Shocked?”
“Yes! I saw him casually walking through the market as if he had all the time in the world, and I thought to myself, he’s going to have to get a move on if he’s going to make the appointment I have with him at midnight in Samarra.”
This ancient parable powerfully captures the anxiety that surrounds death and the inevitability of our encounter with it.
When we find our lives derailed by this idea of death, there are a couple of popular attempts at a solution to the anxiety. On the one hand, we have the old stoic wisdom that tells us not to worry too much because we never actually meet death. While we’re alive, death is absent, and when it shows up on the scene, we won’t be around to see it. On the other hand, we might find solace in the idea that death can be overcome. Whether through religious commitment or technological advancement death can be avoided entirely. Death here, might be seen as a reality to be overcome, or as an illusion to see through, but, either way. We can avoid it.
In these responses, our anxiety is addressed by reassuring us that death is a visitor we never have to greet. But what if the truth, and the potential answer to our anxiety, lies in the opposite direction? What if the good news is that we don’t need to fear death, not because it will never touch us, but because, in a fundamental way, we already are dead, we just don’t know it?
If this is the case, then the challenge we face lies not in attempting to avoid death, but rather in finding ways to symbolise this death that is already sitting at our table.
To approach an understand of what it might mean to say that death inhabits us, we can start with an example of how a form of death might manifest itself in our present relationships with others. It’s not uncommon for a relationship to be dead, without the couple being aware of it. They keep going, acting as if nothing is wrong, but the death of the relationship makes its presence felt in all kinds of symptoms. Without being able to directly symbolise the death, it makes its voice heard elsewhere, perhaps in anxiety, arguments, affairs or alcohol abuse.
This denial can continue for years, with the suffering being managed by the symptoms that erupt from it. However, eventually the symptom can fail and suffering becomes unmanageable. At this point the couple might seek couples therapy as a way of attempting to reset the symptom… as an attempt to get it to work again. However, by talking about the relationship they can gradually face up to, and come to terms with, the fact the relationship really ended long ago, they just didn’t know it. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the couple will break up. All too often people break up with a person, but not with the type of relationship they nurtured with that person. So the same cycle inevitably plays out again and again. Instead, the couple might find a way to bury the type of relationship they have with each other and either build something new together, or go their separate ways without the danger of repeating the same cycle with someone else.
If this example relates to the present, then we might take another that, while appearing to relate to the future, actually touches on our past. Here we encounter what Donald Winnicott called Primal Agony. In this type of suffering a person is completely overwhelmed by a fears of a loss, whether of financial security, a partner, health, freedom etc. At times - often in the middle of the night - they are completely undone by the sense that an apocalyptic event is just over the horizon. While there might be good evidence to believe in some of these things, the level of anxiety that the person suffers over it is out of all proportion to the probability.
For Winnicott, Primal Agony, while seemingly concerned with a possible future event, is rooted in an actual past event. The good news for the one suffering in this way is that the apocalypse isn’t coming… it’s already happened.
The problem is that this past event was not processed at the level of the symbolic, and persists in the Real. The fear of the future is an echo from this undigested event from the past. Some fundamental trauma from childhood shows up as a shadow cast from the future.
To understand trauma, we can start by saying that it is the encounter with some ‘thing’ that resists symbolisation. The early Freudian theory of trauma related to an event similar to the mystical experience of the Absolute. An overwhelming encounter with a reality that cannot be symbolised or intuited. Something that saturates the individual and short-circuits them. The infant experiences some external event, like sexual abuse, that cannot be processed, and remains as wound in their being. Later this theory was improved and transformed into the idea that trauma was fundamentally related to the question of the other’s desire. What made something traumatic was not simply some physical or mental ‘stun grenade’ that would disorient, disrupt and destabilise the individual, but rather the question of the other’s desire. The question ‘why’? Whether there was actual abuse or not, the child’s encounter with the enigmatic desire of the other, the question of what they want from us and with us, lies at the core of the traumatic experience. In this way, trauma is fundamentally connected to an encounter with an abyss. The abyss of the other’s enigmatic desire. Fantasy being the way in which we attempt to answer this question, to greater and lesser effect.
The traumatic event, as a type of nuclear crater formed in the subject, can make its absence felt in the guise of an impending absence to come. They might, for instance, be terrified of their partner leaving them, not knowing that this is actually a fear that arises from the experience their father leaving them as a child. The unknowing around why the father left is transposed onto a question of what their partner really wants. ‘They say they want to stay, but do they really want to leave?’
Part of the challenge for an individual suffering in this way involves being able to symbolise the catastrophe that’s already happened. To borrow the language of Winfred Bion, the original catastrophe can be called a ‘beta element’, which can refer to the traumatic experience overwhelming the mind of the child. Bion describes one of the roles of the adult caretaker as an ‘alpha function’, which involves the caregiver soothing the child by helping them chip away at the trauma with language. They are then alpha-beta-sising the experience. Rendering it symbolic and thus draining it of some of its power. The less this happened as a child, the more likely the adult will experience Primal Agony. The work then, involves doing this work of alpha-beta-sising the past; conceptualising, historicising, mourning, working over and working through. In doing so, there will be a weakening of the agony that appears tethered to the future.
If the first example offered a way of seeing how a form of absence can inhabit the present, then the second example touched on how this absence can be connected to the past. However, in both we can still imagine the existence of a pre-traumatic subject, existing in a state of Original Blessing, and falling into sin/loss through some contingent traumatic event. Such an idea of a pre-traumatic subject is commonly - if not universally - presupposed in the world that deals with ‘mental health’. Whether life coaching, counselling, CBT, NLP, or the sea of other therapies, the religious idea of Original Blessing, Fall and Redemption is directly or indirectly assumed. Indeed even in psychoanalysis this notion can be found, in, for instance, the Object relations of Ronald Fairbairn (who was himself a confessional Christian).
In contrast to this idea of a pre-traumatic subject, Lacan remained true to the later Freud by unearthing what we might term Original Lack. As opposed to some contingent loss suffered by the individual (even if this loss is inevitable), Original Lack means that we don’t just accumulate traumas, but that we are, at a fundamental level, the manifestation of trauma itself.
This means that all continent losses are grounded in a necessary rupture called Lack. As Julie Reshe powerfully describes it in Negative Psychoanalysis, life is a constellation of death. Something that is closely connected to the idea of Castration in psychoanalysis.
To summarise this idea we might tell the creation myth of the subject by describing an infant separating from the First Other - the Maternal Other/mOther - through the instantiation of the Paternal Function. Through the two stage process of Alienation and Separation the infant emerges as a - neurotic - subject, and is subsequently marked by a profound sense of loss: the imagined loss of an oceanic oneness. Through this double process of Alienation and Separation, the infant becomes a subject of desire, always finding objects in the world that offer only a partial satisfaction.
The truth however is that there is nothing that the subject lost, for the subject is the result of the loss itself. Before the birth of subjectivity in the Mirror Phase, one cannot properly speak of the infant in isolation, but rather of the ‘mother/infant’. Before alienation from the primary care giver, there is no self to speak of.
So, if ‘nothing’ lives, then how does it show up in our everyday lives? To understand this, let us consider the psychoanalytic distinction between Demand, Desire and Drive. These are three different - though interconnected - ways in which we derive satisfaction from life, with the satisfaction itself being different in each.
Demand is the easiest of the three to grasp. While this is seen in its pure form only in the cries of the infant, it is often assumed to cover the entire field of wants and needs in adulthood. When the infant is in some kind of discomfort it cries out. This cry is a simple demand for some object that can meet its need, whether for food, warmth, winding etc. This demand is then set in motion by the want of a particular object.
When we move from the domain of pure Demand to that of Desire, we move from the want of an object, to the want of the Lost Object. Once the first stage of the Paternal Function (the ‘no-of-the-father’) has been set in motion, the child experiences, what they believe to be, the loss of the material Other. They are marked by this sense of loss, and are forever barred from rejoining with the primary care giver.
Once the mOther is barred, the Paternal Function (as ‘name-of-the-father’) helps the child name substitute satisfactions. They can’t stay ‘tied to their mother’s apron strings’, but they can win a prize at school, or get praise for something they draw. Here the child enters the world of symbolic, partial satisfactions. These symbolic satisfactions never match up to the imagined full satisfaction of oceanic oneness, so the neurotic moves from one object to the next; buying a bigger home, getting an extension, purchasing a different car, having another child, picking up a new hobby, getting the next model of mobile phone etc. This object is never ‘that’. However good it is, it doesn’t plug up one’s desire in the same way that milk can plug up the demand of the infant. In this way, desire is fundamentally fuelled by the movement towards the impossible Lost Object; always seeking in objects that lie in front of us the imagined return of the Lost Object - that - falsely - appears to lie behind us.
If Demand is related to objects and Desire is set in motion by the Lost Object, then Drive relates to the satisfaction that arises from loss itself. Strange as it might first sound, Drive directly enjoys nothing, even though this often causes the individual conscious suffering. If we take the example of gambling, we can imagine someone playing a slot machine in the hope of winning some money. They play a few times and walk away with slightly more or less money. We can also consider someone who finds it difficult to walk away after having won. They aren’t satisfied with the amount, and keep playing in the hope of winning more. Then, most difficult to initially imagine, we can think of a gambler who is actually addicted to the losing itself. The repetition of loss generates and sustains an unconscious enjoyment, even though it creates a conscious displeasure.
The Drive is most difficult to understand because it operates ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, meaning that it does not obey the law that dominates consciousness - the law of Utilitarianism - which seeks to maximize pleasure and minimise pain. As such, it operates behind our backs, seen only indirectly through its distorting effects. Here we encounter what Lacan called objet petit a, a strange type of non-existent object that nevertheless insists. A some-no-thing that generates our desire. Consciously we see the obstacle to some object as a contingent reality we must strive to overcome, while unconsciously we attach ourselves to the loss itself.
To better grasp this, we can take a look at the scholastic argument for God often called the Argument from Desire. This was perhaps most clearly articulated by C.S. Lewis, who, in The Weight of Glory writes,
A man’s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a mans hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called falling in love occurred in a sexless world.
But what’s missing here is precisely the difference between Demand (for an object) and the ways that Desire and Drive subvert it. What Lewis identifies as a type of desire for something wholly other, is precisely a desire for the wholly other as wholly other. In other words, a want that gets its object because its object is the failure itself. Lewis here identifies the conscious desire for something that would overcome the sense of privation, without perceiving the unconscious element that sustains this desire: the privation itself.
Without understanding Drive we are faced with a seemingly bizarre behaviour. We know that frenetically pursuing new goals and products is an endless, and ultimately destructive pursuit. Indeed we might even be persuaded by the Buddhist idea that desire itself is something to be overcome. However, we find ourselves still acting as if buying new products, building new homes, taking up new hobbies etc. will bring an end to our suffering. Without grasping that we actually enjoy - unconsciously - the dissatisfaction the commodities offer, we are lead by the nose in constantly seeking new things.
The issue is not found in the common wisdom that commodities fail to give us something satisfying. If that were true, we wouldn’t be so beholden to them. As Marx wrote, the commodity abounds in ‘metaphysical subtelties and niceties.’ One way we can understand this is by realising that the commodity doesn’t actually give us something satisfying...it gives us an exquisite satisfaction! And it is this dissatisfaction that fuels our desire. The problem is that this gift of nothing often costs us too much. We are (unconsciously) enjoying the lack, but not (consciously) enjoying our enjoyment of it.
Capitalism - as a libidinal system - masterfully provokes our Drive, while seemingly answering our Demand, in a hidden way. Commodities are presented as a solution to some basic want, with ever new commodities appealing to us because they are never ‘that’. With the whole procedure working precisely because it feeds the very drive that it denies in the name of Demand.
So what is the answer?
We can maybe glimpse an answer in the example of a friend of mine who set out to buy a small sailboat. After a lot of research she identified one that she particularly liked. The boat in question was being sold by an old man who had advertised it on a local website. Eventually she reached out and arranged a meeting. When they met, the two of them ended up talking for a couple of hours. During the conversation, the old man kept putting her off buying the boat. He would tell her about all about the hidden costs, the endless work needed to keep it seaworthy and how rarely she would likely use it. Over the course of the conversation it became obvious that he didn’t want to sell the boat. More than this, she realised that she was getting enjoyment from not buying it. He was finding satisfaction in the idea of selling his boat, giving up sailing etc. and she was getting satisfaction from looking at boats and imagining what it would be like to own one. While the one consciously wanted to sell the boat, and the other wanted to buy it, at a more fundamental level, they were consciously enjoying the failure to get what they wanted.
Here we have an example of the perfect Lacanian couple. What Lacan called the sexual non-rapport, where two people are connected precisely in a type of asymetrical disconnect.
So how do we create a space for this Drive, this enjoyment of nothingness? How do we directly embrace it? A lot is at stake in this question, since being able to do so would fundamentally transform how we exist in the world.
Nothing Binds
If, at a fundamental level, nothing lives within us all, then this is something we all share in common. From this insight it might be possible to imagine a social bond that is structured around something other than positive identities. Today there are two main approaches to building social solidarity, as expressed in what often goes under the labels ‘right’ and ‘left’.
Today we see a passionate battle being waged by those who defend what we might call positive universals, and those who argue that all we have are particular interests. Those on the right argue for a social solidarity based upon the application of positive universals such as Human Rights, Justice and Meritocracy, universals that apply to everyone regardless of their particular identities. The key term here is equality. Everyone should be treated the same by institutions blind to people’s gender, sex, race, age etc.
In contrast, those who embrace Identity Politics aim to unearth how this position is really Identitarian - the seeming universals lauded by the right being constantly exposed as veiled contingent, historical positions that benefit some groups at the expense of others. The difference between Identity Politics and Idenitarianism here being related to the first openly admitting to, celebrating and working with the reality that all positions are historical and contingent, while the latter disavows this truth, pretending that their particular interests are eternal, true and in the service of everyone. The seeming universals of the right really being a form of crypto-particularism.
From this perspective, there is no universal. Instead, different groups need to be given different advantages depending on their different needs. The idea of one universal community based on universal principles is rejected in favour of a society made up of multiple communities with particular identities and differing needs. These communities find a way to live side by side because individuals inhabit multiple groups, creating intersectional webs of communication and solidarity. One is an affirmation of positive universals, while the other is a critique of this, in the name of particularism.
Leaving aside the question of how to avoid the idea that particularism is here expressed as a universal, the critique of critique offers a double negation in which a universal is upheld, however the universal is not a positive, but rather negativity as such.
There is ‘something’ that joins us all, ‘something’ that enables a social bond, and cuts against societal fragmentation, but it is not some positive identity. Rather this social bond is formed by embracing the fact that, as creatures of desire and language, we all have nothing in common. The ‘something’ that unifies us is a some-no-thing.
This negation of negation can be described as the move from Community (in its universal and particular forms) to Communion. It is a stepping out of the world where we are divided by identity, into a space where we acknowledge that there is a fundamental way in which we are not identified with our various contingent identities. Something that Sartre grasped when he wrote about the waiter who, in bad faith, mistakenly thought that he was a waiter.
The term community can be used to describe a group that is formed around, and sustained by, shared values, beliefs, identities, goals and enemies. In contrast, a communion is a gathering in which the social bond is formed through the acknowledgement of a shared lack, through a shared acknowledgment that we are all castrated. I am not only divided from you, but also from all reality and, even more disturbingly, from myself (the waiter is not a waiter).
However, pushing this even farther, this division is not simply what ‘exists’ between myself and the other, or within myself, but also it is also within the Big Other itself. Thus, what I share with all of reality is precisely the division itself.
Communion, as a religious sacrament, refers to a meal that is shared in remembrance of the Death of God. It is a type of metaphysical funeral wake in which a group acknowledges this fundamental death within the Absolute. Communion is thus a place, not where one attempts to overcome alienation, but rather where one redoubles it, and in so doing, robs this alienation of its sting.
In theological terms, we can describe this as an experience of the forgiveness of sin. Employing a Lacanian lens, we can see Original Sin as referring to an original lack, a lack that constitutes the subject. In biblical terms, sin is often linked to debt, as both refer to a type of nothing that is something. To have no money is to have nothing, to owe a debt is to have a nothing that is something. A nothing that causes stress because it is accompanied by demands to pay. In terms of subjectivity, the superegoic injunction to enjoy means that we often feel guilty because we are not enjoying life enough. It is not that we simply aren’t having fun, we are feeling an impressive demand to have fun, popularily as FOMO. We feel that we are missing out, that we are missing something that would make things better, and we are tortured by a voice that affirms this.
In the biblical creation story we have this superegoic injunction manifested in the serpent who told Eve that, if she ate from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, she would become like God. Becoming like God here can be read as becoming like the one who lacks the lack. The fruit is appealing because it promises an end to yearning. Yet before the prohibition, there was no sense of desire, no feeling of something missing. As in the Oedipal complex, it is the prohibition that generates the desire to overcome it, creating an excessive desire in the subject. The serpent, just like the superego, is the voice that articulates the want that comes from this excessive desire. Our problem is that we try to obey the serpent, rather than exorcising it.
If one pays a debt, one metaphorically fills the hole made by the debt. However, to forgive a debt is not the same as paying it. To forgive a debt is to render it null and void. A communion is a group formed around this idea of forgiveness. By directly confronting the lack and seeing it as constitutive of all reality, this lack is not filled with the return of the Lost Object, rather the suffering generated by this lack is robbed of its sting.
The original naming of this self-division in everything is the Death of God, a term which describes the way that this lack echoes within everything. However the regional names for this Death of God vary from one field to another. In politics the not-at-oneness of the body politic, which generates social cohesion, is Democracy, at the level of mathematics this fecund self-division that grounds the system is seen in Gödel’s Incompleteness theorems, in physics it is glimpsed in the Uncertainty Principle, in biology, the not-at-oneness of the organism that births complexity is Evolution, while the name for this at the level of the psyche is the Unconscious. In all of these we see how reality is ontologically divided, and how this dividedness has infinite productive power. In the Death of God we see that reality is neither one, nor two, nor multiple but rather not-one. Or, in theological terms, reality is fundamentally trinitarian… a one that can be counted as three - where we count the divided One as two (Father/Son), and count the divide itself (Holy Ghost) as one.
Communities are intimately connected to the ideological world of self-help, for communities are always seeking to move from point A to point B. Communities have goals to achieve, obstacles to overcome, places to go. In contrast, a communion is based on the enactment of Grace. In Grace, there is no movement from A to B, but rather a radical acceptance that involves realising that A does not equal A. The waiter is not a waiter. We are not what we are.
The irony here is that, when you experience grace, and stop striving for change, change is more likely to happen, for the symptom that is preventing movement in your life is dissolved away by sitting with it, listening to it, and encountering the contradiction that it houses. By listening to the symptom, it can weaken substantively. For example, if someone wishes to write a book, but finds that their mind goes blank every time they sit down to type, or they always find other things to do instead of writing, then a self-help guru might offer advice like, ‘set aside an hour a day’, or ‘write 500 words each morning’. All advice that you can either work out yourself, or find on the internet. The problem is that you can’t follow the advice. Instead, if you are able to ask yourself what this symptom of ones mind going blank in front of the computer might mean, you can come to see that there is a part of you that doesn’t want to write the book. And work through why that is. Perhaps the person felt that they wanted to communicate their anger to their parents, but was afraid that, if they did, their parents would punish them. The desire to write and not write might be a retelling of that experience. By bringing this up and working through it, the person will find themselves either free to write, or free from the desire to write.
Nothing Saves
Finally, if nothing lives and nothing binds, then the good news is that nothing saves. At this point we can approach what I mean by the Profane Temple, as this is a space where, through a particular form of liturgy, a communion is forged.
Through the use of art, music, ritual, poetry and prose the liturgy of the Profane Temple is one that helps people become sensitive to, and accepting of, their own conflictual, self-divided being through an encounter with the division of the absolute with itself.
Within Confessional Church, the liturgy arises out of, and directly reflects a substantive, undivided absolute. This looks different depending on whether the church is more conservative of progressive, but both offer a protection from the self-divided absolute. In conservative circles there is an emphasis on the personal affirmation of this idea. Doubts are repressed or fought against in various ways as the congregation is encouraged to believe in a non-lacking God who will make all things whole. There is often much less emphasis on rituals, with the church service comprising of some songs, a few prayers and a talk.
In progressive circles, doubts and questions are not an issue and are often openly welcomed. It can even be seen as a sign of maturity and morality to question your beliefs, interrogate them and hold them lightly. However there is more emphasis on the ritualistic element of church life, with hymns, prayers, communal affirmations and various sacraments taking central stage. Here the liturgy itself holds the belief in the undivided absolute that is easily questioned by individual members of the church.
Within conservative churches the doubts are repressed in various ways, while in progressive churches the doubts are affirmed, but their affect is kept at bay by placing the belief into the liturgy itself. This is analogous to the parent who gets joy out of the tooth fairy because their child still believes. In reality the child often reaches a point where they only pretend to believe because they know that their (false) belief gives so much joy to their parent. When the child stops believing, or reveals their lack of belief, the parent experiences, not a disillusionment (for they know the tooth fairy doesn’t exist) but a disenchantment of the world. They come to experience the affect of the belief that they already have, an affect that was held at bay by the naivety of the child. As long as the liturgy affirms a God who lacks the lack, then one can have all the doubts one wants, without actually feeling the existential weight of them.
In contrast, in the radical liturgy of the Profane Temple, there is an enactment of the crucifixion, which does not express an intellectual loss, but an existential one. Here the self-division is expressed within the liturgy itself. It thus invites an experience similar to Lacan’s Subjective Destitution, in that the congregation, whether they confess belief in God or not, experience God, not as separate from us, but as separate from itself. Thus encountering the reality that non-identity (‘A does not equal A’) is fundamental to reality.
The liturgy emulates what Lacan meant when he talked about the analyst not giving in to the temptation to give the analysand what they want. Just as the analysand will want the analyst to give advice and fix things, so too people attending the Profane Temple will imagine the liturgy - as an embodiment of the absolute - as offering answers and seting things right. However, in resisting this temptation to offer what the congregation wants, the litgury rather gives back an hysterical absolute. If people project onto the rituals an undivided God, then they introject a divided one in return. The result is a space that is fundamentally anti-ideological, insofar as ideology covers over the lack, or pretends that it is contingent
This anti-ideological dimension of the Profane Temple is captured in an old joke about a competition in which three people - an architect, an engineer, and an old farmer - had to construct the largest possible sheep enclosure using a limited set of materials.
On the day of the event each of them were given some basic tools, a pile of wooden planks, and twenty-four hours to complete their pen.
When it came time for the judges to decide the winner, they began by examining the architect’s work. She had used her extensive knowledge of buildings to construct an impressive circular structure that maximized the utility of the materials. Nothing went to waste, and a hundred sheep could easily be held inside.
Next, they looked at the pen created by the engineer. His was more simply constructed but four times the size of the architect’s. He had also used all of the material, but he had spent much of his time studying the strength of the wooden planks and worked out that he could split them without compromising the security of the pen.
Lastly they came to the old farmer who, in contrast to the others, was surrounded by unused planks and large bags of nails. They watched on in disbelief as the farmer carefully stepped into the two-foot square box he’d made.
“That’s your enclosure?,” laughed one of the judges in disbelief. “Why, you hardly fit inside! How are you expected to get even one sheep in there?”
“Don’t be silly,” replied the farmer, “I’m on the outside. You’re the one standing in it!”
While people might look at a liturgical communion as something full of ideology, the point is that the world itself is ideological, and the Profane Temple - as a communion formed on the basis of grace, and offering the forgiveness of sin - is to have a desert in the ideological oasis.
So where does God fit into all this?
Traditional theism claims the God exists, while standard atheism claims that God does not exist. But, if nothing lives and nothing binds, then this can open the way up to the idea of God as the inexistent thing.
In one of the most famous definitions of God, from Anselm, we see that the word ‘God’ is a signifier that signifies something which cannot be signified. For Anselm, ‘God’ refers to the greatest possible reality. Because of this, the term ‘God’ must refer to something beyond our ability to grasp, otherwise we could imagine something greater than God - namely a being beyond our ability to grasp. But we can’t think of something greater than God because God is the greatest, therefore God is a reality - a hyper-reality - ungraspable by a finite mind. The point here, is that even in traditional theology, ‘God’ is already a Master Signifier. A signifier that cannot itself be signified, but that renders other signifiers meaningful.
To speak of God as the inexistent thing is to say that God signifies a truth that cannot be reduced to the level of being. It is to say that reality, as a Total System also includes something not reducible to that system. So how can we make sense of this idea of a surplus-truth that cannot be reduced to reality as an enclosed system?
In order to grasp this we can take a brief detour into the world of mathematics, and consider Gödel’s famous incompleteness theorems. What Gödel was able to show was the way in which, within formal axiomatic systems, there are statements which are true, yet unprovable and, following from this, that a mathematical system with sufficient complexity contains a necessary element that cannot be calculated.
One of the clearest ways of understanding Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, without getting lost in advanced mathematics, was provided by the mathematician Rudy Rucker in his Infinity and the Mind. In the book he asks us to imagine that humanity has created a Universal Truth Machine (UTM). This machine is so powerful that it can offer a proof for anything that is computable. In effect it can prove the truth of any statement. In light of this, it would seem clear that there is no statement that this computer cannot assess.
However, we can now imagine that someone makes the following statement,
a = The UTM will never prove that a is true
Once this is fed into the machine, a problem arises, for if the machine states that ‘a’ is true, then it renders the statement false. So the machine is unable to state that it is true, yet this inability to state that it’s true, expresses the truth of the statement. Here we see that there is something true that is simultaneously not able to be computed. This can help us undetstand the radical conclusion reached by Gödel, namely that, at the very heart of mathematics, we find something within the system which is simultaneously not of the system.
Physicist Roger Penrose has speculated that this non-computable truth within mathematics has a direct connection with the collapse of the wave function in physics. At its core, the idea is that reality itself is structured in such a way that a non-computable dimension is “part” of reality. It is not so much a part of reality, but a no-part. An exception that is within reality, but is not reducible to it. And, he argues, this surplus can help us understand consciousness itself. This non-computable dimension creates a type of disconnect or asymmetry within reality itself that becomes clearest when it is expressed in self-consciousness. Self-consciousness being a truth that is not able to be rendered computable. What Gödel’s Incompleteness theorems and quantum mechanics point to is what Penrose calls proto-consciosuness. This proto-consciosuness being responsible for the collapse of the wave function. In other words, it performs the function of Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover. The Unmoved Mover not being some uncaused cause which is responsible for getting everything in the universe started - which we see affirmed in the Kalam cosmological argument - but rather the operative force that moves everything in the universe from a state of potential - or superposition - to a state of actuality. Penrose uses the term ‘proto-consciousness’ because he sees it as the ground out of which consciousness itself arises. What we experience as self-consciousness is a type of distance from the universe we are embedded in. Our self-consciousness can be described as a truth that is not computable. Which means that it is an undeniable reality arising from, yet not reduced to, the world of material causes.
One of the problems here is that computer scientists such as Demis Hassabis provide good evidence that consciousness is, in theory, computable. Hassabis, who did his doctoral work in neuroscience, reflects the mainstream view of biology and neurology that there is no ‘quantum dimension’ to be found within the workings of the brain. Hence, consciousness, just like the orbit of the stars, can be computed.
Here we must turn to the idea, not of proto-consciousness, but rather proto-unconsciousness. The unconscious, not naming something actual, but rather, as we have seen, being the name for a non-coincidence of something with itself. What Gödel’s Incompleteness Theroms and Penrose’s work on non-determinisism point to is not anything we can directly see, but only indirectly detect through its effects. And these effects are precisely witnessed in the movement from being to life, life to consciousness and consciousness to self-consciousness. With all the increasing complexity that these leaps entail.
We might be tempted to call this proto-unconsciousness a form of proto-anxiety or cosmological hysteria, for it is here, in the divide between the Total system and its exception, that a type of primal subject erupts. The hysteric is one who experiences their self-division accutely in symptoms such as Imposter Syndrome, where an individual feels that they are not who they identify as. While hysteria was discovered first in females, and associated with the feminine - unlike obsession, which is associated with the masculine - Lacanians, following Freud - who wrote that ‘we are all a little hysteric’ - see hysteria as a universal dimension of the subject in that we are all divided subjects, and all subjects because we are divided. One can even say that part of psychoanalysis rests in hysterisising the analysand, in different ways, depending on their structure. Meaning that the analysand is carefully brought to a place where they can productively confront their self-division. To speak of cosmic hysteria is to make the speculative claim that this division of the subject is always already within being itself. As Hegel famously said in his preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit, “substance is subject”, in other words, substance is itself divided.
There are various ways in which we avoid a confrontation with this lack. On one side, we have superstition, which is the religious attempt to reduce this lack to a known, provable being that we can articulate. On the other side we have scientism, that simple wants to say that there is only the Total system, with no surplus dimension. Both are attempts to get rid of Lack or to render it into a contingent loss. Contrary to these approaches, the Profane Temple exists to help sensitise the congregation - the communion - to this truth beyond proof.
This means that there isn’t simply an epistemological unknowing - describing the realm of things we don’t currently know, but can, in principle know - but also an ontological unknowing. In other words, determinate reality is split by a fundamental indeterminate truth that is always unknown. Something that Lacanians call the Real. While we can chip away at what we do not know with language, language itself contains an undigestible dimension that Lacan called the Sinthome. This is the Real that is utterly unable to be assimilated. It is not something that exists, but rather a no-thing that eternally insists.
In Christian Atheism, Žižek employs the term a-theism to describe this. Here the italicised a represents objet petit a, the inexistent surplus that insists. In contrast to the substantive God of theism, or the non-existent God of atheism, a-theism reflects the idea of God as the undeniable Real which is true, but irreducible to the realm of proof. This is a God who cannot be done away with, no matter how hard superstition and scientism try, for this God is evidenced everywhere in its effects.
The cure then does not lie in overcoming our self-division through some kind of reabsorption into the undivided Absolute, but rather in a full blooded affirmation of our own division as the very site of salvation, as the site where we overlap with the divide in the Absolute itself, or, more accurately still, where we realise that the Absolute is this divide.
Peter Rollins is an author, philosopher, storyteller, producer and public speaker who has gained an international reputation for overturning traditional notions of religion and forming “churches” that preach the Good News that we can’t be satisfied, that life is difficult, and that we don’t know the secret.
