Embracing the Void with Richard Boothby
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.พ. 2025
- Richard Boothby and Todd McGowan discuss the psychoanalytic theory of religion formulated in Rick's book Embracing the Void. They trace the philosophical bases for the religious experience and then focus especially on Christianity.
Richard is a beautiful human being. Giving birth to a spirituality working through Lacan. ❤ almost Todd could we say and type of emancipation 😊
Wow, Rick's story is so heartbreaking and powerful. Thanks for putting this together and I'm so glad to have encountered Boothby.
I found this talk very engaging and the entire series, I was thinking of it as Lacan 101, & now I know what Slavo was talking about. Also, I was trying to think of why Christians have the capacity to be so violent, and I was like, Wow, they have situated the Big Other in an abstract beyond place, and therefore can be murderous to "human others", because they're not ascribing this quality of radical unknown Black Box type thing to the humans around them, but are reserving all Sacredness to the unknowability of Adonai.
Sorry I went on so long, I think you are a good teacher.
I was also "awakened" by an experience with psilocybin. For me, this came in the form of a direct confrontation, or much more direct than in everyday life, with death. And when I reread things I had written previously, poems from my adolescence, small reflections in an aphoristic format, etc., I saw how death was already a central theme, somewhat implicit, unconscious. In a way, psilocybin did not give me the insight, it just forced me to look at it. In a very traumatic way because, I believe, there is not much that can be seen without this brutal push. I would just like to emphasize the "seeing", not the understanding. Understanding, to a certain extent, comes later. With calmer reflection. That said:
1 - Could "Death" be one of the names of "das Ding"?
2 - I was very interested in Buddhism. This religion always seemed to me to be the religion of the void, of nothingness, par excellence. However, could it be said that Buddhism does not go as far as Christianity precisely because it equates "das Ding" with desire and attachment too much? Or because Buddhism ends up focusing too much on the consequences of "das Ding" (desire and attachment), which naturalizes the experience too much and ends up anchoring, more than Christianity, the traumatic relationship with "das Ding" in a relationship of frustrated desire and not in the absurdity of the relationship itself, in the fact that the very source and objective of desire seems to be frustration insofar as human desire is not satisfied in the object?
I apologize if it was not very clear, I do not understand exactly what I am saying and, on top of that, English is not my native language.
21:03 *the Christian Thing* “Christianity is exceptional in the _degree,_ not in doing it at all, but in the degree to which the relationship that is drawn up is _deeply symptomatic._ That is to say Christianity most is of all the monotheisms, and I argue of all the religions (we can explain why this is in a minute), but it is the most directly in confrontation with/in insistence upon centering the whole religious experience on the Real of the unknown Thing-but for that _exact_ reason Christianity is also the most deeply symptomatic religious formation which counters it’s own so direct and insistent approach to das ding that it almost cannot resist the temptation to symptomatically deny the very thing it’s opened up and protect itself, you might say, from its exposure to this traumatic, anxiety producing Thing.”
Freud as philosopher!!!!!!!!!!!!! soooooooooooooo gooooooood. cant wait to read Void. its a void, lord.
It might just be worth clarifying that in the Parable of Good Samaritan, the question is not 'who was neighbour from the point of view of the Samaritan', but 'who was a neighbour from the point of view of the man fallen on misfortune'. And the answer is not 'anyone' or 'everyone', but specifically, only, the one of the three who helped him. And a side note: The Latin Vulgate usually translated as 'neighbour', is 'proximus', which can also, more strictly, be translated as simply 'the next' - giving the story a broader dialectical complexion.
Love both of you guys! Wonderful conversation. Would love to host a conversation on existentialism and Christianity one day ❤
Love your podcast!
“The Kingdom of God is on Mainstreet” …best Todd/Hegel quote
I am all over this book re my current project on the engagement of postmodern philosophy with the Abrahamic scriptures. But I am wondering if this line of though ever engages with Bracha Ettinger's work on Lacan, which deeply refigures the Lacanian desire of the mother. Any takers?
Hey Todd, great discussion! Question: in 'Embracing the Void', does Richard explain how he understands the difference between das Ding and objet petit a?
I'm curious about this too. I've seen a couple great talks with Richard online now and I wanna read him, but I'm especially interested in his thoughts on Das Ding, because I know he gives it more prominence than most readers of Lacan.
In the first part of the book, there is a discussion of the relationship between das Ding and objet a, yes.
@@toddmcgowan8233 Good to hear! I’m ordering a copy today!
37:15 *transactional salvation* Zizek’s Jokes: “There is an old Jewish joke, loved by Derrida, about a group of Jews in a synagogue publicly admitting their nullity in the eyes of God. First, a rabbi stands up and says: _’O God, I know I am worthless. I am nothing!’_ After he has finished, a rich businessman stands up and says, beating himself on the chest: _’O God, I am also worthless, obsessed with material wealth. I am nothing!’_ After this spectacle, a poor ordinary Jew also stands up and also proclaims: _’O God, I am nothing.’_ The rich businessman kicks the rabbi and whispers in his ear with scorn: _’What insolence! Who is that guy who dares to claim that he is nothing too!’”_
44:49 *Lacanian anxiety-being held out into the nothing of the other* “[T]his absolutely crucial point has to be remembered-anxiety for Heidegger is anxiety in the face of my own freedom. Therefore it’s dasein’s own radical openness that is dizzying, that is anxiety producing. By the way, in this regard Freud and Sartre, where they otherwise have some differences, on this they’re speaking with one voice-that it’s my very freedom that is vertiginous and therefore the fundamental origin of anxiety. _Not so_ for Lacan.
For Lacan it is the relation to the other, and it’s in relation to das ding, or so I’m reading that one liner from the seminar on anxiety. […] The unconscious is being beholden where human desire is the desire of the other. There’s this kind of detour, this haunting, undermining detour through the other as the only path to myself. That’s the kind of precariousness of an existentialism you might almost say _raised to another power-circuited through the other.”
Thanks for the excellently chosen timestamp.
32:40 The Samaritan was the ethnic and religious enemy of the Judeans. The parable of the Good Samaritan was making that exact point
His unknown reminds me very much of the secrecy central to derridas ethics
Hi Todd and Richard,
Have you come across that book, The Enchantments of Mammon?
Funny, I feel like Hegel helped me better make sense of my psychedelic experience
Could you please name one example? This sounds extremely interesting to me.
His unknown reminds me very much of the secrecy central to derridas ethics