Embracing the Void in Genesis

Richard Boothby's Lacanian analysis of religion

Nothing can come of nothing; speak again.

Shakespeare, King Lear

As part of this ongoing project to talk about the engagement with the Abrahamic traditions in continental philosophy, I want to take a moment to discuss Embracing the Void, Richard Boothby’s recent book in the philosophy of religion, and then to comment on some of its implications for reading Genesis. I have written about Boothby before; I was greatly in debt to his lucid adumbration of a Lacanian theory of sacrifice in his Freud as Philosopher (Routledge, 2001). It provided the base both for my critique of Girard, expressed in several places, including my May 5th susbtack newsletter, and for my analysis of the role of the Virgin Mary and of the maternal function in the event of the crucifixion (see if interested my The Virgin Mary, Monotheism and Sacrifice, Cambridge, 2008). I want to turn here to his more recent work, because I think it provides a similarly strong base for understanding what is at stake in what might be called the negative cosmology of the Abrahamic religions.

Boothby tells us that he wanted to call his new book Is Nothing Sacred, no doubt for the double meaning that makes it both a question and a declaration. ‘Yes, nothing really is sacred,’ Boothby wants to argue. Alas, much to his dismay, his editor insisted on the title it actually bears, Embracing the Void. The editor was in my view, however, not entirely wrong, for the phrase ‘embracing the void’ echoes appropriately the relevant text of Genesis, “in the beginning the earth was without form and void,” and the shared term points to the central problem of Boothby’s work: how to engage with and speak about the negative, the unspeakable, the emptiness, the ‘nothing’ or ‘never’ or that not only seems to bracket both our origins and our ends and but also to mark the margins and operations of our existence at every turn. It is the necessity (and impossibility) of fully embracing this negative space that for Boothby drives both the attraction of religion and its collective and often defensive manifestations.

Serious engagement with this void or darkness, which is in part the darkness of death, can only have an aspect of ordeal, and that is certainly the case here. In the years before writing this book, Boothby tells us, he lost his son to suicide. That loss apparently first plunged him into a frantic and obsessive search for a cause. The obvious place to look was addiction, which it seems was a factor, but one that opened up more questions that it answered. Why? And why for that person at that time? Human error? Mental illness? A malign fate? Recognizing the dead-end of his search, and seeking help for his pain and confusion, Boothby turned for relief to a course of psychotherapy and then to enrollment in the Johns Hopkins experimental program in the therapeutic uses of psychotropic drugs. As a result of these recourses and no doubt of other factors beyond our purview, Boothby was able to write both a memoir about his experience, Blown Away (The Other Press, 2022), and then this more recent book of philosophy.

Very rarely does someone come along who can speak at all in the face of this kind of ordeal, much less least speak well. The death of a child in in some ways sui generis: it is the void personified. Faced with this level of suffering, people are often fed bits of religious discourse (though seldom enjoined to religious practice, alas) as if it offered an endless promise of heavenly consolations, compensations and reparations. We told by our spiritual brethren not only that are our loved ones are just fine up there but that we ourselves need not suffer that much even here on earth. Didn’t the Buddha teach that pain is an illusion? Doesn’t the Qur’an speak of the paradise of believers? Didn’t Job get it all back in the end? And Jesus has had a great run, no? Surely, “all losses are restored and sorrows end.”

These conventional appeals to religious dogma rarely help and often do harm. Grief, we know, is more sacred than this; in fact it is more sacred than life itself. (Don’t get me wrong here: something is often better than nothing, and when someone you know has experienced death of another, and by all means send that Hallmark card or make that conventional gesture if that’s what comes to you. But do know that the clumsy application of religious ideologies to the reality of death is both common and counter-productive, regardless of motive.) And yet, for many, grief itself requires some attempt at expression, if not rationalization, and requires it in just such elevated and ‘religious’ or perhaps better said spiritual terms. Its very existential intensity cries out for communication, for recognition, for meaning-making beyond the confines of the ordinary reality of the world. Speech is entailed in this situation, moreover, speech, speech and, I would argue, a certain formalization of thought, perhaps even the kind of thought that we call philosophy. Whether adequately or not, people want to express their losses in language, to make their grief a shared experience, to understand it better, if not completely, and to gain the support of others in facing it. And they often want to do this in relation to the record of pain and struggle in the lives of others in the past.

At least for people such as ourselves — if I may thus presume on our collegial connection, dear reader— and certainly for Boothby, grief seems to require not simply acknowledgment but memorial and analysis. So it has been over many aeons of the human and perhaps even animal history (debates in zoology rage as scientists consider whether, for instance, elephants grieve formally and symbolically) and so it is for the line of philosophical thought in the west that stretches from Socrates to the present. Boethius is perhaps the most famous example here: his The Consolation of Philosophy was written on the brink of certain torture and death, and it was done well enough to mean something to his readers even in their own extremity. Boothby’s Embracing the Void is in that lineage, a great instance of the powerful thought that can be generated, for those with the ethical ands intellectual capacity and the stamina to do so, vis-a-vis what is otherwise unthinkable and unmitigated catastrophe. It is a book that shows what can happen when you turn toward that catastrophe, face into it, and live it out as fully as possible.

Having gotten that off my chest, let me introduce Boothby’s book, which is primarily an attempt to articulate — and perhaps to extend — Lacan’s notoriously ambivalent position on religion and the implications of its renewed public presence in our lives. Writing against the horizon of that return, Boothby argues that religion in general functions primarily as an approach to and defense against the unknown, the mystery of otherness that we encounter in other beings, that is to say in other entities to whom we ascribe agency and the capacity for interaction. Following Heidegger and the early Lacan, he calls this mystery das Ding, or ‘the Thing,’ a term that is perhaps misleading if taken to mean a simple, determinate material object. It is rather a focal point, a kind of strange attractor for our attention, and it lies always just outside our full grasp.

Boothby makes this concept central to his understanding of religion. He puts it squarely: “my intention in this book is that religion can be defined as the utterly mediated relationship to the unknown beyond that Lacan [at times] called das Ding” (Boothby, 103). And while the encounter with this mystery, this ‘void,’ might by many be figured as what the Abrahamic traditions call God, and although Boothby finds this figuration at least arguable if not persuasive, he prefers to understand it primarily on the model of our relationships with other humans. It is in them, from birth and throughout life, that we sense and seek das Ding, and in them that we find both our need and our desire. It is obvious that the template for this sensing and seek is our first parents, and that its temporally (and perhaps analytically) primal form is the material and its secondary form is the paternal. This factor is not lost on Boothby, nor is he oblivious to the under-theorizing of the maternal in both Lacan and Freud. Though he does not come yet to a full appreciation of the mother beyond or better supplemental to castration — that task is left to Bracha Ettinger, of whom more in subsequent posts — he does go well beyond Freud and even at points beyond Lacan in its pursuit.

In psychoanalysis, das Ding is a black hole or singularity that becomes apparent to us in early infancy and becomes the focal point around which our psyche organizes. For complex reasons, phylogenic among them, we are fascinated with this ‘thing,’ this unknown beyond. It appears to us, swims up from the depths, so to speak, out of a great and challenging darkness, a void darkness fraught with peril and promise, physical, emotional, and mental. The ‘thing’ — I’ll drop the air quotes going forward — is like an alien on the edge of our known world, one that occupies our hearts and minds and inducts us into an attempt at relationship with it or with what we fantasize lies behind it. Here arise a mystery, a question, that needs our address, but in ways that exceed the parameters of the established, coded, rationalist, world we think we inhabit, the world of ordinary language and ordinary symbolic operations.

While it is a mystery that cannot, can never be, fully known or appropriated, we nonetheless suppose this thing to be there, to have agency over our lives, and if we are lucky and not ill, to negotiate with. It is a kind of dark magnet, half-object, half just inclination, so to speak, or point of orientation, which becomes a kind of focus around which our psyche develops a whole economy and program for survival and connection. Though acute in infancy, where our personal template for it is set, this dependency and personification extend throughout our lives. Even when we are no longer dependent on the mother’s body for food, we are dependent on others for life, and thus on forms of or moments in that otherness that are both deeply famliar to us and deeply strange.

Whatever the interlocutor here, this engagement requires confrontation with a primal otherness we can never quite know, a connection that recedes from us even as we reach out for it — and one that we sometimes indeed actively push away. For in fact, that connection can be so intense that it actually threatens to erase some of the boundaries between selves that individuation and maturation requires. Lacan calls this aspect of connection jouissance. Jouissance is roughly speaking our orgasmic enjoyment of sensation, our own and another’s; it is sensation aroused by the recognition of and direct contact with what is beyond us, inside and out. That contact touches the real, which we do not own or control, but of which the residuals accrue to us if we are lucky, adept and receptive, and they have been so assigned by the source of the intensity. Sometimes jouissance is rendered as pleasure, and I will occasionally so term it, but the usage is off, because this sensation is acutally beyond the pleasuare-pain duality, which it tends to erase.

Phyllogentically speaking, in terms of the the growth to maturity of the individual person, we tend experience that jouissance before we have a secure identity ourselves to serve as a landing-pad or container for its overwhelming power, its overwhelming response to our desire. At the same time, we are wired to seek and retain and even intensify this sensation, which is essential not just to childhood survival but to survival in adult human community. To do so is challenging, to say the least. As neo-nates, we are born long before we are able to survive on our own; we are entirely dependent on the mother, on her fullness, her presence, and her capacity to meet our needs. But this fullness is frequently interrupted, frequently not there when we reach for it. We keep trying, however, both because we need others to survive and because we desire to secure their pleasure and our own.

We want pursue this aim, not only because we want to be fed, recognized and loved, as has often been pointed out, but because mutual enjoyment augments this jouissance, a point I would like to stress beyond either Lacan or Boothby. Reciprocity, not bargaining, is the optimal mode of this exchange, even though the degree of that intensity may be hard to endure. For the other pole of this duality is not simply passive. If we reach for das Ding, das Ding also reaches for us, which often inspires in us pity and terror as well as joy and empowerment. Hence our tendency to defer this connection even when we seek it. But this Thing, this entity which is not an entity at all but more like an absence or a skipped beat in music, draws us forward over and over. It is then, is so to speak the vanishing point to which we turn our instruments of apprehension and comprehension with the most existential concern.

Das Ding emerges as a kind of half-object or semi-defined gestalt in a field of emptiness and darkness that can be called the void but that is by no means blank. It is criss-crossed by vibrations, rhythms, beats, and nascent patterns and objects, opening and closing, folding and unfolding. (Kristeva, following Plato here, calls it the chora; Fred Moten calls it the ‘surround.’) We both cherish this empty space between self and other and seek to fill it, cherish because it is necessary to our survival and empowerment as individuals and seek to fill it because we need stability in its regard. The space or gap between us and the unknown factor or strange attractor in that other and those others is thus defined, as I have said, by distancing and deferral as much as by connection and recognition, and by the ultimate lack of closure, the opening onto an undetermined but possible surrounding milieu, that is also entailed in this construct. This contradictory situation of distance and attraction is one of the great motivators of desire, creativity and achievement in the human domain, and our strategies for dealing with it are as endlessly productive as they are partial and destined to fail.

Faced with our unanswerable question and our insatiable desire for connection — or better connection-across-distance, we fantasize, we contrive, we experiment. We open up a space between us and the other into which we speak and make little offerings, just as you might drop a stone down a well to hear an echo or fathom a depth. Lacan, and Boothby calls these little offerings ‘ceded objects.’ They are pieces of ourselves or fragments of reality for which we have an affinity and through which we hope to make contact with, to lure toward us, a mystery in someone or something else, beyond our ken but vital to our lives. Cutting out and casting forth these little pieces, these ceded objects, which eventually in Lacan become his famous objets petits a, is, in a sense very difficult to capture, not simply a way to connect in this space but a way of creating it, both reaching out to the other and holding its attractive but scary jouissance at bay.

In approaching this vanishing point, we tend to launch such objects toward into the space between us and it as are afforded by our experience, our bodies, our environment, our capacities. In other words, ceded objects are things we send out into the space between us and the otherness of others in the hope simultaneously of making contact and of negotiating distance. They are like sops to Cerberus, except that they need not be that concrete. The gaze, the voice, the word, the work of art, indeed language itself, can function as such objects and often do, in some ways even paradigmatically. These ceded objects are projected into a space, a void, that hardly exists except as opened up by the positing of some desired thing, some mega-object we sense on the border of our awareness. That void is, however, never fully filled; it is a space of necessary emptiness, of what we might call generative lack.

In confronting this void at the heart of the otherness of others and seeking to relate with whatever it points to, we are stuck with an overwhelming question, what do you want from me? What can I offer you that will both establish contact and create a shared object between us which allows for some space and difference? (Lacan explored the centrality of this question in something called his Rome discourse, so he then and later often refers to it in Italian, che vuoi, which becomes a kind of Lacanian meme, hearkening back to Freud’s famous lament that do women really want?) Even to ask this question, however, involves many problems. In the first place, the as I have said, the thing is not only unknowable but attempts to know it involve some distancing, some deferral, distancing their target in the very act of aiming. Secondly, there is nothing there to grasp, so there is no point of closure, no point where we can say “I’ve got it” with any assurance that said getting it will last.

As I have been saying, the thing itself is opaque not just in contingent ways but fundamentally; ambiguity, a penumbra of darkness, are of its essence, though it doesn’t really have an esssence, so there you go. There are no doubt traces, flashes, clues, residuals, of this mysterious agency, and its effects can be traced, if only after the fact. Full direct apprehension, however, is a can ever kicked down the road. And there is the issue of motivation. If the che vuoi is occasioned by vexation at the resistance of the thing and a wish to defang, defend against, control, appropriate, dominate, or master it, then the refusal of an answer is functional and merited. If not, the question answers itself only in particulars and cannot be asked in this discourse but only in the private space between two people. The rest is silence.

The primary ceded objects in the search for jouissance are the ones I have already canvassed: voice, gaze, touch, works of art, and language. Each has properties of its own and informs the space between self and other, the field of play, differently. We will return in a moment to the considerable developmental primacy of gaze, voice and touch in this scenario, but since we have to approach even these through the ceded objects known as words, let’s start there.

One of the reasons jouissance cannot be mastered has to do with the properties of language, which is the primary way we have of relating across the space between self and other, the ceded object of ceded objects. As we try to negotiate this difficult space, and especially when we make of language a vehicle of that negotiation, we enter the realm of what Lacan called the symbolic. It is above all symbolic communication through language that helps us connect with the mystery of others’ otherness, helps us among other things to form and offer our ceded objects. The unbroken field of ambient sound and light in which we move through social space at some point contracts, or is fragmented or cut open, and becomes a set of distinct signs; phonemes become morphemes, chatter becomes exchange. Language thus comes more and more to govern the space between us and the people around us, and language doesn’t simply express but shapes and directs our needs and demands into complex desires for more than simple objects. But this language is inherently broken and partial. No word is entire of itself; all are parts of the continent, pieces of the main. All depend on a system identities and distinctions from other words. (We know this, of course, from centuries of lament about the inadequacies of language but formally and analytically from Saussure, et al.)

It is here, with language and its surround, that Boothby sees one entry point of religion, religion both true and false. True religion celebrates and embraces the void; false religion leads to mystification and repression. How does this happen? Well bear with me. First, language, that is to say the paradigmatic form of symbolic communication, is constructed by and operates according to a set of ground rules, a code, a third factor, that will establish the communication and instruct on its operations. These rules, this code, this third eye, so to speak, are to an extent arbitrary in the sense that they are cultural, not natural. (Not at all, I want to point out, in the sense of meaningless or susceptible to variation without limit.) It is this function of ruled and collective establishment and regulation of symbolic exchange that we call, in Lacanian discourse, the Law. It is in general the purview of the Father precisely because the paternal role is cultural, not natural. One way to emphasize the importance of that Law is religion, our ‘binding’ (religio in Latin) to a single, agreed upon collective code.

So vital is this function, however, that we can easily reify and elevate it into an absolute: the Law is God, and God without remainder on either side. But this ultra-reductive theology never entirely works, both because we can never fully comply and because it leaves out too much that is also vital to communication. Like the body for instance. Like singularity, like the the specific curve of a cheek, the exact taste of another ‘s sweat, a certain slant of light on winter afternoons, the particular trajectory and hum of a bumble bee in the garden in the last hours of sunshine on a day in August. We need the law, to be sure. Without it, we would collapse into the space between us and the mother and there would be no daylight between us and no room to grow. But if reified into the last word and made to cover the whole space of relationship, this recourse becomes toxic. The bee can no longer hum; the body no longer breathe; the music can’t sound; the lover can’t come.

As we can see, the problem of the thing and of the ceded object in its regard is deeply, even ontologically, related to the parental figures of mother and father. Freud and Lacan said as much, of course, but Boothby develops this gendered analysis, and the centrality of the feminine/maternal to it, more emphatically and at points farther than they do. He points out how much analytic clarity and purchase is gained by situating the problem of das Ding specifically in relationship to the maternal, and especially the maternal gaze and voice. With Lacan, he argues that the most important, the most existentially consequential, the most terrifying and yet compelling question the baby can ask of the world into which it is helplessly thrown is: what does my primary caretaker, whom I am coming to see as a woman, want?

In other words, what is their desire? What are the terms on which I may experience that primary care, that loving maternal gaze, that warmth and nourishment, that jouissance occasioned by our experience of one another’s intensities, on which, unlike most other mammals, I am completely dependent for many months after parturition? How can she or they be encouraged to see in me or experience in me and experience in themselves that will make of them reliable and safe shepherds of my precarious, neo-natal existence? Boothby like Lacan only deals with the maternal pole of this equation in terms of her phallic projections, not in terms of her participation in the child’s jouissance. This is a very big omission and it will bear returning to at length. All I want to say here is that the problem of securing the regard of the other is acute and life-long.

But again how does religion come into play here? Let me try to say this aother way. For Boothby, there are two points of entry: 1) the understanding of God as beyond name and form to a degree that leaves the mystery of das Ding fully in play but never mastered, as in the apophatic theological traditions, and 2) the understanding of God as order, law, regulation, and consciousness, fully available and fully evacuated by reason, as in the tradition of positive theology, the scholastics, and orthodox traditions. Put more simply, the God of monotheism can be approached either as an entity sui generis, a dark and unspecified place of otherness, or as Law Personified. Boothby celebrates the former. Institutional religion is for the most part based on the latter.

What might be called the theology of absolute law here makes of the deity the guarantor of the zone of communication between ourselves and our mysterious others; to Him are attributed both the institution of the rules of engagement, that which we call law, or torah, or dharma, and the promise of its ordering and protective effects, which we need not only vis-a-vis other people but vis-a-vis Him as well. No wonder this Other is figured in at least two of the Abrahamic traditions, as the ultimate Father, the One who sets boundaries and limits, regulates our interactions, helps us find distance from the mother, ideally in a negotiated and benign way, and through His Law keeps us safe both from other people and from His own wrath. Nowhere is this clearer than in the ten commandments, which are the ethical algorithm for the psychogenic and ontogenic maturation of the human being in alignment with the God of the law. They begin ““thou shalt have no other God before me,” and they proceed by enjoining correct relationships between men and women, parents and children, that will enable their psychic and spiritual maturation both independently of and supported by their families of origin.

Let us note here again, however, as I have already tried to establish, that complete sublation into the realm of this symbolic patriarchy figured as absolute Law is neither possible nor desirable. Over-identification with the law leads to neurosis. The reification and reduction that make of God a machine-like operator of an ineluctable code, fully expressible, fully scrutable to the human mind and fully enforceable by human power, leads precisely to the construct of totalitarian regimes of theocracy and to frantic efforts to subsume to it all of the energies of the whole human being, including all that the Law leaves out: particularity, the senses, the imagination, and awareness of unseen and unknown variables beyond rational exposition.

It is in part cognizance of the supreme dangers of this terrorist construct without remainder of God as Law and Law as God that leads to atheism in modern culture and indeed in much modern and post-modern philosophy. This sense of the futility and the fatality of reifications of the law even at points leads understandably, as with people like Richard Dawkins, not just to a happy agnosticism, content to live and let live, but to a certain militance against its worst reifications and perversions. (It is also in many instances the unwillingness of the ego to surrender to a higher power on any terms whatsoever, indeed a preference for pandering to some lower ones, but that is for another discussion.) For people like this, science id often summoned to take the place of the Law, as if that would help. It seems to many to provide a less toxic and more open and fluid resource for order and connection than the God of Abraham. I don’t agree — science has its own absolutes and repressions — but I sympathize and understand.

Neither the elevation of science into Law nor the total rejection of the dominance of the paternal metaphor in religion, however, works, because without any law at all we can’t collaborate or act or grow beyond existing paradigms. We end up in a fantasy bubble of our own making, condemned to hang out only with the vapid, the inane and the self-disenfranchised, running around in new age cults that demand little of us ethically or politically but much in terms of denial and foreclosure, refusal of the real, and resistance to personal sacrifice. Here again, I not only sympathize: I’m implicated. All I can say is that we seem to be damned if we do and damned if we don’t, caught between the Scylla of repression and the Charybdis of transgression.

So much for the God of our Fathers and thumbs up to a lot of recent theology seeking to dethrone or at least relativize Him. But Boothby wants to situate his argument about the problem of the thing less in the discourse of Big Divinity or Big Science, even the divinity of the famous deus absconditus or the hidden force of quantum physics, than in the unknown but vital mystery and darkness of other human beings. In terms of monotheism, for him, the personification and the attribution to it of omniscience, omnipotence and perfection we imagine here, are a fiction: there is no Father God in the sense that we persistently and fruitlessly try to construct. However, the structure of the desire to posit such a thing, the structure we might call lack-question-image-law-offering-acceptance is ineluctable.

The difference is that for Boothby the locus of the other pole of the polarity between self and other that this structure occupies is not the realm of some putative God on high but in fact the other persons around us. The real philosophical and practical problem here is then our attraction to and the need to address the dark unknown, the ‘void,’ that is immanent, not transcendent; again, it’s the mystery that calls to us in other human beings. On this account, the work of Lacanian analysis is both to de-mystify and to de-fund the worship of that One True God, that Big (O)ther in the sky, and perhaps to do the same for Big Science (a task Boothby is driven to sketch toward the end of his book but that needs its own treatise to make clear) and to recognize and meet well the quidditas, the singular thing-ness or what-ness or who-nesss, of the others around us.

In this respect and some others, Boothby in general probably belongs to the school of thought we have identified in recent philosophy as ‘Christian atheism,’ of which more anon. His vision is, however, important less, I think, for these theological conclusions than for the special depth of insight he brings to the table about the desires that drive religion. Among his original contributions here are the way in which he takes this Lacanian analysis a step farther by identifying the locus of Das Ding, with its aspects of emptiness, attraction and terror, specifically with the maternal, with the desire of the mother that the infant can sense but not fulfill. Is for Boothby specifically to the mother that we first and most primally address the question, existential for us and to some extent also for her, che vuoi? What does she want? What is her desire? For in meeting that desire lies the pathway to jouissance and maturation for both of us.

To return to the implications for religion in this more advanced contextx, it is very easy, it is fatally easy, to revert to the answer Big Other or God or universal law here: surely That is the Thing she must want. She must want the One, the Whole, the Master Phallus, the Founder, and she must want this essentially because she, like the rest of us, male or female, does not have it. That wish, however, on Boothby’s analysis, would be a mistake to pursue, first because it can’t be done, the Whole Thing is simply not on offer, at least on these terms, and rightly so, because if it were there would be no room for the particular importance of the otherness, the particularity, the ‘not-all-ness’ of human communication. Secondly, even striving to achieve this object, to possess the third term and make it the sole operative here would ratify and ratify falsely all efforts to turn real communication into judgment and condemnation. for since we are messier than this by nature, such efforts can only lead to guilt, despair, and self-implosion.

Having analyzed brilliantly the culs-de-sac here, the aporiae, the contradictions, the impositions, Boothby comes to his most provocative point. These dangers of the concept of Big Other make him want to ask, with a certain temerity, whether, rather than elevate the notion of God into an idol here, we might just flip the script and speak of the telos that leads not to the paternal metaphor but to the maternal matrix. “why not interpret the face, the other, the God face, as feminine jouissance?” he asks (Boothby, 197). The thought is both alluring and frightening, no? But what could it mean?

On to Bracha Ettinger, who has begun to navigate the waters of this unknown, this truly Sargasso sea and has done so as an artist, a psychoanalyst and philosopher, in ways that are profoundly Lacanian and also profoundly supplemental to Lacan’s thought. And we know Derrida’s views on the supplement: it is the tail that wags the dog.