Political Theology and Early Modernity by Graham Hammill & Julia Reinhard Lupton

Author:Graham Hammill & Julia Reinhard Lupton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

2. Lacan’s Renaissance

We all still show too little respect for Nature which (in the obscure words of Leonardo which recall Hamlet’s lines) “is full of countless causes [ragioni] that never enter experience.” Every one of us human beings corresponds to one of the countless experiments in which these “ragioni ” of nature force their way into experience.

SIGMUND FREUD, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood”16

Allow me now to move toward a conclusion on a slightly different level. I have been worrying questions preliminary to any investigation into how, under what circumstances, to what purposes, and with what limitations “political theology” comes onto the scene of “early modernity.” I’ve moved between Freud and Schiller, and through the determining ways that the Enlightenment and its Freudian recasting and critique sought to shape the Renaissance, so as to suggest that a contradictory, even antithetical construction of early modernity shapes the cultural materials available to us today for imagining the encounter, or hand-off, or relève between politics and theology. My hypothesis has been that this antithetical construction of early modernity conforms to two genealogies for modernity that shape, limit, and contradict each other. I have referred to this series of encounters, contradictions, shapings, and limitations rather generally as if they constitute a group of primal scenes, the primal scenes of political theology, intending the genitive in its most extensive senses: to indicate that the concept, if it is one, of political theology suffers from “primal scenes” proper to it (traumatic encounters, fantasies, prohibited scenarios, etc.); and also to indicate that political theology produces for us traumatic encounters, fantasies, prohibited encounters that help constitute our psychic and disciplinary identities. Let me close with an example of the way in which the double fantasy of early modernity’s relation to political theology inflects how we understand cultural mediation more broadly.

There is a subclass of writings within the psychoanalytic canon that bear explicitly on the problem of political theology. Each of us will no doubt be able to come up with his or her own list of these, ranked differently and reflecting quite different senses of what a “psychoanalytic canon” might be; I suspect that Moses and Monotheism might make most lists, as would Anti-Oedipus and some of Marcuse’s works; less obvious, more interesting, might be some of Kohut, and not a few of Klein’s and Winnicott’s works. Lacan’s essay on the “Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” which has been keeping us company surreptitiously thus far, belongs to this baggy group—though much less clamorously than either Freud’s or Deleuze and Guattari’s works. “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” first delivered at the Sorbonne’s amphithéâtre Descartes as a talk to the university’s literature students, strives to hinge the languages and disciplines of philosophy, philology, and psychoanalysis to each other within “l’universitas litterarum de toujours,” “the age-old universitas litterarum . . . the ideal place [for the institution of psychoanalysis],” as Lacan has Freud say, evidently also thinking of the location and occasion of his own talk.

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