Fordham University Press
Interstices of the Sublime
About this book
Interstices of the Sublime represents a powerful theological engagement with psychoanalytic theory in Freud, Lacan, Kristeva and Zizek, as well as major expressions of contemporary Continental philosophy, including Deleuze, Derrida, Marion, and Badiou. Through creative and constructive psycho-theological readings of topics such as sublimation, schizophrenia, God, and creation ex nihilo, this book contributes to a new form of radical theological thinking that is deeply involved in the world. Here the idea of the Kantian sublime is read into Freud and Lacan, and compared with sublimation. The sublime refers to a conflict of the Kantian faculties of reason and imagination, and involves the attempt to represent what is intrinsically unrepresentable. Sublimation, by contrast, involves the expression and partial satisfaction of primal desires in culturally acceptable terms. The sublime is negatively expressed in sublimation, because it is both the "source" of sublimation as well as that which resists being sublimated. That is, the Freudian sublime is related to the process of sublimation, but it also distorts or disrupts sublimation, and invokes what Lacan calls the Real. The effects of the sublime are not just psychoanalytic but, importantly, theological, because the sublime is the main form that "God" takes in the modern world. A radical postmodern theology attends to the workings of the sublime in our thinking and living, and provides resources to understand the complexity of reality. This book is one of the first sustained theological readings of Lacan in English.
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
ix -
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Acknowledgments
xi -
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Introduction
1 -
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1. On Sublimation
18 -
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2. We Are All Mad
37 -
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3. Desiring the Thing
51 -
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4. Foreclosing God
68 -
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5. Anxiety and the S(ub)lime Body of God
81 -
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6. Ages of the World and Creation ex Nihilo, Part I
97 -
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7. Ages of the World and Creation ex Nihilo, Part II
117 -
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8. God Without Being (God)
133 -
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9. Expressing the Real
148 -
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10. Processing the Real
165 -
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Conclusion
181 -
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Notes
189 -
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Index
215 -
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Perspectives in Continental Philosophy Series
217