The Need for Nothing: Lacanian Theory and the Sacred

Abstract

The revolutionary event of Christianity consisted in Jesus’s direct solicitation of the real in the neighbor-Thing. This event presupposed the background of the Jewish regime of halachic law to the extent that it effected a measured rejection of the prescribed rules governing social life in favor of demanding direct vulnerability to the fellow human being, emphatically including an exposure to the Other’s foreign and threatening potential. This fulfillment of the law in love was unavoidably traumatizing. The teaching of Jesus turns every person we meet into a burning bush. It was this radical exhortation to directly embrace das Ding that prompted Lacan to call Christianity the one true religion, the religion of the real [p. 164].