Theology after Lacan.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s protagonist in Notes from Underground nicely identifies the central thesis of this book, namely, that theology in the wake of Lacanian psychoanalysis is devoid of the “the big Other,” i.e., a guarantee that a system of belief is forever secured by a master-signifier around which all meaning takes its place. Indeed, this book reverses this thesis: Only after Lacan can theology mean anything at all. It is precisely by rejecting the idol of God’s necessity (deus ex machina) that theology can only make sense in and through the wild untamable flux and fury of an uncontrollable contingency. Radical contingency grounds the truth of an infinite faith beyond our primordial drive and instinct to control all things—like Aaron’s golden calf that attempts to hijack the infinite in terms of a master-signifier into which all our longings and desire can be cast upon ever so easily. With our hands washed free of faith by controlling the absolute, the desire for living is denuded and life is substituted by believing in a fake god, the big Other. In short, Lacanian psychoanalysis diagnoses the symptom inherent in theology, namely, a symptom that relies upon the hidden idol underneath its golden veneer. Thus the very term theology is metonymic in that it refers to a structure that unconsciously misnames its own truth, the truth of the infinite that is substituted for a fake reality of a false God of the absolute