The Triumph of Religion

This book is either light years ahead of my dim brain or, a complete waste of paper. Naturally, I want it to be the latter but it is for each reader to decide.I will admit to being out of my depth. Jacques Lacan and/or Bruce Fink (the author and translator) uses many terms that are outside my sphere as an interested by stander, this is a book for someone with an advanced understanding of Freud. I found that, after a time,it became words passing in front of my eyes and not into my brain: if you are going to try it, then good luck!

Apologies ladies and gents, no review today. Skim this highlight reel instead.

"The true religion is the Roman one. To try to put all religions in the same basket and do what is called "the history of religions" is truly awful. There is one true religion and that is the Christian religion. The question is simply whether this truth will stand up - namely, if it will be able to secrete meaning to such an extent that we will truly drown in it. It will manage to do so, that's certain, because it is resourceful."

"for the average Joe - for this carnal being, this repugnant personage-the drama begins only when the Word is involved, when it is incarnated, as the true religion says. It is when the Word is incarnated that things really start going show more badly. Man is no longer at all happy, he no longer resembles at all a little dog who wags his tail or a nice monkey who masturbates. He no longer resembles anything. He is ravaged by the Word."

"There are, in fact, little domains where philosophy might still have something to say. Unfortunately, it is rather curious that philosophy shows so many signs of aging. Okay, Heidegger said two or three sensible things. But it has nevertheless been a very long time since philosophy has said anything that might interest everyone. Moreover, it never says anything that interests everyone. When it does say something, it says things that are of interest to two or three people. After that, it shifts to universities and then it's shot - there is no longer the slightest philosophy, even imaginable."

"What a sublime relief it would be nonetheless if we suddenly had to deal with a true blight, a blight that came from the hands of the biologists. That would be a true triumph. It would mean that humanity would truly have achieved something - its own destruction. It would be a true sign of the superiority of one being over all the others. Not only its own destruction, but the destruction of the entire living world. That would truly be the sign that man is capable of something. But it gets them quaking a bit in their boots, all the same. We aren't there yet."

"What scientific discourse unmasks is that nothing any longer remains of a transcendental aesthetic by which harmony would be established, even if that harmony were [now] lost, between our intuitions and the world. No analogy can henceforth be established between physical reality and any sort of universal man. Physical reality is fully and totally inhuman."

"The death instinct is, nevertheless, the response of the Thing when we don't want to know anything about it. It doesn't know anything about us either. But isn't this also a form of sublimation around which man's being, once again, turns on its hinges? Isn't libido - about which Freud tells us that no force in man is more readily sublimated, ­the last fruit of sublimation with which modern man responds to his solitude?"

"nothing in the concrete life of a single individual allows us to ground the idea that such a finality directs his life and could lead him - through the pathways of progressive self-consciousness undergirded by natural development - to harmony with himself as well as to approval from the world on which his happiness depends."

"Yes, we come back to Plato. It is pretty easy to come back to Plato. Plato said a huge number of banalities and naturally we return to them.” show less