Is Psychoanalysis Christian? (ft. Peter Rollins)

[@nightoftheworld]

34:40 *christian a/theism* “The nihilistic core of conversion is the moment at which you are fundamentally freed from the idea that there is any _oceanic oneness_ on the other side of reality. But of course it doesn’t stop there, you have to have the third part and the third part is where, the sacred is not an object that you love but the sacred is the depth dimension in all objects that you encounter through the act of love itself. And so that’s the move from God as an object that you love, to God as the name of a reality touched upon as we love.”

[@thevulgarhegelian4676]

My favorite Hegelian/Freudian/ Lacanian/ Zizekian/McGowanian next to Doug

[@nightoftheworld]

amen

[@nightoftheworld]

14:18 *ambivalence of jouissance* “Yeah and you’re bringing out the opposite point of me in the way that it should be-because I was saying how _we don’t like the others enjoyment_ but you’re also bringing out that _sometimes we really do._ And that’s the ambivalence of jouissance-is we’re both attracted to someone’s pleasure or we’re put off by it. So for example when you listen to someone playing loud music in the car with the windows down. Sometimes you can feel an anxiety that’s more than just the annoyance of the loud music-it’s feeling that their jouissance is infecting you, kind of like they’re forcing their jouissance onto you. So what I love about what you’re saying is that yeah, you’re adding that dimension that I didn’t mention, which is sometimes we hate the enjoyment of the other or we love it.”

[@dethkon]

Wow, what a conversation. Pete is fascinating.

[@AarmOZ84]

I like Peter Rollins. He is basically Slavoj Zizek for dumb dumbs like me. 🙂

[@evreninancoglu2483]

This was one of the best episodes by Alfie and Eliot. I have read and heard a lot from Zizek and McGowan about the Hegelian interpretation of Christianity with a divided, non all God and The holly sprit as the community in solidarity supporting each other. I hadn't known Peter Rollins before but I liked the way he makes complicated Lacanian concepts very clear. To hear more about interpreting Christianity with a Hegelian/Lacanian lens was very exciting and fun. Great video! Thanks!

[@leftistgamer768]

thanks!

[@okaysure8393]

@@leftistgamer768 I like the religion/psychoanalysis crossover stuff. I know it's pretty niche but it's something I'm always interested in hearing. It would be interesting to hear Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, etc. readings of psychoanalysis and what their similarities and differences are.

[@leftistgamer768]

@@okaysure8393 I will look into that!

[@nightoftheworld]

“The divine magician” is a good small book of his that fleshes out his concepts here a bit more

[@nightoftheworld]

11:29 *loving to hate enemy others* “Now if you take René Girard seriously and say that _the main rule of religion, particularly Christianity, is to dismantle this scapegoat mechanism,_ then this again is why I say it as a theological project, we will see an increase in scapegoating. Which I think is identitarian politics today and culture and I think it’s infested the left and the right. The left are as infused with oppositional thinking.. and I don’t like to call them the left because for me the left is those people who can embrace contradiction. But people who call themselves leftists are scapegoating, they reduce the world to oppositions, to an enemy that if only or we could cut out like a cancer from society then everything would be good. And I think that’s a fundamental betrayal of Marx and more importantly Hegel.”

[@Fliptheflipflop]

I love that parable at the end

[@lukejf01]

Love Peter Rollins. I met him at a talk he gave at my university years ago.

[@jeanlamontfilms5586]

I always like thinking about the “End of History” as the “purpose” of history, which I agree with Hegel, is to reproduce the subject through the contradictions of reality.

[@nightoftheworld]

47:38 *dealing with contradiction* “Even Marx, a great young Hegelian, kind of postulates the end of history as the end of contradiction. If the left had stuck with Hegel’s Christology you wouldn’t be able to do that. You would say _communism is not the end of contradiction-communism is where contradiction is embraced._ Because basically the whole of the Phenomenology of Spirit is where contradiction is overcome only by going into a deeper more intractable contradiction-until you get down to the contradiction that is reality itself. And the moment of the end of history is the moment in which we can imagine a society where we embrace the contradiction rather than continually break it into opposition. So this is where Christology has something to say to today.”

[@mcosu1]

I think the story about the woman who has regular one-night stands is from Zizek, 2003, The Puppet and the Dwarf, page 57. It would be interesting if Rollins, a psychoanalyst, subconsciously acquired this memory from Zizek.

[@reubencanningfinkel5922]

one day I will go to wake! one day!!

[@nightoftheworld]

6:05 *life after death* [after separation from (M)Other/ after the symbolic castration necessary for culture] In “Pixar with Lacan” Lilian Rösing, following Zizek’s virus analogy in _Perverts Guide to Cinema,_ says: “‘Humanity means the alien is controlling our animal body.’ [-Z] The soul is an alien. […] The human child is inscribed into language and desire at the same moment. […] This is the basic moment of separation from which desire and language are born: You neither desire, nor name an object until you are separated from it. The cardinal example would be the mother, both as a thing (that you can desire when separated from it) and as a word (by which you will not call her before separation). […] The human ‘flesh’ is not the condition we share with the animal but is created when we are inscribed in the symbolic order, when the subject (the sovereign) is _incarnated._ So human flesh is always an incarnation, always incarnating a position within the symbolic order.”

[@vidividivicious]

I love seeing Pete here. Such an interesting guy

[@tormunnvii3317]

Must…Resist…Hegelianism….

[@jeanlamontfilms5586]

Enjoy the fetish(desire), don’t fetishize enjoyment

[@Stret173]

first julie reshe.. and now peter rollins?!?!?! you dwcided to drown me with my favs of under-tube?

[@fromafricaicame5909]

Boris has messy hair cos he's hustling the electorate

[@TheCyborgk]

Religion divides people along cultural lines, as a Marxist I'm not as opposed to religion as most, but the fact is that it's extremely divisive and talking about any form of religion is going to alienate some potential political allies (which is why I also prefer not to take an anti-religious position theoretically). Of course Christianity will claim to be a universal religion but that's really not the case, it's a weird mix of Judaic, Egyptian, and Greek themes and myths, and it has its own particular history. When it was first born, that mix did have a fairly universal appeal, but in 2022 we don't live in the same world. And the fact is that Hegel's philosophy of religion is basically racist and not something I would want to take on board. And after all, internal contradictions exist in all religions and Christianity isn't the only tradition that can be radicalized. For example, the zen buddhists say: "If you see the buddha on the road, kill him."

[@TheCyborgk]

The claim that Marx equated communism with the end of contradiction is simply wrong. The idea of fishing in the morning and being a critic at night is actually a critique of the division of labor: in fact, this acknowledges that we have contradictory desires in relation to labor, and a free society would allow us to explore those contradictory desires instead of being trapped into a single role and forcing some humans to perform manual work while condemning others to be neurotics who perform mental labor. Likewise, the formula "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs," implies that there is still some contradiction, and that maybe people will have to spent just a little bit of time doing something they don't love for the benefit of others. What Marx actually says is that communism will get rid of CLASS ANTAGONISM, which is not contradiction in general, but a specific historical form of contradiction that Marx believes is not necessary. Communism is a way of life that structures contradiction differently, and something that cannot be defined in advanced since it also has to develop from the actual struggle and material conditions of socialism, which cannot be known in advance. But there is not necessarily an endpoint--communism could have contradictions of a different kind, not class antagonisms, but some other kind of historical contradiction that needs to be overcome... but the point is we have no way of knowing what those contradictions would be or how history might unfold and develop after humans eliminated class antagonism. And the reason is precisely because Marx does NOT propose a simplistic teleology, there is no end of history for a Marxist materialist, except in terms of something like extinction events.

[@TheCyborgk]

If you are interested in a castrated god... why Christ? Why not Dionysus?! (astute readers of the Gospel of John might note that these two deities have some relationship) Also, there are zillions of dead gods; Luther was wrong. Finally, if you talk about the crucifixion of Christ, you have to talk about the important role played by the Devil, who guides Jesus through a quasi-shamanic initiation ritual after his 40 days in the desert. Christianity is basically just witchcraft if you squint. It's all quite pagan really. The idea of a trickster deity who tempts you with false promises in order to help you develop spiritually is quite interesting. Christianity only gets good if you give the Devil his due.

[@impresauro3210]

"Through me the way is to the city dolent; Through me the way is to eternal dole; Through me the way among the people lost. Justice incited my sublime Creator; Created me divine Omnipotence, The highest Wisdom and the primal Love. Before me there were no created things, Only eterne, and I eternal last. All hope abandon, ye who enter in!" inscribed on the gates of hell in Dante Alighieri's Comedy, Inferno, Canto III (Longfellow's translation)