The Impossible Copula
(Humanities and Jude-Christianity)
Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vo. 29, No. 3, Summer 1999, pp. 11-20
Academic Humanities fail to account for religion (especially Judeo-Christianity). Humanities seem on that point to be heirs to a Voltairian (and also Nietzschean) tradition that grasps the Testaments as an oppressive conspiracy concocted by obscurantist priests. But this attempt at differentiation falls into the category of what Freud called, in Civilization and its Discontents, the "narcissism of small differences.” We should not forget that Universities emerged in the twelfth century from theological faculties; As a matter of fact, the methods of the Humanities are almost entirely derived from Biblical interpretation; to wit, the same obsession with the signifier, a quasi sacred status attributed to literature, a devotion to authors similar to a patristic pantheon: we should probably assume that the most efficient readings in the Humanities owe everything to their parentage with Biblical Exegesis. But this similarity between Theology and Humanities, far form being acknowledged, is aggressively denied, whereby the repressed returns in the form of a diffuse religious feeling and the most uncritical assumptions. In fact, the stronger the resemblance, the more ferocious the rejection of religious exegesis will be - Nietzsche, again is here a case in point.
This commonality is not only historical, it is also structural: Freud defines the faithfuls' rituals as an obsessional neurosis (The future of an illusion). Theology and the Humanities are structurally homologous.
At his turn, Lacan -as he is historically justified to do - transposes obsessional neurosis into the University's discourse[1]. A brief elucidation is here in order.
Lacan, in the Seminar XVII, distinguishes four discourses (a partial formalization of general linguistic features) -which of course doesn’t preclude the possible existence of other forms of discourses. The first discourse is the Master’s. As the Form of all forms (the Law), it encompasses politics and philosophy. It can be characterized as paranoid psychosis, inasmuch as its ambition is to found an all encompassing, but illusory totalization (in philosophy, self-consciousness of all thoughts, in politics, the subjects, the “people,” the “nation” and the sovereign as one). In this discourse, the master pretends usurps the structural place of mastery, pretending to be its only and total incarnation. The fundamental characteristic of the Master’s discourse is therefore imposture.
The second discourse is the University’s, a transformation of the Master's, or a shift from psychosis to obsessional neurosis. Whereas the Master monopolizes the place of the dead father by an essential usurpation, the obsessional neurotic (the classical tweed jacketed professor) feigns to occupy it: not without avoiding the risk of death, which defines the Hegelian master. The avoidance of the risk defines the bad faith at work in the heart of the University’s discourse.
These first two formalizations aim at mastery -of a political body or a body of ideas, in the first case - of a textual corpus, in the second (scholastics, or Marx-Lenin-Stalin-Mao deciphered as sacred texts).
Using these two formalizations, it is easy to account for the profound mutation that has happened in the last 15 years, especially in America universities, which have become -only apparently - the space where any discourse is possible. The pseudo-liberalism of the modern Academia (in fact the embodiment of a narrow-minded intolerance) has to be analyzed as a return or a regression from the university discourse to the Master’s discourse (i.e., psychosis, philosophy, politics). This is accomplished by assuming the position of the slave, i.e., "victim" (women, African American, native American, sexual minorities, the list is infinite). The impasse of this regression is obvious: it leaves the Master’s discourse untouched in its structure: the critique of the masters targets, not their abolition, but their substitution by the “victims.” As such, the embrace, by Academia, of the Master’s discourse is doomed to remain forever uncritical.
Needless to say, an authentic grasp of Judeo-Christianity by the Humanities has become an infinitely remote possibility: either the discourse of present Academia mimics the master’s discourse and sees in religion (as Marx said) the “opium of the masses”; or, true to the structure of the University’s discourse, it will study religious texts as it studies the canon: that is, in feigning not being involved in the question.
A correct reading of religion is further impeded by the twofold form of obssesional neurosis plaguing theology and the Humanities; religion makes God the cause of desire[2], whereas Humanities treat Him as an illusion (as Freud did, by the way). In both cases, albeit in different guises, the cause of the subject is located essentially outside. We need, therefore, a third discourse: one that at the same time locates desire in the unconscious and tackles God as real, a discourse that would at the same time escape both the desultory nature of the humanistic reference to religion (for Lacan, a sure sign of the Humanities’ knavery) and the obsessional fixation on God as cause of desire. Theoretical psychoanalysis (the third Lacanian discourse) provides us with such a paradigm[3]. Let’s not in passing that the third and the fourth discourses (the hysteric’s) are discourses of non-mastery: the psychoanalyst cannot master his or her unconscious, the hysteric his/her/body, the scientist - in this an extension of the hysteric, nature. At least, Lacan indicates what the two last discourses structurally should be; a shift to an ambition of mastery indicates a shift to a different discourse: e.g., science can be transformed into scientism (the use of science by the Master) or psychoanalysis into the study of a canon - it certainly happens all the time.
Let us also dispel a possible misconception; if religious (Judeo-Christian) discourse is aligned, as we will see, on the psychoanalyst’s, however they profoundly differ: in the religious structure, God is outside humanity; in Lacanian theory, it is intrinsic to it, God being unconscious - but not the Unconscious, only part of it; hence a radical anthropologization of the concept of divinity, which, in psychoanalysis, doesn’t preexist human language.
We all know, as moderns reading Genesis, that this fiction has nothing to do with the creation of the physical world; scientific cosmology therefore forces us to interpret it differently: the truth of Genesis lies elsewhere. My hypothesis is that Genesis is not about the creation of the world, but about the creation of language and hence about the emergence of humankind[4], since there is no concept of man and the world without speech and language.
Let us take a closer look: as a matter of fact, we find in the Biblical text a rigorously (but of course implicit) Saussurean definition of language as a play of pure differences (signifiers) without intrinsic value by themselves. This is "night" because it is not "day,” and vice-versa; this is "earth,” because this is not "heaven" or "water" and vice versa. Most important, "This is woman, because it is not man": and vice-versa.
Note that Genesis defines here two sets: the set of the signifiers and the set of signifieds; in other words, we have here a simple taxonomy. The relationship between the sets, which result in a statement and meaning, is yet to be defined.
Let us now jump to Saussure, who proposed the notion of sign to designate this relationship, for lack of a better word, he said, because common language doesn't offer us a name for the union of the signifier and he signified. If we follow him, this statement literally means that the fundamental operation that links the set of signifiers and the set of signifieds (the very operation that will create meaning) is outside language: let's assume, unconscious.
The writers of the Pentateuch were acutely aware of this problem: to the differential taxonomy of the signifiers, meaning and truth could come only from outside language, and this is the function they attribute to God. The supreme being, the creator of meaning, is something which is outside the world (of signifiers - but that is the world for us). Hence the notion of a creator (of meaning) residing beyond (albeit, for us, determined by it) the signifier is necessary[5].
The creative act of God is in fact, essentially linguistic, in the sense that it imposes a form upon what is without it (informitas, says Augustine about the primeval waters[6]).
Hence, what produces meaning, this copula which we can reduce to the verb to be that we use every minute, like in "this is that,” (the principle of identity of philosophy) is excluded from the world of signifiers. It is beyond representation.
There is no clearer apprehension of this fact tan the Burning bush: "And God said: I am that I am" (Ex 4,14) (Ehyeh asher ehyeh). This answer to Moses' question prevents us from attributing to God any quality defined by signifiers. The tautology (but is it really a tautology?) of being "undefines" it: since the "I am" is self referential, it is not part of the symbolic order of signifiers, since self referentiality is not a possibility here, language being a set of negative and relative differences between signifiers (again, a strictly Saussurean definition) that prevents any self-definition. Therefore, The Name - what the signifier grasps from the copula - is more than prohibited: it is utterly unpronounceable, utterly unrepresentable.
This is precisely where we can oppose religion to philosophy; let us schematically illustrate this antinomy by an example; for Heidegger, being was once fully manifested at the beginning of Western tradition (Heracliteus); subsequent efforts of thought covered this manifestation: the philosopher's effort is then to unravel the different coverings of thought to go back to this illuminating first moment. Nowhere is it doubted that the self-revelation of being could be other than total, that it is accessible to self-consciousness. In other words, for philosophy, language doesn't leave anything beyond its grasp. This is where philosophy finds its justification at attempting an illusory (I must underline) totalization[7].
Against the self consciousness of philosophy, the Torah posits that the very copula of being is outside language - which to me, and Freud, and Lacan, means unconscious -; it is replaced by a linguistic fiction; the verb to be is the first and most important metaphor: what creates meaning is in fact God's ruach, His breathing, His speech.[8] This complicates Heidegger's vision of "Western tradition.” It is not the smooth continuity he envisions between the Greeks and us moderns; quite to the contrary, its development is marked by radical ruptures (especially under the guise of Christianity and modern science) and by a dual origin (Biblical and philosophical) that make a consoling fantasy out of the concept "Western tradition”.
Following the Torah, any copula will be of fictional nature, a metaphor for a real identity. In particular, any sexual copula: there is not hope that man and woman together could be the sum total resulting from the addition of two complementary elements, thereby forming a whole. Quite to the contrary: since the union, the whole of man and woman doesn't exist, some element is supplementary, outside of the sum. This is a fact that all the fictions of wholeness, unity, etc., deny, by covering it up, repressing it and condemning it to oblivion.
It would be quite amazing if the writers of the Torah, the greatest thinkers and masters of language we know, had missed this fact.
Let us go back to Genesis: "But for Adam there was not found a help meet for him" (2, 20). By this statement, Adam is separated from the animals. They will always find, instinctually, a sexual "help". But Adam won't: he is different from the beasts, because he is the only speaking being. We can easily derive from this that femininity and sexuality in general are a problem only because we speak: they are symbolic in their nature - (which is the way I envision them in this article[9]) and the problems we face through them cannot be solved through a recourse to a long lost instinctual naturalness.
In Genesis, the mate's emergence happens as in a dream: "And the Lord caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof . . . " (2, 21)
Let us underline that Adam doesn't only designate a virile being, but, as it means also humankind, something that, here, is not specified as gendered[10].
The Midrash continues: "They asked before Rabbi Simeon ben Laqish: "On what account is it the case that, while all dreams do not tire a person out, a dream in which one dreams of having sexual relations tires out the one who has it?' He said to them, 'It is because, from the first moment in which a woman was created, it was only in a dream [while man was asleep]."[11] Correction: it was a dream, after all; femininity, caused by God, appears in man's dream; it can mean only one thing: femininity is unconscious.
As you know, Genesis gives two accounts of the dream that creates femininity in language - without grasping it.
The first version, attributed to the Elohist writer baptizes man and woman according to totally different etymological roots: "So God created man [Adam] in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male [zachar] and female [nekevah] created he them." (1,27)[12]
Even If Adam=humankind seems to unite the male and female principles, Hebrew distinguishes them in a radical way, which insists on a separate essence. Zachar, is etymologically tied to a word meaning "remembrance (of the dead)[13],” "memorial"; as an adjective, it means "competent to worship,” that is, “to pray,” or more generally "to speak". Nekevah means the one who is perforated[14]: Hebrew, I surmise, opposes something male that has to do with language to something female that exists but as a void (non language) - if we go beyond the obvious physical analogies.
The Yawhist version veils this dichotomy by a word-play (which, by the way, also works in English): "And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken of man." (2, 21)
In this version, the radical sexual difference is covered by the assonance between ish (man) and ishshah (woman). The Yawhist reconstructs here a reassuring complementarity that erases (or glosses over) what was separated[15].
The Midrash offers a flourish of fascinating commentaries on this passage. First, the assonance is for them proof positive of the anteriority, hence nobility and truth of Hebrew, because neither of the two prestigious languages they compare it to, Greek and Aramean, offer the possibility of such an assonance[16].
More important, the word play orients the commentators toward a mythical complementarity, where woman is what makes man complete:
"Said R. Jeremiah b. Eleazar: "When the Holy One, blessed be he, came to create the first man, he made him androgynous, as it is said: Male and female created he them and called their name man." (Gen 5, 2)
Or, again:
"Said R. Samuel bar Nahman”: When the Holy One, blessed be he, created the first man, he created him with two faces, then sawed him into two and made a back on one side and a back on the other."
This is (in part only, since the out-of-this-world God is evidently preserved) a step backwards from the Torah into myth. We can compare the Midrash, here, to the Mesopotamian Enumah Elish, which is one of the contexts that the Torah demythologizes:
"In the Beginning, from the union of the fresh waters god Apsu and the saltwater goddess Tiamat a couple of gods was born . . . "
This scenario of the union of opposite sexes as the origin of the world can be found everywhere: in Plato's Banquet as well as in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It always bears witness to a deep psychological need that moves us to envision origin as union of the opposite, as a harmonious complementarity. This lost totality becomes then, through this very loss, the privileged object and goal of nostalgia and longing. Here, the myth points to the gap between the Torah and mythical thinking: by its discourse, the myth establishes the double fantasy of a continuity and a totality: continuity between man and god(s), man and nature; totality between man and woman seen as complementary.
Opposing this, the Torah, by sticking to the conception of an out of this world and creative God, indicates that human history is made more of ruptures than evolutions, and that human discourse cannot possibly aspire to represent any totality of any sort: the out of this world God is then what differentiates Judaism from any mythology[17].
But the Midrash is of course not the only commentary of the Biblical ish/ishshah[18]. The Kallah Rabbati writes:
"Rabba said: Why was the woman's name ishshah? Because it is derived from esh ["Fire" in Hebrew, with a similar root]. Why was the man's name ish? Because it is also derived from esh. The letter yod of the word ish and the letter he of the word ishshah spell the two first consonant of the divine name (YHWH). The Tetragrammaton is in the middle of the two words. If the spouses are inflamed in a fight, the divine name is taken away from them and all that is left is esh, esh."[19]
Hence, the echolalia of language is here not the sign of a harmonious complementarity, but of a similarity that cannot but provoke an utter antithesis. God, out of the world (out of language) functions here as a third term necessary to the copula.
Kallah Rabbati's intuition of a separate essence for man and woman is confirmed by etymology; we don't refer here to the poetical etymology used by the Torah and the Midrash, but to the scientific, modern one: the presence of a yod in ish, and the doubling of the sheen in ishshah[20] means that they cannot possibly derive from the same root. We can deduct that the Torah word-play covers up the original fracture between the sexes: Hebrew at first expressed this fracture with zachar and nekeva and then occulted/revealed it with ish/ishshah. The final ah, marking the feminine in Hebrew, has to be seen therefore not as a complement, but as a supplementary trait that doesn't make ish whole.
We can further assimilate the supplementary mark of the feminine with God following again the Kallah Rabbati; in the play of the signifiers, God's name is literally granted the power of closing the gender gap. The first two letters of His name therefore compensate for the radical difference of the sexes. Does it mean that complementarity and totality are attained? On one hand, yes: as the Torah affirms: "They become one flesh" (Gen 2, 24) "which is to say, by means of the place in which both of them become one flesh," comments the Midrash. But does this "place,” which is none other than phallic jouissance (if we follow the Midrash to the letter), solve the sexual difference? By any means, not at all, in the sense that it subsumes the difference under the phallic signifier, thereby erasing any specificity that feminine jouissance could claim[21]. Therefore, to support the Other side of the equation, feminine sexuality, God is still indispensable. This will be manifested in the Christian reflections on the subject, which are totally faithful to the Torah on that point; as a first paradigm, designating the dividing line between man and woman, we can quote Jesus, addressing His own Mother (!): "What I have to do with thee?" This is immediately compensated by the next words "Mine hour is not yet come" (John 2, 4), indicating that the abyss will be filled, but in the afterworld. Indeed, the complementarity of the sexes is beyond this world: "Nevertheless, neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord." (1 Cor. 11, 11).
Or: "What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." (Matthews, 19, 6). Totality is therefore a matter of faith[22]. Or, put in another way: totality is out of this world, since God is out of this world.
This can also be rephrased thus: totality cannot be attained by language, representation, image, since their essence depends on the negative relativity of the signifier, thereby unable to effect a positive sum. Hence, the copula which overcomes the gulf separating the sexes (also man and God, because it is the same gulf) is an object of faith (obsessional neurosis) or love (perversion, especially fetishism - to give (or to be) what you don't have (or cannot be))[23].
The Torah hence precedes modern science and its offspring psychoanalysis by founding the basis of critical thinking. One of its main principles may be expressed thus: there is no copula; if there is one, it is imaginary and fictional, because it depends on language and representation. From which we can easily deduct some corollaries: there is no totality or union (between humanity and God, man and woman, man and unconscious) except for an imaginary one.
This is not a moral condemnation of the belief in the imaginary link (which we can call signification); everybody sees that the link obviates to a radical segregation: without it, no couples, no community, no social life; even: no perpetuation of the human species (except now by in vitro-fertilization), because this perpetuation depends on the belief in some link between man and woman (a copula-tion); that is, if we admit that the reproductive instinct that guides animal species has been obliterated in us by culture.
However, the belief in the copula to the exception of everything else is always a mark of Stupidity, a symptom of mythical thought.
We can remark that all forms of uncritical belief are intimately tied to the functioning of the signifier itself, taken for the whole of the process of language: they are caused by the negative and relative difference that makes it impossible for a signifier to stand for itself without being compared to all signifiers (again a very Saussurean concept); a relationship that is the fundamental link or copula. Hence, the linguistic fiction of an all-encompassing link from all signifiers to all signifiers. But this is only the surface of language: an imaginary taxonomy without meaning, except the affirmation that all is linked (that is why Lacan could say that the signifier is stupid). Such an imaginary refuge is sturdy only if we can hold at bay anything that disrupts our belief.
And we can name that “anything” under different guises: God, the unconscious, femininity, the Real, et alia; they do exist, stronger from the fact that they are just below the surface of the signifier, masked and repressed by its stupidity.
Against the stupidity of the copula, a bulwark was erected, many centuries ago, by the Torah; it has been further refined by science and psychoanalysis.
We should stick to it.
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[1] See “Subversion…”, in Écrits, English 308-309.
[2] Écrits, French, p. 872.
[3] In its Lacanian version, not Freudian, since the very title the Future of an Illusion is the mark of its humanism/scientism. On Lacan's doctrine on God, see the fundamental Dieu est inconscient, by Francois Regnault.
[4] By itself? but that is another question: the question of what could be a radical and real atheism. About the creation of the signifier, see Lacan's remark, Encore, p. 41.
[5] As the Midrash says: "God is the place of the world but the world is not God's place."
[6] Confessions, XII V, 4
[7] Again, Hegel: "Absolute knowledge is everything". See Lacan's critique in Écrits, English, p. 296. Hence, philosophy is akin to the Master's discourse.
[8] Nietzsche writes: "Esse means in fact to breathe". Cf. B. Pautrat, Versions du soleil, p. 200.
[9] See the subtle and illuminating remarks of J. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, Basic Books 1981, p. 30.
[10] As in Gen. 5,2: "Male (zachar) and female (nekevah) He created them. And when they were created, he blessed them and called them Man (Adam)." We can derive from this that Adam, far from representing a totality, is inherently and irremediably divided between male and female.
[11] Jacob Neusner, Genesis Rabba, Scholars press, Atlanta Georgia (Brown Judaic studies), 1985, I, pp. 192-3.
[12] Since there is no image of God (except Christ, but that is another story), the likeness here has to be reduced to the only attribute man partakes with God: speech - which, in parenthesis, can be said to be the ultimate anthropomorphization.
[13] The BDD (Brown Divers Briggs), 271a, indicates that the relation is obscure; for a psychoanalytical ear, however, the connection of zachar as the signifier to the remembrance of the dead father seems quite clear.
[14] BDD, 666 b
[15] Our word sex comes from the Latin "secare": to cut off, to divide, to separate.
[16] Gen. Rab. I, 193.
[17] Be it scientific: see Gödel's theorem of incompleteness.
[18] Some modern languages work the same way: one thinks of man/woman, male/female in English. For the vulgate Latin translation, Saint Jerome had recourse to vir/virago, not without disastrous effects!
[19] In the Rabbi's Guide, p. 190.
[20] BDD, p. 35
[21] Hence Freud: "There is only one sexuality, and it is phallic in its essence."
[22] "Daughter, be of good comfort: thy faith hath made thee whole: go in peace" (Luke 8, 48). This is why atheism is not obtained by declaring oneself as an atheist. As soon as we assume a totality of meaning, or a meaning that is entirely conscious - which it never can be - we are already in the structure of religious discourse itself.
[23] See Freud, "The overestimation of the sexual object", in Three Contribution to the Theory of Sex; see also Lacan's The Signification of the Phallus, where man's and woman's request for love are posited as radically asymmetrical. Men ask women to be the phallus - which they cannot be, whereas women asks for a really phallic man, a man who would have the phallus. Both desires for totality are checkmated by castration.