The Decalogue is an important text of the Bible, a foundational religious text relating to the law, which is an excellent example of the master ' s ability to point and to operate the chain of command. The first commandment of the Decalogue shows the meaning and arbitrariness of what the master can mean, while the second commandment, which proceeds from the authority that the master can mean, concerns the generation of mirrors, the construction of symbolic boundaries and the shielding of symbolic circles against imaginary dualist relationships.
I myself do not fully agree with the "application" of psychoanalysis in the thetheological and literary fields, so it should be said that such "psychological reading" is a metaphorical argument, in which researchers simply "state" their own theory by using some of the available examples, which are not helpful in their original field of study.
In his decades-long psychoanalytic studies, Lacan has always used Western monotheisticism as a fracture or cutting. Lacan saw that some cracks continued to take effect on modern subjects, without being abolished with the secularization of society, as some enlightening scholars had envisaged. Lacan enriches Freud's emphasis in Moses and monotheistics on the shift from multitheistic to monotheisticism as a fundamental historical moment of psychoanalysis, considering it "irreversibly changes everything before and after" [1]. In Lacan ' s view, monotheisticism underpins the illusion of the subjects of the unity of the person, the unity of the State and the relationship between the subjects, and subsides them into order, which is guaranteed by the only God himself. But the problem is that this guarantee lacks a guarantee of its own, or that the monotheistic God itself is self-guarantee, so for Lacan, the monist nature of this god itself means division: "One is always more... than the self-sameness of Greek logic, mathematics and cosmology, but it is a violent break that creates the subject and their world around an empty space."[2]
It was in the study of this fracture that Lacan turned his eyes to the Ten Commandments. Unlike the more common stories of the Bible and myths, the Decalogue is a legal document, and in most of its entries it does not justify its own. In Lacan's view, it "has a privileged character related to the legal structure" [3]. Through Lacan's analysis of the Decalogue, this paper will explain how Lacan's subjects, seen in the monist cult, are alienated by their masters and enter into relationships with psychoanalysis at the expense of the duality of idols in the imagination.
Section 1 S1 can mean: there is and there is only one
Since Lacan has established the Ten Commandments as a one-dollar law system, we need to start with the discussion of the Ten Commandments in Workshop VII. In Workshop VII, Lacan creatively introduced the concept of Floyd Das Ding, which, in Lacan's presentation, "Das Ding always manifests itself, at the level of unconscious experience, as having a law". [4] The one side of Das Ding's order, that is, the voice of the arbitrary nature of the order, has been described by Lacan as a mere order received by the subject from the big Other, "actual rhetoric and enforcement of decisions that put pressure on the subject before any semantic content or regulatory function". [5] Das Ding is a double concept with two functions that can be described as contradictory. On the one hand, Das Ding's "real existence" - although it does not appear directly before the human person - preserves space for exorcism, but it is its very existence, which reinforces the violence of the law by making it intolerable and incalculable. Thus, in order to interpret the function of this contradiction, Lacan linked two equally contradictory and disparate authors: Kant and Sad. Lacan has read Kant's "Deeds of Practice and Reasons," arguing that Kant's ethics have nothing to do with common morality, that absolute orders do not mean public good and welfare at all, but that they are absolute, and that they are "direct orders, not anything else." I'm sorry. To this extent, Lacan believes that the salsic debauchery is an inherent limitation of this ethical order. That is to say, pain, not happiness, provides for ethics: we must move resolutely and painstakingly towards "ethical" purposes, and anyone who, for his or her own pleasure, is the object of this road that needs to be feared. The real pleasure of contact with the object becomes pain within the symbol system of absolute orders, and pain, a process that is isolated from the object and cannot be aimed at the object, but only at a self-established intermediary of absolute orders, becomes happiness in the system. As can be seen here, Das Ding has ensured the establishment of a symbolic system through its very existence, but its invisibility is destined to be unfounded and to make every contact with "objects" outside the system taboo.
Now we can go back to the Ten Commandments. Lacan stressed that the Decalogue must not be understood in religious sociological terms as a "ten good ideas" for the common good of society, even though from a sociological point of view it did convey provisions guaranteeing the basic stability of human society. The Ten Commandments should be understood as the Kantian moral order, which, by virtue of its "godly words", guarantees the existence of the commandments and of God, who delivers them. Lacan has stressed that the manner and content of God's orders, as shown in the Decalogue, are consistent with the symbolic structure of our words.
The Bible is in the Egyptian book. The first sentence of God's Ten Commandments is
God commanded all this to say
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt for the House of Slaves.
There is no god but me. [6]
"God has commanded all of this", first and foremost, the slightly repeated phrase has drawn the attention of Lacan. Some researchers quote the French medieval critic Rashid: "God has spoken the whole commandment in an incomprehensible and terrible word... God began to repeat them - and the people couldn't even bear it - by asking Moses to give them the commandment lest the terrible voice of God should reach them." [7] In addition to the Edie, the Decalogue appeared once in the Episode, Moses told a new generation of Israelis born in the desert about their departure from Egypt under God. In the context of this scene, read and transmitted by the Decalogue, Lacan believes that the very nature of the law - that is to say, the intolerable unfounded nature of the law - immediately gave rise to its interpretation and preservation, that is, the story of Moses. But, as the Decalogue has revealed to us, such preservation is no more than an affirmation and a repetition of that authority.
Then Lacan turned his eyes to the second sentence and God set forth his name here. Lacan pointed out that in the Jewish tradition, the statement of the name of God was generally seen as the first sentence of the opening of the Decalogue, rather than the more typical commandment that "There is no god but me". This means that this description of his name is already an order in itself. God's word of his name is an order. Lacan also quotes the name of God in another place: When Moses asked him who gave him power to liberate the Israelis, he replied, "I am what I am." [8] Lacan identifies here some of the symbolization of the God's name, the "Y" and "H" in Hebrew, "I am what I am": considering that "Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh", it is clear that the "Y" and "H" pronunciations of "YHVH" have been successfully issued, but have not been included in some sense of certainty - in this meaningless homogeneity, this "part of the call" to God's name repeats itself, while at the same time maintaining a hang that can be attributed to a fixed meaning (and therefore to the very existence of God). The verbal repetition of the name of God has fixed its own meaninglessness in a meaningful flow: words have happened, but no meaning has been said. It is for this reason that this sentence will be the top of the Ten Commandments: It's a pure decree with no specific provisions, positive or negative -- - The provision for the existence of God itself, which is absolute mobility and does not hang on to any regulation, is true.
"Provision" is a very subtle word here. Reinhard reminds readers that the concept of the existence of Hebrew is not a state of affairs [9], which means that "I am what I am" cannot simply be understood as a description of the status quo, but rather as an order of God, an act: the word of God says the name of God, the existence of God, the authority of God is created in parallel in the activities to which it speaks. Thus, this beginning of the Decalogue "is both creative and descriptive, and more of a piece of legislation... the fundamental importance of the commandment is not, in fact, to believe in God, but rather to be the constitutive role of an unspoken term in the formation of a nation and the creation of religious subjects". [10] Faith in God is intrinsically based on faith in the master. In Lacan's view, this faith is, in fact, a mixture of "one" beliefs. This constitutive "one" is effective in the sense of its necessity for the structure of the subject, not in a specific sense, and Lacan believes that this "one" should be understood as the first word of the base figure, rather than the first of the sequential words, because this "one" exists outside the system that it created. It is at this point that Lacan defines the name of God "YHVH" as the owner of a "S1", without any reference to it. As the synonym "I am what I am" repeatedly suggests, the master can mean anchoring the body in a specific constellation of symbol order in a self-repeated form of pure orders.
Lacan has repeatedly used the name YHVH as an example of what S1 can be called, and he also spoke of a series of prohibitions surrounding it in the Jewish-Christian tradition - precisely those that have consolidated and established the status of the name as master. Consider another famous entry in the Decalogue
Do not call the name of the Lord your God. [11]
It is precisely in order to isolate the name of God from its rightful place as master and to preserve its sanctity - That is to say, to preserve its ungroundedness as a force of primitive repression, while at the same time preserving the purity of the daily language and avoiding the inflow of this meaning into the daily language. Thus, the words of the name of God have become a good example of Lacan's "half-word" and "the word of truth": It cannot be understood either as a statement of knowledge or as a statement of existence. Because, as knowledge, "I am what I am" only speaks of synonyms and preserves the hollowness of semantic content; and as existence, YHVH's two letters, Y. and H, which are "I am what I am" (Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh), only serve as an indication of the existence of some kind of self-divisiveness - not to call the name of the Lord your God, whereas the fact is that in the words of religious subjects, the divine name is "not" spoken of in the meaning of the symbolic operation of the subject.
In the second, you have no other god than me: S1 →S2
After the first commandment, which proclaimed the name of God as an immutable master in a hegemonic manner, the second commandment was intended to shape the opposability of order on the basis of the master's finger. In this commandment, there is a symbolism of the obstruction of the imaginary dualist order, as well as a symbol of the order itself as a monist guarantee of desire
You have no god but me.
It is not possible to engrave idols for oneself, nor to make any like the heaven, the earth, and the earth, and all that is in water.
Do not kneel down on their knees, nor serve them, for I, the Lord, your God, is a god of scorn. And lo! We shall pursue his sins from his father and his son until three or four generations.
And as for those who love me and keep Our command, We shall show them mercy until a thousand generations. [12]
The second commandment, which fully realized the power of the first traumatic master, woven the uniqueness of God and his implicit name into a wider universe - a universe created by God, but fundamentally not identical to God. Everything in this universe is considered to be a guarantee of stability and unity to God, but God is not anywhere in the universe. Lacan pointed out that the second commandment had two separate functions, namely, to shape a symbolic order to which a finger could be drawn and to use that order to block the imaginary duality: "Until the second `No idol' commandment, God stopped not only the worship of other gods, but also the appearance of any `like', any creation in the subterranean sea as a whole. To put it simply, the shielding of the function of the imagination is the premise and condition of the connection with the symbolic world created by the name of God." [13]
In the theory of Lacono-psychoanalysis, the symbolicization of human beings is the process by which S1 can refer - through sacrifice of imaginary sexual relations - to the incorporation of the subject into a series of multiple numbers that can be pointed at. This sequence is S2: A finger-tip. How the chain of command can act as a barrier to imagination depends on Lacan ' s interpretation of idol worship. In the divine order of idols, God is not like God, and his name cannot be said to be beyond the power of power, but is the presence of something. Thus, idol worship is the direct contact of religious subjects with objects - as long as the idol of wood or stone is in front of it, it is not just an intermediary between the subject and God, but the presence of God in everyday life, and the worship of idols is the dualism of faith and God. The face of God corresponds to that of the subject. But considering the face of God, the situation is completely different. "God's Face" is a paradox, and the Bible's Genesis begins by saying, "Dark on the horizon, the spirit of God is on the water."[14] God has only the spirit, without any form of picturing. But God does refer to "face" in the text of the Decalogue
You have no god but me. You shall have no other Gods between me [al peni: before my face]
In the Hebrew original, "You have no other god before me" is the real word. The same is true of chain S2, which S1 can produce: there can be no other image in the face of "fingerprint". Since then, the only thing a subject can be called "face-to-face" is the face of God, that is to say, the visible face. God is an exception: only he, the only god, can have a face in front of religious subjects. By being excluded from this chain of fingers, S1 can mean ensuring the infinite richness of S2 - that no particular thing is visible to human beings as an extension from God, that is to say, as an element of the holistic nature of the order of God, but as an object of "not God", beyond that sacred only. Its positioning depends on God's positioning, and God itself's positioning is exactly what I am - that I am not anything.
But there is still a need to discuss an image - the image of the subject itself - that is, the self-improvement of the mirrors explored in Lacan psychoanalysis. This is also clearly revealed by the Bible: the creation of the book is still under consideration
So God created man in his image, and a man in his image.
So God blessed them, and said to them, "Enter the earth and rule it." And the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, and the living creatures of every kind on earth. [16]
There are two relationships here: the separation of man from nature, the similarity of man to God. Reinhard spoke of the fact that, considering that God itself does not have an image to use to "similarity", the very similarity of man to God is determined by the inevitable separation of man from nature, which means that man-subject has experienced the creation of God and has become something absolutely different from nature. [17] to provide that this is not the same, that is to say. The human being is physically a direct form of life out of the flesh. Men and women are created by God's "hands" and the desire for sexual intercourse comes directly from God's words. In this sense, a person's self-image does not come from some sort of self-generated directness, but rather from a pronunciation: it is also Lacan's intention to describe "a patternal relationship in and from a language that is created by a phrase, not in the realm of a visual tower."[18] The face of a human being, which is a mirror that is transmitted to him by God.
But here we are at risk of falling into another homogeneity: since the power of S2 can be combined with the power of S1 to establish God's intermediary between the existence of things and the survival of individuals, is it not possible for the subject to have access to the real thing? So the punishment of God, "I, the Lord, your God is the Lord of evil" becomes an empty word. - Is it not true that the threat of punishment, which God has unleashed at this time, is itself a distrust of his power, considering that he has in every respect limited the real involvement of people in the sense of his intimacy? There's still a motivational consideration to be made here. It is clear that God's "obscurantism" is an idolization - that is, an imaginary relationship with the exclusion of things. And God's hate for this relationship is, in fact, one side of the same. This means that God, as the master, can mean that it is precisely the infinity of the infinite richness (S2) that provides the basic constraint, because this infinite moment of change poses a threat. The threat goes back to the realm of imagination that has been abolished by God-owner. And here we've come back to the nature of the owner, which is what we're talking about at the beginning of the Das Ding -- the owner is talking about the threat precisely because it's just a simple repetition of itself, just a slide of the chain of thumb. - Just as some kind of direct encounter with the master can cause the subject to experience the same trauma caused by the unjustified exposure that the master can refer to. The appearance of idols other than God is simply an unimaginable and eternal trauma. At this point, we can say that the first two articles of the text of the Decalogue already adequately reflect the operationalization of religion - the mere repetition by the master of himself as a meaningless thing, the legislative requirements arising from the fear of this repetition, and the attendant duality of the unlimited richness of the chain of fingers: On the one hand, it provides the master with a shield against the imaginary dualist relationship and ensures that the master can refer to an exclusive intermediary status; on the other hand, it establishes a symbolic general order, supported by the master ' s traumatic ability to point to himself.
References
[1]Lacan, Jacques. "The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VIII: Transference: 1960-1961." (2011).p.172
[2]Reinhard, Kenneth, and Julia Reinhard Lupton. "The subject of religion: Lacan and the ten commandments." diacritics 33.2 (2003): 71-97.
[3]Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: The first complete edition in English. WW Norton & Company, 2006.p.81
[4]Reinhard, Kenneth, and Julia Reinhard Lupton. "The subject of religion: Lacan and the ten commandments." diacritics 33.2 (2003): 71-97.
[5]Lacan, Jacques. The ethics of psychoanalysis 1959-1960: The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Routledge, 2013.p.73
[6] Bible Out of Egypt
[7]Reinhard, Kenneth, and Julia Reinhard Lupton. "The subject of religion: Lacan and the ten commandments." diacritics 33.2 (2003): 71-97.
[8]Lacan, Jacques. The ethics of psychoanalysis 1959-1960: The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Routledge, 2013.p.81
[9]Reinhard, Kenneth, and Julia Reinhard Lupton. "The subject of religion: Lacan and the ten commandments." diacritics 33.2 (2003): 71-97.
[10]Ibid.
[11] Bible Out of Egypt 20:7
[12] Bible Out of Egypt 20:3-6.
[13]Lacan, Jacques. The ethics of psychoanalysis 1959-1960: The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Routledge, 2013.p.98-99
[14] Bible Genesis 1:2
[15] Bible Out of Egypt 20:3
[16] Bible Genesis 1:27-28
[17]Reinhard, Kenneth, and Julia Reinhard Lupton. "The subject of religion: Lacan and the ten commandments." diacritics 33.2 (2003): 71-97.
[18]Ibdi.