The Ten Commandments is an important text in the Bible. This foundational religious text related to law is an excellent example of the construction operation of the master signifier and the signifier chain. The first commandment of the "Ten Commandments" shows the meaninglessness and arbitrary nature of the master signifier, while the second commandment starts from the authority of the master signifier and involves the generation of mirror images, the construction of the symbolic world, and the shielding of imaginary binary relationships by the symbolic world.
I personally do not fully agree with the "application" of psychoanalysis in the fields of theology and literature. Therefore, this type of "symptomatic reading" should be called a metaphorical argument. In this process, the researcher only uses some ready-made examples to "illustrate" his own theory. This example is not helpful for research in the field in which it is originally located.
In Lacan's psychoanalysis research that spans decades, he always regards the monotheism of Western subjectivity as a rupture or cut in discourse. Lacan saw these ruptures continuing to operate on the modern subject, rather than being abolished altogether with the secularization of society, as some Enlightenment scholars had imagined. Lacan enriches Freud's emphasis in Moses and Monotheism on the status of the transition from polytheism to monotheism as a fundamental historical moment, arguing that it "irrevocably changes everything that comes before and after" [1]. In Lacan's view, monotheism supports the subject's fantasy of the unity of personality, the unity of the state, and the relationship between subjects, and precipitates them in the order of signifiers, while the only God himself provides guarantee for this legitimacy. But the problem is that this guarantee lacks a self-guaranteed, or in other words, the monotheistic God itself appears as a self-guaranteed. Therefore, for Lacan, the unity of this God itself means division: "There are always many in one... This is not the self-identity of Greek logic, mathematics and cosmology, but a violent rupture that creates subjects and their world around a void" [2]
It was out of the study of this rupture that Lacan turned his attention to the Ten Commandments. Unlike the Bible's more common stories and myths, the Ten Commandments are a document of commandments that, in most of its entries, do not provide reasons for their commands. According to Lacan, it "has privileged characteristics related to legal structures" [3]. Through Lacan's analysis of the Ten Commandments, this article will explain Lacan's psychoanalysis semiotics of the subject being alienated by the master's signifier and entering into a speech relationship at the expense of the duality of idolatry in the imaginary world from the worship of the One God.
Section 1 S1 signifier: there is and only one
Since Lacan stipulates the Ten Commandments as a system of commandments for the One Spirit, it is necessary for us to first introduce the discussion of the commandments in Seminar VII. Lacan creatively introduced Freud's concept of Das Ding in Seminar VII. In Lacan's expression, "On the level of unconscious experience, Das Ding always appears as if it has established a law." [4] Law Order Das The side of Ding, that is, the willful and arbitrary voice of the command, is called by Lacan the pure command that the subject receives from the Big Other. "It is the behavioral discourse and execution decision that puts pressure on the subject before any semantic content or regulatory function." [5] Das Ding is a dual concept, with two functions that can be called self-contradictory. On the one hand, the "existence" of Das Ding - although it does not directly manifest itself in front of people - saves space for original enjoyment that transcends the rules and regulations, but it is precisely its existence, its unbearable and undefinable scandalous identity, that further intensifies the violence of the rules and regulations. Therefore, in order to interpret this contradictory function, Lacan connects two equally contradictory authors who are thousands of miles apart: Kant and Sade. Lacan radically reread Kant's "Critique of Practical Reason" and believed that Kantian ethics has nothing to do with common morality. The categorical imperative does not mean public good and welfare at all, but is precisely the absolute nature of the command, which is "toward the command, not anything outside the command" - so that, Lacan believed that Sade's obscene original music became the inherent limit of this ethical imperative. That is to say, it is pain, not pleasure, that defines ethics: we must move firmly and ascetically toward "moral" ends, and any pleasure for its own sake is an object to be feared and avoided on this road. The real pleasure that is in contact with the object becomes pain within the symbolic system of the categorical imperative, and pain, this process that is isolated from the object and cannot have the object as its purpose, but can only serve as the intermediary of a self-established categorical imperative, becomes pleasure in this system. It can be seen here that Das Ding ensures the establishment of a symbolic system through its own existence, but its own inaccessibility destined the system to be groundless, making every contact with "things" outside the system a taboo original pleasure.
Now we can return to the Ten Commandments. Lacan emphasized that the Ten Commandments must not be understood sociologically as the "ten good ideas" that mean the common good of society, even though from a sociological perspective it does seem to convey some provisions that guarantee the basic stability of human society. The Ten Commandments should be understood as a Kantian moral law, which with its imperative nature of "divine words" simultaneously guarantees the existence of the commandments and the one who gives them, God. Lacan once emphasized that the manner and content of God's commands shown in the Ten Commandments are consistent with the semiotic structure of our speech.
In the Book of Exodus in the Bible, God's first words about the Ten Commandments are
God commanded all these words, saying
I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
You shall have no other gods before me. [6]
"God commanded all these things," first of all, it was this slightly repetitive sentence that caught Lacan's attention. Some researchers quoted the interpretation of the medieval French commentator Rashi: "God spoke the entire set of commandments in an incomprehensible and terrifying word... God began to repeat them one by one - the people couldn't even bear it. They begged Moses to explain the commandments to them, lest God's terrible voice come on their heads." [7] In addition to "Exodus", the "Ten Commandments" also appeared once in "Deuteronomy". Moses explained to the new generation of Israelites born in the desert the story of their coming out of Egypt under God's leadership. Lacan believes that in this scene of the reading and delivery of the Ten Commandments, the very nature of the law-that is, the intolerable groundlessness of the law-immediately gives rise to the activity of interpreting and preserving it, that is, the narration of Moses. But as the Ten Commandments reveal to us, this preservation is nothing more than a statement and a repetition of this authority.
Lacan then turns his attention to the second sentence, where God states his divine name. Lacan pointed out that in the Jewish tradition, the statement of the name of God is generally regarded as the first sentence of the Ten Commandments, rather than the more typical command statement of "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." This means that the stipulation and description of one's own name is already an order in itself. God's utterance of His name is a command. Lacan also cited God's use of his divine name in another place: when Moses asked God who gave him the power to liberate the Israelites, God responded: "I am who I am." [8] Lacan here identifies a partial symbolization of God's divine name "Jehovah": consider the Hebrew pronunciation of "I am what I am" as "Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh", Apparently the "Y" and "H" in the pronunciation of "Yahweh" ("YHVH") are successfully pronounced, but are not written into the certainty of a certain meaning - in this meaningless-sounding tautology, this "partial invocation" of God's name repeats itself, and at the same time maintains the suspension of the signifier's speech to a fixed meaning (and therefore to the fixation of God's concrete existence). The verbal repetition of the divine name already fixes its own meaninglessness in the circulation of signifiers: the act of speaking occurs, but no meaning is uttered. It is precisely for this reason that this sentence can be the first of the Ten Commandments: it is a pure decree without positive or negative specific regulations - a regulation of the existence of God himself, that is, God himself is absolutely fluid, not suspended in any kind of determination, but still real.
"Provisions" is a very vague word here. Reinhard reminds readers that the Hebrew concept of existence does not have a progressive tense [9]. This means that "I am what I am" cannot simply be understood as a description of the current situation, but should be understood as a command and an action of God: God speaks God's name, and God's existence and God's authority are simultaneously generated in the activity of speaking. Therefore, the beginning of the "Ten Commandments" is "both creative and descriptive, but also a legislation...The fundamental importance of the commandments is not actually belief in God, but the constitutive role of an ineffable word in the formation of a nation and the creation of religious subjects." [10] Belief in God is, in essence, isomorphic to belief in the master's signifier. According to Lacan, this belief is actually the belief in the "one" external to the multiplicity. This constitutive "one" is effective in its necessity to the subject structure, rather than in a specific sense. Lacan believes that this "one" should be understood as the cardinal number 1, rather than the ordinal number 1st, because this "one" exists outside the system it creates. It is at this point that Lacan stipulates the name of God "YHVH" as the master signifier "S1", a signifier without a signified. As the tautology of "I am what I am" suggests, the master signifier anchors the subject in a specific constellation of symbolic order through the form of self-repetition of pure command.
Lacan repeatedly used the divine name YHVH as an example of the generation of the S1 signifier. He also talked about a series of prohibitions surrounding this signifier in the Judeo-Christian tradition - it is these prohibitions that consolidate and establish the status of the divine name as the master signifier. Consider another famous entry in the Ten Commandments
You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain. [11]
This restriction on speech is precisely to isolate the divine name in its status as master signifier, to preserve its sanctity-that is, to preserve its power as a primal repression, the unfoundedness of its power, but also to preserve the purity of ordinary language and prevent this lack of meaning from flowing into ordinary language. In this way, the utterance of God's name becomes a good example of Lacan's "half-saying" and "speech of truth": it cannot be understood as a utterance of knowledge, nor as a utterance of existence. Because as knowledge, "I am what I am" only speaks tautology, maintaining the emptiness of semantic content; and as existence, the two letters Y and H of YHVH leaked into "I am what I am" (Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh), but only served as a hint of some kind of self-division of existence - you cannot take the name of Jehovah your God in vain. The fact is that in the speaking order of religious subjects, the name of God "cannot" be spoken in the sense of the subject's ability to operate semiotics.
Section 2 You shall have no other gods before me: S1→S2
After the first commandment declares the name of God as the untouchable master signifier in a hegemonic way, the purpose of the second commandment is to shape the sayability of the signifier order on the basis of the master signifier. This commandment includes the symbolic world's interruption of the dualistic order of imagination, and also the guarantee of the goal of desire by the monism of the symbolic order itself
You shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or on earth below, or that is under the earth, or that is in the waters under the earth.
You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God. I will punish the sin of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.
I will show steadfast love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments. [12]
The second commandment fully realizes the power of the traumatic master-signifier of the first commandment, weaving the oneness of God and his tacit divine name into a wider universe-a universe made by God but not fundamentally the same as God. Everything in this universe is thought to be oriented toward God, with God providing the guarantee of its stability and purposefulness, but God is nowhere within this universe. Lacan pointed out that the second commandment has two separate functions, namely, shaping a symbolic order of signifiers, and using this order to block the duality of imagination: "Until the second commandment 'Thou shalt not worship idols', God not only blocked the worship of other gods, but also blocked the appearance of any 'image', any creation in heaven and earth in the human consciousness as a whole. To put it simply, the shielding of the function of the imaginary world... is the prerequisite and condition for the connection with the symbolic world derived from the name of God."[13]
In Lacan's psychoanalysis theory, the symbolization of human subjectification is the process in which the S1 signifier-through the sacrifice of imaginary relationships-places the subject into the plural sequence of signifiers. This sequence is also S2: the signifier of the signifier chain. How the signifier chain can exert its blocking effect on the imaginary world depends on Lacan's interpretation of idolatry. In the divine order of idols, God is not a formless and supremely powerful existence with an indescribable name like God, but rather the immediate presence of something. Therefore, idol worship is the direct contact between religious subjects and objects - as long as a wooden or stone idol is erected in front of them, this idol is not just an intermediary between the subject and God, but is precisely the presence of God in daily life, and the worship ritual of idols is also the duality of the relationship between believers and God. The face of the god corresponds to the face of the subject. But considering the face of God, it's a completely different story. "The face of God" is a paradoxical expression. The Bible Genesis says at the beginning, "Darkness is over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God is moving on the surface of the water." [14] God only has a "spirit" and does not have any form of concrete form. But God does mention "face" in the text of the Ten Commandments
You shall have no other gods before me. (You shall have no other gods besides me[al pnei: before my face])[15]
In the original Hebrew text, "You shall have no other gods before me" is the true literal meaning. When facing the signifier chain S2 developed by the signifier S1, the situation is the same: in front of the "signifier", no other image can appear. The signifier isolates the direct connection between the subject and the object, replacing it with the universal intermediary of the symbolic world. From then on, the only thing the subject can be called "facing" is the face of God, that is, the face of the signifier. God becomes an exception: only he, the only god, can have a face before the religious subject. By being excluded from this chain of signifiers, the S1 signifier guarantees the infinite richness of the S2 signifier-any concrete thing appears to man not as a generalization from God, that is, as an element of the totality of the divine order, but as something "not God" and outside that divine One. Its positioning depends on the positioning of God, and the positioning of God itself is precisely "I am what I am" - that is, I am "not anything."
But we still have to discuss an image - the image of the subject itself, which is the self-gestalt of the mirror image discussed in Lacan psychoanalysis. This is also clearly revealed by the Bible: still consider Genesis
God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it." And have dominion over the fish in the sea, over the birds in the air, and over every living creature that moves on the earth. [16]
There are two relationships here, namely the separation between man and nature and the similarity between man and God. Reinhard said that considering that God himself does not have an image to be "similar" at all, the similarity between man and God is precisely determined by the inevitable separation of man and nature. That is to say, the human subject has experienced God's creation and has become something absolutely not identical with nature. [17] What stipulates this non-equivalence is the signifier. Man is a life form that is physically separated from the directness of carnal desires - man and woman are separate creations from God's "hands", and the desire for human intercourse also comes directly from God's words. In this sense, a person's self-image does not come from some self-generated immediacy, but from the discourse of signifiers: this is also Lacan's original intention. He aimed to illustrate "a schema relationship produced in and by language, which is produced through the syntax of words rather than in the field of visual gestalt." [18] The human face is originally a mirror image transmitted to people through God's words.
However, right here, we risk falling into another tautology: since the power of the S2 signifier, together with the S1 master signifier, establishes God's intermediary between the existence of things and individual survival, then doesn't it mean that the subject has no possibility of contacting real things? In this way, God's punishment of "I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God" becomes an empty phrase - doesn't the threat of punishment issued by God at this time itself become a distrust of his own power, considering that he has limited man's intervention in reality in the sense of ontological ability in every aspect? There are still dynamic considerations to be made here. What is tabooed by God's "jealousy" obviously includes the idolization of real things - that is, the exclusive imaginary relationship with things. In fact, God's jealousy of this relationship is exactly the same as God's shielding of this relationship. That is to say, God as the master signifier provides the basic constraint for the infinite richness of the signifier (S2), because this infinite change creates a threat at every moment. That is, the threat of returning to an imaginary realm that has been abolished by the God-Master signifier. Here, we finally return to the nature of the master signifier itself, which is the Das Ding discussed in the beginning - the reason why the master signifier threatens is precisely because it is a pure repetition of itself, just the reciprocating sliding of the signifier chain - just as a certain direct encounter with the master signifier will cause the subject to suffer trauma, the same trauma is caused by the unfounded exposure of the master signifier. The appearance of idols other than God is a completely unimaginable and huge trauma that deserves eternal punishment for generations. At this moment, we can say that the first two texts of the Ten Commandments have fully reflected the operation of religious signifiers - the pure repetition of the master signifier itself as a meaningless thing, the legislative requirements triggered by the fear of this repetition, and the dual characteristics of the infinite richness of the signifier chain: on the one hand, it shields the imaginary binary relationship for the master signifier, ensuring the exclusive intermediary status of the master signifier; on the other hand, it builds a symbolic overall order with the support of the inaccessible traumatic nature of the master signifier itself.
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 Exodus". 20:1-3
[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 Exodus".20:7
[12] "Bible" Exodus 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" Exodus 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.