About

ABOUT ME

Welcome to my Blog. I’m Creston Davis and I am currently a professor at Rollins College in the department of philosophy and religion. I grew up in the working class town of Hanover, Pennsylvania (famous for UTZ Chips and Synder’s Pretzels). I served four years in an Airborne Ranger Recon outfit (LRSU–Long Range Surveillance Unit) before I went to college. I read my first bone fide book when I was in the Army. I did my PhD under mentors John Milbank & Slavoj Zizek at the University of Virginia. My dissertation was on Hegel’s ontology, Christian theology, and contemporary philosophy. I have completed some book projects including Theology and the Political: The New Debate, The Monstrosity of Christ, (both with Zizek and Milbank) Hegel and the Infinite (with Zizek and Crockett, forthcoming with Columbia UPress), coauthored a book on Paul and Theology (with Milbank and Zizek forthcoming), and am working on my first monograph, What is Truth? I also coedit two academic book series, Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics & Culture (with Slavoj Zizek, Clayton Crockett, and Jeff Robbins) and New Slant (with Kenneth Surin and Philip Goodchild). Clayton Crockett and I edited a special issue of the Routledge journal Angelaki called “The Political and the Infinite: Theology and Radical Politics.” I am editing a special issue for the Equinox journal Political Theology 11.1 called, “Political Theology: The Continental Shift” which examines the state of political theology Post-Carl Schmitt and in the wake of Continental philosophy’s intervention into the theological in the thought of figures such as Negri, Agamben, Badiou, Zizek, and others.

THE BLOG’s THESIS:

The basic question this blog wants to explore is the diffuse logic of desire found between the object of desire (X) and the one desiring the object (i.e. the subject or S). Thus, to put this blog’s thesis into its simplest equation, it would be: Y= [X --> S , & S--> X]. What then is ‘Y’? In other words, and to formulate this into a question: What is desire, in-itself? What is this mysterious logic that links together S to X (and X to S)?

To get to this we first need to be precise about what we mean by the logic of desire. We begin then with the notion of objet petit a. Because psychoanalysis can be very wordy and full of heavy gargon, I put links to and drew upon Wikipedia so as to keep things simple.

objet petit a is a French term used in psychoanalysis (the study of the psychological functions and behavior developed by Sigmund Freud 1856-1939). But the meaning of the term was developed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) who insisted that objet petite a was not translatable. It’s literal meaning is object little-a and means the unobtainable object of desire. The idea is that there are objects that ignite desire–they are the cause of desire, but the cause itself is hidden from direct view and so is ineffable and elusive. This cause that escapes our grasp (and yet creates it) reveals the reality of a lack–a void–in-the-world. This lack further creates a separation or split that Lacan thinks is found directly within ourselves–in our very subjectivity; indeed it is this lack that creates our subjectivity itself!

Lacan

Here is a passage from Lacan: The objet a is something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. This serves as a symbol of the lack, that is to say, of the phallus, not as such, but in so far as it is lacking. It must, therefore, be an object that is, firstly, separable and, secondly, that has some relation to the lack. I’ll explain at once what I mean. – Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 112.

Because the objet a is there, but you have to grasp at it slantwise and in-diretly, Lacan said it “thus acquir[es] the status of an algebraic sign.” Écrits. Like Algebra–the fundamental operation is to relate what is “known” to what is “unknown”–psychoanalysis is a process by which one comes to terms with basic drives, desires and compulsions that animate the subject’s behavior. We know how we behave (the known) but we don’t always know the cause (objet a) of said behavior (individually and socially). What intrestes me here espcially relative to psychoanalysis is how it can help explain and account for strange and obscure social behavior or ideology.

Slavoj Zizek

My friend and mentor, Slavoj Zizek develops this concept by revealing how the logic of objet petite a works in in all aspects of lived reality: culture, films, literature, and all forms of how ideas manifest themselves. In his essay “Love thy symptom as thyself” Zizek nicely shows how the object petite a works in Alfred Hitchcock’s films which is also known as the MacGuffin-Effect. Basically, the MacGuffin-Effect is that which causes events to take-place, but the cause itself doesn’t really exist as such. Think of the film, North by Northwest–whose plot moves forward based on a person who doesn’t really exist (i.e., the character, Roger Thornhill — played by Cary Grant) is mistaken for a secret agent named George Kaplan who doesn’t actually exist. This mistaken identity makes the plot come to life, because the film essentially becomes a cross-country chase.

Zizek says, “[The] MacGuffin is objet petit a pure and simple: the lack, the remainder of the real that sets in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation, a hole at the center of the symbolic order, the mere appearance of some secret to be explained, interpreted, etc.”

What is especially interesting to me is how the logic of objet petit a is very similar to theology (both Christian or pagan), that is, reasoning from what we know (our world, scientific laws, etc.) to what we do NOT know (the Creator God, the gods, etc.). Thus, if this Blog were to have a thesis it would be: What is the logic of objet petit a? How does objet petit a relate to a theology, and how does this “cause-that is undefinable” account for cultural logics, substance becoming subject (a la Hegel), ideological critique (via Marx), and so on?

BACK TO THE ‘Y’

Holbein’s The Ambassadors

So after fleshing out the basic terminology of what is meant by the mysterious phrase objet petit a we can return to our basic point: the question of the ‘Y’. What accounts for the Y of desire that animates the domain between Subjects and Substance (objects) etc. In short, why does desire exist at all and what really is it? According to Lacan and Zizek desire’s very existence is unknowable in any direct sense. This “unknowability” of the Y for Lacan and Zizek is close to another basic psychoanalytical notion called, The Real. The basic idea of ‘the Real’ is that which avoids being captured by words or any form of language or media. The Real is thus like a terrorist whose job it is to destabilize the idea that language (or reason, or truth or any foundation whatever, science, mathematics etc.) has the last word. Look at Holbein’s painting “The Ambassadors” which is an example that Lacan used. There is much going on here but you basically have two realities going on: on the one level there is confidence of humanity that has arrived as its full consummation, but, on another more ominous level there is something strange by their feet between these two figures in the painting. At first one doesn’t even notice what this strange-intrusive object is, but then if one examines it closer you see it is a skull–a brutal symbol of Death! Here is another shot of the skull but from a different vantage point:

The Skull of Death as 'The Real'

In other words, the Real keeps open the foreclosure of any apparatus of Truth (i.e., capitalism, communism, religious fundamentalism etc.). So to bring the ‘Y’ and ‘The Real’ together albeit in a slightly inaccurate way, what we have then is the idea that there exists desire that alights in the world (as the world), and that this desire is in-itself a totally unpredictable unfolding of itself through itself. In effect then, ideology (in the vulgar sense of the term) is that which directs the ‘Y’ as desire even to the point of domesticating it out-of-consciousness. And this is precisely why psychoanalysis and theology (as a serious study of culture, ideology, feminism, race, capitalism, religion etc. etc.) cannot be ignored for it gives birth to un-covering (re-covering?) a consciousness of desire (and its effects).