Though Freud eagerly participated in this failed frontal assault on belief, psychoanalysis also points toward another strategy: rather than insisting on the irrationality or problematic nature of believing, we might instead maintain the impossibility of not believing. … psychoanalytic insights reveal that belief is not exceptional but the de facto attitude of the subject, the result of a structure in which the subject enters in order to become a subject.
When the subject enters into signification, it encounters the senseless injunction of the master signifier, a signifier that requires unconditional obedience. Through the form of this initial signifier, the subject receives the social authority’s demand. But this demand never acquires a sense, and the structure of justification remains incomplete because no binary signifier for the master signifier exists.
The authority’s injunction exists on its own, without any subsequent signifier that would provide completion and justification for the master signifier.
The parent tells the child to obey, but no parent can ground this demand in an ultimate reason that would allow it to make sense. This is why, at some point, the parent must respond to the child’s question “Why?” with the unsatisfying response “because I said so.” The ultimate justification for parental (and societal) authority is tautological.
In the last instance, the child must obey simply because the parent says so, and this absence of a ground for the parental injunction is typically our first experience of the missing binary signifier that would provide a sense for the senseless master signifier. 250
The absence of a binary signifier, a signifier that would explain or justify the demand of the master signifier, creates an opening within the structure of signification.
Signification begins with a master signifier, but there is no binary signifier that would close the signifying utterance definitively.
Every stopping point remains a failed stand-in for the missing ultimate stopping point. The absence of a final stopping point or binary signifier unleashes the subject’s desire, but it also molds the subject into a believer.
While enlightenment and rationality might topple our belief in God qua master signifier, it cannot touch our belief in the God of the real, the God who occupies the position of the missing binary signifier and thus does not appear in the chain of signifiers. 251
The Enlightenment assault on the God of the philosophers or the symbolic God leaves intact the other version of God – the God of the missing binary signifier. This is the God who acts in mysterious ways, who provides the answers that transcend causal explanations.
This God never shows itself but always remains in the position of impossibility. One cannot argue away this God because it occupies a position outside all rationality and argumentation: the more successfully one refutes this God’s existence, the more ardently the believer will cling to belief.
This insistence is visible not just in backwater fundamentalists but even in a thinker as sophisticated as Kierkegaard, who contends that the strength of the arguments against the existence of God provide incentive for the leap of faith rather than discouraging it.
But even Kierkegaard’s belief is not the result of an existential choice made by the believer but is rather imposed on the subject by the nature of the symbolic structure itself. 252
Each act of speaking makes us aware of a field of the unsaid that does not exist prior to or outside of the act of speaking. The field of the unsaid, the field of the real other, is irreducible. No matter how many times we attempt to say the last word and to provide an ultimate ground for what we sway, our act of speaking will open up this field of the beyond that no words can subsequently contain.
The inescapability of the real other is at once the inescapability of the God of the missing binary signifier, who is nothing but the name for that which we cannot grasp through the signifier, even though the signifier structurally creates a place for it.
Atheists Marxists appeal to History; evolutionary biologists appeal to Natural Selection; Nietzsche appeals to the fecundity of Life itself; and so on. Even though such figures reject the name of the God, they accept God as a structural position by filling in the missing space in the structure of signification with an explanatory guarantee. 253