The key to fighting against the nefarious effects of belief involves promulgating the recognition that we cannot but believe.
Armed with this recognition that God is a structural necessity rather than a being in whom we might opt to believe, we transform the believer’s conception of God.
Though in one sense widespread acceptance of the necessity of belief wouldn’t change much, it would allow this transformation in the nature of what is believed. The subject who grasps belief as a necessity and God as a structural entity recognizes that even God doesn’t know – and this is the fundamental recognition inherent in every politicization.
If psychoanalysis is atheistic, it is atheistic in the sense that it insists that even though there is God qua gap in the signifying order, there is no knowledge in this gap. Or as Lacan puts it in Seminar XI “The true formula of atheism is God is unconscious.” 253
To know that the other in the gap doesn’t know or that God is unconscious is to understand that nothing grounds human existence. The recognition that nothing grounds human existence founds any genuinely emancipatory political project. 254
Recognizing belief as necessary or God as unconscious requires an ability to see contingency at the point were explanations break down and where one typically posits the mysterious power of God.
The place where the binary signifier is missing represents the place where the contingent resides. 254
Rather than stressing the godless nature of the universe or the inutility of faith, his film shows the contingency operating at the point of the absent signifier, where believers would locate God.
Instead of God connecting everyone to each other, Babel shows the contingent nature of the social bond. Contingency becomes the source of the link between disparate worlds, and the contingent encounter provides a possibility for the realization of this link.
The contingent encounter forces the subject to confront a lack of knowledge concerning the other. One has no assurance about what the other desires, and no one can provide this assurance – not even the other itself. 257
As Babel shows, the contingent encounter offers the subject the opportunity to act – to thrust itself toward the other without any guarantee concerning how the other might respond.
In doing so, it brings the subject back to the moment of its entry into symbolization and the point at which belief first manifests itself. 258