The core of Lacan’s atheism is best discerned in the conceptual couple of “alienation” and “separation” which he develops in his Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. [See Chapter 11 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis]
ALIENATION
In a first approach, the big Other stands for the subject’s alienation in the symbolic order: the big Other pulls the strings; the subject does not speak, he is “spoken” by the symbolic structure. In short, this “big Other” is the name for the social substance, for all that on account of which the subject never fully controls the effects of his acts, so that their final outcome is always other than what he aimed at or anticipated.
SEPARATION
Separation takes place when the subject takes note of how the big Other is in itself inconsistent, lacking (“barred;’ as Lacan liked to put it) : the big Other does not possess what the subject lacks. In separation, the subject experiences how his own lack with regard to the big Other is already the lack that affects the big Other itself. To recall Hegel’s immortal dictum concerning the Sphinx: “The enigmas of the Ancient Egyptians were enigmas also for the Egyptians themselves.”
Separation stands for redoubled alienation: the subject enacts separation when his lack coincides with the lack in the Other, that is, when he recognizes that the Other also does not have what he is missing. 129
In the Gnostic mode, for Buddhism, ethics is ultimately a question of knowledge and ignorance: our craving (desire), our attachment to terrestrial goods, is conditioned by our ignorance, so that deliverance comes with proper knowing. (What Christian love means, on the contrary, is that there is a decision not grounded in knowledge — Christianity thus breaks with the entire tradition of the primacy of Knowledge which runs from Buddhism through Gnosticism to Spinoza.) 130
Here, however, we should remain faithful to the Western “Oedipal” tradition: of course every object of desire is an illusory lure; of course the full jouissance of incest is not only prohibited, but in itself impossible; nevertheless, Lacan’s les non-dupes errent must still be asserted. Even if the object of desire is illusory, there is a real in this illusion: the object of desire in its positive content is vain, but not the place it occupies, the place of the Real; which is why there is more truth in the unconditional fidelity to one’s desire than in the resigned insight into the vanity of one’s striving.
As we have seen, at the core of this paradox is a formal structure homologous to that of the Higgs field in quantum physics: what, in the Higgs field, is called the double vacuum, appears here in the guise of the irreducible gap between ethics (understood as the care of the self, as striving towards authentic being) and morality (understood as the care for others, responding to their call). Insofar as the authenticity of the Self is taken to tne extreme in Buddhist meditation, whose goal is precisely to enable the subject to overcome (or, rather, snspend) its Self and enter the vacuum of nirvana, one should remember the Zen Buddhist claim that “Zen and the sword are one and the same,” a principle grounded in the opposition between the reflexive attitude of our ordinary daily lives (in which we cling to life and fear death, strive for egotistic pleasures and profits, hesitate instead of acting directly) and the enlightened stance in which the difference between life and death no longer matters, in which we regain the original self-less unity and become directly our acts.
The point here is not to criticize Buddhism, but merely to emphasize the irreducible gap between subjective authenticity and moral goodness (in the sense of social responsibility): the difficult thing to accept is that one can be totally authentic in overcoming one’s false Self and yet still commit horrible crimes-and vice versa, of course: one can be a caring subject, morally committed to the full, while existing in an inauthentic world of illusion with regard to oneself. 135