Tad DeLay

Psychoanalysis and Theology

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God Is Unconscious: Psychoanalysis & Theology is now available on Amazon.

Peter Rollins talks about the book here.

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My first book will release in early March 2015.  More info here.  From Peter Rollins:

“[The psychoanalyst’s] teachings have not only been productive in generating new concepts and distinctions but have provided ways of challenging the very frame these disciplines used to approach their respective areas of inquiry…With God Is Unconscious, Tad DeLay has boldly entered this fray with an important contribution that offers clear coordinates with which to navigate the landscape of Lacan’s teaching while also preserving his unique voice…DeLay has spent years with Lacan’s teachings. He has sat with them, worked through them, and let them speak into him. The fruit of that labour is an insightful and fertile text that will prove invaluable for those who wish to grapple with Lacan seriously and theologically.”

[taddelay]

My first book will release in early March 2015.  More info here.  From Peter Rollins:

“[The psychoanalyst’s] teachings have not only been productive in generating new concepts and distinctions but have provided ways of challenging the very frame these disciplines used to approach their respective areas of inquiry…With God Is Unconscious, Tad DeLay has boldly entered this fray with an important contribution that offers clear coordinates with which to navigate the landscape of Lacan’s teaching while also preserving his unique voice…DeLay has spent years with Lacan’s teachings. He has sat with them, worked through them, and let them speak into him. The fruit of that labour is an insightful and fertile text that will prove invaluable for those who wish to grapple with Lacan seriously and theologically.”

[taddelay]

Book Announcement, "God Is Unconscious: Psychoanalysis & Theology"

I’m very excited to announce that my first book will be published in early 2015 by Wipf & Stock.

The book is a philosophical, theological, and political meditation on the life’s work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, including commentary on Freud and Žižek. The working title is God Is Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and Theology.

For an idea of the direction this book goes, here is the table of contents.

Introduction

We Speak Indirectly: from the Ritual to the Plague

Outline of the Book

1.  Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real                       

Illusion and Delusion, Apocalypticism and Fundamentalism

The Imaginary Inversion

The Symbolic, the Wolf, and the Gallows

Metonymy: the Unconscious is a Language

Reality and the Real

Paradigms and Piety

2.  Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Beyond the Reality Principle

Quilting Points Ex Nihilo

The (Death) Drive

The Big Other and the Lacanian Subject

Das Ding is a Vase

Trompe L’oeil and the Gaze

The Prodigal, Anxiety, and Doubt

Representative-in-the-place-of-Representation

Cognates for a Void and Theological Cathexis

3) Paradoxes of Law

Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor

The Idiot King and the Censor

The Obscene Excess-Supplement

Decalogue

The Paradoxes of Ethics | Have You Acted in Conformity with Your Desire?

4) Psychopathology: Psychosis, Neurosis, and Perversion

Psychosis and the Secretaries to the Insane

Schreber, Paranoia, and Fundamental Fantasy

The End of (Anti-)Social Psychosis

Neurosis

Obsessional Neurosis

Hysterical Neurosis

Perversion

Transference

Traversing the Fundamental Fantasy

5) The Fool and the Knave

Leftwing Fools

Rightwing Knaves

Collective Foolishness and the Rise of the Knave

Bukharin and Kafka

Luther Against Rome

6) The Four Discourses: Universities, Masters, Hysterics, and Analysts

The Puppet and the Dwarf

Hegel’s Master and Slave

The Four Discourses

Hosea and Yahweh’s Ferocious Ignorance

Analysts and Bureaucrats: Knowledge, Truth, and Opinion

7) The Prophet and the Charlatan

Why Does a Planet Not Speak?

Father, Can’t You See That I Am Burning?

Consume the Book

Epilogue

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“Such is the signifier’s answer, beyond all significations: ‘You believe you are taking action when I am the one making you stir at the bidding of the bonds with which I weave your desires. Thus do the latter grow in strength and multiply in objects, bringing you back to the fragmentation of your rent childhood. That will be your feast until the return of the stone guest whom I shall be for you since you call me forth.’” - Jacques Lacan, Écrits, 29

http://taddelay.com/blog/13970743/jacques-lacan-signifiers-answer#.UvlL8Ba9_ao

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“If the unconscious escapes from a given normative injunction, to what other injunction does it form an attachment? What makes us think that the unconscious is any less structured by the power relations that pervade cultural signifiers than is the language of the subject? If we find an attachment to subjection at the level of the unconscious, what kind of resistance is to be wrought from that?” Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power

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[thechangeistheconstant-deactiva]

What more than 95 percent of all suicide terrorist attacks since 1980 have in common is not religion, but a specific secular goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory the terrorists view as their homeland.

Robert A. Pape via Chris Stedman (via iamstillrobdavis)

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How the 2007-8 collapse happened, and why a 10 billion dollar settlement is supposed to sound serious

[first posted at: http://taddelay.com/blog/13705247/financial-collapse ]

From the New York Times: $10 billion fine negotiated with 14 banks is supposed to settle the 2007-8 crisis? So in other words, crashing global finance turned out to be enormously profitable for only a small closing fee.

For more on the inner workings of the 2007 crisis, I recommend Michael Lewis’ The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. Instead of blaming the poor, which is what you do if you don’t know anything about the CDOs and CDS trading that actually collapsed global finance, you will find in Lewis a remarkably readable description of how 2007 not only happened but was inevitable.

Collateralized debt obligation (CDO) packages were comprised of hundreds or even thousands of subprime mortgages made throughout the 2000s. Subprime loans were made with a “teaser rate” of 8% interest that would jump to a floating rate of 12% or more after two years. Many subprime loans did not require a single payment for the first two years either. By 2005, the default rate after two years (meaning people were not even making a single mortgage payment) on subprimes totaling a half-trillion dollar per year was above 5% and getting close to 10%. Whereas subprimes had made up 5% of the market in the nineties, some estimates put them at over 90% of loans made by 2005. Why were banks giving out loans they knew would not be paid back? Because the CDOs could be sold off to investors that didn’t know this, tucked into the retirement portfolio of your grandmother that doesn’t have a clue what the default rate of 2005 subprimes is. Goldman Sachs knows, but GS is still making a killing.

Tranches are segments of the CDO packages. Each tranche was rated by S&P or Moody’s. The tranches suspected to default at a higher rate (because of a low average debtor credit score- I’ll come back to this) were rated lower. Call it Triple B. The higher end of of the CDO tranches were rated triple A- the same as a US bond- in theory, completely safe to invest in. But since people were spellbound by the myth that ratings meant something, it was harder to sell triple B tranches. So Wall Street extracts the triple B tranches and creates a new CDO credit tower comprised entirely of triple B loans. S&P and Moody’s make their money from Goldman Sachs and friends by rating the loan packages they are handed, so they have a vested interest in pleasing Wall Street. So they respond to a CDO made up entirely of triple Bs- again, loans that are 100% guaranteed to default- by rating only 20% of the new CDO as triple B and the rest as B, A, on up to AAA. And those average loan credit scores? Here is a story that was going around to show you how insane the system is: an immigrant with a fruit stand making $14K/year- but who had taken and repaid a tiny loan to start the stand- had a higher credit score than someone with a stable income of $150K/year who had paid the minimum on his credit cards every now and then. A subprime conference in Las Vegas, January 2007, resulted in one trader telling his table he had met a stripper who was able to take our five- FIVE!- loans for new houses. So a CDO’s credit score could be good without any real assets to back it up. Grandma’s retirement portfolio buys this as well, because there is no incentive not to, and at the end of the day, who really cares if Grandma’s portfolio crashes and leaves her destitute?

Let’s say a CDOs’ value goes to zero the moment the default rate goes to 8%. Subprimes in 2005 had absolutely no chance of not soaring past 8%. Enter the credit default swap (CDS). CDSs were insurance policies. A capital management firm sees a CDO with triple B tranches, realizes the B’s defaults will cause the whole CDO to collapse, and places a bet against the triple A tranches at the top. So the firm agrees to pay a low $1 million per year (which it knows will only take 2 years) and gets $100 million back if the triple A loan tranche collapses (which it does as soon as the minimum wage subprime debtors can’t repay even a single house payment). The firm knows- because they can read reports- that 2005 tranches will collapse, so they make this bet over and over and over again, against Goldman Sachs- who is happy to take a million dollars here and there because it is free money. AIG takes most of these bets until 2006, when they realized they were out-leveraging their ability to pay out by a factor of 50:1 or worse, but what incentive do they have to tell anyone? None, nada, zip.

The smart ones were the firms paying for CDSs on 2005 CDOs. Moody’s and S&P could have stopped all this by rating loan towers correctly, but that would mean Wall Street would have to create a new ratings agency that would do their bidding. In other words, Moody’s and S&P are incentivized to do a really bad job of rating loans. They are just doing their job, which is to provide a service Wall Street will buy. Wall Street is just doing its job too- leveraging itself into a corner as it aims to make more profits than history has ever seen. The prophets taking advantage of CDSs are the villains who see the collapse and make bets that the system will not be able to repay, but its hard not to cheer for them. The only thing that could have killed their bet would be for the federal government to step in and guarantee the subprime tranches- which would have kept Grandma in her house and the foreclosures at bay, but why would the Fed and Treasury want to do that?

This is why the collapse was a financial collapse, not an economic collapse. The latter came as an effect of the former. Leveraging CDOs and CDSs allowed for billions upon hundreds of billions to be swapped in ways that banks could not repay. There was (and still is) no incentive for them to be able to pay out on these bets. So we blame Grandma instead. We blame people who took out subprime mortgages without the ability to pay them even though a lack of subprime payments alone would never have been enough to do this kind of damage to Wall Street. But we need a scapegoat- and since the taxpayer doesn’t know what a CDO or CDS is, its easier for our semi-conscious, patriotic taxpayer to blame Grandma’s bad finances- especially if Grandma is black or poor. It makes as much sense as blaming the moms of Wall Street- if they had just never had kids, then Wall Street traders could have never wrecked the economy. That is technically true, but…. wait, wait, wait- no, let’s go back to blaming poor people.

And instead of asking difficult questions about the nature of late capital markets, let’s scapegoat OWS instead. Have someone draw up plans to snipe those terrorists! And since the Fed and the Treasury sure as hell are not going to address any of this, they just need to extract a $10 billion settlement from 14 banks. Nevermind that the $700 million average that 10,000,000,000 divided by 14 equals is less than the Christmas bonuses for just the board of directors for some of these banks. It’s still $10 billion!- just enough for a people to say “How unfair to make the heroes of the free market pay so much!- that’s more money than I will make in 10 lifetimes.” That’s the point.

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Excess (My PhD paper on Žižek)

[link to full paper here: http://taddelay.com/blog/13695011/zizek-obscene-excess-supplement ]

The first semester of my PhD program has come to an end, and with it comes the final post on my Žižek coursework. If you would like to see what I’ve been working on for the past few weeks, here it is. My paper covered a curious term I kept seeing in Žižek’s work: the obscene excess-supplement. Since a big part of my academic interest is understanding how belief functions, I wanted to explore what the excess-supplement has to say. It took me a while to figure out exactly what he meant by it. The excess-supplement seems to exist wherever there is conscious recognition of an overt norm, paradigm or belief. The excess-supplement either A) sustains the conscious/overt law by disavowing the “underside” of that injunction or B) instructs the subject to ignore the conscious/overt rule by condoning deviant behavior. The former is extremely common in religious belief, and the latter meaning is more common in Žižek’s political work.

The excess-supplement is always at work in belief. There is never simply what is consciously known/experienced; there is always an underside that opposes conscious recognition. My paper begins with an explanation of Lacanian psychoanalytic categories- I’m pretty proud of this section and think it’s worth reading on its own. I proceed to explain why Žižek calls Christianity “perverse.” I then discuss political psychopathology and try to explain how analyzing the excess-supplement can illuminate the types of religious and political beliefs you encounter. I conclude with a critique centering on his debate with Milbank, but conclude the decision on theism/materialism is ultimately irrelevant to how useful understanding the excess-supplement is for the study of belief.

I’m considering expanding this into a brief ebook dealing with a couple of other ideas I’m working on, but if this materializes it will come in the spring. For now, I’m looking forward to a well-deserved break and a visit home for the holiday. It’s been a fantastic semester.

Click here to read:

Excess: The Obscene Supplement in Slavoj Žižek’s Religion and Politics - Tad DeLay

I. Introduction

II. Psychoanalytic Terminology and Method

- Psychosis

- Neurosis

- Perversion

- Objet Petit a and Jouissance

- The Object of Therapy and Categorization of Pathology

III. Christianity, Law and Love

- Transgression Solicited by Law

- Dialectics in Lacan and Hegel

- Christianity as Perverse

IV. Political Dynamics

- Staged Theater: Fascism and Anti-Semitism

- Complexities of Pathological Categorization in Politics

- Perversion in Stalinism

V. Critique

VI. Conclusion

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http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/04/the-trashcam-project.html

"(Photo: The old church in Hamburg Altenwerder photographed with a garbage container by Hans-Peter Strahl, Christoph Blaschke and Mirko Derpmann. Shot on a 106x80 cm sheet of ilford multigrade with 45 minutes exposure time. By the Trashcam Project on Flickr)"

[teapartyjesus]

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On Maundy Thursday, it's worth remembering that stoning was the proper death penalty for blaspheme.  The cross was reserved for those who were political problems.

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Jesus says "Did I fucking stutter?"

Jesus pic of the day

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Jesus says "Did I fucking stutter?"

Jesus pic of the day