On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (review)

With this essay, Eric Santner, the author of Stranded Objects and My Own Private Germany, offers another powerful, erudite and inspiring exploration of an uncharted area of modern German thought. The goal of this truly captivating study is, in the author's words, to bring Rosenzweig's and Freud's projects, which have "never been seen as inhabiting the same intellectual universe, into a sustained 'conversation'" (23). By exploring the "spiritual dimension" of Freudian psychoanalysis (8), and Rosenzweig's "significant and nowhere recognized contributions to the psychoanalytic theory of the drives" (23), Santner convincingly reveals what both projects share: an "ethics pertaining to my answerability to my neighbor-with-an-unconscious;" an ethics of openness to the uncanny strangeness of the Other who is "the bearer of an internal alterity, an enigmatic density of desire calling for response beyond any rule-governed reciprocity" (9). This ethics makes it possible to distinguish between a global consciousness that focuses on external differences between cultures and societies, and a "universality-in-becoming" in which we are called to answer to the "constitutive 'too muchness'" of the psyche, the "internal alienness" of the Other (7). Drawing on Rosenzweig's distinction between descriptive, objective relations in the "third person" and singular, irreplaceable relations of address and interpellation in the second person, Santner opposes globalization, the "expansion and ramification of the third-personal relations of production and exchange within which human beings assume their social identities, their predicative being" on the one hand, to universalization as a mode of subjectification on the basis of a "logic of remnants," on the other (124). The "conceptual space" then of the book is this "divide between the sciences of symbolic identity and an ethics of singularity" (28).

Santner, drawing from a wealth of sources including recent texts by H. Bloom, Agamben, Lear and Laplanche, describes the unconscious as "the locus of psychic activity whereby a human being becomes a 'subject' by metabolizing its existential dependency on institutions" (26). "Institutions" are here understood as sites that generate and regulate symbolic identities. The enigmatic processes "whereby a human life becomes authorized" always secrete "remnants" that are in excess of such social recognition and intelligibility (27). The "psychotheology of everyday life" that informs both Freud's and Rosenzweig's oeuvres, welcomes those uncanny "scraps of validity in excess of any meaning" (97), those demanding remnants, and "opens" us to their address. Santner's point is that "being in the 'midst of life'" occurs when we welcome this demand or call. Paradoxically, we defend against this very sort of aliveness with symptoms and fantasies, the "structured undeadness that keeps us from opening to the midst of life and the neighbor/stranger who dwells there with us" (23). Santner's coinage "undeadness" designates the wide scope of fantasmatic responses to, or defenses against, the enigmatic messages of Other, the uncanny excess that marks the Other's desire and that inaugurates a "seemingly endless drama of legitimation" (36).

Santner compellingly reveals in often truly beautiful text-analyses a deep affinity between Freud's and Rosenzweig's respective conception of their projects as modes of "intervention" into this dimension of fantasy, which is "the very thing that at an unconscious level—and often quite rigidly—holds the subject's world together" (40). But their respective conceptions of authority in Judaism differ decisively, and this difference is paradigmatic for Santner's project insofar as it spans two conceptions of the law, one of which is based on 'undeadening' super-egoic mechanisms, while the other is nothing short of a redemptive intervention. Santner concurs with H. Bloom's diagnosis that Freud misunderstands the nature of authority in Judaism. Freud is unable to recognize that Judaism "might in fact be a specific and radical intervention" into the processes of legitimation, and that "if indeed the Jewish God is a kind of Master, he is one that, paradoxically, suspends the sovereign relation...