Ages of Monsters: Of Gods and Monsters

I have been fighting a brutal cold for the last week, so I apologize for the disjointed nature of this post…

In an enigmatic passage from Seminar 11, Lacan remarks that “…the gods belong to the field of the real” (45).  This passage is all the more enigmatic in that later Lacan declares that “…the true formula of atheism is not God is dead –even by basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder, Freud protects the father –the true formula of atheism is God is unconscious” (59).  I’ve provided commentary on these two passages elsewhere, so I won’t repeat them in detail here.  In referring to the real, of course, Lacan is not referring to “reality”, but to the impossible.  As is so often the case in his thought, Lacan will speak of the real in a number of senses.  However here he…