Marcus Pound Interview

I came across this interview with Marcus Pound a while back and have since read both of his books; he is the author of Zizek: A (Very) Critical Introduction and Theology, Psychoanalysis, and Trauma.

The University of Nottingham's Theology and Philosophy Department is putting out very creative and engaging work, with John Milbank and Connor Cunningham joining Pound in scholarship--I especially want to read Transcendence and Phenomenology. Here's a snippet from the interview with Marcus Pound:

TOJ: Also central to your book is the Eucharist and the theology of transubstantiation. For the Eucharist to work, you argue, God must and does break into time every time we partake in the bread and the wine. God breaking into time, the infinite breaking into the finite, is trauma. Can you elaborate on the therapeutic function of God breaking into time, how God offers in this way an analytic intervention?

MP: Before directly answering your question I should point out the obvious problem regarding this language about God breaking into time. It lends itself toward an extrinsic theology of nature and grace as if prior to the event, God was somehow distanced. Yet as Henri de Lubac puts it, God did not create the world only to disappear. De Lubac, and those associated with nouvelle thèologie spearheaded a return to the sources (i.e. the patristic sources of theology) from which they recovered a more paradoxical understanding of the relation between nature and grace according to which humans were already graced with a natural desire for the supernatural (paradoxical because the end exceeds its beginning). God was not distanced from creation. God is, as Augustine put it: Deus interior intimo meo, the God who is more interior to me than I am myself. That is to say, the realm of the supernatural is not some extra appendage which occasionally bursts through in a punctilios fashion—the predominant model underpinning Evangelism and populist forms of Islam—the world and matter are given as already supernatural in ways which transcend the sphere of a natural order.

There is much in this paradoxical understanding that accords with Lacan’s approach to subjectivity. Augustine’s claim that God is more internal to man than man is to himself easily translates into Lacan’s neologism “exitmacy”, the exterior that is more interior. In fact, in my forthcoming book on Žižek I take seriously the direct historical impact these theological debates had upon Lacan. For example, he cites his conversations with Father Teilhard de Chardin (a close friend of de Lubac), he made de Lubac’s star pupil Michele de Certeau one of his inner circle, and openly spoke out on issues such as Ecumenism and Vatican II. Moreover, what was the return-to-Freud if not a return to the patristic sources of psychoanalysis, a renewed interpretation predicated upon close translations of the original texts, and attentiveness to the historical context which yielded a richer and more paradoxical view of subjectivity?

So, to return to the question: God breaking into time. It is not an extrinsic theology that underpins Lacan but an intrinsic one. The unconscious is not hidden, out of view, distanced from the subject in the manner of an extrinsic God. The unconscious works by hiding the truth in full view, like the thief who hides a diamond in a chandelier. So the trauma is not so much about something new bursting in as it is about seeing what is already there.

And herein lies the point about trauma and Eucharist. The Eucharist is traumatic not because it is a special instance of God’s grace breaking in, as if it were some hidden force behind the material support of life; rather it is traumatic because it shows God in the absolute mundane, the simple subsistence of life, directly identifying the two. As Catherine Pickstock has put it, in the Eucharist—the repetition of Christ’s own passion through the breaking (trauma) of the bread—we face both the greatest dereliction of meaning, Christ abandoned on the cross, yet equally the greatest promise of plenitude through that giving.

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