Abstract

This text returns to our work, Dette et désir. Deux axec chrétiens et la dérive pathologique, (Paris, Seuil, 1978), in order to extricate some lines of a philosophy of religion. While being neutral with respect to conceptions of the world, psychoanalysis is nonetheless animated by the question of truth. The analytic practice, accordingly, consists in the remembrance in which the subject addresses himself to one who is the representative of an order of truth which transcends and summons the speaker. In this way, he finds a birth to himself, insofar as he is subject, in a word which is dialectical and diagenetic. Religion presents a structure which is similar to the analytic process. It also is a dialectical genesis of the subject in a relation of interlocution. Equally in religion, the subject is constituted by the temporalization in which his orientation toward the future and his interpretative recovery of his past envelop one another. The two fundamental dimensions of religion, the sense of debt and desire, summon up the unconscious. A semantic depth thus supports all religious language and fills the religious relationship with transferential elements. For this reason, religion is life and not only thought. On the other hand, religion comes from before the subject as a supraconscious symbolic system which calls for the production of personal meaning. Psychoanalysis and religion articulate themselves, the one on the other, by means of the anthropology common to them, that of the subject who is constituted by his dialectical, diagenetic, rememorative word, which directs the metafinality that is proper to it. By thus showing that religion participates in a universal structure, philosophy still does not prove the truth of religion, but at least it guarantees that it is reasonable. We here illustrate what is to be expected from a philosophy of religion. Philosophy which means to bring a judgement of truth to religion, will be suited to its object only if it applies itself to an analysis of the structure and intentionality proper to the religious act. In itself, metaphysics is not competent to either guarantee or falsify religious discourse