SubStance

SubStance 32.1 (2003) 158-165

Santner, Eric L. On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp.146.

Eric Santner's title is meant to call to mind Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), in which pathology is brought into the everyday, and by which the particular nature of the psyche is elucidated. Freud points to such phenomena as dreams, forgetfulness, parapraxes (e.g., slips of the tongue), and a host of other similarly manifest symptoms to make his case for the existence of an unconscious that refuses to be explained or contained by consciousness. In other words, the Freudian subject is in part at the behest of unconscious urges that steal their way into daily life, manifesting as [End Page 158] symptoms or "psychopathology." These unconscious "instincts" or "drives" (Triebe) are more than just physiological forces (e.g., the sex drive); in addition, they represent what Santner figures as an excess, a surplus charge that is better understood within its wider historical social and cultural contexts. While a sexual object may be invested with a subject's biological drive, this object is also "overdetermined" symbolically, vis-à-vis the myriad social and institutional norms that lend the object its particular significance or charge within the life of the subject. And so, in addition to the unconscious excess or "too much" released as the "psychopathology of everyday life," Santner investigates the excess significance that comes from outside the subject, from the world, and from the Other—capitalized, he tells us, "to underscore and to keep in view the problem of alterity, the question of what makes another human being or culture strange" ( Psychotheology, 8, note 8). This strangeness of the Other—his or her alterity—is, it is claimed, a "theological" question, rather than a mere psychological one. Santner's title plays on Freud's, supplanting pathology by theology; his book is a meditation on the "theological" excess that informs everyday psychic life and defines subjectivity in wider, existential terms.

Santner's notion of "theology" relies in part on his reading of Franz Rosenzweig, a Jewish philosopher who is critical of both organized "religion" and canonical "philosophy." For Rosenzweig, the theological aspect of everyday life takes on wider, existential valences, extending into social, political, ethical, and religious spheres. In contrast to Freud, for whom any religious perspective is "nothing but psychology projected into the external world" (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1960, 6: 258), for Rosenzweig "theology" is almost the reverse of this, signifying the incursion of a radical alterity, an Other introjected into the life of the subject. Otherwise said, where Freud will explain the world anthropomorphically, Rosenzweig understands the subject as theomorphic.

Thus, despite its title, I find Santner's Psychotheology to be decidedly un-Freudian in its inspiration. Following Rosenzweig, Santner asks, Who is my neighbor? The perspective is monotheistic, countering Freud's atheism and pessimism. For Freud, of course, the neighbor is more worthy of my hostility and even my hatred; like me, the neighbor's barely contained unconscious aggressivity and masochism begs me "to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to [End Page 159] kill him" (Civilization and its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1961, 21: 111). Santner expresses greater optimism, citing the poet Friedrich Hölderlin: "Yet where danger lies,/ Grows that which saves" (Psychotheology, 81). For Santner, the unconscious drives also harbor a "saving power" by virtue of their very excess. While we are at the behest of such dangerous aggressive and masochistic drives, they represent an internal "otherness" within each of us—one that opens us to what is other in the Other. The psychoanalyst's technique for listening provides...