A Political Mind – Levinas’ Re-basing of Religion
Book ticketsOrganised by:
British Psychoanalytical Society (incorporating the Institute of Psychoanalysis)
Description
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas described his understanding of religion in one of his main works, Totality and Infinity (1961).
In this paper I attempt to understand his account and to compare it with Freud’s picture of religion in The Future of an Illusion (1927).
Freud’s account, like that of most subsequent psychoanalytic theorists, emphasises the role of religious objects; these are notably absent from Levinas’s account. The paper goes on to consider the significance of this absence. It suggests that Levinas’s account opens up a way to perceive the true importance religions may have, in the life of the individual and in society more widely, which is hard to recognise, and may indeed be obscured, when the emphasis is on their objects.
