4

The gods, revelation in reality, are the outburst of signifiers requiring an essence that they conceal. But their reach has disappeared (“The Great God Pan is dead”), and has been replaced by the image of the crucifixion, incarnating the death of God, truth of the Name-of-the-Father. It is therefore behind this image that the hidden essence is to be found, the space between-two-deaths revealed in the Greek tragedies, space of the sacred, of indestructible desire, at the cost of a pound of flesh. The second death that presides over this space is depicted in the Christian image and interpreted in a Christian way ex-nihilo, a signifying creation from which emerges the Thing and the death drive. The religious operation is strictly the recuperation of the pound of flesh. In a return to the foundation of the religion of the Name, however, Lacan sees in Abraham’s climb the cutting of desire with jouissance, a cutting in which the murder of the mythical father occurs and is paid for with a loss. This foundation is transmitted in spite of or because of being masked within the frame of Ecclesiae where the religious operation seeks to compensate the effect. This part outside religion within the religion partly makes the latter a sublimation in which the void of the Thing is respected.