The Black Bile of God – Melancholic Monotheisms as Abrahamic Atheisms. A Neurotic, Interreligious-Atheistic Reply to Slavoj Žižek’s Christian Atheism
Dissertation project by Christoph Kerwien
Drawing on contemporary religious atheisms – particularly Slavoj Žižek's Christian atheism and dialectical materialism, as well as psychoanalytic concepts of melancholy (Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Žižek) – this dissertation project develops the thesis of a melancholic conception of god: What if not (only) the religious believing subject, but (also/all the more) the religious object of belief, god itself, could be understood as a melancholic suffering from the loss of its loved object? Would the resulting melancholic self-negation of god give rise to a radical, intrareligious form of atheism?
In the first part of the dissertation, this idea is sharpened through critical engagement (alongside, against, and beyond) Žižek's Christian atheism, while deliberately departing from his exclusively Christian framework by adopting a broader, even more traumatic, non-exclusively Christian perspective grounded in the conception of the melancholic, religiously doubting and desperate god. In the second part, the project will examine whether the concept of a melancholic god can be traced across the texts, traditions, and theologies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, thereby revealing a shared, repressed atheistic core underlying all three Abrahamic monotheisms.
The project thus brings together questions from the contemporary philosophy of religion, psychoanalysis, and theology to offer a new perspective on the relationship between Abrahamic religions and atheism as a form of intra- and inter-religious atheism. In doing so, the project also seeks to complicate and enrich the conventional psychoanalytic critique of religion, suggesting that the abandonment of a monotheistic worldview – the psychoanalytic "death of god" – may be located not outside religion, but within its own traumatic, melancholic core.
Dissertation Supervision:
Prof. Dr. phil. Luca Di Blasi (Associate Professor of Philosophy, Institute of Systematic Theology at the University of Bern)
Prof. Dr. Elad Lapidot (Professor for Hebraic Studies and Jewish Thought at the University of Lille)
Dr. Anoush Ganjipour (Équipe Philosophie arabe; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique ; Centre Jean Pépin-École Normale Supérieure, Paris)
