Abstract

Taking up Freud’s developments on the religion of the Father, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan asserted that the affirmation “God is dead” expresses, rather than a position of radical atheism, the paradoxical fact that no one can call himself a true atheist. The death of God, therefore, is the very basis of believing and of its religious expressions. This is the purport of Freud’s myth in Totem and Taboo. On this basis, and in the philosophical context of the 1960s, Lacan suggested a new formula for atheism : not “God is dead”, since he has been dead forever, but “God is unconscious”. This article aims at reading Lacan’s definition of atheism in the light of the Christian concept of incarnation and of Paul’s concept of kenosis. The author shows how incarnation, when it is understood as the very movement of kenosis, may be the basis for an anthropological understanding of the human body.