Interstices of the Sublime represents a powerful theological engagement with psychoanalytic theory in Freud, Lacan, Kristeva and Zizek, as well as major expressions of contemporary Continental philosophy, including Deleuze, Derrida, Marion, and Badiou. Through creative and constructive psycho-theological readings of topics such as sublimation, schizophrenia, God, and creation ex nihilo, this book contributes to a new form of radical theological thinking that is deeply involved in the world.
Here the idea of the Kantian sublime is read into Freud and Lacan, and compared with sublimation. The sublime refers to a conflict of the Kantian faculties of reason and imagination, and involves the attempt to represent what is intrinsically unrepresentable. Sublimation, by contrast, involves the expression and partial satisfaction of primal desires in culturally acceptable terms. The sublime is negatively expressed in sublimation, because it is both the "source" of sublimation as well as that which resists being sublimated. That is, the Freudian sublime is related to the process of sublimation, but it also distorts or disrupts sublimation, and invokes what Lacan calls the Real. The effects of the sublime are not just psychoanalytic but, importantly, theological, because the sublime is the main form that "God" takes in the modern world. A radical postmodern theology attends to the workings of the sublime in our thinking and living, and provides resources to understand the complexity of reality. This book is one of the first sustained theological readings of Lacan in English.

About the Author
Clayton Crockett is a professor and the director of Religious Studies at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including Derrida After the End of Writing: Political Theology and New Materialism, and a co-editor of Doing Theology in the Age of Trump: A Critical Report on Christian Nationalism. He is a fellow of Westar Institute's Seminar on God and the Human Future.

Reviews
"... [A] high quality and novel contribution." -Reviews in Religion and Theology "Draws on psychoanalytic theory and Continental philosophy to develop a radical postmodern theology." -The Chronicle of Higher Education "Crockett's book is much more than an intervention into contemporary theological debates: it is an intervention that will change the very terms of these debates... It articulates a unique position that can only adequately be named Christian materialism. Crockett deploys the emancipatory core of Christianity that sustains every authentic radical politics." -- -Slavoj Zizek University of Ljubljana "An interesting topic, this book would be worth reading along with Twain's 'Autobiography,' Twain's final attempt to reveal his dark side." -Santa Cruz Sentinel



Book Information
ISBN 9780823227228
Author Clayton Crockett
Format Paperback
Page Count 232
Imprint Fordham University Press
Publisher Fordham University Press