The Dialectic of Blasphemy: Transgressive Speech from Luther to Freud and Beyond

Abstract:Drawing on a table talk by Martin Luther, this essay first presents a new taxonomy of blasphemy, in which instances of injurious speech are distributed along four fundamental axes, which are designated as ‘quality’, ‘source’, ‘judgement’ and ‘response’. This elementary taxonomy is then refined via a re-reading of the way in which blasphemy occurs in Freud’s case-study of the Rat Man, which generates an additional axis, notably that of the ‘object’. It is argued that the various components on the axes of blasphemy do not stand in a one-to-one relationship to one another, but follow a subjective pathway. This idiosyncratic, subjective dialectic of blasphemy is further substantiated with reference to the logic of the obsessional fantasy. Finally, it is concluded that a psychoanalytic approach to the question of blasphemy needs to start from a critique of the relationship between the subject and language, and from the observation that words have the power to heal as much as they have the ability to injure.