Secular Messiahs and the Return of Paul’s "Real"

By: Concetta V. Principe

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Synopsis: Considering that secularism was designed to erase the influence of religion from the public sphere, the use of the messiah in secular texts begs the question: Why does the religious trope recur? Following from this point of inquiry, this book posits that the messiah in secularism can be understood as the 'return of the repressed' and, as such, may be read as symptomatic of trauma. According to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, trauma indicates the 'encounter with the Real', where the 'Real' is so inexplicable that it is visible only in what returns to haunt the subject: the objet a. But if the messiah may be seen as the objet a, then what is the source of this traumatic return? Principe engages with the limitations of answering this question with the aim of circumscribing a field of exploration: is there a relation between the modern use of the messiah and the earliest witness to the term in Paul's letters of his encounter with Christ? And what is the relation between Paul's Christianity and secularism? In other words, what of Paul's 'Real' returns in the twentieth century?