Tad DeLay > Quotes

“Epiphanies do not arise through direct regurgitation of what came before; epiphanies are unexpected slips into novelty.”
― Tad DeLay, God Is Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and Theology

“Faith depends on unconscious pleasure, and so we hold onto our beliefs exactly as strongly as the pleasure they yield us.”
― Tad DeLay, The Cynic and the Fool: The Unconscious in Theology & Politics

“Marx foresaw the rise of analysis and political theology when he wrote, “Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.” The gods do not really die, but they shift forms. We evolved with a need to believe, and if a god appears to die an(O)ther will occupy the vacated position. We are forever rearranging and rearticulating the Imaginary to account for flaws in the Symbolic; we do not even touch the Real (to say nothing of reality as such).”
― Tad DeLay, God Is Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and Theology

“We are not to regress to pure id, as if paradise were a social psychosis. We are also not to export responsibility onto the plane of the Symbolic, as if fidelity requires the enslavement of the obsessive neurotic. We are not to evade the big questions so as to postpone our confrontation with the pure truth that we tend to repeat what is not working, as if security can be found in hysteria. We can only offer a caution: who is asking us to see the world this way? And why are we so eager to submit to the Other’s self-proclaimed representative, whether in the form of a person or an ideology?”
― Tad DeLay, God Is Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and Theology

“Nearly half of American Christians believe Christ will return and inaugurate the end of the world by 2050. That this belief has risen during the Great Recession suggests a curiously inverted form of security connected to apocalypticism. As Žižek often remarks, it is easier for Hollywood filmmakers to imagine the end of the world than to imagine something other than our current political and economic order. What is the motivation when one of a society’s highest and most commonly shared ideals entails its own absolute, unequivocal, and unavoidable destruction?”
― Tad DeLay, God Is Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and Theology