Messiah, Muselmann and the Return of Paul's Real: Evidence for a Trauma of Secularism

This project addresses the anomaly evident in the use of religious terms for secular projects. If secularism was a system that intended to free the state from religion and the subject from religious superstition, then why would religious terminology be used in twentieth-century intellectual and cultural secular projects? For example, why would noted Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin draw on the messianic figure in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”? Moreover, what could be meant by the identification of the most abject inmate in Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp predominantly populated by European Jews, as the Muselmann? This project argues that the return of the religious terms, messiah and the Muselmann in twentieth-century secular texts is symptomatic of what psychoanalysts define as a trauma.

Freud identifies trauma as evident only in its symptom of compulsive repetition, which motivates a working-through of what was missed. Lacan identifies trauma as the subject’s encounter with the real, where the real is inexplicable and missed, and what returns of the trauma is a remainder of the encounter: Lacan calls this remainder the objet a. The messiah and the Muselmann in secular texts are objets a and therefore, stand as a return of a trauma. Since these two religious terms seem to have no relation to each other apart from being of the religious within secularism, which is a system that has excluded religious presence in the operations of the state, then the objets a would suggest that the trauma is located within secularism itself. What is this trauma and where does it come from?

Taking into account the limitations of psychoanalytic hermeneutics, which stresses that the original trauma is forever lost to us, this project traces a connection between contemporary secular messianism and the largest group of earliest-extant texts citing the messiah, St. Paul’s letters. On establishing the connection between Pauline messianism and the twentieth-century terms, messiah and Muselmann, I provide an analysis of four ‘case studies’ of the trauma of secularism expressed in twentieth-century philosophical texts and contemporary cultural works.