The Numinous and the Noetic in Religious Experience

One of Jacques Lacan's most important discoveries was the relation between the desire to articulate in the register of the Symbolic and the failure of articulation in the Register of the Real. The Real is that which resists symbolization absolutely. This resistance can be construed negatively as a lack of articulation. Or this negativity can be positivized as too much to articulate. Lacan adumbrated this disjunction as the distinction between "having" in the register of the Symbolic and the failure to have or grasp "being" in the register of the Real. When there is a disjunction between what can be represented and what is, there is a sense of the numinous and of the noetic. The numinous is the uncanny sense of the presence of something that is beyond representation in the sensual or conceptual intention, so it might be thought of as a present absence. The noetic is the uncanny sense of intuiting what can't be intended, but what is fundamentally unintentional, or beyond one's own intentions. However, bringing Lacanian psychoanalysis into the realm of the noetic means that this exterior intention of the unintentional is our interior intention for what is beyond us, which he called "Jouissance" and which Freud called "Death Drive."

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co