Part I
15–17 November 2023

In his Seminar X, Lacan repeatedly advocates Kierkegaard’s thesis from his The Concept of Anxiety according to which “woman is more anxious than man”. This brings us directly to the problem of the conceptual relation between anxiety and sexual difference. The main goal of this paper is to show the inextricable connection between above-mentioned thesis (together with conceptual context of Seminar X and Freud’s theory of repression) and Lacan’s discussion developed in Seminar XX about the so-called formulas of sexuation. For if it is possible to argue that woman’s anxiety is actually the anxiety of the Other—given that woman represents sexual difference for man—then it is also possible to link the greater anxiety of women precisely to the fact that in Seminar XX Lacan places the barred, inexistent Other, which stands for the inexistence of the sexual relation as such, on the female side of the formulas of sexuation. Woman’s/Other’s anxiety is therefore inextricably related to the feminine mystical jouissance beyond phallus and is as such irreducible to the subjective anxiety, which is the affect of phallic jouissance. Considering the fact that Lacan, paradoxically, in Seminar XX positions the woman also as one of the faces of the “two-God” (neither One God, nor Two Gods), which might be considered as a formula of psychoanalytic atheism, the paper will conclude by estimating to what extent the woman is not just more anxious than man, but, consequently, also more atheist.

To Be Continued?... Philosophy and Psychoanalysis Today Part II 16–18 April 2024

Part I 15–17 November 2023

Info, Index

Boštjan Nedoh (ZRC SAZU)

Why Is Woman More Anxio-theist Than Man? Anxiety, Atheism and Sexual Difference

To Be Continued?...
Philosophy and Psychoanalysis Today

Part II
16–18 April 2024

Part I
15–17 November 2023