On a scale from 1 to 10, how important is religion for you?

So that’s the tragedy of our predicament. In order to fully exist as individuals we need the fiction of a Big Other. There must be an agency which, as it were, registers our predicament, an agency where the truth of ourselves will be inscribed, accepted, an agency to which to confess.

But what if there is no such agency? This was the utmost despair of many women raped in the post-Yugoslav war in Bosnia in the early 1990s. They survived a terrible predicament and what kept them alive was the idea ‘I must survive to tell the truth’. If when if they survived they made a terrible discovery, there is no one to really listen to them. Either some ignorant bored social worker or some relative who usually made obscene insinuations like are you sure you were not even enjoying a little bit the rape and so on and so on. They discovered the truth of what Jacques Lacan claims: there is no Big Other. There may be a virtual Big Other to whom you cannot confess. There may be a real other but it’s never the virtual one. We are alone.


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