On Becoming God

The book takes as its starting point the declaration by a woman religious in a fourteenth-century text that she has “become God”. Part I sets out the methodological tools necessary for a critical understanding of this claim, arguing that practices of a gendered identity be seen as tools through which people together manage a sense of connectedness to the world and others, a sense of irrefragable involvement that in the fourteenth century is given the name “God”. Writing the history of identity then means writing the history of these changing practices. An example of what this entails is set out in Part II, which traces changes evident in mystical texts written in the Rhineland in the wake of the condemnation of Meister Eckhart's teaching for heresy in 1329. A new identification with the practices by which individuals monitor their spiritual longings introduces, in the texts of Heinrich Seuse, habits which prefigure those of modern identity. Identity appears as a set of practices by which men and women together regulate the distance from what in the medieval period was called “God”. Part III, in search of a vocabulary for acknowledging the sense of connectedness that was previously managed with religious habits, offers a critical reading of early psychoanalysis. The idea of the unconscious is shown to be a tool for keeping at bay the sense of connection. But Freud's early texts also show the possibility of attending to the shared project of coming to terms with togetherness and of “becoming God” as much as we can bear

Aesthetics · Art · Declaration · Heresy · Linguistics · Literature · Mysticism · Political science · Social connectedness · Sociology · Theology · Law · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis and Social Critique · Psychology · Social Psychology · History · Middle Ages, 600-1500 · Psychoanalysis and philosophy · Religion · Self · Self (Philosophy)

• What Julian Saw

  Open Access•Juliana Dresvina•Religions•2019

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