Relevant to this thread (an excellent one!) is a paper I wrote for a theory course I took last semester. It's not the first academic paper written about Witnesses, nor the best (it received an A-), but I think it has a moment or two. It's dripping with psycoanalytic references, because that was part of the assignment.
I recommend skipping the first paragraph. Oh, and I apologize ahead of time for taking up so much space with this.
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Ask a fundamentalist what he desires, and the answer will be, in some way, the opposite of the truth: that seems the implication of Slavoj Zizek’s and Parveen Adams’s ideas of fundamentalism. For Zizek, the “fundamentalist freaks” (Zizek 2) are a threat to the “authentic Christian legacy” because they appropriate the place of God (divine law) in order to transgress (as the case may be) international law (56). For Adams, the fundamentalist demands consistency in a pluralistic society and therefore attempts to “abolish the difference between a representation and an event” (Adams 58). In both cases, the fundamentalist is dishonest: he either assumes a divine right to transgress a law, in which case his desire is couched in terms of stolen divinity instead of unlawful transgression; or he equates thoughts and deeds, images and events, thereby judging the world against a set of false dichotomies, in which case his desire for “morality” and “equality” are as immoral (and even, as Parveen argues, incestuously deviant) as the crimes to which he objects. In the case of religious fundamentalists like Jehovah’s Witnesses, these themes are writ large in the literature and art they so famously disseminate door-to-door. In this paper, I want to look at what occurs in the psychical space of a Witnesses when they create and view their own (admittedly propagandistic) art.
Crucial to this task are two propositions by which all Witnesses live and organize their lives: first, that all non-Jehovah’s Witnesses, regardless of age, gender, nationality, or religion, will die “very soon” in a fiery apocalypse; second, that Jehovah’s Witnesses will, after the apocalypse, continue to live on the earth in corporeal form, eternally though not immortally. Ostensibly, this is a simple dichotomy between good and bad, saved and unsaved, and it has easily parallels to certain non-fundamentalist sects. What is unusual, however, is the utter severity by which all people are judged, and the belief that one survives, not into heaven or some other transcendental, non-corporeal realm, but into the earth one already occupies. We expect, perhaps, the usual religious conflation of “heaven” or “paradise” for the real, that elusive register beyond signification. That is, the religious person can discuss his transcendental realm only as the psychoanalyst can discuss the real: imprecisely, without permanently knowing or encountering it. In Witness theology, however, humans are forever confined, literally, to the symbolic: they hold no hope of encountering a transforming Thing—das Ding.
What does this do in the psychical space of Witness fundamentalists? First, it forces them to adopt a quasi-epicurean stance in relation to their fate as survivors of the apocalypse. “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die” becomes “let us eat, drink, and be merry, and tomorrow we will still be alive.” The problem of living forever in corporeal form, restricted to language and representation and all the trappings of the symbolic, is not simply that one becomes bored with life, but more precisely that in infinite time one exhausts a finite number of possible psychical sublimations. Food and drink (one might add sex, sports, travel, and whatever else to which one is driven by the pleasure principle) become crude objects that take the place of the Thing, which even in the epicurean construction can only be met in death. In Lacanian terms, it is the pleasure principle that “governs the search for the object and imposes the detours which maintain the distance in relation to its end”—detours conferred by the object, but followed by the pleasure principle (Lacan 58). For the post-apocalypse Witness, sublimation can never rise above the level of the pleasure principle; the possibility of meaningful jouissance is closed. What, after all, can the lost object, the objet petit a, that “left-over of the Real” (Adams 2), mean to the subject trapped forever in the symbolic, living mortal life for eternity, whose transcendent realm is also symbolic, identical in its construction and arrangement to the one he currently occupies? Objet petit a, in this scheme, refers to nothing in the real, nor is it “the left-over of jouissance” (55), because there is no jouissance. It refers to the symbolic. The real collapses, displaced in itself, and in every sublimating gesture the object merely replaces another like itself. This is what happens when heaven is wherever you happen to be, when the rapture leads to indefinitely prolonged human mortality—just more of the same.
One expects Jehovah’s Witnesses to recoil against this in some subconscious way; I think it is clear that this must be so.
Consider, for example, a typical illustration depicting the passage of Witnesses into paradise (figure 2). In the foreground, a select group of Witnesses, each colorfully and ridiculously garbed in his or her native attire, stares out at the spectator, smiling as if in invitation—they have presumably been saved and are now established on earth. In the background, a long line of Witnesses appear to ascend a mountain enshrouded in clouds, at the top of which gleams a celestial palace that can only be interpreted as the divine throne of God (“the mountain of Jehovah”). Several puzzling questions emerge. First, why are the surviving Witnesses dressed in native costumes if the cultures out of which they have survived have been annihilated? Doesn’t this signify patriotism, an passionate attachment to cultures, traditions, governments, that no longer exist? Second, why are the Witnesses in the background queued to ascend the mountain, the residence of God, if their place is on the earth? Third, why are the Witnesses in the foreground facing us, the spectators? Does this signify invitation, or nostalgia, or something else?
Ostensibly, the rhetoric of the picture is that the spectator, presumably a non-Witness, can achieve the same salvation as those in the illustration. In terms of the psychical space integral to the space of representation, something else is happening. Witnesses claim to desire uniformity in the paradise into which they are delivered, but they go out of their way to dress in culturally stereotypical costumes, marking and dividing themselves. Witnesses claim to desire life on earth, but the illustration puts them in proximity to heaven, the divine, that to which they can never aspire. Witnesses claim to desire the destruction of all not in their sect, but their eyes are trained on us—and where are we located? We, the non-Witness for whom this conversion brochure was prepared, are in figure 1, dying or dead with the rest of the unsaved by virtue of our non-membership in the chosen religion. It is important to understand that this is due to otherness rather than wickedness—the following is a typical establishment of this fact:
Never forget that only God’s organization [ubiquitous euphemism for “Jehovah’s Witnesses”] will survive the end of this dying system. Act wisely, therefore, and make plans for life eternal by building your future with Jehovah’s organization. (Watchtower 7/15/84, 20)
The false dichotomy is Witness/Non-Witness, or, to recast matters in Lacanian terms, Subject/Other. If the Witnesses in figure 2 are indeed gazing out at the non-Witnesses in figure 1, what does their gaze—trained so fixedly on the other—signify? Lacan clears the matter up with his discussion of a “register of a jouissance” that “is only accessible to the other” and “is the only dimension in which we can locate the strange malaise” of “jealousy born in a subject in his relation to an other, insofar as this other is held to enjoy a certain form of jouissance or superabundant vitality, that the subject perceives as something he cannot apprehend by means of even the most elementary of affective movements” (Lacan 237). It is with this malaise that the Witnesses of figure 2, so reluctant to mill about for eternity in the place they have always been and now will always be, regard the dead or dying subjects—us—in figure 1. Ostensibly, this latter illustration is meant to frighten, shock, and deter us, using all the important propagandistic strategies; but in the horror of the picture’s rhetoric, the non-Witness subjects encounter the real, experience jouissance, and die; their faces, not insignificantly, are depicted at the moment of death. In religious terms, this is more intimate and personal an encounter with God than the Witnesses stand to experience in their indefinitely prolonged mortality on earth; in psychoanalytic terms, the non-Witnesses who perish have vouchsafed for themselves a moment in which the symbolic register was transcended, though terminally. It is not insignificant that the men in the lower left and right corners of the picture stare back, faces immobilized at the point of death, at the Witnesses who have survived and are looking at them (us); the horror can be read as a reaction against what they see in figure 2—the fate they escape.
The encounter with these representations and the psychical implications outlined above occur in the Witness subject at the level of the subconscious. When asked directly, Witnesses usually deny holding the belief that all non-members will perish at the apocalypse, despite evidence to the contrary printed explicitly in so much of the literature they disseminate. But my point is that even the denial reveals a desire to identify with the other, the non-Witness who will not convert and will therefore be killed. In the Authorized Site of the Public Affairs Office of Jehovah’s Witnesses, under a “Frequently Asked Questions” link, the following answer appears after the question, “Do you believe that you are the only ones who will be saved?”:
No. Many millions who have lived in centuries past and who were not Jehovah’s Witnesses will come back in a resurrection and have an opportunity for life. Many now living may yet take a stand for truth and righteousness before God’s time of judgment, and they will gain salvation. Moreover, Jesus said that we should not be judging one another. Humans look at the outward appearance; God looks at the heart. He sees accurately and judges mercifully. God has committed judgment into Jesus’ hands, not ours.—Matthew 7:1-5; John 5:22, 27. ( http://www.jw-media.org/beliefs/beliefsfaq.htm)
This is the sort of Orwellian double-speak that begs political dissection; it reads as straightforward propaganda, the absurdities and contradictions of which should be obvious. It simply makes no sense to claim that non-Witnesses will survive the apocalypse because they won’t be non-Witnesses when the apocalypse arrives. But, psychoanalytically, this is precisely what is relevant. Paradoxically, the gap between Self/Other is here collapsed; non-members are seen strictly as potential members, but that potentiality is so displaced that the identification is utterly complete, though like all identifications, subconscious. Jealous of the jouissance accessible to the non-member but denied himself, the fundamentalist Witness identifies with the other even as he reviles the other.
And revile he does. Hatred of the other permeates the surface rhetoric of the scenes of destruction that characterize much of the literature published for and distributed by Witnesses. Take, for example, figures 3 and 4. In the former, a woman clutching her baby, a toddler clinging to its mother’s hand, a pre-adolescent boy, and a lone infant (upper right corner) fall into a gaping abyss; in the latter—another “abyss” scene—the family dog and a little girl holding a doll are also cast violently to their death. What’s different between these pictures and the one seen in figure 1 is the cartoonish quality on the one hand, and the blatant slaughter of the most innocent members of society: women and children, or more specifically, mothers and daughters, mothers and sons. I want to read this as a subliminal rejection of the paternal phallus and the sexual modalities constructed around it; a rejection of the family and the Oedipal laws and processes that govern it; what surfaces in the place of traditional modalities are perverted sexual modalities, particularly masochistic ones. The text accompanying figure 4, wrapped around the illustration, is worth reproducing here:
A flesh-eating plague will destroy many ... Eaten up will be the tongues of those who scoffed and laughed at the warning of Armageddon! Eaten up will be the eyes of those who refuse to see the sign of the “time of the end”! Eaten up will be the flesh of those who would not learn that the living true God is named Jehovah! Eaten up while they stand on their feet! ... Worms will not stop swarming over the millions of bodies until the last body is eaten up. Birds and beasts also will eat their fill of human flesh until nothing is left but white bones. (From Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained, 1958, 209-210.)
The masturbatory prose is sexually pathological. The cannibalistic tone (Witnesses equate themselves with the plague of locusts discussed in Revelation) recalls the primeval myth, wherein the tribe murders and consumes the father, and with this invocation there is a kind of incestuous, orgasmic release in the subject’s contemplation of this scene—one played over and over in the canon of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ literature. The perversity is that the text and images participate in and celebrate that which is elsewhere denied and buried beneath platitudes about Christ’s edict to “refrain from judging one another”; the perversity is that consciously Witnesses deny holding this belief, and actually believe that denial, while subconsciously the belief constructs a perverted psychical space for incestuous sexual desire and jouissance.
But this is the Lacanian jouissance of Lebensneid, the jealousy directed to the other, who holds the secret of the subject’s jouissance for him. The oddity of the fundamentalist in this case is that he is prone “to being jealous of something in the other to the point of hatred and the need to destroy, jealous of something he is incapable of apprehending in any way, by any intuitive path” (Lacan 237). Identification, jealousy, and hatred converge into masochistic pathology, and it is this symptom which the Witness subject is ultimately doomed to exhibit. There are other characteristics of the masochistic temperament on display here. Compare, for example, the make of the automobiles in figures 1 and 4. Both are relative to the decade in which the pictures were produced. The clothes of the individuals who are dying are, unlike the absurd native garb of Witness survivors, relative to the styles and fashions of the decade in which the pictures were produced. In other words, the apocalypse is always about to happen; Witnesses live in a perpetual stage of expectation, anticipation, suspension, delay. And it is “postponement of gratification” (33) that Parveen Adams lists as one main characteristic of the masochist; another is “fantasy,” which Adams glosses as “performances” and “acting out” but which can also, I think, be construed less strictly as an imaginative performance or acting out. Furthermore, the masochist “plays and replays the scene that is essential to him” (46). The pivotal scene in Witness theology is the death scene, the apocalypse, and with it the approximation of jouissance through the voyeurism, or witnessing (appropriately enough), the jouissance of the other.
Ask a Witness what he desires, and the knee-jerk answer will be “life everlasting on earth.” This, however, is psychological hell—the imminent exhaustion of all forms of sublimation, the persistence of the symbolic, the collapsing of the real. The last orgasmic moment—the last shot at meaningful jouissance—comes with the arrival of the end of the world, which, of course, never comes. If the fantasy ends with the Witness staggering about in the register of the symbolic, it also transfers the same condition into the actual life of the subject.
