摘要：MY POINT INOn Religion was to use love to explain the possibilities for religion, of a religion with or without religion, now that the reductionist accounts of religion—of the sort we find in psychoanalysis, e.g.—have been laid to rest. Gregg Lambert on the other hand seems still stuck in reductionism. He has produced a critique of love that is so cynical as not only to make On Religion unrecognizable but also to make psychoanalysis look sick, as if it there were no room for love in a psychoanalytic account of mental health.1But beyond all that, his view is so dark that he risks reducing theory and critique to a pointless self-destructive consuming of one's own substance of no use to anyone. Might not Lambert's text set the analyst herself to wondering, whence all this "resistance" to what deconstruction affirms, to Derrida's idea that "deconstruction never proceeds without love,"2not to mention all this resistance to love itself. But if there is a fine line between irony and cynicism, and if love builds up, as Kierkegaard says, following St. Paul, then perhaps this is Lambert's way of being ironically constructive, indirectly communicative. On that assumption, allow me first to thank him for his spirited commentary and then, on the principle that no good deed should go unpunished, or, alternately, that his love for me places a demand on me that I love him in return, allow me to offer a response
