The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 did not just redraw the geopolitical map; it triggered a profound ideological crisis within the global left, the aftershocks of which continue to define our contemporary intellectual landscape. The disappearance of the primary antagonist to global capitalism engendered a widespread postmodernist spirit, marked by a deep-seated skepticism toward the very idea of large-scale, universal projects for social transformation. The revolutionary ambition that had animated leftist thought for over a century, the pursuit of the communist horizon, was largely abandoned. It was replaced by what can be described as a modest politics, a retreat into localized struggles, micropolitical interventions, and a theoretical framework that grew suspicious of any claims to totality, system, or universal truth.

This political shift found its philosophical expression in the idealization of permanent antagonism. If the grand narrative of revolution was no longer believable, then politics became an endless process of contestation, a perpetual negotiation of differences with no ultimate goal or resolution in sight. The fear of “totalitarianism,” associated with the failures of state socialism, was sublimated into a philosophical fear of “totalizing reason,” which studiously avoided theoretical “closure” of any kind. This philosophy of conceptual modesty draws from a Kantian lineage. As Ray Brassier explains:

For however ‘enlightened’ or ‘secular’ its initial agenda might have been, the critique of metaphysical rationalism has ended up providing a philosophical alibi for ‘fideism’: the claim that reason has no absolute jurisdiction over reality, and hence cannot be invoked to disqualify the possibility of religious faith. If reason’s jurisdiction is confined to the phenomenal realm, then reason is in no position to rule out the possibility that faith might harbor a mode of non-conceptual access to the in-itself. Thus post-Kantian philosophy has abjured rationalist atheism for a profoundly equivocal species of agnosticism, something which is nowhere more apparent than in the work of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, with their thinly disguised exaltations of mystico-religious illumination over conceptual rationality.^[1]

To understand the changed philosophico-political stance vis a vis religion, let us first consider Lenin’s position on atheism. In his 1905 essay, “Socialism and Religion,” he lays out a viewpoint that is simultaneously firm in its philosophical foundations and flexible in its political strategy. He begins with an unequivocal declaration: “Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook.”^[2] For Lenin, the intellectual basis of the revolutionary project is non-negotiable. This necessitates the active “propaganda of atheism” and the dissemination of the scientific and Enlightenment literature that exposes the “true historical and economic roots of the religious fog.”^[3]

However, Lenin immediately warns against the error of posing the religious question in an “abstract, idealistic fashion,” as a purely “intellectual” problem detached from the class struggle.^[4] This, he states, is the mistake of “radical-democrats from among the bourgeoisie.”^[5] He argues that religious prejudice is not a simple failure of reason but “merely a product and reflection of the economic yoke within society.”^[6] The spiritual oppression of religion is rooted in the material oppression of capitalism. Consequently, it cannot be dispelled by pamphlets and preaching alone; it can only be truly overcome when the proletariat is “enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism.”^[7]

From this analysis flows a brilliant strategic conclusion. Because “unity in this really revolutionary struggle... is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven,”^[8] the party should not make atheism a primary, divisive plank in its public program. Proletarians holding onto their prejudices should not be barred from joining. The immediate political priority is to unite the oppressed class to solve the basic economic and political problems. The reactionary bourgeoisie actively foments religious strife to divert the attention of the masses. The revolutionary response is to counter this with a calm, patient preaching of “proletarian solidarity and the scientific world-outlook,” while refusing to get bogged down in "secondary differences.”^[9] The ultimate goal is to make religion a private affair by eliminating its true source i.e. economic slavery.

The contemporary postmodern left, in its embrace of agnosticism, has fundamentally misread Lenin’s dialectical position. It has mistaken his strategic pragmatism for a philosophical endorsement of indifference. Lenin’s strategy was to tactically de-emphasize a direct assault on religion in the political arena to preserve the unity required for the economic struggle, all while maintaining scientific materialism as the unshakeable philosophical bedrock of the movement. The agnostic left, by contrast, has abandoned the bedrock itself. It has collapsed the distinction between political strategy and philosophical foundation, embracing a genuine ambivalence about the materialist worldview that Lenin took for granted.

This is where philosopher Adrian Johnston’s critique of Lorenzo Chiesa—in the book God is Undead: Psychoanalysis for Unbelievers—represents a crucial intervention into leftist thought, aiming to delineate with uncompromising rigor the line between two distinct forms of post-theological atheism. At stake is not merely an interpretive squabble over Lacan’s seminars but the very definition of a viable atheistic project in the twenty-first century. Johnston stages a confrontation between his own “non-agnostic atheism,” a materialist and systematic philosophy forged from a Hegelian reading of Lacan, and what he characterizes as Chiesa’s “para-ontological agnostic atheism.” The conflict turns on fundamental questions of ontology, truth, and the persistent specter of religious belief. Johnston’s objective is to systematically expose the internal contradictions, rhetorical overreaches, and, most damningly, the latent theological complicities he identifies within Chiesa’s agnosticism. In doing so, he defends the necessity of a robust, metaphysically committed materialism that can build a coherent system of thought without succumbing to the structural temptations of theism it seeks to overcome.

The Un-Dead God and the Fallacy of Suspicion

The shared point of departure for both thinkers is a core Lacanian insight that revises Nietzsche’s famed pronouncement. For Lacan, the declaration “God is dead” is naive in its finality. God does not simply vanish from the ontological stage; rather, God becomes “undead,” a persistent structural residue that circulates within the unconscious, informs symbolic law, and resurfaces through disavowed metaphysical commitments and ideological fantasies.^[10] Atheism, therefore, cannot be a simple act of dismissal but must become a sustained project of reckoning with the tenacity of these theistic remainders.

While both Johnston and Chiesa accept this premise, Johnston argues that Chiesa draws a dangerously overreaching conclusion from it. In Johnston’s reading, Chiesa extends a hermeneutics of suspicion to its breaking point, effectively diagnosing any form of strong conviction or systematic coherence as a symptomatic return of the theological repressed.^[11] Under this framework, any confident assertion of truth (whether based on correspondence to reality or the internal coherence of a system) is reduced to a veiled continuation of religious faith. A firm materialist or assertive atheist claim about the nature of being would, by virtue of its very firmness and intensity, be categorized as structurally “religious.”

Johnston launches his critique here, targeting this generalized suspicion as a philosophical poison that paralyzes thought. He argues that this move constitutes an abusive overextension of psychoanalytic methodology, transforming a clinical tool for interpreting symptoms into a blunt instrument that pathologizes all determinate philosophical positions. The result is a self-defeating agnosticism where any strong stance, including a committed atheism, is seen as a displaced theism. This, for Johnston, is an untenable position that effectively disqualifies in advance any meaningful engagement with ontology, metaphysics, or truth, leaving philosophy in a state of perpetual, anxious deferral. It creates an environment where the fear of being “theological” prevents one from making any positive claims about reality, a state of intellectual paralysis that Johnston finds both philosophically unsound and politically unproductive.

The False Equivalence: Metaphysics, System, and Monotheism

Building on this, Johnston identifies a second critical flaw in Chiesa’s approach: the tendency to conflate any and all systematic metaphysical frameworks with monotheism. For Chiesa, the very act of attempting to construct a coherent, comprehensive ontology or to unify epistemology with ontology is seen as structurally equivalent to erecting the theological “One”—the absolute, all-encompassing God of onto-theology. Any system that strives for completeness or consistency is, by this logic, repeating the foundational gesture of religious metaphysics.^[12]

Johnston vehemently resists this equivalence. Drawing on a lineage that includes Marx, Hegel, and Lacan, he insists that not all systematic structures are inherently onto-theological. He invokes Marx's famous metaphor of extracting the “rational kernel” from the “mystical shell” of Hegel's dialectic. The historical and genealogical entanglement of metaphysics with religion does not necessitate their logical or structural identity. Just because many, or even most, historical ontologies have been grounded in theistic assumptions does not mean that the project of ontology itself is irredeemably tainted. Johnston argues for the possibility of a materialist system, an atheistic metaphysics that can account for consistency, coherence, and totality without recourse to a divine guarantor. To reject system-building outright is to throw the baby out with the bathwater, abandoning the most powerful tools of philosophical reason out of an excessive fear of their historical misuse. Johnston’s project is precisely to rescue systematicity for atheism, to demonstrate that a fully articulated, non-contradictory account of the Real is not only possible but necessary for a truly post-theological philosophy.

The Hidden “One”: Para-Ontology’s Formal Contradiction

In a pivotal and incisive move, Johnston turns Chiesa’s own formalist methodology against him. He argues that the very core of Chiesa’s para-ontology—its proposed embrace of an endless, undecidable oscillation between the One and the not-One (or, in Lacanian algebra, between A and Ⱥ)—paradoxically generates the very kind of formal totality it was designed to evade. Chiesa’s position, intended to keep metaphysical options perpetually open, can be formalized as a meta-principle: a commitment to the endlessness of the oscillation itself.^[13] Johnston expresses this as a formal structure: for all x, x is defined by the contradiction of (x and not-x), or in Lacanese, (∀A [A ∧ Ⱥ] ∧ ∀Ⱥ [Ⱥ ∧ A]).

This meta-formalization of perpetual oscillation, Johnston contends, itself becomes a new, higher-order One. It is a single, unifying structural law, the law of endless vacillation, that governs the entire field. Chiesa’s agnostic atheism, in its very attempt to avoid taking a side and thus evade onto-theological totalization, inadvertently reinstates a totalizing principle at the level of pure form. The content is undecidability, but the form is a rigid, universal, and absolute commitment to that undecidability. Johnston thus charges Chiesa with smuggling a hidden metaphysical One back into his system, cloaked in the sophisticated language of paradox and indecision. The agnostic escape route from metaphysics leads directly back to a more abstract, but no less totalizing, metaphysical commitment.

This critique reveals the heart of Johnston’s Hegelian strategy: to show how a position that claims to stand outside or between determinate ontological claims is, in fact, already making a very strong, albeit disavowed, ontological claim of its own. The agnostic’s suspension of judgment is not a neutral emptiness but a positively defined structure with its own logic and its own implicit universalism.

The Hegelian Alternative: Systematic Atheism and the Barred Other

In place of Chiesa’s para-ontological agnosticism, Johnston proposes a radically different path for Lacanian thought: the construction of a fully atheistic and non-agnostic metaphysics grounded in the concept of the barred Other (Ⱥ). This position openly and unapologetically commits to an ontology of the Real as fundamentally inconsistent, incomplete, and non-totalizable, a “not-One.” Unlike Chiesa’s wavering, however, this is not presented as one of two equally plausible options. For Johnston, the barred Other is the sole, groundless ground of being.

To justify this move from agnosticism to a determinate atheistic ontology, Johnston leans heavily on Hegel’s critique of Kant’s thing-in-itself. Kant’s agnosticism regarding the noumenal realm, his insistence that we can never know reality as it is “in itself,” is, for Hegel, a form of intellectual timidity that fails to recognize its own performative contradictions. To draw a limit to knowledge, one must, in some sense, already be on both sides of that limit. Hegel’s counter-move is to demonstrate that the unknowable noumenon is not an external barrier to thought but an internal product of thought’s own activity of abstraction and negation. We can know precisely how the illusion of unknowability is constructed.

Johnston applies this Hegelian lesson directly to the critique of religion and agnosticism. The “unknowable” God of apophatic theology and the suspended judgment of the agnostic are, like Kant's noumenon, manufactured constructs. A truly materialist critique, Johnston insists, must not stop at the border of the supposed unknowable but must press on to explain the genesis and structure of that very border. It is through this Hegelian-Lacanian transparency, showing how the illusion of the transcendent One is produced by immanent socio-symbolic and cognitive processes, that a robust, non-agnostic atheism becomes possible. This approach does not shy away from making strong claims about the Real; on the contrary, it insists that such claims are the only way to effectively dismantle the ideological edifice of theism.

This philosophical orientation is buttressed by Johnston’s reading of Lacan’s own intellectual trajectory. He argues that while Lacan’s work in the mid-1950s exhibited Kantian affinities, treating the Symbolic order as an impassable horizon and the origin of language as a structural unknown, his later work, particularly from Seminar X onward, shifts toward a more Hegelian stance. This later Lacan rejects the notion of an unknowable Real in favor of a direct exploration of its immanent structure, its production, and its relationship to the subject. For Johnston, this evolution in Lacan’s thinking provides a clear warrant for developing a determinate, systematic, and truth-oriented ontology that is militantly atheistic, leaving behind the apophatic modesty of agnosticism.

Finitude, the Wager, and the Politics of Truth

The philosophical dispute ultimately cashes out in the domain of the political and the ethical. Johnston argues that Chiesa’s stance, by tainting all ontological truth-claims with the suspicion of religiosity, neuters the critical force of atheism. If any strong assertion is structurally theological, then atheism can never confidently assert itself as a more credible, more truthful worldview. The critique of religion becomes impossible, as any robust critique presupposes its own truth claims, its own ground from which to challenge the position it opposes. Para-ontology, in its disavowal of commitment, risks reducing atheism to a politically impotent posture of infinite deferral and intellectual hygiene, incapable of intervening in the ideological battles of the present. Johnston insists that a meaningful atheistic metaphysics must accept the “risk” of asserting a real, consistent, and true theory of being, even if this means, in a sense, “fighting fire with fire” by building a system to rival the metaphysical systems of theism.^[14]

Furthermore, Johnston exposes the psychological mechanism he sees at work in the agnostic’s performative modesty. The agnostic often critiques the certainty of both theist and atheist as a libidinal defense against the trauma of fundamental uncertainty. Johnston, however, inverts this psychoanalytic claim. He argues that the unconscious, in the Lacanian sense, is not a repository of ignorance but of “unknown knowns,” or repressed certainties. The agnostic’s insistence on epistemological modesty, Johnston suggests, is not a brave confrontation with uncertainty but a repression of a deeper, more terrifying certainty: the certainty of non-being.^[15] We are, he argues, already acquainted with non-existence, not as a future hypothesis about the afterlife but as a retroactive fact of our pre-life. Our non-existence precedes our existence. Agnosticism, in this light, becomes a defense mechanism that uses uncertainty about what comes after death to obscure the undeniable certainty of the nothingness that came before birth. The non-agnostic atheist, by contrast, confronts this void in both directions, inhabiting a position of more radical and honest finitude.

This leads to the final, decisive argument against the crypto-theology of Chiesa's position. The endless oscillation that Chiesa’s agnosticism requires, the perpetual negating and re-negating of ontological positions, secretly relies on a fantasy of infinite duration. This is Hegel’s “bad infinity” (schlechte Unendlichkeit), an endless, repetitive progress that never achieves resolution. For a subject to sustain such an infinite process of epistemic vacillation, that subject must be implicitly immortal. This, for Johnston, is the ultimate religious residue in Chiesa’s thought: a crypto-theological commitment to an imperishable, soul-like agency capable of carrying out this endless task.^[16]

Johnston counters this with Lacan’s insistence on finitude, captured in axioms like “there is no metalanguage” and the emphasis on the termination of the analytic session. Life is not an infinite seminar on metaphysics; it is finite. There is a “moment to conclude.” The human subject is not the bearer of an immortal epistemic openness but is thrown into a world structured by mortal limits. Pascal’s wager becomes relevant here, not as a proof for God, but as a demonstration of the inescapability of commitment in the face of finitude. One must wager because one will die. Agnosticism’s attempt to suspend the wager indefinitely is a fantasy that denies the fundamental condition of mortality.

Johnston’s structural principle of finitude was foreshadowed by Lenin in the field of revolutionary politics. During the initial revolutionary ferment, he acknowledges the necessity of mass discussion, collective education, and the patient awakening of the proletariat to political life. Endless meetings and the airing of questions were not a defect but a vital stage in the collective digestion of historical novelty.^[17] Yet, precisely because life is not a seminar, because famine, war, and infrastructural collapse impose temporal thresholds, there comes a moment when discussion must yield to decision, and decision to execution. “Now it is impossible to postpone it or wait for it any longer.”^[18] The wager must be made, the finite must be acknowledged, and structure imposed.

What Johnston names as the “moment to conclude,” Lenin operationalizes as the imperative of “one-man managerial authority.”^[19] This is not an abandonment of democratic principle but its condition of possibility under the pressure of material survival. Just as the analysand must confront their own symptom not in the endless deferral of metalanguage but in the structured temporality of the analytic session, so must the working class confront the limits of discussion in the practical, time-bound need for logistical organization. Political life, like psychic life, is not infinite reflection but finitude under pressure.

Both thinkers therefore denounce the fantasy of a life without thresholds, a fantasy that, for Johnston, takes the form of metaphysical agnosticism and, for Lenin, the failure to distinguish discussion from execution. In both cases, the refusal to conclude is not a virtue but a disavowal of the real. The point is not to abolish deliberation but to situate it within a structure that demands eventual commitment. Theory must touch ground, even as it educates; politics must decide, even as it organizes. Just as the subject of analysis cannot be endlessly suspended between positions, the revolutionary cannot be endlessly suspended between discussion and implementation. The real forces a wager – on the couch, and in the grain transport plan.

In the end, Johnston’s critique culminates in a stark choice. One can adopt the agnostic’s pose of infinite suspension, a position that, under scrutiny, reveals itself to be formally contradictory, politically sterile, and reliant on a disavowed fantasy of immortality. Or one can embrace a non-agnostic, systematic atheism that accepts finitude, makes a determinate wager on the nature of the Real as inconsistent (Ⱥ), and builds a coherent philosophical and political project on that groundless ground. For Johnston, the ceiling of theistic certainty is gone, and the agnostic who pretends to suspend judgment from it fails to realize the hook is no longer there. All that remains is the radical immanence of the barred Real, to which only a committed, non-agnostic atheism can be faithful.

1. Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 68.

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2. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 10 (Progress Publishers, 1962), 86.

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3. Ibid.

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4. Ibid.

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5. Ibid.

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6. Ibid.

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7. Ibid.

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8. Ibid.

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9. Ibid, 87.

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10. Adrian Johnston, “The modest absolute: Or, why I am not an agnostic (or even an agnostic atheist),” in God is Undead: Psychoanalysis for Unbelievers (Bloomsbury, 2025), 193.

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11. Ibid, 197.

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12. Ibid.

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13. Ibid, 198, 199.

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14. Ibid, 198.

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15. Ibid, 210.

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16. Ibid, 212, 213.

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17. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 27 (Progress Publishers, 1965), 210.

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18. Ibid, 211.

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19. Ibid.

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