A social theoretical interpretation of theological knowledge: The turn towards psychoanalysis

Jürgen Habermas's idea of knowledge-constitutive interests allows us to recast the theological crisis that was the emergence of the Latin American theologies of liberation as a tension between the practical interest of the historical-hermeneutic sciences and the emancipatory interest of the critically oriented sciences. Rethinking this theological crisis brings forth the historical problem of the dissimulation of the theologies of liberation.; Today, under the conditions of postmodernity, this dissimulation has become an eclipse. That fundamental liberationist idea of making transcendence as the making a break with U.S.-style liberal-democratic capitalism, has today become the talking about the meaning of transcendence as the making of conversation in a public sphere that naturalizes the idea of the Free Trade Area of the Americas. As an intellectual moment of the general social process of the assimilation of U.S. Hispanics, into a multicultural society that ideological functions as a buttress for Anglo-American hegemony, U.S. Hispanic theology is also, in the name of “liberation,” contributing to the eclipse of the Latin American theologies of liberation.; Only a return to the foundations of the theologies of liberation against the postmodern condition can overcome this dissimulation and eclipse. A return to the foundations, however, does not suffice. For that the theologies of liberation are not reducible to the postmodern condition does not imply that they are except from the challenges generated by this condition. Indeed, a return to the foundations of the theologies of liberation must be completed by a reconstruction of these foundations. This reconstruction must guide the theologies of liberation through the linguistic turn, but without reducing liberation to language. We see the possibility of such a linguistified corrective to the theologies of liberation in poststructuralist psychoanalysis understood as a critically oriented science.; The liberationist turn to psychoanalysis needs to be developed from the U.S. Hispanic point of view, not only because U.S. Hispanic reality is what mediates the tension between the historical-hermeneutic and critically oriented theological sciences, but also because under the conditions of postmodernity the problem of finitude, the problem of knowledge as crisis, must seek legitimation in and through the particular.