Slavoj Žižek and Christianity

Sotiris Mitralexis, Dionysios Skliris, Sotiris Mitralexis, Dionysios Skliris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367588298
• eBook ISBN: 9781351593472
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Slavoj Žižek's critical engagement with Christian theology goes much further than his seminal The Fragile Absolute (2000), or his The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003), or even his discussion with noted theologian John Milbank in The Monstrosity of Christ (2009). His reading of Christianity, utilising his signature elements of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian philosophy with modern philosophical currents, can be seen as a genuinely original contribution to the philosophy of religion. This book focuses on these aspects of Žižek's thought with either philosophy and cultural theory, or Christian theology, serving as starting points of enquiry.

Written by a panel of international contributors, each chapter teases out various strands of Žižek's thought concerning Christianity and religion and brings them into a wider conversation about the nature of faith. These essays show that far from being an outright rejection of Christian thought and intellectual heritage, Žižek's work could be seen as a perverse affirmation thereof. Thus, what he has to say should be of direct interest to Christian theology itself.

Touching on thinkers such as Badiou, Lacan, Chesterton and Schelling, this collection is a dynamic reading and re-reading of Žižek's relationship to Christianity. As such, scholars of theology, the philosophy of religion and Žižek more generally will all find this book to be of great interest.

1
The Slovenian and the Cross

Transcending Christianity’s perverse core with Slavoj Žižek

Dionysios Skliris and Sotiris Mitralexis

This volume¹ explores aspects of Slavoj Žižek’s work on Christian theology, the relevance of that work for Christian theology and his dialogue with Christian theologians. The assumption behind this volume is not that Žižek does theology as such – for this would require, well, faith – but that his insights on Christianity are of acute interest for theology, either in a straightforward or indirect and “perverse” way. For one might assume that an atheist, materialist, Marxist communist thinker cannot but be dismissive of Christianity – however, this would be gravely erroneous in a case as distinctive as Žižek’s, who may indeed offer valid insights through treading the seemingly paradoxical territory of atheist theology. His reading of Christianity as expounded in his voluminous and on-going oeuvre, uniting elements of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian philosophy as well as modern and contemporary philosophical currents, has a rightful claim to originality. Far from being an outright rejection of Christian thought and intellectual heritage, Žižek’s work can be seen as involving its perverse (or “decaffeinated”) affirmation, arguably including elements of interest to Christian theology itself.

Žižek’s interest in Christianity begins mainly with The Ticklish Subject (1999), in which he engages with the theology of Saint Paul. After that, he writes three books which have Christianity as their main subject, namely The Fragile Absolute, or Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting for? (2000), On Belief (2001) and The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (2003). Christianity is also one of the important subjects in The Parallax View (2006), which recapitulates many of his main interests. Žižek is also the co-author of books on theology in which he has collaborated with noted theologians such as John Milbank of the Radical Orthodoxy movement – in The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic (2009) and Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology (2010), both edited by Creston Davis – as well as with Boris Gunjević (God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse, 2012).

Žižek’s idiosyncratic approach to Christianity is such that he could be described as an “atheist Christian,” in the sense that he does not believe in the existence of God, nor in the literal bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ, yet he regards the “Christian experience” as extremely important. He further links Christianity with psychoanalysis and the communist idea as the three great traditions of emancipatory importance, which are more timely and relevant than ever precisely in their interconnection within our post-modern world. In order to understand Žižek’s philosophy, we have to realize that in it there is a continuous passage from religion to psychoanalysis and to politics and back, with continuous correspondences between the three levels. His implicit claim is that everything that applies to religion applies in a certain similar way to psychology and to politics. To take a most important example to which we will return later, what Žižek perceives as the community of the Holy Spirit after the Resurrection of Christ can be illuminatingly likened, as will be shown in this volume, to certain psychoanalytic communities as Jacques Lacan conceived them, as well as to the political subject of communism, as Žižek himself perceives the true meaning of the term. Correspondingly, historical and institutional Christianity is perceived as a perverse form of Christianity (taking account of the psychoanalytic content of the term “perversion”) in a similar sense in which Stalinism is a perverse form of communism, with psychoanalysis showing similar tendencies.

Slavoj Žižek was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 1949, where he studied philosophy and sociology, completing his Ph.D. thesis on The Theoretical and Practical Relevance of French Structuralism. During his youth he participated in intellectual circles critical of the establishment and in magazines such as Praxis, Tribuna and Problemi, known for an alternative version of Marxism to the official one of the Yugoslav regime. In 1985, Žižek received a second Ph.D., in psychoanalysis, from Université Paris VIII under the supervision of the well-known psychoanalyst Jacques Allain-Miller. His international reputation began with the publication of The Sublime Object of Ideology in 1989, in which he analyzed the use of ideology, drawing on his experience of the establishment ideology in Tito’s Yugoslavia. In the late 1980s, Slavoj Žižek took part in the struggle for Slovenia’s democratization and even ran as the Liberal Democratic Party’s candidate for the Slovenian presidency.

This first phase of Žižek’s itinerary is characterized by the critique of “actually existing socialism’s” totalitarian ideology and a certain proximity to liberalism, from which he has since distanced himself. Gradually, his critique became directed more against nationalism and, ultimately, its association with liberalism, despite the widespread common impression to the contrary. An early critique of the connection between nationalism and liberalism is already to be found in Tarrying with the Negative (1993). A turning point for Žižek was his philosophical encounter with Alain Badiou, with whom he came to share many philosophical themes, particularly on the theology of Paul the Apostle and Christianity in general, as well as on the need to conceive of the communist hypothesis anew, although in a way different from that encountered in “actually existing socialism,” on the need for a re-interpretation of Lacan, and so on. The encounter with Badiou is located mainly in The Ticklish Subject (1999), where Žižek is in dialogue with Badiou’s work Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. In many ways, Žižek can be considered as a disciple of Badiou, since on these important issues the older Badiou will set an agenda and a terminology, with Žižek following and adding to the debate in a distinctive manner. Žižek’s dialogue with his French colleague and comrade is, however, a critical one. Their great difference lies in the fact that Žižek insists on a dialectical perspective, following Hegel in a progress through contradictions where negativity plays the main role. Badiou, on the other hand, focuses on the notion of the event, i.e. of an occurrence that takes place in spite of the absence of its apparent preconditions, something which has a certain positivity. We could say, then, that in his interpretation of Christianity Badiou articulates a “theology of the Resurrection” or a “theology of Glory,” while Žižek formulates a “theology of the Crucifixion.” Badiou sees in the Apostle Paul the great visionary who began his journey through the vision of the resurrected Christ, “meeting” Him on the road to Damascus. The rest of Paul’s life consisted in a faithfulness to this event, and in this sense “crucifixion” paradoxically follows the Resurrection as a “testimony” to the event. In Žižek’s interpretation, on the contrary, “salvation” comes from the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, which is not understood literally, and is identical to the Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit. We will return to this later in this volume.

Slavoj Žižek positions himself in the interpenetration of the multiple traditions to which he belongs. The two main ones are dialectical Marxist thinking and psychoanalysis. Dialectical Marxist thought, however, originates from German Idealism, which in turn is connected to modernity’s general program, the latter having roots in a certain Christian tradition which also sometimes presents dialectical elements. In contemplating Žižek’s intellectual lineage and heritage in a chronological sequence from the earliest to the most current, we would say that the thinkers who have defined him and constitute recurring reference points are the Apostle Paul from the period of the Christian Urkirche, Augustine of Hippo from the patristic period and German religious thinkers such as Meister Eckhart and Martin Luther, while he draws on John Calvin’s understanding of absolute predestination. Beyond this, Descartes as the founder of the program of modernity, Kant, Schelling and Hegel from German Idealism, but also at the same time Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Marx, Lenin and Althusser from the communist tradition, Freud and Lacan from psychoanalysis, Walter Benjamin, Hans Jonas, and Theodor W. Adorno from the great Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, as well as Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière from his contemporaries. Arguably, each of those thinkers has contributed a certain building block to the dialectical thinking of Slavoj Žižek, which, being dialectical, also constitutes a kind of recapitulation of the history of philosophy through an acutely original interpretative perspective. In this process, each previous element is interpreted by a later one. For example, the Apostle Paul’s theology of the universality of love that goes beyond the Jewish Law is considered in the light of Martin Luther’s Protestant emphasis on absolute individuality. Augustine’s thought is contemplated in the light of its evolution in René Descartes’ program of modernity, while in Meister Eckhart we can see a great German thinker, a precursor of German Idealism. Immanuel Kant, of course, is considered to be the philosopher of the Thing, from a viewpoint that is not only Hegelian, but also Lacanian, as we encounter in Lacan the distinction between the Real and the Symbolic somewhat as we encounter in Kant the distinction between the Thing (in-itself) and phenomena. German Idealism is considered in the light of its materialist interpretation. And Žižek’s perhaps most crucial gesture is his reading of Hegel through Lacan, and vice versa, of Lacan through Hegel. It should also be noted that Žižek is strongly opposed to Levinas and to the interpretation of the Jewish tradition he represents, while he distances himself from Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler as far as their own combination of Judaism with elements of post-modern post-structuralist thought is concerned.

Let us consider an example of how Žižek is inspired by such sources. Žižek inherits from the theological tradition of German Idealism the question of what God was doing before the creation of the world. And he responds by resorting to Schelling in particular.² His answer is that, before the creation of the world, God was becoming God. We could thus say that before the creation of the world there was an abyss of primordial freedom, i.e. of an absolute freedom as an undifferentiated potentiality for everything and anything. The differentiation came about when God changed from not wanting anything, in the sense of anything particular, to wanting nothing itself. This latter object of volition signifies a kind of contraction in the triple sense of reduction, condensation and contracting a disease. The fact that God desires a nothing , the nothing entails that, suddenly, a zero is set next to God. This entails an emptying of God, a kenosis, a reduction of Him, so as to “fit” this zero, this nothing, next to Him. This emptying, however, is also a condensation of God in the sense that God is “transformed” into Being, or, as we could say, in the double meaning of the word contraction, God “contracts” Being as a disease, as Being can be considered to be a disease or even a reduction compared to the previous condition of absolute free will. From now on we will have a tug-of-war between the contraction and the expansion of Being, to which Žižek will give a name derived from Freudian psychoanalysis (as Lacan interprets Freud but even more as Žižek interprets Freud building on Lacan’s intuitions): drive. The next stage is that in which God as Word, as Logos, creates the world. According to Žižek, this moment of creation represses the drive, which turns into the repressed past of the world. In this psychoanalytic reading, what the Logos represses is in essence the very founding act of creation. The Logos thus constitutes temporality, as the distinction between past and present emerges for the first time, with the past being the repressed drive and the present being the Logical creation.

However, in order to better understand this aspect of Žižek’s thought, which draws from Lacan and Schelling, we have to also take into account a distinction between male and female that Lacan makes and which Žižek employs to its utmost potential.³ What Žižek refers to as the male model is what he calls a “constitutive exception.” This means that any symbolic system is based on the fact that the very moment of the symbolic system’s creation violates the rules that govern it. This founding moment of the symbolic system is repressed as a kind of repressed exception that dictates the norm. We do possess, however, a dialectic concerning a totalizable symbolic system and its exception that constitutes it without belonging to it. In contrast to this, the female model signifies a “whole” that is a priori non-totalizable. Cosmogony, as Žižek describes it drawing from Schelling and Lacan, signifies a passage and transition from the female model to the male one. Prior to the advent of the Logos we have a female model, that is, a non-totalizable All. This female model “vanishes” in order for a world of the male model to emerge and thus becomes a “vanishing mediator.” When we find ourselves in the ratiocentric world, we bear a repression of the founding moment of the symbolic system, which is categorized by Žižek as a drive. We could describe the same in Schelling’s terms by claiming that God is trying to escape either from hell or from madness. This theogony–cosmogony resembles Neoplatonic theogonies-cosmogonies or even certain traditional Christian cosmogonies – but it has some key differences. First, we encounter here a process of God’s own generation, a becoming within God himself, i.e. a process theology, which finds itself at a certain distance from traditional, orthodox theology. Second, temporality is not seen here as a reduction and degradation, as in Neoplatonism, but as a mode in which God Himself is becoming complete.

This leads us to a radical reconfiguration of temporality and history, which is consistent with modernity’s program of configuring modern subjectivity and history as the locus of self-realization – not only of man, but of God Himself as well. Moreover, in contrast to Neoplatonism, where the main and primary division is between the One and Being–Nous, here the primary division is between Will–Freedom and Being. We have here, therefore, a voluntarist philosophy which accords to the importance of the will in the program of modernity in German Idealism. This process is also perceived as an emptying, a kenosis of God, in order for zero/nothing to emerge, out of which Being will arise. This is in contrast to traditional and orthodox Christian theology, where we do encounter the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, yet the eternally Triune God remains an eternally absolute presence, and the creation of the world from nothing means that the world is contingent and that God exists independently of the world, which could have never existed. In the theogony–cosmogony, however, which Žižek refers to, God is initially an abyss of free will, followed by an emptying, a kenosis towards the emergence of nothing/zero and then the emergence of Being in opposition to nothing/zero, with God Himself being then self-realized through the creation of the world and within history, which emerges together with temporality.

Žižek develops this theogony–cosmogony, connecting it to the emergence of the subject and culture. The subject is constituted by the symbolic system. And here we may remember Louis Althusser seeking to demonstrate how the subject is constituted precisely by the dominant symbolic discourse that, in a Godlike gesture, calls it forth to existence. The establishment of the Symbolic entails the repression of the Real in the Lacanian sense. The Real is at the same time what lies beyond the Symbolic, i.e. what cannot enter the symbolic order, something which the Symbolic cannot reach. The Real is also an inner core of the Symbolic that makes its appearance as a crack, a hole, an internal failure and subversion. What remains from the Real is the so-called objet petit a, according to the Lacanian terminology, which is an object, since it is external to the Symbolic and the subject that has been constituted as a subject by that Symbolic. And it is small, because it is that which is left from the repressed big Real. And it is “a” from “autre,” as opposed to the Big Other. The objet petit a mobilizes the desire of the subject, which attempts to reach a Real that is simultaneously beyond the Symbolic but also in its inwardly subversive inner core. Since, however, the Real is perpetually beyond reach, desire operates permanently through substitutes. When a subject’s desire is fulfilled, the subject understands that this is not what it wanted but a mere substitute. Thus, it has to desire something else, and this cycle takes place perpetually. Žižek juxtaposes the notion of desire operating through substitutions to the drive, which concerns the founding moment of the symbolic system and is repressed. The drive is more associated with the subject’s fundamental fantasy. The fundamental fantasy defines the subject by being itself repressed and unconscious. It is a kind of founding act that constitutes the symbolic system by being itself its repressed exception. Žižek names this fundamental fantasy the “ultimate predestination” of the subject, reminding us of the term used by John Calvin and inspired by Augustine of Hippo. The paradox is that the fundamental fantasy may be a pre-conscious “absolute predestination” of the subject, but it is also the precondition for the exercise of the subject’s freedom. It is, of course, distinguished from the primordial, abysmal freedom of the theogony before the subject’s genesis. As...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 The Slovenian and the Cross: transcending Christianity’s perverse core with Slavoj Žižek
• 2 Žižek and the dialectical materialist theory of belief
• 3 From psychoanalysis to metamorphosis: the Lacanian limits of Žižek’s theology
• 4 “No wonder, then, that love itself disappears”: neighbor-love in Žižek and Meister Eckhart
• 5 Concrete universality: only that which is non-all is for all
• 6 Pacifist pluralism versus militant truth: Christianity at the service of revolution in the work of Slavoj Žižek
• 7 Rethinking universality: Badiou and Žižek on Pauline theology
• 8 “Rühre nicht, Bock! denn es brennt”: Schelling, Žižek and Christianity
• 9 Murder at the vicarage: Žižek’s Chesterton as a way out of Christianity
• 10 Žižek and the dwarf: a short-circuit radical theology
• Afterword: the antinomies that keep Christianity alive
• Index