Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity

Deconstruction, Materialism and Religious Practices

Katharine Sarah Moody

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409455912
• eBook ISBN: 9781317071822
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Religion

The 'theological turn' in continental philosophy and the 'turn to Paul' in political philosophy have occasioned a return to radical theology, a tradition whose philosophical heritage can be traced to the death of God announced in the work of Nietzsche and Hegel. John D. Caputo's deconstructive theology and Slavoj Zizek's materialist theology are two radical theologies that explore what it might mean to pass through the death of God and to abandon this experience as specifically Christian. Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity demonstrates how these theologies are transforming everyday religious practices through an examination of the work of Peter Rollins and Kester Brewin, two figures at the radical margins of a contemporary expression of Western religiosity called emerging Christianity. The author uses her analysis of all four figures to argue that deconstructive practices can enable religious communities to become part of a wider materialist collective in which the death of God continues to resonate. Pushing the methodological boundaries of philosophy of religion by examining religious practices as the site of philosophical signification, the book challenges scholars and practitioners alike to a new and more demanding dialogue between theory and practice.

PART I
An Emerging A/Theistic Imaginary

Chapter 1
Religion and the Critique of Ideology

The first of two chapters introducing Žižek’s materialist theology includes a brief introduction to the work of Alain Badiou, since, as Adam Kotsko has argued convincingly, Žižek’s reasons for engaging with Badiou’s philosophical interpretation of Saint Paul’s Letters are generated by a deadlock in his own work on ideology critique and political change, and his critical assessment of Badiou’s project is pivotal for his exploration of what ‘a sociality without a master signifier’ might look like, functioning as a catalyst for the current period of Žižek’s work and for what I am calling his turn to radical theology.¹ It leads him to his own distinctive interpretation of the emergence of Christianity from its specifically Jewish context and relationship to the Law, and to his own radically materialist death-of-God theology. This is the subversive heart of Christianity, accessible only to a true materialism, that Žižek writes of in The Puppet and The Dwarf. Where Walter Benjamin conceives of the relationship between materialism and theology as a chess-playing puppet and its hunchback puppet-master, with ‘the puppet of “historical materialism”’ enlisting ‘the service of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight’, Žižek suggests that now it is materialism that must hide its face behind theology.² After the theological turn of much contemporary continental philosophy, materialist philosophy must advance under the name of a materialist theology. It must advance, we might say, in the name of God. But, equally, this name must, after the death of God, be the name of a God who dies. Hence Žižek’s second claim for the relationship between materialism and theology: not only is Christianity’s subversive kernel only open to a materialist approach, but a true materialism requires the Christian experience of the death of God. This book explores what this claim might mean, as well as what it might mean to abandon this experience as specifically Christian or, even, theistic.

This chapter introduces Žižek’s theory of ideology critique, in order to further characterise how it is that this prompts his turn to Christianity, to Paul in particular, and to a Hegelian theology specifically, which is the subject of the chapter that follows. But we can initially begin by noting that what might be called Žižek’s theological turn echoes 1960s death-of-God theology, albeit in perhaps more concretely political directions – an affinity that Kotsko attributes to the Hegelian heritage shared by both Žižek and Altizer and that, as I suggested in the Introduction, therefore places Žižek within the tradition of radical theology. Not having referenced Altizer in his earlier work, Žižek now claims that the redemption of Christianity’s subversive core depends upon a return to Altizer’s death-of-God theology. In The Monstrosity of Christ, he quotes Altizer at length, for whom ‘the passion and the death of God are the deepest center of Christianity’, and with whom Žižek asks, ‘Whither the “Death of God”’?³ This question is a pertinent starting point for an introduction to Žižek’s radical theology, since it is a question that emerges at the intersection of his Lacanianism, Hegelianism and Marxism. For Žižek, the Hegelian death of God represents the non-existence of the Lacanian big Other and the suspension of the existing social and symbolic field; it is the point at which something other than global capitalism becomes possible. And it is this juncture in Žižek’s philosophical trajectory that is key for his turn to religion, for there is an identifiable tension within Žižek’s earlier work which, as Kotsko observes, opens up ‘the question of why one would bother overthrowing a given order if the only possible outcome is a new order that can only possibly be different in degree, never in kind.’ Kotsko compellingly suggests that this tension, and the questions that arise from it, are significant for the shift to Žižek’s current period. Having previously used Christianity and Christian theology more as ‘examples drawn from a shared cultural heritage’, during this stage Žižek writes 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); he includes a chapter on ‘Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology’ in The Parallax View (2006); and he co-authors a book with theologian John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ (2009).⁴ But this period of more serious theological engagement began with his critical responses to Badiou’s (1997) book Saint Paul contained in his (1999) The Ticklish Subject. Here I introduce what might be the central disparity between Badiou and Žižek, before moving on to raise the question that Kotsko identifies as key to Žižek’s own turn to Paul and to Christian theology more widely.

The Event of Pauline Christianity

According to Žižek, Badiou’s is a ground-breaking reading of the Apostle Paul as a ‘theoretician of the formal conditions of the truth-procedure’ (TS165). For Badiou, an Event is a ‘transformation of the relations between the possible and the impossible’ within a given Situation; it makes ‘seem possible’ that which is ‘declared to be impossible.’⁵ And yet an Event is necessarily ‘undecidable’, since a ‘groundless decision’ has to be made that an Event even occurred – ‘the decision to say that the event has taken place.’⁶ Through their proclamation of the Event, an individual or individuals – a ‘some-one’ or ‘some-ones’, as Badiou refers to them – enters into the composition of a Subject that is greater than them, becoming involved in the construction of a Truth that is universal in scope through what Badiou calls a Truth-procedure or Truth-process – the ceaseless activity of distinguishing between those elements of the Situation that have a positive connection to the Event, and those that do not and are either indifferent or hostile to it. For Badiou, Truth is what ‘fidelity constructs, bit by bit; it is what the fidelity gathers together and produces’, what Fidelity to the Event creates through investigation of the relationship between the Situation and the Event.⁷ In other words, Truth is produced in a Situation through the Subject’s Fidelity to the Event, with the Subject engaging steadfastly in the long, hard work of sustained enquiry, as a finite part of an infinite series of investigations that will determine the relationship of each element in the Situation to the proclaimed Event. As Peter Hallward notes, this is ‘a militant rather than scholarly process.’ The construction of Truth is ‘an attempt to win over each element to the event’.⁸

Badiou sees in Paul a ‘poet-thinker’ of the Event. He discloses both the ideas of ‘a rupture, an overturning’ – an Event, an intervention and interruption – and of ‘a thought-practice that is this rupture’s subjective materiality.’ For Paul, Christ is an Event: ‘Christ is a coming; he is what interrupts the previous regime of discourses.’ For Badiou, Paul’s Letters are a sustained effort to think through the consequences of proclaiming the Event of Christ’s Resurrection, his defeat of Death and overcoming of the Law, and to cultivate collectives that provide material body to the Event and its Truth. But Badiou is himself clear, however, that this Event is false, mythical, a fable. Paul is neither apostle nor saint, but a militant figure who is, ‘strictly speaking, the inventor’ of a thought centred on a single Evental Statement – in this case, ‘Christ is risen’ – and of a new discourse and disposition – neither Jewish nor Greek – one that is offered to and open to everyone and which thereby founds a new universalism: ‘Paul’s unprecedented gesture consists in subtracting truth from the communitarian grasp, be it that of a people, a city, an empire, a territory, or a social class.’⁹

Žižek is in part attracted to Badiou’s work as a political theory that reasserts the universality of Truth. But he is also critical of Badiou’s interpretation of Paul on the Law, as well as of his claim that Lacanian psychoanalysis is not able to provoke a new political practice. However, as Adrian Johnston stresses, Žižek also turns to Badiou’s work on the notion of the Event in his own attempts to ‘delineate the contours of what constitutes a genuine Lacanian ethico-political “act” (i.e., a gesture that decisively-yet-unpredictably breaks with the reality of a given status quo and its Symbolic, socio-historical scaffolding)’.¹⁰ Badiou’s work on Paul therefore plays an important role in both the emergence of Žižek’s own materialist theology and the development of his own philosophical trajectory.

For both Badiou and Badiou’s Paul, Life and Death designate alternate subjective paths or dispositions that divide every subject between the thought of the Flesh, which is Death, and the thought of the Spirit, which is Life, and there is ‘an absolute disjunction’ between the two. Badiou’s philosophical schema places Death on the side of Flesh, the Law and Works, rather than on the side of Spirit, Grace and Faith, forcing him to conclude that ‘death cannot be the operation of salvation.’ Resurrection, not Crucifixion, is the Christ-Event. Death becomes, then, or, rather, constructs, the place of immanentisation or reconciliation, the place of ‘divine equality’ with humanity; it is the Evental Site necessary for the Event as such – Salvation, Resurrection – to be addressed universally to humanity. For Badiou, Christ’s Death serves only to function as the means of signalling humanity’s access to eternal Truth, that ‘Christ’s resurrection is just as much our resurrection’.¹¹ For Žižek, however, this means that there is no dialectical movement involved in the moment of Resurrection for Badiou: ‘The Truth-Event is simply a radically New Beginning’ (TS169). Badiou wants New Life without Death, Resurrection without Crucifixion. As such, his interpretation of the relationship between Life and Death remains anti-Hegelian, anti-dialectical. On Žižek’s reading such an interpretation of Paul is not properly Lacanian either. Psychoanalysis does not, Žižek writes, ‘posit a “new harmony”, a new Truth-Event’, as Badiou’s account of it suggests, but, rather, ‘wipes the slate clean for one’ (TS179). Correspondingly, for Žižek, death drive is not the name for the intermingling of Law and Sin, of Law and its obscene superego supplement, as it appears for Badiou. In resisting the perverse realm of Law-Sin that dominates and determines our current Situation, the Lacanian death drive names instead the source of a radical and terrifying freedom. It is therefore linked by Žižek to his reading of Hegelian negativity and of the Lacanian Act.

Rather than an obstacle to the emergence of something new, as in Badiou, death drive forms the gesture of negativity that clears the space for a new beginning; ‘a gesture of taking away, which is in itself giving, productive, generating, opening up and sustaining the space in which something(s) can appear’ (PD94). For Žižek, and his Hegelian-Lacanian reading of Paul, Death is necessary for Resurrection Life, involving the ‘cutting of links with reality’ (FA103) and the ‘withdrawal-into-self’ inherent to the origin of subjectivity (TS36).¹² The emergence of subjectivity involves both death drive and sublimation, both a withdrawal from the Symbolic Order and the choice of a fundamental or structuring fantasy, both the clearing of a place and the elevation of an arbitrary object of desire to the ‘place of the impossible Thing.’¹³ According to Žižek, this is ‘the very founding gesture of consciousness, the act of decision by which I “choose myself”’.¹⁴ But at work in the Christian notion of conversion is precisely the possibility of repeating this primordial, and therefore eternal, choice of character. As Schelling writes, ‘there is, in every man, a feeling that from all eternity, he has been what he is, i.e., that he did not become it in course of time.’¹⁵ But Žižek’s reading of Schelling – as well as of Paul – is that, as in the psychoanalytic cure, one can choose oneself again.

For Žižek, the relationship between death drive and creative sublimation means that any sublime object, any contingent thing elevated to the status of the Thing, including the proclamation of an Event, is a structuring fantasy, ‘a veil that covers up the primordial ontological Void’ (TS186). This is why Žižek writes that ‘Lacan implicitly changes the balance between Death and Resurrection in favour of Death’ (TS179). Whereas for Badiou the subject is constituted by the Decision or proclamation of the Event and by remaining faithful to this Fidelity to the Event, Lacan stresses the gap between the Subject, understood as ‘the negative gesture of breaking out of the constraints of Being’, and the process of subjectivisation, understood as the filling in of the Void thus cleared by withdrawal from symbolic identification, with the positive gesture of an ‘emphatic engagement, the assumption of fidelity to the Event’ (TS187). For Lacan, there is both the negativity of the Ac...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I An Emerging A/Theistic Imaginary
• Part II An Emerging Ir/Religious Practice
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index