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Zizek's Second Coming
Char Roone Miller
George Mason University
cmillerd@gmu.edu
© 2003 Char Roone Miller.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Slavoj Zizek, On Belief. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
1. "God is dead," proclaimed Nietzsche's madman. Many readers,
particularly undergraduate students, have been surprised by the
passing of God; Nietzsche's implication that God once lived does
not comfortably fit their sense of Nietzsche as an atheist. More
than a century later, Slavoj Zizek surprises readers with his
suggestion that God is still alive and kicking in a
post-Hegelian/post-Marxist/post-modern world. Zizek's project
shares many elements with Nietzsche's, in spite of its opposite
account of God's health, including, most importantly, the interest
they share in liberating people from their infatuation with the
Other that dominates their lives--most significantly for Zizek,
from the Big Other that governs the ideological systems of meaning
in which our "choices" occur. Zizek, Senior Researcher at the
Institute for Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia,
and amazingly popular critical theorist, attempts in On Belief to
bring Christ back as the herald of a politics by which the choice,
the real choice (as well as the choice of the real), of meaning
can be faced.
2. The support for this argument is not easy to follow: Zizek's
language is brisk, lively, and smart, but it is not clearly
structured. Nor does his style of writing in pithy aphoristic
paragraphs lend itself to broad summary (much like Nietzsche's
style). But this book is clearly an attempt by Zizek to reposition
the social meaning and power of Christianity in order to dispose
of a range of social hierarchies (race, nation, sex, and class, at
least); it is difficult to think of a more challenging yet
rewarding political project. Zizek is unwilling to leave the
territory of Christianity to the ostensibly Christian institutions
and interpretations currently acting to maintain the
liberal-capitalist empire. In a way similar to the destruction
that Pauline Christianity wrought on the Roman Empire, Zizek wants
to use a reconfigured Christianity to ease the grip of
liberal-capitalist hegemony. "What Christianity did with regard to
the Roman Empire, this global 'multiculturalist' polity," he
confides, "we should do with regard to today's Empire" (5).
3. This re-imagined Christianity, Zizek claims, is the suppressed
truth of Christianity, the liberating power of love for the
imperfections of the Other: "the ultimate secret of the Christian
love is, perhaps, the loving attachment to the Other's
imperfection" (147). Affection for the sins and weaknesses of
others is coupled with the erasure of a final judgment, in part
because our attachment to the gap in the perfection of others is
exactly what God loves about us. Furthermore, this gap is the way
in which humans are created in the image of God. "When I, a human
being, experience myself as cut off from God, at that very moment
of the utmost abjection, I am absolutely close to God, since I
find myself in the position of the abandoned Christ," explains
Zizek (146). Because Christ is like us, an abandoned and imperfect
sinner, he is loved by God and by us. "And it is only within this
horizon that the properly Christian Love can emerge, a Love beyond
Mercy. Love is always love for the Other insofar as he is
lacking--we love the Other BECAUSE of his limitation,
helplessness, ordinariness even" (146-7). Thus Zizek's
Christianity subverts the idealization we feel toward the Other by
filling this connection with not our desire so much as our
affection for the empty desire of the Other.
4. Zizek's version of Christianity is, he claims, a way to will the
return of the repressed as a symbolic act.
The symbolic act is best conceived of as the purely formal,
self-referential, gesture of the self-assertion of one's
subjective position. Let us take a situation of the political
defeat of some working-class initiative; what one should
accomplish at this moment to reassert one's identity is
precisely the symbolic act: stage a common event in which some
shared ritual (song or whatsoever) is performed, an event
which contains no positive political program--its message is
only the purely performative assertion: "We are still here,
faithful to our mission, the space is still open for our
activity to come!" (84-5)
Zizek wants to keep this space open for positive political action.
He is the symbolic voice for the "truth" of Christianity.
5. Following the logic through, as Zizek attempts (with Hegel and
Nietzsche on his team), allows him to expect the return of the
repressed within Christianity--or at least to exploit the
miraculous return of freedom and choice in a world where it has
been crushed and exploited by international corporate power.
Hegel's dialectic allows the suppressed to return in defeat as the
significant real. Nietzsche's debt to Christianity is very similar
to Zizek's program, in that Nietzsche often found himself and his
truth-telling about God to be the fulfillment of Christianity.
Zizek believes that Christianity can undercut the
liberal-capitalist empire in the same way, by demanding that the
truth be told. This is in resistance to the great temptation of
the postmodern world: that in the way we flit from identity to
identity and desire to desire, we will flit from one logic to
another. The truth should be told. "Thought," Zizek writes, "is
more than ever exposed to the temptation of 'losing its nerve,' of
precociously abandoning the old conceptual coordinates" (32).
Christianity can provide the coordinates by which the ways we
understand good/evil, right/wrong, and valuable/insignificant can
be re-coordinated. In this redeployment of Christianity, through
the pursuit of the conclusion of its logic, Zizek attempts to make
the death of Christ stand for the death of the envy of the Other's
jouissance. From this claim Zizek works out a seemingly endless
range of insights and thoughtful observations on culture, society,
and politics.
6. One of the remarkable twists to Zizekian Christianity is its
defense and romanticization of sex by filling that romance not
with fate but with accidents and fortune. Zizek inquires at one
point: "What if sexual difference is not simply a biological fact,
but the Real of an antagonism that defines humanity, so that once
sexual difference is abolished, a human being effectively becomes
indistinguishable from a machine?" (43). Sex and sexuality become
absolutely necessary to the continuance of human subjectivity as
we know it--a subjectivity that Zizek does attempt to
maintain--not because sexual difference and desire provide a firm,
"natural" foundation but because they constitute the negative
trauma around which human symbolization spins.
The passage from animal copulation to properly human sexuality
affects the human animal in such a way that it causes the
human animal's radical self-withdrawal, so that the zero-level
of human sexuality is not the "straight" sexual intercourse,
but the solitary act of masturbation sustained by
fantasizing--the passage from this self-immersion to
involvement with an Other, to finding pleasure in the Other's
body, is by no means "natural," it involves a series of
traumatic cuts, leaps and inventive improvisations. (24)
There is no given to the human condition, human relations, or
human subject. All of what we take to be naturally given to us and
naturally ours--tastes, desires, sex, and loves--are the product
of a haphazard yet skillful "tarrying with the negative."
Humanity, like Christ, is not at home in this world and will never
recover her authentic self, natural desires, or proper place. Our
success is our displacement.
7. On Belief raises many questions: what, for example, is the
function of the Others that dominate this text, Hegel and Lacan?
In a text that ostensibly attempts to renegotiate the machinery by
which others determine our choices, Zizek spends a lot of time
defending and deferring his insights to Lacan. I'm highly
sympathetic to his defense of Lacan against those who would
classify Lacan as overly obscure, willfully obfuscating,
ahistorical, and ham-fistedly structuralist, but I'm not sure how
it fits within the larger project of Zizek's writings or his
attempts to reduce the authority of the Other.
8. Additionally, the selection of friends and foes seems rather
random and chaotic. Why, for example, the apparently willful
disavowal of ideas that Zizek could easily appropriate, such as
Gnosticism? Perhaps this is the inverse of the previous question
or a way to suggest that there are people missing from this book
who could provide useful aides and foils for Zizek, particularly
Elaine Pagels (see The Gnostic Gospels). Zizek ridicules
Gnosticism without dealing with Pagel's work, work that in many
ways is very similar to his, particularly through its emphasis on
the absence of a final judgment.
9. Finally, what are the stakes in asserting a monotheism instead of
a polytheism, or more broadly, how are Zizek's decisions
concerning the true Christianity and its corruptions being made?
This reading feels like Freud's Moses and Monotheism, in which
Freud admits that in order to make his point concerning the
creation of racial and national identities he is forced to
construct an edifice that any fool could knock over. These sorts
of choices and assertions seem to be part of the attempt to
willfully articulate a new position and organization for the
things that give life meaning, a process that would be more
effective if made less tentative.
10. Admittedly, to ask Zizek to play by these rules, by which his
choices are fully explained, is to expect more of him than anyone
else can give, and probably to miss the point that accounts of the
meaning of Christianity really do not have a point of closure.
It's that lack of a point of closure, or determinative point, that
makes counter-hegemonic political action possible.
11. Zizek knows a thing or two about political action; for example, he
ran for president of the Republic of Slovenia in 1990. More
significantly, as a member of the Committee for the Protection of
the Human Rights of the Four Accused in Slovenia in 1988, Zizek
worked to free four journalists arrested and brought to trial by
the Yugoslav Army in Slovenia and in doing so struggled for the
liberation of Slovenia. The strategy was pursued by articulating a
demand to change the conditions under which the journalists were
arrested, which meant a change in socialism; by pursuing the
literal meaning of the commission, Zizek helped to bring down the
socialist government. He is working in a similar vein here--by
pursuing a literal meaning of Christianity, he hopes to change the
ruling linguistic and intellectual co-ordinances of the fictional
rules that govern our lives. By asserting the "true" value of
Christianity, Zizek and Nietzsche seem like the two most Christian
madmen since the one who died on the cross.
Department of Public and International Affairs
George Mason University
cmillerd@gmu.edu
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