Daniel Worden

Department of English & American Literature
Brandeis University
dworden@brandeis.edu

 

Review of: Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity.Cambridge: MIT P, 2003.

 

The first book in his “Short Circuits” series from MIT Press, Slavoj Zizek’s The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity strives to radicalize belief and action by revaluing the solid, divine foundation usually thought to underpin religious faith. The book’s title might be misleading for those interested in the study of puppetry or dwarves, for this work does not share a common focus with Susan Stewart’s On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection or Victoria Nelson’s The Secret Life of Puppets.

 

Instead, The Puppet and the Dwarf alludes to the first of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Benjamin describes “an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess.” Inside the chess-playing puppet is “a little hunchback who was an expert chess player” who controls the puppet’s moves. This absurd Turing Machine illustrates the trick involved in theoretical discourse: “the puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone, if it enlists the service of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight” (253). Benjamin’s formulation implicates theology as the hidden motor of historical materialism, and the thesis aphoristically argues that “materialist” accounts of history are ultimately guided by theological narratives of salvation, of a progressively inclined “invisible hand,” or of the divine coming of class consciousness. Zizek reverses this formulation to mount an attack not against theology in general or Christianity in particular, but against deconstruction.

 

At the outset of the book, Zizek claims that in our historical moment “the theological dimension is given a new lease on life in the guise of the postsecular ‘Messianic’ turn of deconstruction” (3). Deconstruction assumes the position of Benjamin’s chess-playing puppet, while historical materialism retreats to the dwarf’s position. Never sparing of deconstruction, Zizek’s formulation here and throughout unapologetically links deconstruction to the pasty liberalism he is so fond of deriding. However, lurking behind Zizek’s usual critique of liberal political positions (multiculturalism, identity politics, human rights), there lies a more intriguing relation to deconstruction. Zizek devotes a great number of pages in this book to Saint Paul, one of his heroes, and Jesus, a man whom he values not as the son of God but as he who kills himself in order to save himself from becoming doxa. Jesus seems to figure here as none other than Jacques Derrida, the messianic voice of deconstruction, around whom disciples gather, and Paul as none other than Zizek himself, the outsider who rigorously theorizes and institutionalizes the excess out of the dominant tradition. Christianity serves as the allegory through which Zizek critiques and proposes a solution to the apolitical “messianism” of deconstruction.

 

The messianic promise has recently taken the shape of “elsewhere” in Derrida’s writings. As he claims in Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, this elsewhere exists “on the shores” of language, just barely unreachable and unspeakable, but nevertheless it is that which constitutes language’s promise. In Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida constructs a dialogue on the limits of language, and language’s limits give way to the promise of an “elsewhere”:

 

you at once appreciate the source of my sufferings, the place of my passions, my desires, my prayers, the vocation of my hopes, since this language runs right across them all. But I am wrong, wrong to speak of a crossing and a place. For it is on the shores of the French language, uniquely, and neither inside nor outside it, on the unplaceable line of its coast that, since forever, and lastingly [à demeure], I wonder if one can love, enjoy oneself [jouir], pray, die from pain, or just die, plain and simple, in another language or without telling one about it, without even speaking at all. (2)

 

Occurring “on the shores” of language, this “wonder” reaches for the promise of unmediated transparency. Derrida here seriously entertains the possibility of an “unspeakable” that promises the very profundity of belief that remains “lastingly” inaccessible. Zizek traces this concept of the unspeakable to Hegel’s “absolute panlogicism” and Lacan’s formulation of the Real as not external to the Symbolic, in effect arguing that language overlays the real and in so doing punctures its surface:

 

it is not that we need words to designate objects, to symbolize reality, and that then, in surplus, there is some excess of reality, a traumatic core that resists symbolization--this obscurantist theme of the unnameable Core of Higher Reality that eludes the grasp of language is to be thoroughly rejected; not because of a naïve belief that everything can be nominated, grasped by our reason, but because of the fact that the Unnameable is an effect of language. We have reality before our eyes well before language, and what language does, in its most fundamental gesture, is--as Lacan put it--the very opposite of designating reality: it digs a hole in it, it opens up a visible/present reality toward the dimension of the immaterial/unseen. When I simply see you, I simply see you--but it is only by naming you that I can indicate the abyss in you beyond what I see. (70)

 

This dialectical relation between reality and language, that reality is explained by language, while the latter, through its articulation, exposes reality as propped up by nothing in its fundamental rootlessness, though, never reaches even a tentative synthesis. The praxis that emerges from this insight seems to be simply that one is responsible for one’s own decisions, a solution more descriptive than prescriptive. Zizek lacks a positive program of action, causing his work here to resonate with the moral ambiguousness that emerges out of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, an embrace of radical freedom that fails to develop a normative component to guide one’s radically free choices.

 

To give his Christian allegory of deconstruction and ideology critique a positive component, a model of intellectual praxis, Zizek theorizes what, exactly, Paul did to the Jewish tradition to force a radical break between Judaism and Christianity. This radical break occurs because of the “perverse core” of which the book’s title speaks; the promised core, simply put, is no core at all. The messianic promise of Christianity is a hollow promise, for God, the core, can do nothing but fail to act. God is a “petit objet a,” an object that is desired but can never satisfy. Zizek performs a convincing reading of Jesus’s question during the crucifixion–“God, why hast thou forsaken me?”–to support this point. Instead of marking the necessity of Jesus becoming fully human so that he could then rise from the dead and ascend to heaven, Jesus’s question exposes God’s essential impotence. God forsakes Jesus because God is powerless to do anything. The messianic promise is exposed in Christianity to be a promise with no possibility of fulfillment. Like the commodity, Christ is figured as that which gives value to humanity by promising to be more than human. As Zizek claims in a previous work, On Belief, “Christ directly embodies/assumes the excess that makes the human animal a proper human being” (99). But this excess is always already fictional, an excess that ideologically inflects desire.

 

The argument of The Puppet and the Dwarf has much less to do with actual theology than with present-day critical theory. Concerned not with the “historical” Jesus or the “historical” Paul (although he does cite historical studies and even an “alternative” history that asks, “what if Jesus had not been betrayed by Judas and crucified but had lived to a ripe old age?”), Zizek’s argument is aimed at contemporary ideology, particularly leftist ideology. Since theology is the puppet against whom we all play chess (theology not only in the sense of a messianic promise but also in the sense of the valuation of things as sacred, including, but not limited to, our bodies, our health, commodities, and the cultures of ourselves and others), then theology itself must be modified. Zizek’s book, in this sense, is an attempt to embrace the dwarf (historical materialism) and forego the puppet (theology). If Christ is ultimately human with no excess content that makes him transcendent, then the Big Other turns out to not be a Big Other after all. Accordingly, one should view the world not as constituted by radical difference but instead as always reaching toward a totality. Christianity, then, demystifies Otherness and allows for collective formations:

 

insofar as the Other is God Himself, I should risk the claim that it is the epochal achievement of Christianity to reduce its Otherness to Sameness: God Himself is Man, "one of us" [...]. The ultimate horizon of Christianity is thus not respect for the neighbor, for the abyss of its impenetrable otherness; it is possible to go beyond--not, of course, to penetrate the Other directly, to experience the Other as it is "in itself," but to become aware that there is no mystery, no hidden true content, behind the mask (deceptive surface) of the Other. (138)

 

Opposed to the Levinasian insistence of absolute Otherness, Zizek affirms radical collectivity as the basis for an ethics, an ethics that figures “believers” as the idolatrous and those who fail to believe in the content behind the “face of God” as the radically pious. Through recognizing that ideology is everywhere and denying the “messianic promise” of a pure language or a divine politics, one embraces radical freedom and responsibility.

 

The alternative to the absolute alterity of Levinas, Zizek argues, is ideology critique. Discontented with the reification of cultural difference as an alibi for ideologically informed exploitation, the book calls for a renewed investment in the demystification of perceived differences that are not evidence of “the Big Other” but instead are cultural productions. The clearest sense of this ideology occurs in Zizek’s endorsement of a “return to the earlier Derrida of différance,” wherein the subject perceives that something rendered “outside” by ideology is in fact “inside”:

 

in this precise sense, the "primordial" difference is not between things themselves, nor between things and their signs, but between the thing and the void of an invisible screen which distorts our perception of the thing so that we do not take the thing for itself. (143)

 

This plea might sound pathetic, even humanistic. But, within the schema of the book, similarities emerge through communal recognition and action, not through one-to-one reified individual interaction. Zizek’s recent book endorses ideology critique as a means of rendering texts–film, fiction, philosophy, psychoanalysis, theory–as moments of ideological work, both mystifying and liberating. Zizek reads theology as a philosophy, as productive of a metaphysics that burrows within liberal ideology in the form of a reverence for Otherness and a refusal to think Otherness as Sameness. In this register, The Puppet and the Dwarf complicates the common methodology underlying postcolonial studies, gender studies, queer theory, race studies, and deconstruction.

 

Paul emerges as the hero of this book, for he exposes the lack at the center of the messianic promise and then builds a scaffolding around that lack. As Zizek argues in the Appendix on “Ideology Today,” the structure of the commodity matches up nicely with the belief that “the face of God” marks an alien consciousness. Using the example of the Kinder Egg, the chocolate candy that contains a toy, Zizek remarks that “a child who buys this chocolate egg often unwraps it nervously and just breaks the chocolate, not bothering to eat it, worrying only about the toy in the center” (145); the child who cares only for the promised interior to the egg matches up with the consumer, caring only for the promised commodity’s value never to be given, or messianic deconstruction, with its promise of “elsewhere,” desiring the Unnameable which can only remain so as an effect of language.

 

Interestingly, the example of the Kinder Egg also mirrors the opening image of Benjamin’s dwarf-piloted puppet. Like the child, the consumer, and the deconstructionist, Zizek too seizes on the interior, historical materialism, while discarding the puppet, theology. Zizek’s system here, if it is even systematic enough to be called such, is structured around a lack, like the other systems that he both criticizes and admires. While the scaffolding constructed around any lack eventually becomes rigid doxa, much like Lenin’s politics eventually informing the rigid totalitarianism of Stalin, there remains a fleeting moment when one is radically responsible for one’s choices, when ideology no longer determines actions but gives way to freedom.

 

Works Cited

 

• Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 253-64.
• Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
• Zizek, Slavoj. On Belief. New York: Routledge, 2001.