Christopher Pizzino

Department of Literatures in English
Rutgers University
pizzino@fas-english.rutgers.edu

 

Review of: Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? New York: Verso, 2000.

 

In one of the more arresting moments in The Fragile Absolute, Slavoj Zizek connects the Pauline concept of agape, commonly known as Christian love, to the closing shot of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue.¹ The shot is a series of tableaux, each focused on a character somehow related to the life of the film’s heroine, Julie. The tableaux are separated by a formless void in which each seems to float. After panning through the void from one character to another, the camera comes to rest on the weeping face of Julie herself. Emotionally paralyzed by the death of her husband and child, she has moved through the film untouched by her encounters with those around her. The effect of the conclusion is to suggest that Julie has delivered herself from paralysis and once again become a participant in the psychic life of others. Her tears indicate that “her work of mourning is accomplished, she is reconciled with the universe; her tears are not the tears of sadness and pain, but the tears of agape, of a Yes! to life in its mysterious synchronic multitude” (103). The tone is unusually lyrical for Zizek, and indeed for cultural theory in general, yet it is easy to recognize the standard maneuver being executed here. A canonical theoretical (or in this case theological) text is expounded using a popular text as an example. In this instance as in previous works, what distinguishes Zizek’s connections from those of most other cultural theorists (aside from their frequency) is the way the popular text becomes more than mere illustration. The usual priorities could be said to be reversed; theory itself seems the subsidiary thing. One might observe in the provocative tone of overstatement Zizek has mastered that if we examine Paul’s ultimate statement of the nature of agape, the famous passage from 1 Corinthians 13, it amounts only to a sort of illustration of the conclusion of Blue (in fact the passage is being sung in the background). In his attempt to express an affirmation that could overcome the fragmentation of historical experience, Paul creates a shadowy and insufficient illustration of the “mysterious, synchronic” truth expressed by Kieslowski’s camera.

 

As bracing as such moments are, Zizek’s allegiance to a specific set of theoretical touchstones lets us know that theory, or at least a certain kind of theory, never remains in the supporting role for long. Though the tone of the commentary on Blue is climactic, the work of Zizek’s argument is not complete until the book’s final chapter, in which agape itself is connected to Marxist and psychoanalytic points of reference. Like the use of popular culture, this argumentative procedure is now familiar. In a sense Zizek reads Paul’s theology much as he has read an array of Western philosophers, notably Hegel and Schelling. The wide field of application sheds light on the status of both philosophy and popular culture. Examples from either sphere gain value insofar as they express, in whatever form, the truths of the powerful theoretical principles Zizek has formed from his readings of Marx on the one hand and Lacan and Freud on the other. Working on the canon of Western philosophy in this way leaves Zizek open to the challenge that although he has given us new ways to understand Marx, Freud, and Lacan, he has distorted our view of the raw material on which he operates. The question of distortion, however, is likely to be more interesting if we follow Zizek’s own habits of investigation and reverse the direction of inquiry, asking in what ways his own work is affected by his appropriations. Such a question seems particularly relevant for this book, his first to give sustained attention to Christian theology. The question to ask, then, is not how Zizek distorts Christianity but how the presence of Christianity distorts Zizek. The distortion turns out to have a familiar shape. By asserting from a perspective one could provisionally define as secular that Christianity is “worth fighting for,” The Fragile Absolute enters a long-standing set of conflicts between religion and the secular, and these conflicts determine the shape of the argument in ways that are at odds with Zizek’s own theoretical program.

 

As the reading of agape suggests, Zizek’s purpose in this book is to establish parallels between Christian thought and his own, situated athwart Marxism and psychoanalysis. Despite the urgency of the project implied by the book’s title, however, the parallels are slow to appear. The preface announces a crisis that precipitates the need for a consideration of Christianity, namely the rise of “fundamentalism” in various political and social contexts. After this announcement, Zizek turns abruptly to the lively ideological critique for which he is known, focusing his attention on the implications of global capitalism in a post-Soviet era. Here too Zizek finds a state of crisis, one which threatens the very possibility of a meaningful Marxism. Then follows another abrupt turn, this time to the concept of agape in the writings of Paul. Agape represents for Zizek the part of Christianity worth saving, the “legacy” that can undo the double bind in which Marxism is caught. What is particularly striking about the book’s trajectory is the way that Christianity appears first in a threatening role and then in a fruitful one, nearly vanishing in between. Before it can appear in a redemptive capacity, it seems, religion must first appear in the ominous guise of “fundamentalism.”

 

Alongside Zizek’s misguided attacks on “fundamentalism,” there is a single moment of insight worth mentioning. In a chapter memorably entitled “Victims, Victims Everywhere,” the media portrayal of conditions in Kosovo is said to illustrate “the paradox of victimization: the Other to be protected is good insofar as it remains a victim… the moment it no longer behaves like a victim, but wants to strike back on its own, it magically turns all of a sudden into a terrorist/fundamentalist/drug-trafficking Other” (60). Here the figure of the “fundamentalist” is clearly a fetishized construction, a simplification structured to serve the interests of Western capitalist understanding. The target of Zizek’s critique is not “fundamentalism” at all but rather those who use the term unreflectively, dividing Others into “victims of religious persecution” and “fundamentalist radicals.” Such a critique is certainly long overdue in the context of U.S. discourse, where accusations of “fundamentalism” are readily directed at groups within the nation as well as without. Theoretical tasks immediately suggest themselves. For instance, there is the need to understand the relationship between familiar images of “fundamentalism” on the home front–the fanatical terrorist in Contact–and instantly recognizable images of “Islamic fundamentalism” deployed in films like Rules Of Engagement. It could be claimed that in popular film, fundamentalists, as well as victims, are everywhere.

 

Unfortunately, and despite this suggestive moment of critique, fundamentalism as a secular fantasy also has a strong presence in this book. In fact the preface contains what qualifies as a classic instance of this fantasy. First there is an indictment of “one of the most deplorable aspects of the postmodern era,” namely “the return of the religious dimension in all its different guises: from Christian and other fundamentalisms, through the multitude of New Age spiritualisms, up to the emerging religious sensitivity within deconstructionism itself.” This alleged return raises the abiding question of “the religious legacy within Marxism itself” (1). Zizek’s approach to this question is, not surprisingly, an attempt at reversal:

 

Instead of adopting such a defensive stance, allowing the enemy to define the terrain of the struggle, what one should do is to reverse the strategy by fully endorsing what one is accused of: yes, there is a direct lineage from Christianity to Marxism; yes, Christianity and Marxism should fight on the same side of the barricade against the onslaught of the new spiritualisms–the authentic Christian legacy is much too precious to be left to the fundamentalist freaks. (2)

 

This certainly appears to reverse a traditional Marxist position on the question of religion, but it does so by way of a view of fundamentalism that could hardly be more predictable. The fundamentalist is the political “enemy,” the one whose dogmatic theological stance not only justifies but actually requires hostility on the part of the critic.²

 

The baldness of this declaration is itself something of a landmark. Never before in a work of cultural theory has the prejudice against certain forms of religion been expressed so openly, and never have the specific contours of that prejudice surfaced in such a condensed form. The self/other antagonism finds clear expression in a language of boundaries and alliances but also deploys a language of monstrosity. The choice of the word “freaks” carries the conviction that fundamentalists, those on the other side of the “barricade,” are so utterly other as to put themselves beyond the reach of analysis. Tied to the image of the fundamentalist-as-other is an equally significant feature of secular ideology, namely a historicizing structure that approaches religion by way of its particular relation to temporality. The familiar Weberian claim that religion is in decline is the most visible example of this, but Zizek provides another. If the traditional language of “secularization” suggests that religion’s decline is inevitable, the language of “return” suggests some tidal rhythm that allows it to keep resurfacing. Though it might seem that there is a contradiction here between Zizek’s claim and the traditional line, the point of Zizek’s claim is not to critique the traditional position but simply to reverse it. The fact that secular historicism has trouble accounting for such returns is not itself a cause of distress, although religion’s “return” obviously is. This is not the first time a claim of return has been uttered, but its use necessitates a certain degree of forgetfulness.

 

The more Zizek’s historicizing language about religion is examined, the less difference there appears to be between the traditional claim to decline and this latest announcement of return. In Weber’s Protestant Ethic, the stance is one of distance; religion is made an object of study, and its value is paradoxically derived from the assumption that it is vanishing. In his conclusion, Weber remarks that “the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs” (182). The death of religion is so deeply presumed that it provides the kind of automatic reference point necessary for a simile. For Zizek, religion is not simply another element of culture to be studied and is certainly not vanishing from history. In fact its ahistoricity relative to other elements of culture, combined with the abhorrent reality of its “fundamentalist” manifestations, give it a peculiar and traumatic presence. In taking the fight to Christianity, insisting that it must be made to confess its alliance with Marxism, Zizek gives the impression that there is more than an external threat here–not simply a political challenge but an epistemological problem. It could certainly be argued that this anxiety is already latent in Weber’s assumption of theoretical distance, the insistence on containing religion within a framework of historical necessity. Nearly a century after Weber, religion has demonstrated an unexpected staying power, and the position of distance collapses. The question that haunts the background is the same.

 

In order to function as an assumption, the question itself has to stay in the background. If made visible, it might read thus: How can secular thought tolerate the idea that religions continue to exist at all? More specifically, how can secular thought approach those forms of faith that make their political presence felt while subjugating the concerns of history to those of eternity (i.e., “fundamentalists”)? Once asked, the question smacks of the “immodest demands of transcendental narcissism” that William Connolly has ascribed to secular thought (8), a charge that would seem to require retrenchment of its claims to cultural and epistemological ascendancy. But in this book, the latest and boldest in a tradition of such immodesty, the shape of the answer still conceals its question.³ Clearly, the persistence of religion as a political and cultural force contradicts secular assumptions. But the self/other dichotomy created by the image of the “fundamentalist freak” places the blame for this contradiction on fundamentalists. The frequently declared “return” of religion, despite what secular thought knows to be true of its continuing existence, becomes the very evidence that return is unthinkable. In the tone of Zizek we might say that the fantasy of fundamentalism works like this: We all know that religion, because it is in decline, is illegitimate at best and potentially monstrous; therefore, if it is discovered that religion is not in decline at all and is in fact not only a living element of culture but a political and intellectual force as well, this proves beyond a shadow of a doubt just how monstrous it is!

 

Given the circular nature of such assumptions about fundamentalism, it is not surprising that Zizek does little to analyze it as such. After the preface, he largely ignores religion for several chapters, turning instead to the issue that has always been central to his thought: the relationship between psychoanalytic conceptions of the subject and Marxist conceptions of ideology and politics. One of the central claims Zizek makes about subjectivity, stated here in a vocabulary less explicitly Lacanian than he has used in the past, is that “the paradox of the subject is that it exists only through its own radical impossibility, through a ‘bone in the throat’ that forever prevents it (the subject) from achieving its full ontological identity” (28). As always, such formulations are surrounded by examples (though again, this is not the best word for them) from the realm of culture and especially popular culture. There is a discussion of the crucial place of trash or excrement in postmodern art, an analysis of Coke as the ultimate example of surplus enjoyment, and a reading of the place of simulation in the constitution of sexual relationships in My Best Friend’s Wedding. In addition to this typical procedure, however, there is a reconsideration of the whole question of “radical impossibility” in light of current problems in Marxist thought. In this book even more than in his previous work, it is clear that for Zizek psychoanalysis is not merely a way to upgrade Marxism by making it more sensitive to questions of culture and subjectivity. A psychoanalytically informed Marxism seems to Zizek the best hope for a systematic critique of Marxism’s weaknesses and failures in the context of post-Soviet Europe.

 

The failure of Communism, Zizek insists, was not the result of some defeat from without by the forces of capitalism. Instead, Communism was already “a fantasy inherent to capitalism itself” (18). If capitalism struggles with the contradictions created by surplus value and finds itself plunged again and again into crisis, then Communism is the fantasy that such crises could be abolished forever while the productive drive of capitalism is retained. In other words, Communism is a fantasy that the “radical impossibility” of the capitalist economy could be overcome without altering the structures of desire and enjoyment it produces. Zizek asserts not only that the progressive/utopian idea of pushing capitalism toward some final stage into Communism is a trap, but also that there is no hope of some return to pre-modern conditions which would do away with capitalist machinery and economics (as Tyler Durden aspires to do in Fight Club, to mention a film that will no doubt find its way into Zizek’s work in the very near future). Marxism must continue its work stripped of all its fantasies about a past before the advent of Capital or about a future that awaits it:

 

The task of today’s thought is thus double: on the one hand, how to repeat the Marxist “critique of political economy” without the utopian-ideological notion of Communism as its inherent standard; on the other, how to imagine actually breaking out of the capitalist horizon without falling into the trap of returning to the eminently premodern notion of a balanced, (self)-restrained society. (19-20)

 

Needless to say, this double task challenges Marxist theory far more than the business of critiquing artifacts of popular culture. Having implicated Marxism in capitalism’s “radical impossibility” in the fullest possible way, Zizek then attempts to work toward a new means of surpassing that impossibility. It is at this point that religion reappears, this time in the role of ally.

 

Zizek’s key move is a transmutation of the problem of “radical impossibility” that leads back into the realm of theology. The double bind of Marxist theory, he asserts, has much in common with the paradox of the law in Christianity and Judaism. The problem of surpassing the fantasy of Communism without falling into fantasies of historical regression is seen to parallel the problem of how, finally, to settle the law’s demands. This second double bind is expressed thus:

 

The “repressed” of Jewish monotheism is not the wealth of pagan sacred orgies and deities but the disavowed excessive nature of its own fundamental gestures: that is–to use the standard terms–the crime that founds the rule of the Law itself, the violent gesture that brings about a regime which retroactively makes this gesture itself illegal/criminal. (63)

 

The “violent gesture” Zizek discusses here is the killing of the lawgiver that Freud posits in Moses and Monotheism, but it is translated into “standard terms,” that is, into the terms of a Lacanian discourse that can comprehend the productive drives of capitalism on the one hand and the cycle of law and transgression on the other. Just as Marxism is denied both the fantasy of a return to a “premodern” economy and the hope of a utopian future for capitalism, so Judaism is cut off from pagan conditions where the regime of the law does not yet exist and from a future in which the demands of the law could be met once and for all. Zizek’s leap from ideology to theology is a large one, but it is evidently made in the most serious way. The paradox that structures the Judeo-Christian economy is posited as a kind of spiritual proto-capitalism, giving explicit form to Zizek’s initial claim of a “direct lineage from Christianity to Marxism.”

 

It is clear that Zizek does not think Christianity in any of its institutional forms provides the solution to Marxism’s dilemma. However, he still finds in Christian theology formulations that can point the way. The essence of the “authentic Christian legacy” is found in another passage from Paul, his analysis of the relationship between law and transgression in Romans 7. Paul’s observation that without law there is no knowledge of sin becomes an exploration of Christianity as a move to end the cycle of law and transgression. Far from simply attempting to fill up the structure of Judaic law through messianic redemption, Christianity seeks to move beyond the structure altogether. Zizek asks:

 

What if the Christian wager is not Redemption in the sense of the possibility for the domain of the universal Law retroactively to “sublate”–integrate, pacify, erase–its traumatic origins, but something radically different, the cut into the Gordian knot of the vicious cycle of Law and its founding transgression? (100)

 

What enables this cut is agape, which “simultaneously avoids narcissistic regression and remains outside the confines of the Law” (112-13). If all this sounds familiar, it is because it makes Christianity bear such a strong resemblance to a psychoanalytic model of self-transformation. Zizek even goes so far as to claim that “while it is easy to enjoy acting in a egoistic way against one’s duty, it is, perhaps, only as the result of psychoanalytic treatment that one can acquire the capacity to enjoy doing one’s duty” (141).⁴

 

If we take Zizek’s claims simply as a reading of certain key moments in the writings of Paul, it is difficult to dispute the plausibility of the resemblance between psychoanalytic treatment and Christian conversion.⁵ But it is difficult to avoid the thought that there is a pattern of fetishism at work in a theoretical position that enthusiastically embraces those elements of Christianity which match psychoanalytic theory while rejecting what cannot be subsumed with corresponding zeal. Do we not have here an example of the “double attitude” Freud discusses, which simultaneously venerates and denigrates the fetish? Are not Zizek’s defense of the “subversive core of Christianity” (119) and his hostility for “fundamentalist freaks” two aspects of the same construction? Here we see how the collapse of Weber’s theoretical distance brings religion into play on both sides of the “barrier”; religion is at once a source of authorization and an uncanny threat. At the same time that it provokes the most extreme ideological hostility, religion’s traumatic status is the impetus for a struggle over its “legacy,” the core value that is the ostensible prize to be won from “fundamentalism.”

 

Zizek’s way of treating religion in general and Christianity in particular suggests that before we secular critics declare ourselves fit to pass judgment on the nature of the “authentic Christian legacy,” we have much to do in the way of understanding the role played by religion in secular fantasy. In The Fragile Absolute, religion is made the basis for a solution to a dilemma in Marxist thought, providing both an enemy to oppose from without and a way to restructure difficulties from within. The question for secular theory at present is how to avoid this procedure of deploying religion in the interest of this or that project. If many of Zizek’s moves are examples of what we should avoid, his concepts of subjectivity nevertheless suggest the direction we might go from here. Agape, he argues, gives us a way to “liberate [ourselves] from the grip of existing social reality” by “renounc[ing] the transgressive fantasmic supplement that attaches us to it” (149). This renunciation must take the form of “the radical gesture of ‘striking at oneself'” (150), of aiming directly at the object of desire that grounds subjective and ideological stability. This gesture is illustrated, not surprisingly, by popular texts: The Shawshank Redemption, Beloved, Medea, and others. The line of thought I have been suggesting is meant to serve as another illustration, one that hits closer to home. The way in which Zizek’s argument is overtaken by the fetish of fundamentalism (and its complement, the “subversive core”) suggests that at the moment secular discourse needs to “strike at itself,” to make the secular and not religion the primary object of its critique.

 

As a beginning, it seems worthwhile to get to work on a redefinition of the word “secular,” which needs to be understood (and has been used here, I hope) as marking a certain subjective stance with its own complex psychic life and not simply a set of pre-given discursive structures. At the same time, the secular will have to be more rigorously critiqued as an ideology which gives a place for that subjectivity. Such a redefinition will be greatly helped by the work of Slavoj Zizek. If his use of “fundamentalism” is cautionary, his understanding of ideological subjectivity gives us a way forward. Whatever “forward” means, it will involve neither a renewal of hostilities with this or that form of religion on the basis of historical presumption nor a “return,” repentant or otherwise, to a theological source of authorization. The history of such hostilities and returns should now become the focus. In the realm of critical theory, The Fragile Absolute is the latest chapter in that history. Caught between a vision of “the tears of agape” on the one hand and a fear of “fundamentalist freaks” on the other, it stops short of a recognition of its own secular ideology.

 

Notes

 

1. Thanks to Larry Scanlon for a timely word on Pauline scholarship.

 

2. The majority of this review was completed before September 11 and I thought it inadvisable to attempt a revision which would address recent events at length. Suffice it to say that official and unofficial responses alike have largely conformed to the generic parameters I describe for “fundamentalism” as a discourse. We have repeatedly heard the notion that fundamentalism is beyond the reach of analysis, that it falls into some category of absolute evil which renders it unworthy of discursive engagement (and eminently worthy of hostility). Even some responses which attempt to challenge this notion nonetheless end up reiterating it. Take for example the parallels many have made between Osama bin Laden and Jerry Falwell. If the impetus of the parallel is to upset racist and nationalist notions about fundamentalism, the end result is to establish a more unilateral prejudice which blocks an understanding of fundamentalism as a discourse (and does little to get at the roots of racism or nationalism either).

 

3. I am thinking of Louis Althusser’s discussion of Marx in the opening chapter of Reading “Capital.” Althusser insists that Marx’s achievement lies not in his providing more accurate answers to the questions posed by classical economics but rather in his ability to perceive the real nature of its questions. So here, the point is not to differ with Zizek concerning what ought to be done with the Christian legacy nor suggest a different response to the “return” of religion. Rather than attempting to answer such questions, the unexpressed intention of the questions themselves must be examined.

 

4. This kind of enjoyment would seem also to be the subject of Blue and particularly of its conclusion. The music playing in the background as Julie is “reconciled with the universe” is a piece written by the heroine to celebrate the formation of the EEC. Throughout the movie she has disavowed authorship of the piece, but at the last she decides to claim it as her own and complete it. What strikes a chord with Zizek’s view of agape is that Julie does not act against her duty, as it were, and refuse to complete a work officially intended to commemorate a new era of capitalism in Europe. Instead, she actively and passionately embraces the work, though in such a way as to give it a more particular and more radical meaning in relation to her life. Such an intensely private political vision raises questions about the value of agape other than those I discuss here.

 

5. Though my concern with Zizek’s view of Christianity is the way it functions as a secular ideology, it is at least worth mentioning that his “Christian” view of Paul has related problems as well. By stressing the distinction between Judaism and Christianity in a way that re-canonizes Paul as a Christian, Zizek makes a highly contestable theological claim, even if his intentions are only to reclaim Paul for Lacan, Freud, and Marx.

Works Cited

 

• Althuser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading “Capital.” Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Random House, 1970.
• Connolly, William. Why I Am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999.
• Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” Trans. Joan Riviere. Sexuality and the Psychology of Love. Ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963.
• Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons. New York: Routledge, 1992.