Zizek’s Second Coming

Char Roone Miller

Department of Public and International Affairs
George Mason University
cmillerd@gmu.edu

 

Review of: Slavoj Zizek, On Belief. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

 

“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.

 

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).

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.