Slavoj Zizek: Hegel - Chesterton: German Idealism and Christianity

According to a commonplace, Judaism (and Islam) is a "pure" monotheism, while Christianity, with its Trinity, is a compromise with polytheism; Hegel even designates Islam as THE "religion of sublimity" at its purest, as the universalization of the Jewish monotheism:

In Mohammedanism the limited principle of the Jews is expanded into universality and thereby overcome. Here, God is no longer, as with the Asiatics, contemplated as existent in immediately sensuous mode but is apprehended as the one infinite sublime Power beyond all the multiplicity of the world. Mohammedanism is, therefore, in the strictest sense of the world, the religion of sublimity.1

This, perhaps, explains why there is so much anti-Semitism in Islam: because of the extreme proximity of the two religions. According to Hegelese, in Judaism, Islam encounters ITSELF in its "oppositional determination," in the mode of particularity. Against this, one should argue that it is Judaism which is an "abstract negation" of polytheism and, as such, still haunted by it (Jehovah - plural; do not celebrate other gods IN FRONT OF ME; etc.), while Christianity is the only TRUE monotheism, since it includes self-differentiation into the One - its lesson is that, in order to have truly One, you need THREE. Here Hegel's logic of triads gets stuck into a deadlock: the triad that offers itself is that of Judaism - Christianity - Islam: first the immediate/abstract monotheism which, as the price to be paid for its immediate character, has to be embodied in a particular ethnic group (which is why Jews renounce all proselytism); then Christianity; then Islam, the only TRUE universal monotheism. What would be an alternative here?

Two features which cannot but appear opposed characterize the modern subject as it was conceptualized by German Idealism: (1) subject is the power of "spontaneous" (i.e., autonomous, starting-in-itself, irreducible to preceding causality) synthetic activity, the force of unification, of bringing together, linking, the manifold of sensual data we are bombarded with into a unified representations of objects; (2) subject is the power of negativity, of introducing a gap/cut into the given-immediate substantial unity, the power of differentiating, of "abstracting," of tearing apart and treating as self-standing what in reality is part of an organic unity. In order truly to understand German Idealism, it is crucial to think of these two features not only together (as the two aspects of one and the same activity - like claiming that the subject first tears apart natural unity and then brings these membra disjecta together into a new, his own ("subjective"), unity), but as stricto sensu identical: the very synthetic activity introduces a gap/difference into substantial reality, and/or the very differentiation consists in imposing a unity. How, exactly, are we to understand this? The subject's spontaneity emerges as a disturbing CUT into the substantial reality, since the unity that the transcendental synthesis imposes onto the natural manifold is precisely what this word means in everyday use, not in Kant: "synthetic," artificial, "unnatural." To evoke a common political experience: all great unifiers started with a divisive gesture - de Gaulle unified the Frenchmen by way of introducing an irreconciliable difference between those who wanted peace with Germany and those who did not recognize capitulation and wanted to go on fighting.

And the same goes for Christianity: we are not FIRST separated from God and THEN miraculously united with him; the point of Christianity is that the very separation unites us - it is in this separation that we are "like God," like Christ on the cross, i.e., the separation of us from God is transposed into God himself.

And the same goes for ethics: a radical act of Good HAS to appear first as "evil," as disturbing the substantial stability of traditional mores.

This is why we find in Christianity opposed features attributed to Christ: he brings peace, love, etc.; AND he brings sword, not peace, he wants to turn son against father, brother against brother... Again, this is ONE AND THE SAME gesture, not a logic of "first divide in order then to unite." And, again, it is crucial not to confuse this "identity of the opposite" with the standard pagan motif of a divinity who has two faces, a loving one and a destructive one - we are talking about one and the same face. But, yet again, this does not mean that "the difference is only in us, not in God, who dwells in his blessed Beyond" (as in the old simile of our reality as a painting: if we look at it from too close a point, we see only blurred stains, but from a proper distance, we see the global harmony) - or, rather, it IS like that, but not as external to God-in-Himself: this shift is inherent to God. The dialectic of appearance holds here also: appearing is not external to God, God also is only as deep as he appears, His depth has to appear as depth, and it is this appearing that introduces a gap/cut: God has to appear "as such" in the domain of appearance itself, tearing it apart - it is NOTHING BUT this appearing.

There are (not too numerous, but numerous enough to be considered systematic) passages in Hegel which explicitly belie the notion of the "end of history," demonstrating that he in no way thought that, at his historical moment, history came to an end. At the very end of his entire "system," in the conclusion of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he tersely states that this is, for the time being, the state of knowledge: Dies ist nun der Standpunkt der jetzigen Zeit, und die Reihe der geistigen Gestaltungen ist fuer jetzt damit geschlossen. 2 In the Introduction to The Philosophy of World History, he concludes that "America is therefore the country of the future, and its world-historical importance has yet to be revealed in the ages that lie ahead," 3 and he makes a similar statement on Russia: both are "immature" states, state which have not yet reached the full actualization of their historical form. Even in his much-maligned philosophy of nature, he concedes his own historically conditioned limitation: "We must be content with what we can, in fact, comprehend at present. There is plenty that cannot be comprehended yet." 4 In all these cases, it is that, "for a moment, /Hegel/ can take an external point of view with respect to the (universally comprehensive) story he is telling and announce that at some later stage a more articulate (universally comprehensive) story will be available." 5 How, from what position, can he do it? Where does this excess/remainder of historicist common sense come from, which relativizes the highest speculative insights? It is clear that there is no space for it WITHIN the Hegelian philosophical narrative.

Is then THIS the task of a proper "materialist reversal of Hegel": to introduce this self-relativization INTO the "system" itself? To recognize traces which, for us today, REMAIN unreadable traces; to recognize the irreducible parallax gap of multiple narrative (of those in power, of those oppressed...) which cannot be brought together, etc.? What if, however, this conclusion, seductive as it appears in its prima facie convincing character, proceeds all too fast? What if there is no external opposition between the "eternal" System of Knowing and its historicist (self-)relativization? What if this (self-)relativization does not come from outside, but is inscribed into the very heart of the System? The true "non-All" is thus not to be sought in a renunciation to systematicity that pertains to the project of "negative dialectics," in the assertion of finitude, dispersion, contingency, hybridity, multitude, etc., but in the absence of any external limitation that would allow us to construct and/or validate elements with regard to an external measure. Read in this way, the infamous "closure of the Hegelian system" is strictly correlative to (the obverse of) its thorough (self-)relativization: the "closure" of the System does NOT mean that there is nothing outside the System (the naïve notion of Hegel as the individual who claimed to achieve "absolute knowledge of everything"); it means that we are forever unable to "reflexivize" this Outside, to inscribe it within the Inside, even in the purely negative (and deceptively modest, self-depreciating) mode of the awareness that reality is an absolute Otherness which forever eludes conceptual grasp.

This is why all those who try to demonstrate some deeper affinity between Heidegger and Oriental thought, mostly Buddhism, miss the point: when Heidegger speaks about the "appropriating event /Ereignis/," he thereby introduces a dimension which, precisely, is missing in Buddhism, that of the fundamental historicity of Being. Although the (wrongly) so-called "Buddhist ontology" desubstantializes reality into a pure flow of singular events, what it cannot think is the "eventuality" of the Void of Being itself. To put it in yet another way, the goal of Buddhism is to enable a man to achieve Enlightenment through "traversing" the illusion of the Self and rejoining the Void - what is unthinkable within this space is Heidegger's notion of the human being as Da-Sein, as the "being-there" of the Being itself, as the site of the event-arrival of Being, so that it is Being itself that "needs" Dasein - with the disappearance of Dasein, there is also no Being, no place where Being can, precisely, take place. Can one imagine a Buddhist claiming that the Void /sunyata/ itself needs humans as the site of its arrival? One can, but in a conditional way which totally differs from Heidegger's: in the sense that, of all sentient beings, only humans are able to achieve Enlightenment and thus break the circle of suffering. Perhaps the clearest indication of the gap that separates Christianity from Buddhism is the difference in their respective triads. That is to say, in its history, each of them divided itself into three main strands; in the case of Christianity, it is, of course, the triad of Orthodoxy-Catholicism-Protestantism, which neatly fits the logic of Universal-Particular-Individual. In the case of Buddhism, on the contrary, we get a case of what, in Hegel, occurs as the "downward synthesis," in which the third term, whose function is to mediate between the opposition of the first two, does it in a disappointing-regressive way (say, in Hegel's Phenomenology, the whole dialectic of observing Reason culminates in the ridiculous figure of phrenology). The main split of Buddhism is the one between Hinayana ("the small wheel") and Mahayana ("the great wheel"). The first one is elitist and demanding, trying to maintain the fidelity to Buddha's teaching, focusing on the individual's effort to get rid of the illusion of the Self and attain the Enlightenment. The second one, which arose through the split from the first one, subtly shifts the accent onto compassion with others: its central figure is the Bodhisattva, the individual who, after achieving Enlightenment, decides, out of compassion, to return to the world of material illusions in order to help others to achieve Enlightenment, i.e., to work for the end of suffering of all sentient beings. The split is here irreducible: working for one's own Enlightenment reasserts the centrality of the Self in the very striving for its overcoming, while the "great wheel" way out of this predicament just repeats the deadlock in a displaced way: egotism is overcome, but the price is that universal Enlightenment itself turns into an object of the instrumental activity of the Self. So how to bring these two orientations together? The third big school, Vajrayana, which predominates in Tibet and Mongolia, is clearly regressive, a reinscription of Buddhism into traditional ritualistic and magic practices: the opposition between Self and others is overcome, but through its "reification" in ritualized practices which are indifferent to this distinction. It is an interesting fact of historical dialectic that Buddhism which, originally, dispensed with all institutional ritual and focused solely on the individual's enlightenment and end of suffering, irrespective of all dogmatic and institutional frames, ended up as clinging to the most mechanical and firmly entrenched institutional hierarchic frame...

But the point here is not to make fun of the "superstitious" features of the Tibetan Buddhism, but to become aware of how this total externalization DOES THE WORK, "delivers the goods": is the relying on a prayer-wheel or, more generally, on the efficiency of the ritual not also a way to achieve the "mindlessness," to empty one's mind and repose in piece?

G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday tells the story of Gabriel Syme, a young Englishmen who makes the archetypal Chestertonian discovery of how order is the greatest miracle and orthodoxy the greatest of all rebellions. The focal figure of the novel is not Syme himself, but a mysterious chief of a super-secret Scotland Yard department who is convinced that "a purely intellectual conspiracy would soon threaten the very existence of civilization":

He is certain that the scientific and artistic worlds are silently bound in a crusade against the Family and the State. He has, therefore, formed a special corps of policemen, policemen who are also philosophers. It is their business to watch the beginnings of this conspiracy, not merely in a criminal but in a controversial sense. /.../ The work of the philosophical policeman /.../ is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. 6

As cultural conservatives would have put it today, deconstructionist philosophers are much more dangerous than actual terrorists.

We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's. /.../ The common criminal is a bad man, but at least he is, as it were, a conditional good man. He says that if only a certain obstacle be removed - say a wealthy uncle - he is then prepared to accept the universe and to praise God. He is a reformer, but not an anarchist. He wishes to cleanse the edifice, but not to destroy it. But the evil philosopher is not trying to alter things, but to annihilate them. 7

This provocative analysis demonstrates the limitation of Chesterton, his not being Hegelian enough: what he doesn't get is that universal(ized) crime is no longer a crime - it sublates (negates/overcomes) itself as crime and turns from transgression into a new order. He is right to claim that, compared to the "entirely lawless" philosopher, burglars, bigamists, murderers even, are essentially moral: a thief is a "conditionally good man," he doesn't deny property AS SUCH, he just wants more of it for himself and is then quite ready to respect it. However, the conclusion to be drawn from this is that CRIME IS AS SUCH "ESSENTIALLY MORAL," that it wants just a particular illegal reordering of the global moral order which should remain. And, in a truly Hegelian spirit, one should bring this proposition (of the "essential morality" of the crime) to its immanent reversal: not only is crime "essentially moral" (in Hegelese: an inherent moment of the deployment of the inner antagonisms and "contradictions" of the very notion of moral order, not something that disturbs moral order from outside, as an accidental intrusion); but morality itself is essentially criminal - again, not only in the sense that the universal moral order necessary "negates itself" in particular crimes, but, more radically, in the sense that the way morality (in the case of theft, property) asserts itself is already in itself a crime - "property IS theft," as they used to say in the 19th century. That is to say, one should pass from theft as a particular criminal violation of the universal form of property to this form itself as a criminal violation: what Chesterton fails to perceive is that the "universalized crime" that he projects into "lawless modern philosophy" and its political equivalent, the "anarchist" movement that aims at destroying the totality of civilized life, ALREADY EXISTS IN THE GUISE OF THE EXISTING RULE OF LAW, so that the antagonism between Law and crime reveals itself to be inherent to crime, the antagonism between universal and particular crime. - And our thesis is that this limitation is not constrained to social problematic, but that it affects also Chesterton's global theological vision, in two forms: on the one hand, it prevents him from grasping all the consequences of the Christian act of love which "sublates" the entire domain of Law and its criminal transgression; on the other hand, he is more consequent in his theological ratiocinations than in his social vision: in his theology, he DOES explicitly posit the identity between Law and universalized/absolute crime - therein resides the very final twist of Thursday, in which "Sunday," the arch-criminal, anarchist's all-powerful leader, is revealed as the person as the mysterious chief of the super-secret police unit who mobilizes Syme into the fight against anarchists (i.e., HIMSELF). So let us proceed with our brief description of the novel and look at how, in a scene worthy of the Mission Impossible, Syme is recruited by this mysterious chief reduced to a voice in darkness, to become one of these "philosophical policemen":

Almost before he knew what he was doing, he had been passed through the hands of about four intermediate officials, and was suddenly shown into a room, the abrupt blackness of which startled him like a blaze of light. It was not the ordinary darkness, in which forms can be faintly traced; it was like going suddenly stone-blind.
'Are you the new recruit?' asked a heavy voice.
And in some strange way, though there was not the shadow of a shape in the gloom, Syme knew two things: first, that it came from a man of massive stature; and second, that the man had his back to him.
'Are you the new recruit?' said the invisible chief, who seemed to have heard all about it. 'All right. You are engaged.'
Syme, quite swept off his feet, made a feeble fight against this irrevocable phrase.
'I really have no experience,' he began.
'No one has any experience,' said the other, 'of the Battle of Armageddon.' 'But I am really unfit'
'You are willing, that is enough,' said the unknown.
'Well, really,' said Syme, 'I don't know any profession of which mere willingness is the final test.'
'I do,' said the other - 'martyrs. I am condemning you to death. Good day.' 8

Syme's first duty is to penetrate the seven members' "Central Anarchist Council," the ruling body of a secret super-powerful organization bent to destroy our civilization. In order to preserve their secrecy, members are known to each other only by a name of the week; through some deft manipulation, Syme gets elected as "Thursday." At his first Council's reunion, he meets "Sunday," the larger-than-life president of the Central Anarchist Council, a big man of incredible authority, mocking irony and jovial ruthlessness. In the ensuing series of adventures, Syme discovers that all other five regular members of the council are also secret agents, members of the same secret unit as himself, hired by the same unseen chief whose voice they've heard; so they join their forces and, finally, at a lavish masked ball, confront Sunday. Here, the novel passes from mystery to metaphysical comedy: we discover two surprising things. First, that Sunday, president of the Anarchist Council, is the same person as the mysterious never seen chief who hired Syme (and other elite detectives) to fight the anarchists; second, that he is none other than God Himself. These discoveries, of course, trigger a series of perplexed reflections in Syme and other agents. Syme's first reflection concerns the strange duality he noticed when he first met Sunday: seen from the back, he appears brute and evil, while, seen from the front, face to face, he appears beautiful and good. So how are we to read this twosome nature of God, this unfathomable unity of Good and Evil in Him? Can one explain the bad side as just conditioned by our partial, limited, view, or - a horrible theological vision - is the back really His face, "an awful, eyeless face staring at me," whose deceptive mask is the good jovial face?

When I first saw Sunday /.../ I only saw his back; and when I saw his back, I knew he was the worst man in the world. His neck and shoulders were brutal, like those of some apish god. His head had a stoop that was hardly human, like the stoop of an ox. In fact, I had at once the revolting fancy that this was not a man at all, but a beast dressed up in men's clothes. /.../ And then the queer thing happened. I had seen his back from the street, as he sat in the balcony. Then I entered the hotel, and coming round the other side of him, saw his face in the sunlight. His face frightened me, as it did everyone; but not because it was brutal, not because it was evil. On the contrary, it frightened me because it was so beautiful, because it was so good. /.../ When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble face is but a mask. When I see the face but for an instant, I know the back is only a jest. Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be explained. / I was suddenly possessed with the idea that the blind, blank back of his head really was his face -- an awful, eyeless face staring at me! And I fancied that the figure running in front of me was really a figure running backwards, and dancing as he ran. 9

If, however, the first, more comforting, version is true, then "we have only known the back of the world": "We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front" 10

However, things get even more complicated: God's essential goodness itself is held against him. When, asked who he really is, Sunday answers that he is the God of Sabbath, of peace, one of the enraged detectives reproaches him that "it is exactly that that I cannot forgive you. I know you are contentment, optimism, what do they call the thing, an ultimate reconciliation. Well, I am not reconciled. If you were the man in the dark room, why were you also Sunday, an offense to the sunlight? If you were from the first our father and our friend, why were you also our greatest enemy? We wept, we fled in terror; the iron entered into our souls -- and you are the peace of God! Oh, I can forgive God His anger, though it destroyed nations; but I cannot forgive Him His peace." 11

As another detective notices in a terse English style remark: "It seems so silly that you should have been on both sides and fought yourself." 12 If there ever was British Hegelianism, this is it - a literal transposition of Hegel's key thesis that, in fighting the alienated substance, the subject fights his own essence. The novel's hero, Syme, finally springs to his feet and, with mad excitement, spells out the mystery:

I see everything, everything that there is. Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, 'You lie!' No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, 'We also have suffered.' 13

This, then, is the formula provided: "So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist." So that Law is the greatest transgression, the defender of the Law the greatest rebel. However, where is the limit of this dialectic? DOES IT HOLD ALSO FOR GOD HIMSELF? Is He, the embodiment of cosmic order and harmony, ALSO the ultimate rebel, or is He a benign authority observing from a peaceful Above with bemused wisdom the follies of mortal men struggling each other? Here is the reply of God when Syme turns to him and asks him: "Have you ever suffered?"

As /Syme/ gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, 'Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?' 14

This final revelation - that God Himself suffers even more than us, mortals, brings us to the fundamental insight of Orthodoxy, Chesterton's theological masterpiece (which belongs to the same period: he published it a year later than Thursday), not only the insight into how orthodoxy is the greatest transgression, the most rebellious and adventurous thing, but a much darker insight into the central mystery of Christianity:

When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist. 15

This is why Christianty is »terribly revolutionary. That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have His back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king.« 16 Chesterton is fully aware that we are thereby approaching "a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss /.../ a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt." 17 In the standard form of atheism, God dies for men who stop believing in Him; in Christianity, God dies for himself. In his "Father, why have you abandoned me?", Christ himself commits what is for a Christian the ultimate sin: he wavers in his Faith. This » matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss« is narratively presented as the identity of the mysterious Scotland Yard chief and the President of the anarchists in Thursday.

The attentive reader has already guessed that we do not have merely a duality, but a trinity of the features/faces of God: the whole point of the novel's final pages is that, to the opposition between the benevolent God of peace and cosmic harmony and the evil God of murderous rage, one should add a third figure, that of the suffering God. This is why Chesterton was right in dismissing Thursday as a basically pre-Christian book: the insight into the speculative identity of Good and Evil, the notion of God's two sides, peaceful harmony and destructive rage, i.e., the claim that, in fighting Evil, the good God is fighting himself (an internal struggle), is still the (highest) pagan insight. It is only the third feature, the suffering God, whose sudden emergence resolves this tension of God's two faces, that brings us to Christianity proper: what paganism cannot imagine is such a suffering God - what does one do when one suffers? One prays. No wonder that, in his "The Meaning of the Crusade," Chesterton quotes with approval the description he got from a child in Jerusalem on the Mount of Olive: "A child from one of the villages said to me, in broken English, that it was the place where God said his prayers. I for one could not ask for a finer or more defiant statement of all that separates the Christian from the Moslem or the Jew." If, in other religions, we pray to God, only in Christianity God himself prays.

This suffering, of course, brings us to the Book of Job, praised by Chesterton, in his wonderful small "Introduction to Book of Job," as "the most interesting of ancient books. We may almost say of the book of Job that it is the most interesting of modern books." What accounts for its "modernity" is the way in which The Book of Job strikes a dissonant cord in the Old Testament:

Everywhere else, then, the Old Testament positively rejoices in the obliteration of man in comparison with the divine purpose. The book of Job stands definitely alone because the book of Job definitely asks, 'But what is the purpose of God? Is it worth the sacrifice even of our miserable humanity? Of course, it is easy enough to wipe out our own paltry wills for the sake of a will that is grander and kinder. But is it grander and kinder? Let God use His tools; let God break His tools. But what is He doing, and what are they being broken for?' It is because of this question that we have to attack as a philosophical riddle the riddle of the book of Job.

However, the true surprise is that, at the end, the book of Job does not provide a satisfying answer to this riddle: "it does not end in a way that is conventionally satisfactory. Job is not told that his misfortunes were due to his sins or a part of any plan for his improvement."

"God comes in at the end, not to answer riddles, but to propound them." And the "great surprise" is that the book of Job "makes Job suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man."

This is why God has to rebuke his own defenders, the "mechanical and supercilious comforters of Job":

The mechanical optimist endeavors to justify the universe avowedly upon the ground that it is a rational and consecutive pattern. He points out that the fine thing about the world is that it can all be explained. That is the one point, if I may put it so, on which God, in return, is explicit to the point of violence. God says, in effect, that if there is one fine thing about the world, as far as men are concerned, it is that it cannot be explained. He insists on the inexplicableness of everything. 'Hath the rain a father? /.../ Out of whose womb came the ice?' (38:28f). He goes farther, and insists on the positive and palpable unreason of things; 'Hast thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is, and upon the wilderness wherein there is no man?' (38:26). God will make man see things, if it is only against the black background of nonentity. God will make Job see a startling universe if He can only do it by making Job see an idiotic universe. To startle man, God becomes for an instant a blasphemer; one might almost say that God becomes for an instant an atheist. He unrolls before Job a long panorama of created things, the horse, the eagle, the raven, the wild ass, the peacock, the ostrich, the crocodile. He so describes each of them that it sounds like a monster walking in the sun. The whole is a sort of psalm or rhapsody of the sense of wonder. The maker of all things is astonished at the things he has Himself made.

God performs here what Lacan calls a point de caption: he resolves the riddle by way of supplanting it by an even more radical riddle, by way of redoubling the riddle, by way of transposing the riddle from Job's mind into "the thing itself" - he himself comes to share Job's astonishment at the chaotic madness of the created universe.

Job puts forward a note of interrogation; God answers with a note of exclamation. Instead of proving to Job that it is an explicable world, He insists that it is a much stranger world than Job ever thought it was.

To answer the subject's interrogation with a note of exclamation: is this not the best succinct definition of what the analyst should do in a treatment? So, instead of providing answers from his total knowledge, God does a proper analytic intervention, adding a mere formal accent, a mark of articulation.

There is a stupid question here which should be raised: why does God not consider telling Job the truth - that it was all staged to test Job's faith, and that Job won and the Devil is defeated?

This is why, for Chesterton, the book of Job "saved /the Jews/ from an enormous collapse and decay":

Here in this book the question is really asked whether God invariably punishes vice with terrestrial punishment and rewards virtue with terrestrial prosperity. If the Jews had answered that question wrongly they might have lost all their later influence in human history. They might have sunk even down to the level of modern well-educated society. For when once people have begun to believe that prosperity is the reward of virtue, their next calamity is obvious. If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue. Men will leave off the heavy task of making good men successful. The will adopt the easier task of making successful men good.

Towards Thursday's end, just prior to the six detectives' final confrontation with Sunday, they all participate in a ghostly masked ball wearing costumes which do not conceal but display their true inner nature - it is no longer "If you want to show your true self, tear off the mask!", but, on the contrary, "If you want to show your true self, put on the /right/ mask!"

Although, for Chesterton, Hegel was the worst of modern nihilistic "German philosophers," the proximity of his theological paradoxes to the Hegelian dialectic cannot but strike the eye. Let us approach this proximity from the other (Hegel's) side, by way of confronting the core question of the Hegelian Christology: why the idea of Reconciliation between God and man (the fundamental content of Christianity) has to appear in a single individual, in the guise of an external, contingent, flesh-and-blood person (Christ, the man-god)? Hegel provides the most concise answer in his lectures on the philosophy of religion:

Cannot the subject bring about this reconciliation by itself, through its own efforts, its own activity - so that through its piety and devotion it makes its inner /life/ conform with the divine idea, and express this conformity through its deeds? And further, is this not within the capability /not merely/ of a single subject but of all people who genuinely wish to take up the divine law within themselves, so that heaven would exist on earth and the Spirit would be present in reality and dwell in its community? 18

Note the precision of Hegel here: his question is double. First, the individual's divinization, spiritual perfection; then, the collective actualization of the divine community as "heaven on earth," in the guise of a community which lives totally in accordance with the divine law. In other words, the hypothesis that Hegel entertains here is the standard "Marxist" one: why cannot we conceive a direct passage from In-itself to For-itself, from God as full Substance existing in itself, beyond human history, to the Holy Spirit as spiritual-virtual substance, as the substance that exists only insofar it is "kept alive" by the incessant activity of individuals? Why not such a direct "desalienation," by means of which individuals recognize the God qua transcendent substance as the "reified" result of their own activity?

So why not? Hegel's answer relies on the dialectic of positing and presupposing: if the subject were to be able to do it on its own, through its own agency, then it would have been something merely POSITED by it - however, positing is in itself always one-sided, relying on some presupposition: "The unity of subjectivity and objectivity - this divine unity - must be a presupposition for my positing." 19 And Christ as God-man is the externally presupposed Unity, Reconciliation... first immediate, then mediate, holy spirit. From Christ, Love as his Predicate, to LOVE ITSELF as subject, as Holy Spirit - "I am where two of you love each other..."

But even here it may appear that one can counter Hegel with Hegel himself: is not this circle of positing-presupposing the very circle of substance-subject, of the Holy Spirit as a spiritual substance kept alive, effectively existing, arriving at its actuality, only in the activity of living individuals? The status of the Hegelian spiritual substance is properly VIRTUAL: it exists only insofar as subjects ACT as if it exists. Its status is similar to that of an ideological cause like Communism or My Nation: it is the "spiritual substance" of the individuals who recognize themselves in it, the ground of their entire existence, the point of reference which provides the ultimate horizon of meaning to their lives, something for which these individuals are ready to give their lives, yet the only thing that "really exists" are these individuals and their activity, so this substance is actual only insofar as individuals "believe in it" and act accordingly. So, again, why can we not pass directly from spiritual Substance as presupposed (the naïve notion of Spirit or God as existing in itself, without regard to humanity) to its subjective mediation, to the awareness that its very presupposition is retroactively "posited" by the activity of individuals?

Here we reach Hegel's key insight: Reconciliation cannot be direct, it has FIRST to generate (appear in) a MONSTER - Hegel uses twice on the same page this unexpectedly strong word, "monstrosity," to designate the first figure of Reconciliation, the appearance of God in the finite flesh of a human individual: "This is the monstrous /das Ungeheure/ whose necessity we have seen." 20 The finite fragile human individual in "inappropriate" to stand for God, it is die Unangemessenheit ueberhaupt /"the inappropriateness in general, as such/" 21 - are we aware of the properly dialectical paradox of what Hegel claims here? The very attempt at reconciliation, in its first move, produces a monster, a grotesque "inappropriateness as such"? So, again, why this weird intrusion, why not a direct passage from the (Jewish) GAP between God and man to the (Christian) reconciliation, by a simple transformation of "God" from Beyond to the immanent Spirit of Community?

The first problem here is that, in a way, JEWS ALREADY DID THIS: if there ever was a religion of spiritual community, it is Judaism, this religion which doesn't say a lot about life after death, or even about the "inner" belief in God, but focuses on the prescribed way of life, of obeying the communal rules: God "is alive" in the community of believers. The Jewish God is thus both at the same time: a transcendent substantial One And the virtual One of spiritual substance. - So how is this Jewish community of believers different from the Christian one, from the Holy Spirit?

While observing Napoleon on a horse in the streets of Jena after the battle of 1807, Hegel remarked that it was as if he saw there the World Spirit riding a horse. The Christological implications of this remark are obvious: what happened in the case of Christ is that God himself, the creator of our entire universe, was walking out there as a common individual. This mystery of incarnation is discernible at different levels, up to the parent's speculative judgment apropos a child "Out there our love is walking!", which stands for the Hegelian reversal of determinate reflexion into reflexive determination - the same as with a king, when his subject sees him walking around: "Out there our state is walking." Marx's evocation of reflexive determination (in his famous footnote in Chapter 1 of Capital) also falls short here: individuals think they treat a person as a king because he is a king in himself, while, effectively, he is a king only because they treat him as one. However, the crucial point is that this "reification" of a social relation in a person cannot be dismissed as a simple "fetishist misperception"; what such a dismissal itself misses is something that, perhaps, could be designated as the "Hegelian performative": of course a king is "in himself" a miserable individual, of course he is a king only insofar as his subjects treat him like one; however, the point is that the "fetishist illusion" which sustains our veneration of a king has in itself a performative dimension - the very unity of our state, that which the king "embodies," actualizes itself only in the person of a king. Which is why it is not enough to insist on the need to avoid the "fetishist trap" and to distinguish between the contingent person of a king and what he stands for: what the king stands for only comes to be in his person, the same as with a couple's love which (at least within a certain traditional perspective) only becomes actual in their offspring.

Only one radical conclusion: the problem is not "how to overcome the split". The split stands for subjectivity: subjectivity is split, gap of negativity. THIS NEGATIVITY IS NOT A PROBLEM, BUT A SOLUTION, it IS already in itself DIVINE. Divine is not the abyssal all-encompassing Substance/Unity behind the multitude of appearances, divine is the negative power of tearing apart the organic unity...

So Christ's "death" is not overcome, but ELEVATED into Spirit's negativity.

We can also see the homology between this necessity of Christ as the immediate embodiment of the spiritual substance and the necessity of illusion on which, among others, Bourdieu insists in his critique of Levi-Strauss's explanation of potlatch: it is not enough just to claim that Christ is a reified-immediate materialization of the Holy Spirit, the true question is why does the Holy Spirit have to appear first in the immediate form of a singular human being.

Notes:

1 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1971, p. 44.
2 G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen ueber die Geschichte der Philosophie, Dritter Band, Leipzig: Verlag Phillip Reclam 1971, p. 628.
3 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1975, p. 170.
4 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1970, p. 62.
5 Ermanno Bencivenga, Hegel's Dialectical Logic, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000, p. 75.
6 G.K.Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1986, p. 44-45.
7 Chesterton, op.cit., p. 45-46.
8 Op.cit., p. 48-49.
9 Op.cit., p. 168-170.
10 Op.cit., p. 170.
11 Op.cit., p. 180.
12 Op. cit.
13 Op.cit., p. 182-183.
14 Op.cit., p. 183.
15 G.K.Chesterton, Orthodoxy, San Francisco: Ignatius Press 1995, p. 145.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 G.W.F. Hegel. Theologian of the Spirit, Peter C. Hodgson, editor, Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1997, p. 237. Since this translation of some chapters from Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of religion is unreliable and fragmentary, one should always check the German original.
19 Hegel, op.cit., p. 237.
20 Hegel, op.cit., p. 238-239.
21 G.W.F. Hegel, Werke 17, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag 1969, p. 272.

Hegel - Chesterton: German Idealism and Christianity - The Symptom 7 (Sping)

Slavoj Zizek: The Popes Failures

Pope John Paul II’s reaction to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is well known. Immediately after seeing it, he murmured, “It is as it was!”—a statement that was then quickly withdrawn by Vatican officials. A glimpse into the Pope’s spontaneous reaction was thus replaced by the “official,” neutral stance, corrected so as not to hurt anyone. This withdrawal, and its nod toward liberal sensibility, betrayed what was best in the late pope, his intractable ethical stance.

Today, in our era of over-sensitivity regarding “harassment” by the Other, it’s increasingly common to hear complaints about “ethical violence,” those ethical injunctions that “terrorize” us with their brutal impositions. In its place, these critics would prefer to see an “ethics without violence,” a sort of permanent (re)negotiation of ethical norms. It is here where the highest cultural critique unexpectedly meets the lowest pop psychology.

The example par excellence is John Gray, author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, who, in a series of “Oprah” shows, brought this stance to its extreme logical terminus. Since we ultimately “are” the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, Gray argues, the solution to our psychic deadlock resides in creatively “rewriting” the narratives of our past with a positive twist. What Gray has in mind is not only standard cognitive therapy—that is, changing negative “false beliefs” about oneself into a more positive attitude of the assurance that one is loved by others and capable of creative achievements. He advocates a more “radical,” pseudo-Freudian notion of regressing back to the scene of the primordial traumatic wound.

Gray accepts the psychoanalytic notion of an early childhood trauma that forever marks its subject’s further development, giving that development a pathological spin. He proposes that, after regressing to this primal traumatic scene and directly confronting it, the subject should, under the guidance of a therapist, “rewrite” that experience in a more “positive,” benign and productive narrative. For example, if the traumatic scene that persists in your unconscious, deforming and inhibiting your creative attitude, is that of your father shouting at you, “You are worthless! I hate you! Nothing good will ever come out of you!,” one should simply rewrite it into a scenario where a smiling, benevolent father encouragingly tells you, “You’re OK! I trust you fully!” To play this game to its end, in Freud’s famous case of “Wolfman”—whose primal, traumatic scene was witnessing his parents’ coitus a tergo—Gray’s ostensible solution would be for Wolfman to rewrite the scene, so that what he effectively saw was merely his parents lying in bed, his father reading a newspaper and mother a sentimental novel.

The problem is that such a satirical exaggeration is actually taking place. Today, many ethnic, sexual or racial minorities rewrite their past in a more positive, self-assertive vein, i.e. African Americans who claim that long before European modernity, ancient African empires already had highly developed science and technology. Along the same lines, one can imagine a rewriting of the Ten Commandments: Is some commandment too severe? Let us regress to the scene on Mt. Sinai and rewrite it! “Thou shalt not commit adultery—except if it is emotionally sincere and serves the goal of your profound self-realization.” Exemplary here is Donald Spoto’s The Hidden Jesus. In this New Age “liberal” reading of Christianity, we can read apropos of divorce:

Jesus clearly denounced divorce and remarriage. … But Jesus did not go further and say that marriages cannot be broken. … Nowhere else in his teaching is there any situation where he renders a person forever chained to the consequences of sin. His entire treatment of people was to liberate, not to legislate. … It is simply self-evident that in fact some marriages do break down, that commitments are abandoned, that promises are violated and love betrayed.

Sympathetic and liberal as these lines are, they involve the fatal confusion between emotional ups-and-downs and an unconditionally symbolic commitment that is supposed to hold precisely when it is no longer supported by direct emotions. “Thou shalt not divorce—except when your marriage ‘in fact’ breaks down, when it is experienced as a unbearable emotional burden that frustrates your full life.” In short, except when the prohibition to divorce would have regained its full meaning (since who would divorce when the marriage is still blossoming?).

This is how (although the modern topic of human rights is ultimately grounded in the Jewish notion of the love for one’s neighbor) we tend to establish today a negative link between the Decalogue (the traumatically imposed divine Commandments) and human rights. That is to say, within our post-political, liberal-permissive society, human rights have, ultimately, become the rights to disobey the Ten Commandments. “The right to privacy”—the right to adultery, done in secrecy, where no one has the right to probe. “The right to pursue happiness and private property”—the right to steal and exploit others. “Freedom of expression and freedom of the press”—the right to lie. “The right of free citizens to bear weapons”—the right to kill. And ultimately, “freedom of religious belief”—the right to worship false gods.

The greatness of John Paul II was that he personified the disavowal of the liberal, easy way out. Even those who respected the Pope’s moral stance usually accompanied their praise with the caveat that he nonetheless remained hopelessly old-fashioned, medieval even, by sticking to dogmas out of touch with the demands of modernity. How could someone today ignore contraception, divorce or abortion? How could the Pope deny the right to abortion even to a nun who got pregnant through rape (as he effectively did in the case of the raped nuns in Bosnia)? Isn’t it clear that, even when one is in principle against abortion, one should consent to a compromise in such an extreme case?

One can see why the Dalai Lama is a much more appropriate leader for our postmodern, permissive times. He presents us with a feel-good spiritualism without any specific obligations. Anyone, even the most decadent Hollywood star, can follow him while continuing their money-grabbing, promiscuous lifestyle. In stark contrast, the Pope reminded us that there is a price to pay for a proper ethical attitude. It was his very stubborn clinging to “old values,” his ignoring the “realistic” demands of our time, even when the arguments against him seemed “obvious” (as in the case of the raped nun), that made him an authentic ethical figure.

That said, however, was John Paul really up to the level of this task? Consider that the Catholic Church has its own “white mafia,” Opus Dei, a (half) secret organization that somehow embodies the pure Law beyond any positive legality. Opus Dei’s supreme rule is an unconditional obedience to the Pope and the ruthless determination to work for the Church, with all other rules being (potentially) suspended. As a rule, its members, whose task is to penetrate the top political and financial circles, keep secret or play down their Opus Dei identity. As such, they are effectively “opus dei”—the “work of God,” i.e., perversely imagining themselves as the direct instrument of divine will.

Let us also consider the abundant cases of sexual molestation of children by priests. These cases are so widespread, from Austria and Italy to Ireland and the United States, that one can effectively speak of an articulated “counterculture” within the Church that has its own set of hidden rules. And there is a connection between the pederast scandals and Opus Dei because the group works with the Church to intervene and hush them up.

The Church’s reaction to the sex scandals demonstrates the way it perceives its role: It insists that these cases, deplorable as they are, are the Church’s internal problem, and it displays great reluctance to collaborate with police in their investigations. Indeed, in a way, the Church is right. The molestation of children is the Church’s internal problem—that is to say, an inherent product of its institutional organization and of the libidinal economy on which that organization relies. Obviously, these scandals are not simply particular criminal cases concerning particular individuals who just happen to be priests. The problem is systemic.

Consequently, the answer to the Church’s reluctance should not only be that these are criminal cases and, if the Church does not fully cooperate in the investigations, it should be seen as an accomplice after the fact. Over and beyond this, the Church, as such, as an institution, should be investigated in regard to the way it systematically produces such crimes. This is also the reason why one cannot explain away the priests’ sexual scandals as the opponents of celibacy suggest—that they occur because the priests’ sexual urges do not find a legitimate outlet and thus explode in a pathological way. Allowing Catholic priests to get married would not solve the problem. We would not get priests doing their jobs without harassing young boys because it is the priesthood itself that generates pedophilia through its sexual apartheid (male exclusivity).

And it is here that the Pope failed. In spite of his public pronouncements of worry, he failed to confront the roots and consequences of the pedophilic scandals. Under his reign, Opus Dei got stronger than ever. The pope’s spokesman, Navarro Valls, is a member. He even elevated the group’s founder, Jose Maria Escriva de Balaguer (an open anti-Semite and proto-Fascist), into sainthood—an act that blatantly contradicts and thus cancels his apology to Jews for the centuries of Christianity’s crimes committed against them. This is why John Paul II was an ethical failure—proof that even a sincere, radical ethical stance can become a fake, empty pose if it does not take into account its own conditions and consequences.

Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a senior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, in Essen, Germany. He has also been a visiting professor at more than 10 universities around the world. Žižek is the author of many other books, including Living in the End Times, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, The Fragile Absolute and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? He lives in London.

An Interview with Slavoj Zizek "On Divine Self-Limitation and Revolutionary Love"

Joshua Delpech-Ramey, Journal of Philosophy and Scripture

JPS:  Of late, the writings of St. Paul have become for you, as well as for Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben, a touchstone for radical thought.  You seem to see in Paul's works  something of a revolutionary manual, and in the founding of the community of believers a supreme example of the structure and effect of an authentic revolutionary act.  For Badiou, Paul articulates a general structure of universality.  But how separable is Paul's gesture in founding Christianity from the particularities of Christianity itself?   How general are the lessons one can learn from Paul?   Can or should those lessons be separated out, as form from content, from their particularity as aspects of the history of Christianity, itself?   Or are the particularities of Christianity somehow, of the essence of this gesture?

SZ:  My problem with Badiou, although I admire his book very much, is that Badiou . . . allows for only four truth procedures:  science, art, politics, and love (and then philosophy is just the study of these genetic procedures . . . ).  The point is that his supreme example of a truth-procedure—event, and so on—its implicit model is a kind of religious interpellation.  So no wonder that the best example, it's religious!  But paradoxically there is no place for religion.  You know the irony is that the supreme example of the seminal structure of truth event that he tries to articulate, and it doesn't count as a truth-event.

So what he does is something similar to Heidegger—there is a long history to this.  As we know the early Heidegger started with the same reference, St. Paul.  He [Heidegger] I think used the term formales anzeigen, formal indication.  The idea being that, as Heidegger would have put it, religious experience is just an ontic experience, it doesn't really have this transcendental dignity, and so on, but you find there a certain formal structure which can be then generalized, abstracted from its particular context into a kind of transcendental a priori.  But still what is not answered, as you said, is that we cannot simply arrange this and say it's a simply empirical concept.  Why this structure?

The second point I want to make here is, I think the reason that Badiou does not deploy this, as I tried to develop in the long chapter on Badiou and St. Paul in The Ticklish Subject , the key question for me is negativity in the sense of death.  For him, in Badiou's reading of St. Paul, the death of Christ, as he puts it, has no inherent meaning whatsoever—it's just to prepare the site for the event.  All that matters is resurrection life.  This is connected with a very complex philosophical-theological topic . . . you may have noticed if you read Badiou, Badiou has some kind of natural, gut-feeling resistance toward the topic of death and finitude.  For him, death and finitude, animality and so on, being-towards-death, death-drive—he uses the term sometimes in a purely non-conceptual way, "death drive, decadence" as if we were reading some kind of naïve Marxist liberal optimist from the early 20^th century.  This is all somehow for me interconnected.  Although I am also taking St. Paul as a model, a formal structure which can then be applied to revolutionary emancipatory collectivities, and so on, nonetheless I try to ground it in a specific Christian content, which again for me focuses precisely on Christ's death, [his] death and resurrection.  I am trying even to identify the two.  The idea that resurrection follows death, the idea that these are two narrative events, this is at the narrative level of what Hegel would have called vorstellungen , representations.  Actually, the two of them are even united.  That is to say that Christ's death, in the Hegelian reading, is the disappearance of disappearance.  It is in itself already what becomes for itself the new community.

What interests me is how precisely to distinguish Christ's death from this old boring topic—and all the old materialist critics of Christianity like to point this out:  what's the big news, don't you have this sacrificial death of God in all pagan religions?   Ah ah!  You don't.  The structure is totally different if you read it closely:  already at the most superficial level, after Christ's death what you get is Holy Spirit, which is something totally different than in previous societies.  All this about Isis, and so on, this rather boring circular myth, where basically god dies . . . you know, it's like, people are disordered, things go bad, but then there is the phoenix, everything is good again—no wonder this version is so popular, like even in The Lion King, where you have a kind of  Hamlet-version where king dies, son redeems, there is a new king and so on . . . Christianity precisely is not this.

This brings us to two further topics.  Now in Badiou's reading of psychoanalysis, he totally dismisses death drive.  But the paradox for me, as I try to develop in my work, is that death drive is a very paradoxical notion if you read Freud closely.  Death drive is basically, I claim, the Freudian term for immortality.  Death drive has nothing to do, as Lacan points out, convincingly, with this so-called nirvana principle where everything wants to disappear, and so on.  If anything (and because of this I like to read Richard Wagner's operas where you have this), death drive is that which prevents you from dying.  Death drive is that which persists beyond life and death.  Again, it's precisely what, in my beloved Stephen King's horror/science fiction terminology he calls the "undead":  this terrifying insistence beneath death, which is why Freud links death drive to the compulsion to repeat.  You know, it can be dead, but it goes on.  This terrifying insistence of an undead object.

Point two:  This is the big lesson to be learned, with all my criticism (criticism is the vulgar word, my difference of horizon), from Heidegger.  The big breakthrough of Heidegger is to totally reconceptualize the notion of finitude.  Already we have this in the early Heidegger with special reference to Kant.  Already you see precisely how the other of finitude, the big stuff—infinity, eternity, and so on—is a category, modality, horizon of finitude.  This was, for Heidegger, Kant's big breakthrough:  transcendental as opposed to transcendent is a category of finitude. 

All this somehow gets lost, in Badiou.  [But] the whole category of "event" works only from the category of finitude.  There are events only in finite situations.  You can prove it only from his own position.  Only for a finite being do you have this infinite work, what he likes to describe, in Christian terms, this trinity of faith, hope, love.  Faith that the event did take place, hope in the final state (in Christianity universal redemption, in Marxism I don't know, communism at the end) and love as work, as what is between the two, fidelity to the event and so on.  But . . . when in his last work, Badiou tries to articulate the structure of totalitarian danger, he calls "forcing the event," which means simply to ontologize the event, as if the event were not an infinite process whose place you have to discern in reality, as if the event totally permits its irrealities.  But the gap between event and reality, that which is covered up by totalitarianism, is precisely the gap of finitude—so there is something missing at this level in Badiou.

JPS:  A fourth term for that triad, as it were, of faith, hope and love?

SZ:  Yes, yeah, maybe, but also . . . in these terms, I would say it:  what I do like in Badiou is his clear awareness that the authentic Christian notion of love is something basically very violent and unilateral, it's totally different for me from the pagan notion where love is this kind of universal balance, you love the whole universe, you say yes to everything—no!  Love—you find this in Christianity—is one-sided, unilateral.  Love means "I love you more than everything":  love is precisely what Buddhists would have called the origin of evil.  Love is a kind of radical imbalance.  Here I think you get (as I tried to put it in my Fragile Absolute) a very fine analysis of this logic of finitude already in the Bible, already in Paul, in Corinthians.  It's very mysterious, that part, that paragraph on love [I Corinthians 13].  The mystery is the following one.  He [Paul] oscillates basically  between two versions, and the key point I think is to read them together.   The first one is a kind of radical affirmation of love's priority, in the sense of "even if I got to know everything, and have all the power, without love I would be nothing, etc."  But then two paragraphs later, he says—as if since now we don't know everything—all that we have is love.  And I think that the two are to be read together.  This is the paradox of Christianity, for me, that it's not God sitting up there and was a good enough guy to come to us . . . what we have to think, in a way, is the self-limitation of divinity itself.  

The basic message is that I think there is a certain dimension of Christianity which for more complex reasons is missed, I think, by Badiou, because of his overall view that there is no place for finitude, as for example in his critique of Heidegger where he misses the point.  He even goes into this mode where being-toward-death is just the animal level of being threatened . . . although I don't identify Heidegger's being-toward-death with death drive, Badiou is also missing that, because he cannot elevate finitude to its transcendental a priori dignity.  He remains precisely, at a certain level, a pre-kantian metaphysician.   

JPS:  Next let's talk about this idea of the incarnation, as you read it in The Puppet and the Dwarf, as symbolizing an internal difference, a lack in God.  The other side of that speculative judgment is the way you read Christ, from the perspective of finitude.  Now for orthodox Christianity, Christ is the icon of God:  what can be known of God is seen in Christ.  Now for your materialist idiom, you want to say something like "Christ is the icon of humanity, or of what in humanity is not quite human"—is  that what is breaking through from the perspective of finitude?

SZ:  One thing I would like to specify is that nonetheless I violently reject this so-called "humanist" reading of Christianity, which says that simply, in a kind of Fuerbachian boring statement, that God is only the projection of various aspects of being human, and so on.  No, I think this "more in the human than humanity"—you have to take it very radically.  The basic message of religion, to put it in a nutshell, is that humanity cannot stand on its own, that you need an otherness, not a natural otherness like the earth or the all-embracing feminine . . . Here I may be approaching not so much gnosticism as certain not a little bit heretical twists, because I want to say not only that humanity only knows God through Christ but that only through Christ does God know himself.  We all know that this is a well-known gnostic, or not so much gnostic as a certain mystic tradition or heretical move, this idea that our knowledge of God is divine self-knowledge, and so on.

But this is also how I read Jewish iconoclasm.  I don't think Jewish iconoclasm is opposed to Christianity.  Those who claim Jews got it correctly, let's not conceive God in an anthropomorphic way, Christians screwed it up in a half-pagan way—no!  They don't get it.  The true lesson already of Jewish iconoclasm is against this gnostic fake mysticism.  The only terrain of the divine is contact with other humans.  The divine is not [there] in this gnostic way, you withdraw into some absolute knowledge.  Images of God [are not proscribed] because God is tout autre, beyond, and every image betrays him, but because the space of the divine is not up there, it's here, in human interactions, and I think this is perhaps only brought to a conclusion in Christianity.

But again I cannot emphasize enough, I am not playing the old game, "theology is just the alienated self-image of humanity" and so on.  The whole problem is precisely that humanity never coincides with itself.

JPS:  Does this have to do with why for you the true anti-type of Christ is not Adam, but Job.  Why is that, exactly?

SZ:  On the one hand, as we all know, this is one of the standard readings of Christianity, that Job's suffering in a way points towards Christ's suffering.

JPS:  But you also, in The Puppet and the Dwarf, propose the character of Job as the first great critic of ideology.  What is uncanny about Job however, is that unlike the modern liberal subject who considers herself as having the legal right to the criticism of the state, of religion, of any authority, etc., Job does not presume that he has the right to criticize God.  After God's "answer" to Job—an answer which takes the form of a kind of obscene slide-show of the history of God's power—Job remains silent.  How, then, can you claim that Job is the first critic of ideology?   How and in what sense are we to interpret Job's silence as critical?

SZ:  There is sympathy with God:  Job correctly reads this very strange text, this divine boasting:  "I created monsters, sea serpents, who are you?" [Job replies:] "I sympathize with you, I know that this is a show to conceal that you are impotent. . ."

Where I see this critical-ideological dimension is more in this—I would really like to write about these three or four guys who confront Job.  In these three or four guys you see a spontaneous categorization of different modes of ideology.  The first guy is a pretty brutal, simplistic ideologist.  He says God is God, you suffer because you must have done something wrong.  The other guys have more and more refined versions and so on.  But again, the shocking news for me is that when God appears, you remember he says "every word that Job says is true."  In a way Job doesn't even have to answer because God, in a way . . . 

JPS:  God answers for him?

SZ:  Yes, God says everything Job says is true and everything those four ideologists said is false.  So God clearly takes sides.  This is for me really the single maybe most radical theological breakthrough, especially if you read it with Rene Girard.  I don't always follow Girard but here I think he was right that what matters is this parallax as such, that is so uncanny.  It's not simply who is right:  in a way, nobody is right.  The point is not simply that God was wrong . . . 

I tend to agree with historicist critics of Christianity about this first scene with the devil.  Probably this was a remainder of some previous pagan tradition where you have something like this, a gentleman's conversation between God and devil, let's make a deal, and so on . . . but I wouldn't make too much out of that.  OK, they took it, OK!  Bricolage, it's how you write sacred books!  What interests me more is that you have two perspectives, and you cannot say this or that is the true one.  You cannot say simply Job was right, God was cruel, you cannot say it was just illusion, there is this undecided openness.  This is for me such a tremendous breakthrough.  Why?   It's not the usual oriental openness, where all our perspectives are finite. . . it's not just different finite perspectives on some more primordial maternal chaos or whatever.  No, the gap is between God and man . . . Never forget this.

That's my thesis:  you just have to transpose this radical gap back into God himself and you get Christ.  This is the big mystery I'm struggling with.  This is in the subtitle of the book [ The Puppet and the Dwarf], "the perverse core of Christianity."  In a way I am sorry for that subtitle because some of my more vulgar materialist antitheological friends misread it and thought that I was saying Christianity is in itself perverse, and that I want to point to some perverse core in a negative way.  Or some people even misread it as if in a kind of vulgar Deleuzian way that I want to assert "yes, Christianity is perverse!"—you know, people who praise perversion as liberation, and so on.  No, no none of it!   

My desperate problem is how to draw, how to extract the Christian notion of redemption from this financial transaction logic.  This is what I'm desperately looking for.  Here I think it is crucial to read Christ's sacrifice not literally as paying a debt.  It is also—we should just trust our intuitions here—because the message of Christ's sacrifice is not "now I take it for you, you can screw it up again."  No, it just opens the space for our struggle, and this is the paradox I like.  This is what I like in what maybe is the best chapter of this book, the fifth one [of Puppet].  To put it in very simple terms, Christ's redemption doesn't mean that, OK, now we can go watch hard-core movies because we are redeemed each time.  No, it's done, the Messiah is here, it's done, means that the space is now open for struggle.  It's this nice paradox that the fact that the big thing happened does not mean it's over.  It precisely opens the space for struggle.  This is what I find again so incredible.  Which is why to the horror of some of my Jewish friends, who doesn't like this idea that in Christianity everything happened whereas in Judaism the Messiah is always postponed, always to-come, and so on.  No, I like here this crazy radicality of Christianity which is that, no, it happened, it already happened.  But precisely that doesn't mean everything is already decided.  No, again, what intrigues me is that I find here such a shattering revolution of the entire economy. . .

And another aspect which is linked to this entire economy—and here I do agree with Badiou—I do not agree with his critics who think Paul's famous "for me there are no Jews nor Greeks" simply means everybody can become a member, it is universally open.  Then you can play all these games:  if you are out, then you are not even human, there are only my brothers and if you are not my brother you are not even people.  OK, OK, but my point is that Badiou nonetheless is still more precise.  I speak here ironically of Badiou's Leninism.  The shattering point is that truth is unilateral, that universal truth, no less universal for that reason, is accessible only from an engaged position.  We don't have, "you are saying this, I am saying that, let's find the neutral position, the common."  Truth is unilateral.

This is where I think Agamben misreads Badiou (because Agamben's book is explicitly in polemic with Badiou) precisely concerning universality.  What Agamben tries to prove is that Paul's position is not universality but even double division—you cut a line, a division between those who are in and those who are out within every community.  But I would say that precisely this is the Paulinian-Hegelian notion of universality, not universality as a positive encompassing feature.  Universality is a line that cuts universally and this is, how shall I put it, absolutely unique in Christianity and this is what we are losing with these gnostic wisdoms and even with political correctness, tolerance, and so on, because the notion of truth there is not that of a fighting truth but that of differences, space open for everything.  This notion of truth as painful, truth means you cut a line of difference . . . which is why for me, as I claim, you know that mysterious statement of Christ's "I came here not to bring peace but a sword"—I don't think this should be read as "kill the bad guys."  It is a militant work of love.

JPS:  A cut within ourselves?

SZ:  Yeah, yes!  This is why again, in a totally different way (you put it wonderfully) this too, is in a movie that I like,  Fight Club, where at first, you hit yourself.  This is the most difficult part.  The change is a change in you.  Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School, so sadly forgotten today, put it in a very nice way in his essay on liberation, "freedom is the condition of liberation."  In order to liberate yourself you must be free.

We see this today, with feminists, that the first step in liberation is that you perceive that your situation is unjust.  This already is the inner freedom.  The problem is not, at first, that the situation for women was bad, but [rather] that they just accepted it as a fact.  Even in revolution it goes like this.  If you look at the French Revolution, the shift was purely ideological.  They overthrew the king when they started to perceive that position as unjustified.  Look at it in an objective way.  The ancienne regime was, in the second part of the 18^th century, much more liberal and open than before.  It's just that the implicit ethical standards changed.  My big obsession with Christianity is that there is something extremely precious in this legacy that is being lost today.

JPS:  This is a question about idolatry, one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest theme of monotheistic religion, and of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scriptures.  You claim provocatively in The Puppet and the Dwarf that "the ultimate idolatry is not the idolizing of the mask, the image, but the belief that there is some hidden, positive content beyond the mask" (138).  What do you mean, exactly, by this phrase?

SZ:  The key point for me is that Hegelian statement which I make all the time, which is that what dies on the cross is not a finite representative of God, but the God beyond himself.  So that "Holy Spirit" means precisely, we are on our own, in a way.  This terrible opening, this freedom, which, and here I am quite dogmatic:  what we really mean by freedom was opened only through Judeo-Christian space.  Freedom in this radical sense only is or appears as a correlate of what Lacan would have called desire of the Other qua Other.  Without the abyss of the other, without perceiving the other in an abyss, without not knowing what the other wants, you are not free.  If you know what they other one wants, and you are the object of his desire . . . Here it can be said also why Christianity is the religion of love.  It's a positive ontological constituent of love:  you only love someone who is an abyss, whom you don't know.  Love always means this. . .  In order to love someone, it should be an abyss . . . it should be a lacking in perfect being, but at the same time a being with an impenetrable excess.  There is no love without this.  You have all that mystical stuff where you say yes to the universe, but that's not what is uniquely Christian love.  

And here I think, again, as for the essence of Christianity Kierkegaard got it first.  When he emphasized that it is totally wrong to read Christ as a metaphor in the sense that first the truth appears just as a person but then with the Holy Spirit we know that it's not a person but just a universal notion of love, or whatever.  The greatness of Kierkegaard is to show that our only access to eternity is through temporality.  Not in this fake Hegelian sense that eternity is just the totality of the movement of the temporal, but this crazy paradox that in a specific historical moment something happened.  Only through that passage do you get eternity.  That is to say, if you go directly to eternity, you get nothing, you miss eternity itself.  So if I were to pick out one writer here who got it, it would have been technically Kierkegaard.  It's also clear that the Kierkegaardian triad aesthetic-ethical-religious is so clearly the Lacanian imaginary-symbolic-real.  It fits so perfectly.  

Also, what interests me in some of my works is to explain this relation between sexuality and love.  Not in some cheap New Age religious sense where the ultimate religious experience is to have good sex, because you get the yin-yang balance and so on . . .  what I think is that something is missing for me, in Kierkegaard.  I develop this, I think, in my Wagner book.  It's that you have a.) the aesthetic mode of sexuality which is, basically—I know it's more complex than this—seduction, Don Giovanni, blah blah.  Then you have the ethical mode which is marriage.  Then where is the religious mode?   I think it is courtly love, this absolute logic, and so on.  But something is missing there.  And the whole trick of it, and Kierkegaard was approaching it, is how (we should never forget it) with Kierkegaard, it's either/or:  the three are not at the same level, you always have to make a choice between the two.  Which is why (and in some of his most radical formulations Kierkegaard did get a presentiment of it), paradoxically, once you make the fundamental choice and you opt for the ethical, from within the ethical the only step toward the religious is, often in its appearance, a regression towards the aesthetic.

Which is why I refer, in the last pages of my On Belief , to that weird English catholic novel by Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited, where you have exactly this.  For the heroine, it would be ethical to marry the guy, now [at the end], because she is divorced.  But she says no.  Her only way to maintain fidelity to God is to go on changing lovers like crazy.  Ethical would be, as Kierkegaard puts it (in a wonderful way apropos Abraham) the ethical is sheer interpretation itself.  To act ethically, as opposed to religiously . . . from a religious perspective ethics is not something you should stick to against temptation.  The ethical, as such, is the temptation.  Which is why, again, this crazy leap of faith into the religious, can well appear, to external observers, to those not within the event, as merely aesthetic, as some kind of aesthetic regression.  And again I think that to return to a diagnosis of where we are today, I think that precisely what I find horrible in these new forms of spirituality is that we are simply losing our sense for these kinds of paradoxes, which are the very core of Christianity.

On Divine Self-Limitation and Revolutionary Love - Joshua Delpech-Remey / Journal of Philosophy & Scripture (Spring)

Slavoj Zizek - Why Only an Atheist Can Be a True Christian (video)

October 12, 2010 Wilson College, Princeton University

Slavoj Zizek: The Monstrosity of Christ (video)

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Philosopher and sociologist Slavoj Zizek discusses his new book, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, and explains how the Christian concept of the "toxic neighbor" impacts political, economic, sexual, and cultural thought.

The Antichrist By F. W. Nietzsche (audiobook)

 What is good?--Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. What is evil?--Whatever springs from weakness. What is happiness?--The feeling that power increases--that resistance is overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid). The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it. What is more harmful than any vice?--Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak--Christianity...

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