Reading Notes: Zizek on The Perverse Core of Christianity

“My claim here is not merely that I am a materialist through and through, and that the subversive kernel of Christianity is accessible also to a materialist approach; my thesis is much stronger: this kernel is accessible only to a materialist approach—and vice versa: to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian experience” (6).

Thus Spoke Slavoj Zizek... To make sense of Zizek's claim, it's necessary first to clarify his terminology.

By a "true dialectical materialist," he basically means Marxist, though Zizek avoids the phrase in The Puppet and the Dwarf, because as a political ideology, communism is presumed to have died with the fall of the Soviet Union. However, Zizek is not convinced and retains hope that a true communist state is a viable goal.

[Note: I would like to think that "dialectical materialism" could also refer to democratic socialism, but that needn't concern us here. I will only note that I don't believe the abolition of private property is any solution. There is some validity to the notion that private entrepreneurship provides a catalyst for innovation. That said, I'm entirely unconvinced that the so-called free market can be trusted to solve the world's pressing problems (overpopulation, environmental devastation, global warming, AIDS, etc.) and am convinced that strong, nation states (with democratically elected representatives, not plutocrats) are needed to serve as a counterbalance to multinational corporations.]

It is more difficult to provide a concise gloss on the "subversive kernel of Christianity," but it is a notion that emerges from Zizek's interpretation of Christ's crucifixion. For Zizek, the significance of Christ's death is that in this sacrificial act, God reveals his own impotence. "When Christ dies, what dies with him is the secret hope discernable in 'Father, why hast thou forsaken me?': the hope that there is a father who has abandoned me. The 'Holy Spirit' is the community deprived of its support in the big Other" (171). Another way of putting this is to say that Christ's death made possible a paradigmatic shift in the Symbolic Order, one that transformed Christianity from an esoteric Jewish sect into a religion of universality and which made possible a new type of human subject. Zizek conceives of the early Christians as a sort of proto-revolutionary community organized by Paul, whom Zizek regards to be, "like Lenin" a "great institutionalizer."

I spoke with Ned Lukacher about Zizek's take on Paul, which is adopted from Alain Badiou, and he suggested that it was a myth and misrepresented and idealized Paul's teachings. I'm not enough of a theologian to judge, but my hunch is that Lukacher is right. This doesn't necessarily discredit Zizek's interpretation, since one of Zizek's central notions is the necessity of fantasy, which functions as a sort of anamorphic frame that provides the constraints which enable us to establish a sense of reality. In this way, for Zizek, fantasy and the anamorphic gaze provides the basis for human subjectivity.

Ultimately, I think, it is a renewed faith in universalist notions that Zizek wants to extract from the "perverse core" of Christianity. Zizek recognizes, correctly, that over the past few decades Western culture has lost its faith in the notion of progress (which, as a Hegelian, Zizek still retains). More specifically, we have lost our conviction that human beings can create an egalitarian global society, one in which class differences have disappeared. What Zizek wants to take from Christianity is not so much the specific content of its teachings, as its commitment to, or faith in the possibility of radically transforming the existing order of things, e.g., "Christian love is a violent passion to introduce a Difference, a gap in the order of being, to privilege and elevate some object at the expense of others" (33).

I understand where Zizek's coming from, though I must admit that this rhetoric of violent love sounds a bit too close to the evangelical right. That said, Zizek might argue that the Left Behind crowd misses the point of Christianity. These evangelicals emphasize the visions of the apocalypse because they cannot imagine life on Earth being ordered in a more fair and just way. Instead, they fantasize about the end of the world as we know it, convinced that their 'personal relationships' with Jesus will provide them access to the Kingdom of God while the majority of suckers on the planet (including Christians of other denominations) are left behind.

Anyway, the last term that needs to be unpacked is the "Christian experience." At this point, I'm still not certain what Zizek means by this. Does he say 'experience' to emphasize he's not advocating belief in actual Christian doctrine? If so, why refer to Christian at all? Couldn't he just say the experience of recognizing that one's actions needn't be constrained by the symbolic order and that there's no Almighty whose going to point the way?

I'll have to think about this some more before I can finish writing up my review for ebr...