Paragraph Breaks: Draft Version 1.1

The following is the opening section from a review essay of Slavoj Zizek's The Puppet and the Dwarf that will appear in its entirety in ebr ) once the site redesign is completed. My piece will be included a cluster featuring other Zizek-related material, including a long review of On Deleuze by Hanjo Berressem.

I'm posting this portion of my essay here in draft form so that I can play around with the layout -- particularly paragraph breaks. Paragraphs in academic essays tend to be longer than in non-academic pieces. Although the overall length of an essay tends to be less of an issue in online writing, long paragraphs can be difficult to read online.

Rob Wittig advocates lots of 'white space' for online writing. The trick is to divide the paragraphs up in such a way that they are not too long but also retain the initial logic of the piece. For those of us who take writing seriously, it's no easy thing.

Ideally, I'd like each paragraph to be about 3-4 sentences long and no more than five. However, I don't know if that's feasible. We'll see...

Slavoj Zizek’s subtitle, “The Perverse Core of Christianity,” seems to promise an account of all that is corrupt in the Christian faith. Readers aware of Zizek’s reputation as a leading Leftist theorist but unfamiliar with his thinking might open The Puppet and the Dwarf expecting a neo-Nietzschean or post-Marxist critique of Christianity. But Zizek doesn’t censure Christians for subscribing to a ‘slave morality’ or becoming addicted to an ‘opiate for the masses.’ It’s liberals, particularly Western intellectuals with pseudo-spiritual leanings, whom Zizek rebukes. Their misguided ethical convictions and corresponding lack of political gumption have facilitated the spread of a global corporatism that benefits a small economic elite at the expense of the world’s workers. With this emergent global capitalist New World Order in mind, Zizek prescribes a dose of Christianity to an anemic and largely impotent Left he diagnoses as suffering from a debilitating malady—postmodern cynicism.

Postmodern cynicism (a term that Zizek doesn’t use, but which concisely encapsulates a number of his targets) refers to several related concepts: the relativist notion that all truth claims are contingent, social constructions which are ‘true’ only for members of particular communities; the rejection of universal truth claims on the grounds that they disrespect or infringe upon the difference of others; and the tendency to disavow sincerely and “directly assumed belief[s]” (7) for fear of offending others or of appearing politically incorrect. Quickly, Zizek’s arguments against these notions are as follows: First, it makes no sense to speak of a relative truth that doesn’t apply universally. For a claim to be considered true, it must, by definition, be presumed to be valid for everyone. If others don’t recognize a claim’s validity, it’s because they are mistaken. Second, talk of respecting difference or otherness fetishizes empty abstractions and is effectively meaningless, mere grandstanding rhetoric. These first two points, while valid, do not constitute a particularly novel theoretical intervention. However, Zizek does contribute something new to Anglo-American debates about the belief in postmodern societies with his account of disavowed belief, which begins with a simple premise: “today, we believe more than ever” (6).

The catch is that believers are confused and fail to grasp the extent of their beliefs, particularly when it comes to “religious matters” (5). Thus, to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s oft-cited formula for cynical reason—“I know what I am doing; nonetheless, I am doing it…”— Zizek adds a final clause: “…because I don’t know what I believe” (5). Our confusion about what we believe is understandable given that defining what belief entails is no straightforward project. What does it even mean to say that I believe in something? Such a question implies a uniquely modern concept of subjective belief.

Zizek notes, “the direct belief in a truth that is subjectively fully assumed (‘Here I stand!’) is a modern phenomenon, in contrast to traditional beliefs-through distance, like politeness or rituals” (6). Postmodern thought has challenged the autonomy of the individual subject, and a typically postmodern reflex has been to place one’s directly held beliefs at a remove. Examples include: Deconstructionists whose skepticism requires the positing of “an Other who ‘really believes’” (6); ironists who incessantly place their remarks within quotation marks; and self-conscious lovers who say things like, “As the poets would have put it, I love you.” This phenomenon, which he refers to variously as disavowed, displaced, or suspended belief, both amuses and annoys Zizek.

Zizek, who is giving psychoanalysis new life in the 21st century, insists that any rigorous theory of belief must take into account unconscious beliefs, which by definition are unknown to the subject holding them. While people consciously profess their disbelief in a particular ideological system, they behave ‘as if’ they actually believe in its authority. By analyzing people’s behaviors as manifested in various cultural phenomena, Zizek aims to identify our unconsciously held beliefs and the desires that motivate them. In The Puppet and the Dwarf, he is especially interested in religous belief.

Discerning widespread ambivalence about people who profess to having fundamentalist religious beliefs directly (are they to be commended for taking a decisive stand or condemned as extremist?), Zizek redefines (postmodern) culture as the practices that follow from all of our ostensibly nonserious, ironic or disavowed beliefs:

When it comes to religion…we no longer “really believe” today, we just follow (some) religious rituals and mores as part of respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong (nonbelieving Jews obeying kosher rules ‘out of respect for tradition,’ etc.). “I don’t really believe in it, it’s just part of my culture” effectively seems to be the predominant mode of the disavowed/displaced belief characteristic of our times. What is a cultural lifestyle, if not the fact that, although we don’t believe in Santa Claus, there is a Christmas tree in every house, and even in public places every December? Perhaps, then, the “nonfundamentalist” notion of “culture” as distinguished from “real” religion, art, and so on, is in its very core the name for the field of disowned/impersonal beliefs—‘culture’ is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without ‘taking them seriously’ (7).

Culture, thus defined, refers to the domain of ideas we espouse, things we do, and projects in which we partake but from which we strive to maintain a sophisticated distance. Zizek identifies various contemporary religious formations—ranging from Western Buddhism to New Age paganism and gnosticism to a deconstructionist-Levinasian Judaism—whose adherents subscribe to modes of disavowed belief that cannot be publicly acknowledged and must remain a “private obscene secret” (6).

Zizek rejects these religions on the grounds that, despite appearances to the contrary, they function as ideological handmaidens to global capitalism. However, his aim is not to expose the adherents of these faiths as hypocrites whose spiritual commitments are easily trumped by their material interests. Nor does he wish to see a return to an authentic form of these faiths in place of their superficial, postmodern forms. Zizek rejects all varieties of these religions outright. His argument against these faiths is that the inherent logic of these faiths allows one to partake in exploitative market practices with a clearer conscience and dampens one’s political desire to change the economic system.

This is not the place to rehearse or debate the specifics concerning Zizek’s controversial accounts of these religions. But, broadly speaking, these religions share two key features—a vision of the universe as a harmonious whole and an ethos that regards efforts to introduce a split into this universe as being misguided, even evil. [note: insert remarks here? Paganism – abyss and Judaisim-otherness as sameness]. Buddhist compassion teaches meditative techniques that allow one to remain indifferent to phenomenal reality, which is illusory, and to “fully assum[e] the Void as the only true Good” (23). The bottom line is that these belief systems enable people to function more efficiently as capitalist subjects.

Because these faiths are complicit with capitalism, the Left must purge itself of the ethos that they share—an ethic of otherness. Zizek attributes much of the Left’s problems to a misguided commitment to otherness, which has resulted in a political agenda based largely on appeals to cultural difference and the need for tolerance. In other words, too many Leftists have become complacent liberals who are basically satisfied with the existing socioeconomic order—at least that’s what all their talk about celebrating multiculturalism diversity and respecting “otherness” implies. The Left needs to understand that its ultimate commitment is not to liberal tolerance but to eliminating material inequality.

The book’s underlying premise is that the Left must reclaim the Christian legacy and harness its immanent and still largely untapped revolutionary potential. Zizek asserts, “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). The “subversive kernel of Christianity” that Zizek extracts for his readers, then, is presented as an alternative to the “perverse core” referred to in the subtitle. But before unpacking Zizek’s account of Christianity’s subversive kernel versus its perverse core, it is worth noting how the book’s allusive main title cues us in to Zizek’s critical project.