1 of 6
And so it has come to this. Philosophy is now in the hands of a Slovenian madman. Slavoj Zizek has been thought of as one part Groucho, one part Karl Marx, an idiot savant, a Shakespearean fool, or maybe Dylan's Jokerman.1 A self-declared "fighting atheist" who claims the Christian legacy is worth fighting for. A Leninist who seeks wisdom in Chesterton's Orthodoxy. A leftist accused of being authoritarian, anti-feminist, and anti-Semitic. A critic of the worst excesses of capitalism who himself so over-produces books and articles that critics despair of ever being able to pin him down before he's off on his next tangent. So full of apparent contradictions is Zizek that to some critics it appears that while it is true Zizek exists, nevertheless we may well have created him.2
When writing about Zizek, one must decide (finally) to plant the flag somewhere. For the purposes of this article, I limit the discussion to Zizek's political-religious thought.3 And in order to provide anything like a coherent account even of this more narrowed focus, I will do so by discussing Zizek's concept of "the act." Although Zizek gives his most sustained philosophic analysis of the act in two earlier works, The Indivisible Remainder (1996) and The Ticklish Subject (1999), in the five books under discussion here, Zizek's invoking of the act serves as one link between his three works on Christianity and his accounts of the two defining moments of our contemporary political world, 9/11 and the war in Iraq. While there are some signs that his red-hot status may be cooling a bit, there is still enough going on in his rants against the Bush Administration and his riffs on St. Paul to give readers pause before judging him to be a signifier of nothing. There is method to his madness, wisdom in his foolishness.
At the outset of The Fragile Absolute, Zizek offers one of his patented twists on the expected Marxist response. In castigating the "deplorable aspects of the postmodern era" and "the return of religion is all its guises," Zizek—rather than ferociously attacking religion as hopelessly obscurantist—claims that "Christianity and Marxism should fight on the same side of the barricade against the onslaught of new spiritualisms." In the strange, strange world of Zizek, there is something in the Christian legacy worth fighting for, even for Marxist materialists! Unlike classical paganism and its New Age variants in our own day, which promise a secret wisdom for their devotees, "Christianity, on the contrary, offers Christ as a mortal-temporal individual, and insists that belief in the temporal Event of Incarnation is the only path to eternal truth and salvation." Zizek recognizes a similar paradox in "the specific Christian notion of Conversion and the forgiveness of sins: Conversion is a temporal event which changes eternity itself." As a key theme in his account of an act, Zizek acknowledges that the "good news" of Christianity "is that, in a genuine Conversion, one can 're-create' oneself … and thus change (undo the effects of) eternity itself" (his emphasis). He concludes Fragile Absolute with a section fittingly entitled "The Breakout." In it, he focuses on how, through the "happy event" of the Crucifixion, Christians die to the world (renunciation) and through their re-birth "catch a glimpse of Another Space" in which the old hierarchies of power and domination are done away with. New birth and alternative space thus form two of the (revolutionary) insights of the Christian act.
For this "fighting atheist" it is not, of course, so much the truth of what Christians believe but the world-altering power of the Christian imagination that attracts him. What Zizek sees is precisely what the comfortable Western Church might be most in need of recovering: an appreciation for the explosive nature of the Christian Gospel and how it calls forth an alternative or counter way of life to the standard operating procedures of the world.4 In an edited volume published the same year as Fragile Absolute, Zizek sets out this explosive re-figuring power of the act: "An act does not occur within the given horizon of what appears to be 'possible'—it redefines the very contours of what is possible."5 The Christian legacy is worth fighting for because it has provided (and still carries with it) the historical possibility for an act to be imagined, practiced, and realized. Where New Age spiritualism (and Eastern religion in general) leaves the world and its dominant power relations in place, Christianity can still tell a story that turns the world upside down.
RSS Feed
