Monstrosity of Christ Short Circuits Slavoj Žižek, Editor

PARADOX OR DIALECTIC? Slavoj Žižek John Milbank EDITED BY CRESTON DAVIS The Monstrosity of Christ Short Circuits Slavoj Žižek, editor The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, by Slavoj Žižek The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, by Alenka Zupanˇciˇc Is Oedipus Online? Siting Freud after Freud, by Jerry Aline Flieger Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK, by Alexei Monroe The Parallax View, by Slavoj Žižek A Voice and Nothing More, by Mladen Dolar Lacan and Subjectivity: A Philosophical Introduction, by Lorenzo Chiesa The Odd One In: On Comedy, by Alenka Zupanˇciˇc The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? by Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, edited by Creston Davis The Monstrosity of Christ Paradox or Dialectic? Slavoj Žižek John Milbank edited by Creston Davis The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected] or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. This book was set in Copperplate 33BC and Joanna by Graphic Composition, Inc. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Žižek, Slavoj. The monstrosity of Christ : paradox or dialectic? / Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank ; edited by Creston Davis. p. cm.—(Short circuits) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-01271-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Philosophical theology. 2. Christianity—Philosophy. 3. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831. 4. Milbank, John. 5. Žižek, Slavoj. I. Milbank, John. II. Davis, Creston. III. Title. BT40.Z59 2009 230—dc22 2008035984 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Series Foreword vii Introduction: Holy Saturday or Resurrection Sunday? Staging an Unlikely Debate 2 Creston Davis The Fear of Four Words: A Modest Plea for the Hegelian Reading of Christianity 24 Slavoj Žižek The Double Glory, or Paradox versus Dialectics: On Not Quite Agreeing with Slavoj Žižek 110 John Milbank Dialectical Clarity versus the Misty Conceit of Paradox 234 Slavoj Žižek Index 307 Series Foreword A short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network—faulty, of course, from the standpoint of the network’s smooth functioning. Is not the shock of short- circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for a critical reading? Is not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion) and read it in a short- circuiting way, through the lens of a “minor” author, text, or conceptual apparatus (“minor” should be understood here in Deleuze’s sense: not “of lesser quality,” but marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology, or dealing with a “lower,” less dignifi ed topic)? If the minor reference is well chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions. This is what Marx, among others, did with philosophy and religion (short- circuiting philosophical speculation through the lens of political economy, that is to say, economic speculation); this is what Freud and Nietzsche did with morality (short-circuiting the high- est ethical notions through the lens of the unconscious libidinal economy). What such a reading achieves is not a simple “desublimation,” a reduction of the higher intellectual content to its lower economic or libidinal cause; the aim of such an approach is, rather, the inherent decentering of the interpreted text, which brings to light its “unthought,” its disavowed presuppositions and consequences. And this is what “Short Circuits” wants to do, again and again. The under- lying premise of the series is that Lacanian psychoanalysis is a privileged in- strument of such an approach, whose purpose is to illuminate a standard text or ideological formation, making it readable in a totally new way—the long history of Lacanian interventions in philosophy, religion, the arts (from the visual arts to the cinema, music, and literature), ideology, and politics justifi es this premise. This, then, is not a new series of books on psychoanalysis, but a series of “connections in the Freudian fi eld”—of short Lacanian interventions in art, philosophy, theology, and ideology. “Short Circuits” wants to revive a practice of reading which confronts a classic text, author, or notion with its own hidden presuppositions, and thus reveals its disavowed truth. The basic criterion for the texts that will be pub- series foreword lished is that they effectuate such a theoretical short circuit. After reading a book in this series, the reader should not simply have learned something new: the point is, rather, to make him or her aware of another—disturbing—side of something he or she knew all the time. Slavoj Žižek The Monstrosity of Christ Introduction: Holy Saturday or Resurrection Sunday? Staging an Unlikely Debate Creston Davis If the theological was marginalized in the age of Western secular modernity, it has now returned with a vengeance. Theology is reconfi guring the very makeup of the humanities in general, with disciplines like philosophy, political science, literature, history, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, in particular, feeling the impact of this return. There are many ways of accounting for this surprising development but one stands out, namely, the collapse of commu- nism in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the subsequent global expansion of capitalism under the fl ag of the American Global Empire. So extensive and profound have been the effects of this development that some have celebrated it as the victory not merely of an economic order or ideology, but of life itself. We are told that life, history, humanity has attained its end.1 But just as humanity was said to be reaching the summit of its development, a feeling emerged in the collective consciousnesses of philosophers, critics, poets, and theologians. Something was being lost, forgotten. The exceeding depth of humanity was being overrun by the fi end of mindless material con- sumption, and the mysterious truths and hopes of humanity and history were being sold out to the markets: the new logic of this new world order was a crass conspicuous logic of the nouveau riche. In response to the advent of this capitalist nihilism, thought—the act of thinking—was forced to fi nd a new way forward, a new source of hope. It had to appeal to a tradition that could resist the hegemony of capitalism and its presupposition—the individual will-to- power. Thinkers of resistance to capitalist depredation could no longer appeal to the humanist- Marxist tradition alone, especially as the history of actually existing Marxism fi nally folded before the juggernaut of capitalism. This was the opening for the theological. The portal to theology was opened precisely because capitalism is ultimately a self- enclosed structure, and so theology gives us a way to transcend capital premised on relationality and not on Ego (the Hegelian “In- Itself”). Yet, this new thought could not simply embrace the theological and re- pudiate the older tradition of resistance. Not only because the theological is equivocal, and so not universally opposed to the advent of capitalist nihilism (as Marx duly noted), but also because the Marxist tradition, even in historic defeat, was not defeated without remainder. This is to say: even in its death, it retains a truth that exceeds the bureaucratic, nihilistic materialism or im- manentism without remainder that was defeated with the fall of the Wall in 1989. That truth is that humanity is material; thus the material world cannot be written off in favor of some kind of retreat into an ethereal transcendence.2 Thus accounts of human fl ourishing and resistance to capitalist nihilism must be thoroughly material. So, in the end, this new thought must be critical of the Marxist- Communist tradition without being dismissive. This is the problematic that gives rise to a new logic that nurtures a world beyond a secular- immanentist humanism and its unavoidable conclusion: capitalist indifference. By secular humanism I mean that which obeys the Kant- ian injunction to conceive of the possibilities of human experience without reference to transcendence. The basic idea here is to recover or reconnect transcendence with a militant materialism. Daniel Bell nicely summarizes this creston davis movement away from a self-enclosed humanistic- immanent worldview to- ward a properly transcendent but nevertheless revolutionary, material politics, when he writes: For a time it was fashionable in some revolutionary circles to suggest that liberation was to be found only beyond the confi nes of [transcendence]. If humanity was to overcome the afflictions of this present age, then a genuinely revolutionary politics must eschew, indeed escape, the constrictions of [transcendence]. Now . the dismissal of [transcendence] is being reconsidered. While total- izing discourse may be anathema and practice celebrated, it is recognized that liberation hinges upon a prior ontology that maps the trajectories of the con- stitutive power of life. [And] for a time it was also popular to espouse

Load more