God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Stuck Between Terrorism and Neurosis

Slavoj Žižek is a well-known Marxist philosopher, that is to say, a dialectical materialist. He is also a Christian theologian with a particular interest in what Christians call The Spirit, a decidedly immaterial entity. One might think these two aspects of Žižek’s thought are an unusual, on the face of it contradictory, combination. But consider this:

Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
- 1 John 4:8

Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.
- Matthew 10:34

Contradiction is the essence of Christianity: the last shall be first; blessed are the poor and the meek; a God without power; Father, why have you forsaken me?; a call to all the world for redemption that cannot be understood by the world. And these are only contradictions in the originary messages of Christianity. As has been noted by modern theologians, the early Christian community expected the imminent return of Jesus as the triumphant Christ; what they got instead was the Church and its consistently corrupt, self-serving, and decidedly un-Christian members. So who better than a master dialectician to assess the state of Christianity than a Marxist philosopher who happens to be a believer?

This book is a follow-on from a debate that Žižek had with the English theologian, John Milbank of Radical Orthodoxy fame. This debate is documented in their joint publication of The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic in 2009. Žižek feels that although that debate ended, it wasn’t finished. Apparently Milbank just wanted to leave the field, believing that both had reached the stage of simply repeating their positions and more or less talking past each other.

What interests me in God in Pain, however, is not any additional debating points presented by Žižek, but his acute theological understanding of modern society, particularly his diagnosis of the source of the global factionalism that ostensibly involves all the major world religions. While I think he ignores the pivotal (and destructive) role of the Christian idea of Faith in his discussion, an idea that has penetrated other religions so deeply that we now consider Faith and Religion as synonymous, his recognition of the political import of religious tradition, either active or unconscious, is important.

This statement , I think, sums Žižek ‘s position reasonably well: “… [I]t is not only that every politics is grounded in a ‘theological’ view of reality, it is also that every theology is inherently political, an ideology of new collective space (like the communities of believers in early Christianity, or the umma in early Islam).” In other words, theology is unavoidable as the dominant source of what goes on in the world, even of relatively few are aware of it.

Žižek begins his own political theology not with references to classical or contemporary theological works, but by using a central insight of the influential French psychiatrist and polymath, Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s fundamental thesis, in brief, is that the denial of the existence of God does not make all behaviour allowable but quite the opposite:

1. The true formula of atheism is not ‘God is dead’ but rather that ‘God is unconscious.’ A dead God, like a dead father, would, from a theoretical perspective, impose profound inhibitions on human behaviour. An unconscious God would be merely an absent father whose prohibitions could be broken with impunity.
2. Psychiatric analysts know from experience that if God doesn’t exist consciously or otherwise for an individual, then nothing at all is permitted any longer. Neurotics prove this every day.

In short: “The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn’t know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God… If God doesn’t exist, then ‘everything is prohibited’ means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment.”

This inversion also hold for those who hold themselves to be true believers: “‘if God exists, then everything is permitted’—is this not the most succinct definition of the religious fundamentalist’s predicament? For him, God fully exists, he perceives himself as his instrument, which is why he can do whatever he wants, his acts are redeemed in advance, since they express the divine will .” Thus Augustine’s Amor et quod vis fac, ‘Love and then do whatever you want to.’ And Luther’s rabid hatred of the Epistle of James, which suggested that ethical actions were at least as important as faith for salvation. Or for that matter the “righteousness through faith” claimed by Paul in the epistle to the Romans.

The difficulty in trusting in the divine will, of course, is often obvious to everyone but the believer. As Žižek notes, “the ambiguity persists since there is no guarantee, external to your belief, of what God really wants you to do—in the absence of any ethical standards external to your belief in and love for God, the danger is always lurking that you will use your love of God as a legitimization for the most horrible deeds.” Such danger is not only in the personal extremes but also exists in the institutional mainstream. For example:

“The well-documented story of how the Catholic Church as an institution protects pedophiliacs in its own ranks is another good example of how, if God exists, then everything is permitted (to those who legitimize themselves as his servants). What makes this protective attitude towards pedophiliacs so disgusting is that it is not practiced by tolerant hedonists, but—to add insult to injury—by the very institution which poses as the moral guardian of society.”

So, this presents the apparent alternatives which are presented to the contemporary thinking person. Either we become neurotic atheists all the while denying the unconscious constraints imposed on us. Or we become fundamentalist terrorists who seek to impose our interpretation of the divine on all and sundry with no real concern about human well-being. In political terms, think of the Left-wing judgmental, politically correct, no-harassment-here, identity police who actually carry around an enormous degree of cultural guilt which they would like the rest of us to share; and the smug, know-nothing Right-wing evangelicals who destroy democratic politics through their single-issue focus and their immunity to factual argument. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.

How does one avoid these extremes with both intellectual and spiritual integrity intact? What’s important here as well is that Žižek has something equally significant to say to the ‘middle-ground’ who wish a pox on the houses of both Left and Right-wing extremism. These folk frequently have given up on politics all together as irredeemably evil, or at least not worth the effort of even voting. This he considers a sort of modern gnosticism. Žižek puts gnosticism in an interesting light: “I have used here the term “gnosticism” in its precise meaning, as the rejection of a key feature of the Jewish-Christian universe: the externality of truth.”

This externality of truth is central to Žižek’s call to not just the extremes but the modal political population. He realises that neither Christianity nor any other religion can provide a fixed moral code of behaviour. But he also knows that morality is not a strictly private matter. We are individuals but we are also in each other’s pockets. Religious belief is a provocation and spur to ethics but ethics is external to religion itself. So, for Žižek (as well as for me) sacred scriptures, doctrines, and religious commentaries are a kind of theological poetry. So, for example, “… the [Christ] Event is a pure-empty-sign, and we have to work to generate its meaning.” And we create this meaning cooperatively in community. This means practicing political love (agapé) in the working out of moral and legal standards of behaviour.

This externality of truth does not imply that truth exists abstractly, known only to God or his official mediators perhaps; nor does it reject the possibility that what is considered truth changes and evolves from time to time, or even from situation to situation: “…[W]hat “Revelation”[that is to say ‘gold-standard’ truth] means is that God took upon himself the risk of putting everything at stake, of fully ‘engaging himself existentially’ by way, as it were, of stepping into his own picture, becoming part of creation, exposing himself to the utter contingency of existence.” That contingency of existence is us as we find our way along the road of moral, scientific, and even literary truth. God allows us to learn, even to learn what learning means.

For me this implies Hope in God, and Faith in each other, not the other way round. God’s faith in the human species, to join with it in an enterprise of learning, is the infinite miracle of grace. The meaning of the gospels, therefore, is not contained in dogmatic statements or creeds but in the activity of the community as it goes about learning: “… it is up to them [the audience/hearers of the word/congregation] to act like the Holy Spirit, practicing agape.”

Žižek is, I think, appropriately vague about what agapé is. After all we are also learning how agapé works in practice and are quite rightly experimenting more or less continuously with what politics should look like. But I lose him abruptly when he identifies the motivation necessary to adopt it: “Agape is what remains after we assume the consequences of the failure of eros.” That is, true political love is what’s left over after we’ve exhausted every other option. The problem, of course, is that humanity has shown a remarkably consistent tolerance for failure. It seems unlikely that agapé has any chance of large-scale adoption short of the threat of immediate extinction; and perhaps not even then.

So I have to conclude that Žižek’s redirection of Faith towards Man from God is God whistling in the dark. I can certainly maintain some sort of Hope - in Man as well as God perhaps. But I think Faith, if Žižek’s theology is correct, is not a virtue even God can afford to have. Quite apart from the likelihood of continuing human obduracy, the central problem with Žižek’s conception is that the agapé relationship, even if it were mutual, is not transitive. That is, if A exhibits agapaic love towards B, and B a similar love toward C, these relations say nothing about what A’s relation to C might be.

The implications of this are profound. First this intransitivity puts a limit on the size of the community involved. The limit is essentially the number of others that an individual can be expected to love in the appropriate manner. There is an implied intimacy which suggests that this number is rather few, say less than 20. Yet even if it were in the hundreds, the organisation that could feasibly be sustained is obviously rather small. This is precisely the problem faced by many business start-ups, for example. There seem to be definite ‘break-points’ - 7, 20, 50, 200 - at which the character of the organisation changes dramatically (or if one prefers, The Spirit gets harder to find) because intimate relationships cannot be maintained as the enterprise grows.

There is a further consequence, even in relatively small-scale communities. Relational intimacy is not free. It requires effort to maintain as every married person understands. One cannot afford to spread one’s love, even agapé, around indiscriminately. Moreover, communities cohere as much around difference as they do around similarity. Thus Christianity has traditionally defined itself as not-Jewish even during the period of gospel-writing. Modern businesses typical stress their differences from the competition as a tool of internal solidarity. The Marines are not soldiers. Canadians are not Americans, etc. Even communities built on love can simultaneously hate.

Therefore, while I find Žižek’s analysis stimulating and at times inspired, his prescription, if I understand it at all, is of questionable worth and passé despite his novel terminology. His agapé, for example, sounds very much like the epsilon-relation proposed over a century ago by the American Pragmatist, Josiah Royce. Royce too had the dream of creating increasingly inclusive communities founded on the Christian idea of love. For the reasons I outlined above, among others, his dream failed despite some really determined efforts. Agapé, it seems, resists institutionalisation. So while I continue to try to avoid both terrorism and neurosis, I’m at a loss to suggest what a political process might look like that reconciles the two.

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