Theology has opened up to what is often dubbed ‘continental’ philosophy. Whether or not the harvest of this philosophy always rewards the labour of its reading is a moot point, but there is no sign that the labours cease. There is always new flora to be examined and, perhaps, introduced to theological soil. Slavoj Zizek is the latest transplant. In this thorough and accessible book Adam Kotsko sets himself the task of carrying out an initial examination.
Zizek's intellectual and political roots are a curious hybrid of a reading of Hegel, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Althusserian structuralist Marxism, and an obsession with popular culture. He defines himself as a Marxist and an atheist. However those confident self-designations fly in the face of his philosophy, which is concerned to undermine the ready and ideological acceptance of the world so that emancipatory potential might be released. This Althusserian project of ideology-critique is linked to Lacan in that it is identified as an assault on the ‘big Other’, the master signifier that at once represses possibility, creates the space for fantasy, and establishes that against which emancipation must be achieved (by this argument God can be identified as one such big Other). The method is Hegelian; Zizek makes a statement about the big Other, contradicts it, and then out of the synthesis announces that a truth has been reached. This explains why his books contain assertions, philosophical exegesis and political commonplaces, tell jokes, contradict themselves, often lack narrative and so on. Zizek is trying to force the reader to emancipate her or himself from thrall to Zizek and, thus, think for himself or herself. The irony is of course that with all of his publications Zizek is doing nothing other than ensure that his name itself becomes part of the big Other, and the industry of exegesis that he has inspired (and of which Kotsko's volume is one of the better examples) denies space for the emancipation of the reader.
Zizek's work is not possessed of any great humility, and therefore it is unsurprising that it has turned to questions of theology and, specifically, Christianity. That turn happens because what he is trying to do is deal with the question of what happens after there has been emancipation from the big Other. Kotsko calls this the ‘morning after problem’. It is the problem of the fate of the moment of emancipation.
Zizek draws on Alain Badiou's theory of the ‘truth-event’ according to which truth is something that happens as an event. As Kotsko shows, for Badiou a truth-event erupts unpredictably from a situation that is occupied by all and yet only fully apprehended by those who are excluded from the ‘official’ definition of the situation. Badiou gives a secular reading of the conversion of St Paul as an example of a truth-event. In Kotsko's gloss, ‘the resurrection of Christ is the unexpected truth-event that seizes Paul, causing him to dedicate his life to spreading the gospel’ (p. 79). Consequently Badiou sees the truth-event as the irruption of a ‘new beginning’, but Zizek argues instead that it is better seen as a moment of detachment from what has gone before. For Zizek then the truth-event is an emancipation from the big Other, a kind of death of the old. In an interview that Kotsko does not cite (and Zizek's output is massive so this is no criticism), but in a passage that he makes it possible to see is typical, Zizek said: ‘What I like is to see the emancipatory potential in institutionalized Christianity. Of course, I don't mean state religion, but I mean the moment of St. Paul. I find a couple of things in it. The idea of the Gospel, or good news, was a totally different logic of emancipation, of justice, of freedom’ (‘IDEOLOGY IS A CERTAIN UNIQUE EXPERIENCE OF THE UNIVERSE AND YOUR PLACE IN IT, TO PUT IT IN STANDARD TERMS, WHICH SERVES THE PRODUCTION OF THE EXISTING POWER RELATIONS AND BLAH BLAH BLAH’ at http://www.believermag.com/issues/200407/?read=interview_zizek).
The thesis about the Gospels – note that he sidesteps Christ – leads Zizek to a somewhat hackneyed and predictable assault on institutionalised Christianity. For him, what happens on the ‘morning after’ is Church building and thus the consolidation in ideology of a new big Other from which there will in turn need to be emancipation. Zizek is not saying that it is possible to return to the Gospel message, rather his point is that its institutionalisation needs to be negated if it is going to be able to shatter the contemporary big Other. And the way to do that is to draw out dialectically the conflict between the Gospels and the Church. In all of this it is clear that Zizek is using Christianity and, by extension, theology, for his own purposes. He is just trying to find a new place to carry out his self-appointed task of negator in the name of emancipation: Lenin, Stalin, St Paul are all reduced to the same status. It is in that spirit of negation that he claims that Christianity is fundamentally a comedy. Kotsko quotes Zizek's question: ‘is there anything more comical than Incarnation, this ridiculous overlapping of the Highest and the Lowest, the coincidence of God, creator of the universe, and a miserable man?’ (p. 153).
If there is a temper that runs through this book it is, I think, one of Kotsko's increasing apprehension that perhaps Zizek has considerably less to say about theology and Christianity than he thought when the project was started. Attempts are made to link Zizek with Altizer, Tillich, Bonhoeffer and even Kierkegaard and Chesterton (Zizek has claimed the latter as two of the stimulants of his thought), but the connections that Kotsko forges say more about the ingenuity of his mind than Zizek's own insights. Indeed, Kotsko has written a sophisticated and knowledgeable book, but about a body of work that is perhaps best approached theologically as an over-inflated footnote to C.S. Lewis's identification of the Incarnation as a ‘catastophic historical event’ (The Problem of Pain 1940, Centenary Press, London, p. 12).
