Incarnation in The Works of Zizek

Modern Theology 23:4 October 2007 ISSN 0266-7177 (Print) ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
THE END OF GODS TRANSCENDENCE? ON INCARNATION IN THE WORK OF SLAVOJ IEK

FREDERIEK DEPOORTERE
In 1990, Thomas Luckmann published an article entitled Shrinking Transcendence, Expanding Religion?1 This title summarizes well the present religious situation in Western Europe. For Europeans, belief in the personal and transcendent God of Christianity seems to be irrevocably on the retreat. This trend, however, should not be taken to imply that Europeans are any less inclined to believe in God than they were before. What has changed for Europeans is that God is now increasingly considered as immanent and described in non-personal terms as, for example, an energy or force. Thus, contemporary forms of religiosity in Europe tend to stress inner-worldliness and immanence of the Divine, which is not to say that Europeans are any less (or more) religious. This shift towards conceiving the Divine as inner and immanent is also reected in a number of inuential contemporary thinkers, such as the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo and the Slovenian thinker Slavoj iek. Both have argued in their recent work that the incarnation should be understood as the end of Gods transcendence. In this essay, I will focus on Slavoj iek (b. 1949), a philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst and professor at the Department of Philosophy, in the Faculty of Arts, at the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). His thinking moves within three co-ordinates: Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian philosophy and Marxism. As outlined by iek in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), his rst work to be published in English, Hegel is not the author of
Frederiek Depoortere Faculty of Theology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Sint-Michielsstraat 6, bus 3102, 3000 Leuven, BELGIUM
2007 The Author Journal compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
498 Frederiek Depoortere panlogicism, but on the contrary a thinker of contingency and difference. This can only be demonstrated, however, if one reads Hegel with Lacan.2 Since the publication of his 1999 major work The Ticklish Subject3 one can discern in iek an increasing interest in Christianity, even to the point that one can perhaps legitimately speak of a religious turn in his work. Evidence for such a claim can be gleaned from the fact that iek has written books with titles such as The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (2000),4 On Belief (2001),5 and The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (2003).6 Religion also plays a major role (as a topic of reection) in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (2001).7 The current essay aims at evaluating ieks claim that the Incarnation should be understood as the end of Gods transcendence. In the rst part, I introduce the problem of transcendence; in the second and major part, I discuss the theme of the Incarnation as it appears in ieks recent work; and in the third part I assess ieks claim that Gods transcendence ends with the Incarnation. 1. The Problem of Transcendence In the rst part of this essay, I consider what transcendence is and what its fate has been in modern philosophy. 1.1. God and Other Transcendences Transcendence is a word with many meanings. It refers both to something that is beyond us and to a movement of going beyond. During his discussion of Hegels concept of God, William Desmond helpfully differentiates three kinds of transcendence.8 First, there is exterior transcendence. This is the transcendence of external beings as other in nature, which consists in their not being the product of our thinking. This kind of transcendence thus refers to the fact that external reality exists independently of us. This kind of transcendence is also described by Luckmann in his article mentioned at the outset. There Luckmann speaks about the fact that human beings always exist in time and spacewhich implies that there was once a time when we did not yet exist and that there also will come a time that we shall no longer exist. Existing in space is another way of speaking about human contingency; humans are located in a certain place and not in countless other places. Moreover, humans are not able to control everything. Things happen to us which we would prefer not to have happen.9 As we constantly bump into limits, we are confronted with transcendences, that which is beyond us and which we cannot control. Second, Desmond identies what he calls interior transcendence. This is the transcendence of selfbeing, the self-surpassing power of the human being. Human beings can overcome themselves and become what they were not yet. In this regard, Tjeu van Knippenberg speaks about the ability of human beings to go beyond
The End of Gods Transcendence? 499 themselves, to come to the realization that they are not limited to themselves and do not belong to themselves.10 Third, Desmond also speaks about superior transcendence. This transcendence is both in excess of determinate beings, as their original ground and the most possibilizing source of our self-transcendence. According to Desmond, both exterior and interior transcendence point towards this third kind of transcendence. The existence of an external reality which escapes our control gives rise to the question of the origin of being and to the wonder of why there is something rather than nothing. The possibility of human self-transcendence, in turn, gives rise to the question of the ultimate aim of human striving. The question of the ultimate origin and aim has probably occupied the human mind since the dawn of civilization. Western civilization, for its part, has sprung forth from a fusion between two different sets of answers to these fundamental questions; namely, Greek philosophy and Biblical faith. From the beginning, Greek philosophers have sought to explain being in terms of a fundamental principle. The earliest of these, the Milesian philosophers Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes (sixth century BCE), put forward the idea of a primeval substance as the source of all that is and to which everything returns. So, from the very start, philosophy has tried to grasp the whole of reality by thinking its ultimate principle. An eminent example of this endeavour can be found in the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus. Plotinus spoke about the One, which he conceived as the ultimate source (arch) of all beings, the single source of all reality, but also as the ultimate goal (telos) of all aspirations. The One is the indemonstrable rst principle of everything, the transcendent innite being and, as such, the supreme object of love.11 In the course of history, moreover, the term God has also frequently been used by philosophers to designate this highest principle of thought and reality. Such a God as the ultimate principle of reality, however, can hardly be considered compatible with the Biblical God. For the God of the Bible is fully personal. He precedes nature and has called creation into being ex nihilo, as the other than Himself. Although the Bible conceives God as separated from creation, God is nevertheless present in the world and involved in the history of humankind with whom He enters into relationship. God is a loving God and acts to redeem humankind. The God of the philosophers, by contrast, is impersonal. As a result, humans cannot enter into a personal relationship with him. He is the ultimate principle underlying visible and ever changing nature, but cannot be said to be radically different from nature. Such a God cannot love nor can he act in order to redeem humankind. Thus one encounters two different conceptions of superior transcendence. The Greek Divine, on the one side, can be designated as the other of nature and can only be considered as transcendent insofar as it grounds the ux of ever-changing, visible nature and in this way indeed goes beyond visible nature. The Biblical God, on the other hand, is more correctly designated the other than nature. Since the Biblical God is separated, and thus distinct from
500 Frederiek Depoortere created nature, only He can be said to truly transcend nature. The Greek Divine only transcends the ever changing multitude of visible nature, but not nature as such, inasmuch as the Divine is the most fundamental principle of that nature itself. Therefore, the Greek Divine can only rightly be considered as immanent transcendence, as transcendence within the realm of nature. 1.2. The Fate of Transcendence in Modern Philosophy Despite the obvious irreconcilability of the Greek and Biblical concept of God, at least from a contemporary perspective, the patristic authors, who laid the foundations for medieval Christian thought and, as such, for Western civilization, succeeded in achieving something of a synthesis between both the Greek and Biblical legacies. This was only possible, however, because the Church Fathers treated the inheritance of Greek philosophy as a body of ascertained knowledge on which one could draw for illustration and explanation, [but] not as a bundle of questions to discuss or opinions to criticize.12 According to Augustine and most medieval thinkers in his line, revelation as found in Scripture was primary. The work of pagan philosophers was of secondary importance and only useful to the extent that it elucidated Biblical revelation. Or, to put it differently, the medieval synthesis between Greek philosophy and Biblical faith was only possible because philosophy lost her independence, becoming merely the ancilla theologiae, the handmaid of theology, who alone ruled as the queen of sciences. While pre-modern Christian thinkers could still start from revelation as received in Scripture and continued in the Tradition of the Church, using philosophy merely as a tool to formulate intelligibly their faith ( des quaerens intellectum), modern philosophy, due to the disintegration of the original ontological synthesis13 at the end of the Middle Ages, necessarily had to begin with the autonomous subject. In this way, they were forced to search the way to God starting from a self-enclosed subject, separated from the Divine and surrounded by a nature that was both alien and mute (intellectus quaerens dem). This attempt, understandably, led to an increasingly abstract God. First, deism reduced God to a distant Prime Mover, who had created the world but immediately afterwards withdrew to some remote corner of the universe. As the natural sciences developed, God became more and more an unnecessary hypothesis.14 It was against this background of philosophy ultimately becoming inherently atheistic that Immanuel Kant wrote his Critique of Pure Reason. As he outlined in the introduction to the second edition of this epoch-making work, one has to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.15 Kants dichotomy between knowledge and faith, however, relegated God to a realm far beyond the everyday reaches of the world and reduced Him to nothing but a representative of little else than a standard of absolute moral duty.16 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel for his part considered this result of Kants critical philosophy as a great failure of thinking.17 But, precisely in attempt 2007 The Author Journal compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
The End of Gods Transcendence? 501 ing to solve the Kantian dichotomy, Hegel brought to a climax the modern diremption between, on the one hand, reason, claiming to be autonomous and self-sufcient, and, on the other, divine transcendence, claiming to be beyond reason. Or, as Desmond puts it, if Kant sought a religion within the bounds of reason alone, Hegel entirely agrees, except he also says reason has no bounds, and hence can take within itself everything, including religion. He does not betray the project of bringing religion within the bounds of reason, but by expanding reason, while claiming to complete Kant, he ends up with a more radical rationalization of religion: there is no other to reason, there is no beyond, there is no transcendence.18 Thus, Hegel ends up with a thinking that disallows any real transcendence, any transcendence that is truly other, and thus a thinking that remains boxed up in its own self-enclosed circle of self-determining, self-expanding and self-completing thought.19 Hence Desmond claims that Hegels God cannot but be a counterfeit double, which turns out to be merely a religious representation for the Whole of all wholes. As Desmond notes, this leaves no room for any God who is beyond the whole. For, the whole is all there is. Or, as Desmond puts it in reference to Parmenidess One: The true is the One [or, to use a phrase from Hegel: the true is the whole (das Wahre ist das Ganze)]. For as there is only one whole, so it seems, so there is only one One. Outside of this there is nothing, and no God also beyond the whole.20 On the basis of Desmonds three kinds of transcendence distinguished in the previous section, one may now say that modernity witnessed the loss of truly superior transcendence. Modernity experiences nature as a self-sufcient whole no more in need of the Biblical Creator-God as its transcendent source beyond nature. Concomitantly, human self-transcendence is no longer automatically linked with the God of the Bible as a truly transcendent aim. As a result, both exterior and interior transcendence are no longer grounded in a transcendence which is truly beyond nature. This loss of truly superior transcendence found its culmination in Hegels system. Simultaneously, modernity gave rise to a number of immanently superior transcendences, replacing the abolished truly superior transcendence, namely the classless society of Marxism and other modern utopias, all of which offered an overarching frame of reference and an ultimate goal for human striving. In the meantime, however, post-modernity has also experienced the imputation and deconstruction of the immanent superior transcendences as hegemonic and violent master narratives. Thus, we may conclude that while modernity saw a secularization and immanentization of superior transcendence and replaced truly superior transcendence with immanently superior transcendences, post-modernity criticized superior transcendence as such, stressing otherness, difference and the ultimate irreconcilability of reality and, there 2007 The Author Journal compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
502 Frederiek Depoortere fore, rejecting as totalitarian any attempt to reduce that reality to a unity, a whole or an ultimate principle. This all-too-brief and sketchy survey brings us back to iek, who adopts Hegels view, put forward in the latters Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, that the God of Beyond dies on the cross and passes into the Holy Spirit as the community of believers. This basic idea, although most clearly endorsed in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?21, actually forms the foundation of all ieks writings on Christianity. So, with regard to Christianity, iek is in the rst place a Hegelian, even before he is a Lacanian. This, of course, raises the question whether Desmonds critique of Hegels God also applies to iek. Indeed, the question should be asked whether iek ends up denying, as did Hegel, true transcendence. 2. On Incarnation in the Work of Slavoj iek In what follows I consider how iek develops, with the help of the work of Lacan, the understanding of the meaning of the Incarnation which he adopts from Hegels Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. 2.1. The Deadlock of the Sacricial Interpretation of Christs Death on the Cross In the last pages of The Fragile Absolute, iek questions the traditional view according to which Christ, Gods only-begotten son, died on the cross in order to redeem humanity. According to this account, in ieks view, Christs death on the cross is reduced to a sacricial gesture in the exchange between God and man and this immediately gives rise to some very disturbing questions: Why does God have to sacrice his son? Is there perhaps some higher authority or necessity above God to which God has to comply? If so, then God can no longer be considered as omnipotent. God is then very much like a Greek tragic hero subordinated to a higher Destiny: His act of creation, like the fateful deed of the Greek hero, brings about unwanted dire consequences, and the only way for Him to re-establish the balance of Justice is to sacrice what is most precious to Him, His own son. If, on the other hand, we want to hold on to the claim that God is omnipotent, then the only possible conclusion seems to be that God is a perverse subject who plays obscene games with humanity and His own son: He creates suffering, sin and imperfection, so that He can intervene and resolve the mess He created, thereby securing for Himself the eternal gratitude of the human race.22 This dilemma is taken up again and elaborated upon in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? If one considers Christs death as a ransom for human sins, then the question arises: Who asked for a ransom in the rst place? Who asked for such a heavy price? One possibility is that Christs death is the ransom paid by God to the Devil, who owns those living in sin. This view,
The End of Gods Transcendence? 503 however, leads to the strange spectacle of God and the Devil as partners in an exchange. A second possibility is that God is the plaintiff. For, human sin has offended Gods honour and that offended honour should be satised. Yet, humanity is not capable of providing this satisfaction on its own. Only God can and does so by sending his Son, Jesus Christ, the God-man. Being God, Jesus Christ is able to accomplish the required satisfaction; being human, he can replace us in doing so. This view has been defended by Anselm of Canterbury. It is, however, not without serious difculties. Does not the success of the defence come at the price of turning God into a cruel, merciless and jealous creature? For what kind of God demands such a bloody satisfaction merely because his honour has been offended by human sin? Moreover, why should God comply with the need to satisfy an offended honour? Why does God not simply forgive humanity directly, without having recourse to a bloody sacrice? This brings us to a third possibility, namely that God could indeed have forgiven humanity directly, but nevertheless sent his son in order to set the ultimate example that would evoke our sympathy for him, and thus convert us to him. This position has been adopted by Abelard, who stated that the son of God took our nature, [. . .], thus binding us to himself through love. This, however, is not really a satisfying solution. For, as iek remarks, it is easy to see that something is amiss in this reasoning: is this not a strange God who sacrices his own Son, what matters most to him, just to impress humans? Things become even more uncanny if we focus on the idea that God sacriced his Son in order to bind us to himself through Love: what was at stake, then, was not only Gods love for us, but also his (narcissistic) desire to be loved by us humansin this reading, is not God himself strangely akin to the mad governess from Patricia Highsmiths Heroine, who sets the family house on re in order to be able to prove her devotion to the family by bravely saving the children from the raging ames?23 This, in brief, constitutes the perverse core of Christianitythe subtitle of ieks The Puppet and the Dwarf. Indeed, how could one but fail to notice the perverse strategy of God in Genesis 2 and 3? If God really wanted to avoid human sin, why put the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden in the rst place? And where did the snake come from? One cannot avoid the impression that the whole mise en scne was precisely aimed at letting Adam and Eve sin, in order that God would be able to save humanity later on through Christs sacrice.24 Furthermore, as iek points out in On Belief, does not Christianity burden humanity with an even stronger (impossible?) debt by presenting Christs death on the cross as an inexplicable act of Mercy, of paying our debt? One can of course respond to this charge by stating that Christ is precisely not asking anything in return. He has simply acted out of love for humankind. Yet, is it not exactly through not demanding from us the price for our sins,
504 Frederiek Depoortere through paying this price for us Himself [through his Son], that the Christian God of Mercy establishes itself as the supreme superego agency: I paid the highest price for your sins, and you are thus indebted to me forever . . . 25 Does an excess of mercy without proportion to what I deserve not automatically lead to an excess of guilt without proportion to what I actually did?26 And should we not think in this regard of the example of the spouse who, during a domestic quarrel, answers to her desperate husbands question But what do you want from me? with a rm Nothing!? What she really means to say, of course, is: Nothing in particular! She is therefore asking for total surrender beyond any negotiated element. And is the same not true for Christ? For, as iek puts it, when the falsely innocent Christ-like gure of pure suffering and sacrice for our sake tells us: I dont want anything from you!, we can be sure that this statement conceals a qualication . . . except your very soul. When somebody insists that he [sic] wants nothing that we have, it simply means that he has his eye on what we are, on the very core of our being.27 It is however possible, according to iek, to offer an account of Christianity that does not fall in the trap of this perversionbut on condition that one abandon the idea that Christs death was a sacrice. In what follows, I examine this alternative account of Christianity. 2.2. From God as Wholly Other Thing to God as Barely Nothing In On Belief, iek refers to the way science-ction horror lms depict the alien. There are two different ways that this is accomplished. On the one hand, the alien is depicted as wholly Other, as a terrible Thing, a monster whose sight one cannot endure, usually a mixture of reptile, octopus and machine. On the other hand, the alien is presented as exactly the same as we, ordinary humanswith, of course, some barely nothing which allows us to identify them [as aliens] (the strange gleam in their eyes; too much skin between their ngers . . .).28 According to iek, it is precisely this difference between the alien as a wholly Other Thing and the alien who is almost completely identical to ordinary humans, except for some barely nothing, that acts as a heuristic for understanding the difference between the God of Judaism and the God of Christianity. In Judaism, God is, according to iek, the transcendent irrepresentable Other. Judaism states that the suprasensible dimension (the Sublime) is beyond the sensible, is the Real behind the curtain of the phenomena, and that it tries to render that Real precisely by renouncing all images.29 To elaborate on this, I refer the reader to ieks discussion of Jewish iconoclasm, the prohibition of making images of God. It is important, however, not to misunderstand this iconoclasm. It is commonplace to state that pagan gods were anthropomorphic, while the Jews were the rst to thoroughly de-anthropomorphize their God. According to this view, images of God are
The End of Gods Transcendence? 505 prohibited because they would humanize [a] purely spiritual Entity. This rationale is incorrect, according to iek. Pagans did not believe their images to be gods and they did not even believe these images to be, in any way, adequate representations of the gods. And this is why iconoclasm can never make sense for paganism. Images of the gods are neither true nor adequate anyway. So, the Jewish prohibition of making images of God can, according to iek, only be intelligible on the assumption that the Jews believed that such an image would show too much, rendering visible some horrifying secret better left in shadow, which is why they had to prohibit itthe Jewish prohibition only makes sense against the background of this fear that the image would reveal something shattering, that, in an unbearable way, it would be true and adequate.30 But what horrifying secret would have emerged had the Jews in fact made images of their God? In order to trace this secret iek claims, in contrast to the common view, that what the Jews did was completely to personalize and anthropomorphize God. Their God, in other words, is just another person in the fullest sense of the term. Indeed, the Jewish God experiences full wrath, revengefulness, jealousy, etc., as every human being. Thus, Jewish iconoclasm should rightly be understood, not as a reaction to previous pagan religiosity, but as a necessary consequence of Judaisms own full personalization of God. For, an image would render [the Jewish God] all too faithfully, as the ultimate Neighbour-Thing and the Jewish iconoclasm is precisely aimed at avoiding this traumatic experience of God as just another person.31 What brings the secret of Judaism to light, according to iek, is Christianity, and it does so by asserting not only the likeness of God and man, but their direct identity in the gure of Christ. So, Christianity brings to a logical conclusion the process of Gods personalization already begun but not fully completed by Judaism. It accepts God as just another human being, as a miserable man indiscernible from other humans with regard to his intrinsic properties.32 In this way, only Christianity really escapes from paganism, really sublates it, while Judaism still remains an abstract/immediate negation of anthropomorphism, and, as such, attached to it, determined by it in its very negation.33 Or, to put it differently, Christianity rejects the God of Beyond and can thus be described as a radical desublimation, in the sense of the descendence of the sublime Beyond to the everyday level. So, Christianity makes the transition from God as the wholly Other Thing to the Divine as barely nothing, as the imperceptible something that makes Christ divine, a pure appearance which cannot ever be grounded in a substantial property. But what is this barely nothingthis imperceptible something? Or, to phrase it differently: what is the Divine?34 In order to answer these questions, I now turn to ieks understanding of what exactly makes us human beings rather than just another animal species.
506 Frederiek Depoortere 2.3. An Excess of Life that Makes Us Human In The Ticklish Subject, iek discusses the transition from nature to culture from the human being as a mere animal to the human being as a being of language bound by the symbolic Law. According to iek, the common sense view, in which the Law aims at controlling our natural passions and inclinations, should be rejected. Rather, what the Law is directed against is not our natural instincts, but something completely unnatural, that is, a moment of thoroughly perverted, denaturalized, derailed nature which is not yet culture. There is thus no smooth, evolutionary development from nature to culture on ieks account. Rather, the transition from nature to culture is brought about by something that is no longer nature but is also not yet culture. This vanishing mediator, this In-between, is nothing more and nothing less than the appearance of the drive.35 It is important to keep in mind the distinction, made by Freud, between drive (German: Trieb) and instinct (German: Instinkt). Instincts are biological needs, such as the need to eat, drink and copulate. They have a relatively xed and innate relationship to an object. Their most distinguishing characteristic is that they can be satised by, for instance: eating, drinking or copulating. Drives, by contrast, are not linked to a particular object. They differ from biological needs in that they can never be satised, and do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually round it.36 This distinction between biological needs (instincts) and drivesor to put it differently, the distinction between animal and human beingcan be claried further with the help of one of ieks favourite anecdotes concerning a laboratory experiment with rats, once described by Jacques-Alain Miller, son-in-law and selfproclaimed heir of Lacan: In a labyrinthine set-up, a desired object [actually an object of biological need] (a piece of good food or a sexual partner) is rst made easily accessible to a rat; then, the set-up is changed in such a way that the rat sees and thereby knows where the desired object is, but cannot gain access to it; in exchange for it, as a kind of consolation prize, a series of similar objects of inferior value is made easily accessiblehow does the rat react to it? For some time, it tries to nd its way to the true object; then, upon ascertaining that this object is denitely out of reach, the rat will renounce it and [put up with] some of the inferior substitute objects. In short, it will act as a rational subject of utilitarianism. It is only now, however, that the true experiment begins: the scientists performed a surgical operation on the rat, messing about with its brain, doing things to it with laser beams about which, as Miller put it delicately, it is better to know nothing. So what happened when the altered rat was again let loose in the labyrinth, the one in which the true object is inaccessible? The rat insisted; it never became fully reconciled to the loss of the true object
The End of Gods Transcendence? 507 and [never] resigned itself to one of the inferior substitutes, but repeatedly returned to it, attempted to reach it. In short, the rat was in a sense humanized, it assumed the tragic human relationship toward the unattainable absolute object which, on account of its very inaccessibility, forever captivates our desire. (Millers point, of course, is that this quasihumanization of the rat resulted from its biological mutilation: the unfortunate rat started to act like a human being in relationship to its object of desire when its brain was butchered and crippled by means of an unnatural surgical intervention.) On the other hand, it is this very conservative xation that pushes man to continuing renovation, since he never can fully integrate this excess into his life process. So we can see why Freud used the term death drive: the lesson of psychoanalysis is that humans are not simply alive but are possessed by a strange drive to enjoy life in excess of the ordinary run of thingsand death stands simply and precisely for the dimension beyond ordinary biological life.37 To sum up, in the rst part of the experiment the rat is a mere animal looking for objects that can satisfy its biological needs (food, a partner). When confronted with an object that would meet these needs in a very satisfactory way, but that is inaccessible, the rat simply renounces the object and is content with another object, even if it is less satisfying. In the second part of the experiment, after the rat has been humanized, by messing about with its brain, it shows, in contrast, a stubborn attachment to the impossible object. The object in question has become a Thing, something to which the rat is excessively attached. The rat nevertheless comes back to its Thing again and again, trying to reach it. It is precisely this endless repetition of the same failed gesture, this closed loop, which is the drive. The drive is thus not to be understood as a remainder of animal nature in human persons, lurking under a small layer of civilization imposed on them by the Law of culture, but still ready to take control again in a moment should one lapse into inattentiveness. Quite the contrary; the drive should rather be understood as thoroughly unnatural. Recall that the rat only enters the domain of the drive after its brain has been messed up, after some malicious experiment allowed the smooth course of spontaneous, biological life to derail. The drive is an excessive love of freedom, . . . , which goes far beyond obeying animal instincts. The drive is an uncanny unruliness that seems to be inherent in human nature, a wild unconstrained propensity to insist stubbornly on ones own will, cost what it may.38 The Law of culture aims at pacifying this excessive love of freedom and at returning to a new kind of naturalness, namely that of culture, which is, according to iek, the actual nature of human beings. The Law prohibits the Thing, the impossible object of full satisfaction, and introduces in this way the metonymy of desire (see gure 1 below, in which d stands for desire and is the Lacanian notation for the subject). The closed loop of the drive, the
508 Frederiek Depoortere endless circular course around the impossible object, is forced open and replaced by a succession of substitutes for the forbidden Thing. In this way, closure is replaced by radical openness. For, since the satisfaction obtained by a substitute always fails miserably in comparison to the satisfaction expected from the Thing, the succession of desired objects is endless.39
Figure 1: Existence under the Law: the metonymy of desire
This transition from drive to desire, effected by the Law of the symbolic order, is, on the one hand, a return to a kind of naturalness, sinceas indicated abovethe rat as mere animal quickly turned to substitutes and this brought iek to the remark that in that case the rat acted as a rational subject of utilitarianism. On the other hand, however, the naturalness effected by the Law is not a return to spontaneous animal life. For human desire is not a return to biological need. The humanized animal does not really give up its Thing and remains stubbornly attached to it (as expressed by the dotted line in the gure). Moreover, the course of desire is sustained by the illusion that full satisfaction (the possession of the Thing) would be possible if only the Law did not prevent it. Or, to put it differently, the Law calls into being the fantasy that the Thing is not really impossible, but only forbidden and fosters in this way the expectation that one day possession of the Thing will become possible. It is this expectation, then, which drives human culture and has caused human evolutions ever-accelerating pace, while the chimpanzeesour closest relatives in the animal kingdom, with whom we share more than 98% of our genetic materialhave almost remained unaltered for the past six million years. Furthermore, the Law is not able to prevent a resurgence of the drive. In contrast to biological need, and like the drive, desire is not linked to particular objects. Anything can become an object of human desire; this is demonstrated by the fact that human beings can become addicted to anything, be it cigarettes, coffee, chocolate, gambling, pornography or even collecting stamps.40 These addictions make clear that human beings desire beyond what is necessary for survival and even beyond what is necessary to live a pleasurable life. Humans can even desire at the expense of their own well-being. Cigarettes, coffee and chocolate are bad for ones health. Addiction to cigarettes, gambling and pornography are expensive; excessive gambling can ruin one nancially and addiction to pornography can destroy ones marriage and social life. Although addicts know all this, on one level, and often experience
The End of Gods Transcendence? 509 the unpleasant consequences of their addiction, they simply cannot give up their bad habit by an exertion of the will. This makes it clear that striving for pleasure (German: Lust) is not the primary principle in human life. The pleasure principle, which dictates our daily functioning, implies that human beings strive for pleasure and avoid pain. It is effected by the Law of the symbolic order and aims at restoring the bond between desire and object, a bond which was lost when biological need became derailed as drive. The pleasure principle forbids humans from pursuing their desire and states that humans should instead take consequences into account. It states that humans should always make a rational calculation of costs and benets. As Freud himself has already made clear with his reality principle (which isin contrast to common opinionnot contrary to the pleasure principle, but an integral part of it), one might be better off renouncing a pleasure in the short term in order to gain an even greater pleasure in the long term. Despite its centrality, however, the pleasure principle does not entirely succeed mastering the excessiveness of human desire. For human beings can always go beyond the pleasure principle, to use the title of Freuds famous 1920 essay. Beyond the pleasure principle lies the domain of the Thingthat Thing for which we are prepared to sacrice everything: all we possess, our well-being and even our very life. This is the domain of jouissance (German: Genu), of an excessive enjoyment in pain beyond all limits that is no longer pleasant in the ordinary sense of the term.41 Entering the domain beyond the pleasure principle, however, implies the end of the human being as a symbolic subject, as a being of language, which, as desiring, only exists in its distance from the Thing and which is that distance.42 Entering the domain of the Thing is therefore lethal. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud identied the death drive, the drive towards the lethal Thing, as the primary force in human life. The symbolic Law and language, pleasure and desire, are all secondary phenomena: they are nally ineffective defences against the unbearable jouissance of the Thing to which the death drive drives us. As can be seen in gure 2 below, the death drive is essentially transgressive and aims at reaching the jouissance of the Thing by eliminating the Law:
Figure 2: The death drive: addiction and transgression
510 Frederiek Depoortere The transgressor, however, runs the risk of getting stuck in what we can (in Hegelian terms) describe as a bad innity, the result of which is that he or she will need ever greater transgressions to experience the same effect. It is as with a drug addict who always needs greater doses and it is the same with the novels of the notorious Marquis the Sade, which report an endless repetition of transgressions. In effect, the endless metonymy of desire has only been replaced by another kind of endlessness, which is the breaking of the Law. Moreover, the transgressor still remains, despite his or her intention to be free of the Law, actually attached to the Law. For he/she nds jouissancenot in reaching the Thing (which always remains elusive)but precisely in transgressing the Law. This is due to the fact that, though the transgressor breaks the Law, its hidden foundation, namely fantasy, continues to remain operative. Hence the perpetrator is still victim to the illusion that the Thing is only inaccessible because it is forbidden by the Law and that it sufces to go beyond the Law to possess it. 2.4. The Coming of Christ: the Death of the Divine Thing The discussion in the previous section seems to imply that we are forced to choose between two possibilities: on the one hand, tragic desire and dull pleasure under the reign of the Law and, on the other, lethal transgression of the Law towards the domain of the Thing (with its promise of unlimited jouissance, which, however, always remains unfullled; because, beyond the Law, full satisfaction remains inaccessible). Yet, is this not similar to the choice between pestilence and cholera? According to iek, thankfully, there are yet other possibilities and it is precisely in this regard that the above-mentioned transition from God as the wholly other Thing to the Divine as barely nothing becomes the prime example. But before turning to this, let me rst introduce another important Lacanian category, namely the objet petit a (or object little a, an expression that Lacan insisted should not be translated). In order to do this, I have to take up the Thing once more. As already noted, the Thing, being the impossible/ forbidden object in which desire would nd its complete satisfaction, is nothing but its own absence: it is a hole in the centre of the symbolic order around which that order pivots. In that empty space, however, objects can appear; they are, in other words, raised to the dignity of the Thing (this being the Lacanian formula for sublimation) by virtue of the fact that they inhabit that empty space where the Thing is lacking. These objects are thus designated by Lacan as objets petit a. Traditionally, there are four such objects, namely the breast, the faeces, the voice and the gaze. According to iek, however, anything and everything can be become an objet petit a and, as such, an incarnation of (the lack) of the Thing. As he puts it: The Thing is nothing but its own lack, the elusive spectre of the lost primordial object of desire engendered by the symbolic Law/ Prohibition,
The End of Gods Transcendence? 511 and lobjet petit a . . . mediates between the a priori void of the impossible Thing and the empirical objects that give us (dis)pleasureobjets a are empirical objects contingently elevated to the dignity of the Thing, so that they start to function as embodiments of the impossible Thing.43 However, it is more correct to speak, as Philippe Van Haute does in his Against Adaptation, about the objet petit a as the dis-incarnation, as it were, of the lack. For, on the one hand, it indeed gives a concrete, bodily lling-in of the absence of the Thing (incarnation), but on the other hand it remains forever elusive (dis-incarnation).44 Given this background, the difference between paganism, Judaism and Christianity comes more sharply into focus. Both paganism and Judaism believe in a suprasensible plenitude beyond the symbolic order. As already noted above, pagans do not believe their idols to be adequate representations of the gods. Nevertheless, they try to grasp something of the suprasensible dimension through creating a multitude of images, or, as iek puts it, through the overwhelming excess of the sensible, like the Indian statues with dozens of hands. Judaism, by contrast, renounces all images together and tries to render the suprasensible dimension precisely in this way.45 So, to formulate it differently, while the pagans seek comfort for the absence of the Thing and the harshness of the symbolic Law by having recourse to the imaginary, such a consolation is refused to the Jews. They keep open the space between themselves and the Law (the space which is lled-up by paganism with imaginary constructions). In this way, however, they are directly confronted with the Law in all its arbitrariness, as is depicted in gure 3 below:
Figure 3: The Jewish relationship to the suprasensible dimension
Despite their differences, however, both pagans and Jews share the belief in a sublime beyond. To put it differently, they both believe in God as the Thing and thus both share the fantasy that the Divine Thing is far too sublime, far too elevated for human beings to be able to handle direct confrontation with it. With the coming of Christ comes the death of this Divine Thing. For in Christ the Divine is, according to iek, reduced to the pure Schein of another dimension,46 to something in Christ that is more than himself. This some 2007 The Author Journal compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
512 Frederiek Depoortere thing is nothing other than the surplus on account of which man cannot ever fully become man, self-identical. So, according to iek, the Divine is not the Highest in man, the purely spiritual dimension towards which all humans strive, not some inaccessible/prohibited sublime plenitude beyond the world of visible phenomena. Beyond the phenomena, there is nothing, nothing but the imperceptible X that changes Christ, this ordinary man, into God. This X, however, is precisely the excess of human life, the too much that makes us into humans (and not mere animals), but which at the same time can never be contained within smooth biological life. The Divine is nothing other than the obstacle that, paradoxically, makes us human, preventing our ever becoming self-identical. Given this analysis, one is better able to understand the central proclamation of Christianity, which is, according to iek, the absolute identity of man and God. The Divine, in other words, is nothing more and nothing less than that which makes us human beings instead of mere animals. This is what has been revealed by Christ.47 The coming of Christ does imply the end of the God of Beyond. In this regard, iek speaks of desublimation: the descendence of the sublime Beyond to the everyday level or the coincidence, identity even, between the sublime and the everyday object.48 This corresponds to a transition from the Thing to the objet petit a, and the transition from desire to drive. As noted above, desire thrives under the Law, which forbids the impossible Thing and thus generates the distance to the Thing, the distance which is the subject of desire. The logic of desire is indeed based on placing an impossible Thing in an inaccessible Beyond as forbidden. Desire is the endless movement from one substitute to the next, without ever reaching an end. Therefore, desire is inherently tragic: every substitute is not It. Or, as iek puts it, the obtained satisfaction never equals the sought-for satisfaction and it is precisely in this gap that desire thrives.49 As displayed in the gures above, this subject position is sustained by virtue of a fantasy that says The Thing is not impossible as such, but only because it is forbidden by the Law. The coming of Christ, however, shatters this fantasy: the Divine Thing does not exist and it is only its own absence, nothing but an empty space. In this one is able to leave the domain of tragic desire behind and to (re-)enter the domain of drive. The drive clings to some particularpathological (in the Kantian sense of the word)object that is also the support of a something that is more than the object itself and that we can designate, in Lacanian terms, as the objet petit a. The domain of drive is also the one of love. Love precisely consists in the identication of some very clumsy and miserable being as the locus from which another dimension shines forth. iek puts it this way: Love [in contrast to desire] fully accepts that this is thatthat the woman with all her weaknesses and common features is the Thing I unconditionally love.50 Love thus means that something, for instance the body of ones partner, starts to function as the object around which drive circulates.51 This is shown in gure 4 in which the circle in the dotted line stands for the
The End of Gods Transcendence? 513 material support of the objet petit a and the outer circle stands for the drive, the circular movement of the subject around this spectral oject.
Figure 4: Drive and love
According to ieks logic, one can thus conclude that, while Judaism is the religion of desire, Christianity is the religion of love. Judaism desires a God who, precisely as the Sublime Beyond, remains inaccessible. Yet the coming of Christ as the true God/man does not imply, as one might think, that in Christianity one can simply renounce transcendence completely. For according to iek, in Him the transcendent realm becomes accessible as immanent transcendence.52 Christ is not merely a stand-in for God, not one substitute for the impossible Divine Thing among many possibilities. He is not a contingent material (pathological) embodiment of the suprasensible God. Christ is God. With his coming, the God of Beyond has died and the Divine is reduced to nothing but the aura of a pure Schein that shines through this fellow human being.53 But precisely in this way it makes itself accessible to us for our attachment in love. 2.5. The Crucied Christ: the Ultimate objet petit a As stated in section 2.1 above, iek rmly rejects the sacricial interpretation of Christs death as perverse. Yet, according to him, it is possible to offer a non-perverse reading of this event. In the light of the discussion in the three previous sections, I am now in a position to formulate this alternative explanation. Perhaps the best way to begin is by returning to the story of the Fall. According to iek, in Genesis Paradise stands for human life not yet contaminated by its excess; sin is then precisely this excess of Life which makes [us] human and the Fall is the moment when the human animal contracted [this] excess.54 To clarify the way Christ relates to this excess, iek makes use of a comparison which demonstrates how his Marxist background plays a role in his interpretation of Christ. His comparison is the following: Christ is among human beings in the way that money is among ordinary commodities. A commodity should be carefully distinguished from a mere object (for what follows, see table 1 below). An object belongs to the realm of nature and possesses a certain use value (for satisfying biological needs). A commodity,
514 Frederiek Depoortere

Table 1: Money among the commodities PRE-SYMBOLIC NATURE EXCESS ORDER OF SYMBOLIC EXCHANGE commodities money = commodity as such
Objects with use value (satisfying biological needs) money = material object without use value
surplus value (<labour) MONEY money = incarnation of surplus value
by contrast, is an object of symbolic exchange in the market. It acquires a certain surplus value (or excess) through the labour invested in it. This surplus value is expressed in an amount of money. Money, however, is an exceptional object/commodity because it is without use value (outside of the symbolic exchange of the market it is completely uselessconsider, for example, what benet money would be to surviving on a deserted island). Nevertheless, and precisely in this vein, money enables the symbolic exchange. As a result, money is the commodity as such: the incarnation of surplus value uncontaminated by use value and, therefore, the universal equivalent [that] exchanges/gives itself for all other excesses.55 Table 2 below then makes clear in which way Christ is among human beings what money is among ordinary commodities. As money is the material substratum to which the excess that is surplus value (which is in itself nothing but an aura of some incorporeal dimension) attaches itself, so Christ is the material support for an incarnation of the excess of human life. He directly embodies/assumes the excess that makes the human animal a proper human being. And as money is the commodity as such, Christ is man as such.56
Table 2: Christ among human beings PRE-SYMBOLIC NATURE human animals Christ = ? EXCESS an excess of life (<appearance of the drive) CHRIST Christ = incarnation the excess of human life (Christ = God) ORDER OF SYMBOLIC EXCHANGE human beings of language Christ = man as such
The question that remains, however, is what is the equivalent of money as material object without use value in the second table? In short, what does Christ signify within pre-symbolic nature? If one simply follows the example of money, then something like the following seems appropriate: Christ = a human animal without some X. But what exactly does X stand for? iek is
The End of Gods Transcendence? 515 not very clear on this point (and maybe his intention wasnt to stretch the comparison as far as I am attempting to do herebut because one should always be attentive to what is not said as well as what is said, as psychoanalysis teaches us, the question is worth asking). Although iek is unclear, he does provide some clues. For instance, he states that Christ was the Pure one, without excess, simplicity itself.57 iek seemingly implies that Christ was without the excess of life that characterizes humanity. Is iek translating here the orthodox view that Christ was without sin? This conclusion seems justied on the basis of his interpretation of the story of the Fall, mentioned above, where he renders sin as the excess of life. Yet, since this excess is precisely what turns the human animal into a human being of language, does this not imply that iek is actually saying that Christ was not a real human being? But then again maybe orthodox Christianity is doing the same, albeit implicitly, when it states that Christ has been tempted in every way, just as we areyet was without sin (Heb. 4:15). Yet, what is a human being without sin, without his/her constitutive excess? Merely an animal again? But how seriously can one take iek if he would be really claiming that Christ was merely a human animal?58 This last point warrants further elaboration: take ieks statement that Christ as man = God is the unique case of full humanity.59 If Christ is a fullled or completed human being, he should indeed be without excess, for, as has already been repeatedly indicated, that excess is precisely the obstacle on account of which man cannot ever fully become man, selfidentical.60 But does this necessarily imply a return to pre-symbolic nature? What if, in fact, it is the opposite? This is indeed what iek seems to imply: that Christ is the rst case of a thoroughly denaturalized human being. In this way, the relationship between Adams Fall and the Redemption brought by Christ, the Second Adam, appears in a completely new light. The Fall is not a pitiful incident, but already the rst act of redemption. Moreover, the coming of Christ is not aimed at rectifying the effects of the Fall, but at fullling them. The Fall is the rst step on the way from human animal to full humanity. The problem is that after the Fall humanity remains stuck at the level of a negation of nature. It is only in Christ, the rst case of full humanity, that the human animal is completely sublated. Therefore, Christ is, as iek puts it, more than man. In this regard, iek even makes an explicit reference to Nietzsches bermensch: And why should we not take the risk here of referring to Nietzsche: [Christ] is overman?precisely insofar as one can say, apropos of his gure: Ecce homo, precisely insofar as he is a man kat exochen, as such, a man with no distinctions, no particular features (the ultimate Mann ohne Eigenschaften, the man without properties).61 However, in what way can one understand the claim that Christ was a man without properties? Was he not, after all, a particular human being who said and did very particular things? Yet, maybe, one can make sense of
516 Frederiek Depoortere ieks statements when by applying what he is saying to the moment of the crucixion. For at that moment, a particular human being is stripped of all his particular characteristics and reduced to man as such. At that moment, he is disgorged by the symbolic order (he had already died symbolically, so to speak, he dwelt in what Lacan designated as the domain between the two deaths) and therefore he reduces to nothing but a piece of waste, the excrement of the symbolic order. Only at that precise moment, then, does Christ truly become Christ, the ultimate objet petit a62, the incarnation of the human excess as such, that excess which can never be contained within the symbolic order of exchange. And precisely in this way Christ effects our redemption. For, by becoming the ultimate objet petit a, he assume[d], contract[ed] onto himself, the excess (Sin) which burdened the human race. iek elaborates on the character of this redemption as follows: By taking upon himself all the Sins and then, through his death, paying for them, Christ opens up the way for the redemption of humanity however, by his death, people are not directly redeemed, but given the possibility of redemption, of getting rid of the excess. This distinction is crucial: Christ does not do our work for us, he does not pay our debt, he merely gives us a chancewith his death, he asserts our freedom and responsibility, i.e. he merely opens up the possibility, for us, to redeem ourselves through the leap into faith, i.e. by way of choosing to live in Christin imitatio Christi, we repeat Christs gesture of freely assuming the excess of Life, instead of projecting/displacing it onto some gure of the Other.63 Of course, this promising fragment, which concludes the second part of On Belief, raises the question about what iek means by freely assuming the excess of Life. Unfortunately, he does not concretize this. Moreover, the other expressions in the fragment quoted just above seem to refer to the kind of praxis that is now expected from usnamely, a leap into faith, or an injunction to live in Christ by means of imitatio Christi. All these remain vague without further specication. Moreover, it is also not immediately clear what iek precisely means by projecting/displacing [the excess of Life] onto some gure of the Other, seemingly our usual way to deal with this excess. Perhaps a clue is to be found in the last pages of On Belief where iek mentions the religious suspension of the ethical. Apart from one reference to a novel, namely Evelyn Waughs Brideshead Revisited64, this religious suspension of the ethical is not concretized either, and, furthermore, it is not immediately clear how we should understand the link between the religious suspension of the ethical and the assumption of the excess of life. As a result, iek leaves his readers with a strong feeling of dissatisfaction. For despite his fascinating analyses, he proceeds only a very short way indeed about how they can be made fruitful for practice in daily life. In response to this pressing question, iek seems (yet) to remain silent.
The End of Gods Transcendence? 517 2.6. Conclusion I wish to conclude this investigation of the theme of the Incarnation in ieks work by showing how iek and the French literary critic and philologist Ren Girard share a common inspiration. By so doing, it will become clear, I hope, that ieks intuitions about the Incarnation are neither as peculiar nor as far-fetched as may be thought when rst encountering them, for they are also found among other contemporary thinkers, Girard serving as a case in point. Ren Girard has repeatedly and consistently advanced the thesis that there is a close connection between the sacred and violence.65 There are indeed important points of agreement between Girards violence of the sacred and ieks excess of life: 1. Both Girard and iek trace the origins of human culture back to the moment when the human animal was contaminated by something, causing that animal to leave the domain of smooth, spontaneous biological life and to become truly human. 2. This something, which makes us human, is, according to both thinkers, a too much, an excess. In the case of Girard, it is an excess of violence and, in the case of iek, it is an excessiveand for this reason also a violentattachment to a Thing. 3. This excess, although it is indispensable to what makes us human, is also what most threatens us. As Girard mentions, violence can result in complete destruction of human society and, as iek makes clear, the stubborn attachment to a Thing can lead to an addiction at the cost of our own health, well-being or even life itself (which is, by the way, the reason Freud introduced his concept of the death drive). 4. Furthermore, in both cases, culture (Girards sacricial order, ieks Law of culture) aims at restricting and controlling this too much, without, however, ever completely succeeding in that aim. A return to smooth and spontaneous, biological life is impossible. Or, to employ the root metaphor of Genesis 3, the way back to Paradise has been blocked by the cherubim, and a aming sword which turns every way (Gen. 3:24). It is against this background that both Girard and iek interpret the Incarnation of Christ: 5. Both authors offer an alternative interpretation of sin: sin is the excess by which the human being is contaminated. 6. Moreover, they both adopt the traditional view that Christ was without sin (without violence, without excess). 7. But precisely in this way, by being without excess himself, Christ was able to redeem humankind of its too much, either by showing humanity the way out of violence (as Girard states) or by showing humanity how it should repeat Christs gesture of freely assuming the excess of Life (as iek puts it).
518 Frederiek Depoortere In this way, both authors reject the traditional view according to which Christ was the sacrice needed to satisfy Gods honour offended by human sin. But it is important to understand that ieks account of the incarnation is not a matter of merely substituting the old, incorrect view (the sacricial, legalistic one) for a newer, correct one (one which would no longer be sacricial nor legalistic). His point rather is precisely that, within the horizon of Christs death on the cross, this redemptive event could not have been read other than in the wrong waythat is, in the legalistic way, as being a sacrice. Christs death can only become the access to something completely New by simultaneously being the absolute culmination point of the Old. So, it is precisely by becoming the ultimate sacrice that Christ breaches the sacricial order and inaugurates a life which needs no sacrice any longer. For, after Christs Crucixion, every further sacrice has become useless for the single reason that, in Christ, God sacriced Himself to Himself and, in this way, the highest sacrice possible has already been offered.66 3. The End of Gods Transcendence? In the nal section I will evaluate ieks claim that Gods transcendence ends with the Incarnation. In order to proceed with this assessment, I will discuss the way iek deals with human self-transcendence and raise the question of whether his work leaves any room for some form of superior transcendence, as identied by William Desmond. As already noted above, human self-transcendence can be designated as the self-surpassing power of the human being. This self-surpassing power can, according to iek, be linked with the movement of desire. Despite the fact that the movement of desire also underlies the ever-accelerating pace of human cultural evolution, iek claims that it is a secondary phenomenon, principally because it is a way of dealing with a much more fundamental manifestation of the drive; namely, the stubborn attachment characterizing the human being, the excess of freedom that can never again be integrated into smooth, biological life. Desire comes into being when the invention/intervention of the Law places the impossible object of the drive into an inaccessible Beyond as a forbidden Thing. In this way, iek appears to advance a kind of Feuerbachian theory of projection: his theory of desire, in other words, seems to imply that the superior transcendence of the Divine Thing is the result of the projection of the impossibility inherent in human existence into an inaccessible Beyond. Perhaps this is what iek means when he speaks about projecting/ displacing [the excess of Life] onto some gure of the Other. With his plea for a transition from the Thing to the objet petit a, and from tragic desire to love/drive, iek seems to be placing himself in the line of the Left Hegelians; for instance, in the line of Feuerbachs critique of religion as projection and Marxs critique of religion as alienation. The main difference between iek and these predecessors, however, is that, for iek, Christianity no
The End of Gods Transcendence? 519 longer stands accused, but is, on the contrary, commended. Indeed, iek adopts Christianityat least its teaching on the Incarnationas an important tool in his own critical endeavours. According to Jason Glynoss analysis of ieks anti-capitalism, there is a direct link between the way the subject of desire moves from the one substitute for the impossible/forbidden Thing to the next, and the way that the subject of capitalism endlessly consumes one commodity after the other.67 Thus, as iek expects, breaking away from the logic of desire will enable a break with capitalism. And since Christianity offers us, at least according to iek, the eminent example of such a break with the logic of desire, he considers Christianity as a main source for the anti-capitalist struggle. Indeed, in order to think the revolutionary subject iek falls back on Christianity. Initiallyfor instance in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)iek merely stated that a revolutionary praxis asks for a moment of decision which can be compared with the leap of faith and he used the example of the famous Pascalian wager to illustrate this point.68 Yet, in his more recent work (from the 1999 The Ticklish Subject onwards), the content of Christianity has become increasingly central to ieks work. As Michael Moriarty observes in his discussion of ieks use of religion, were it not for theological notions iek would not (or no longer) be able to analyse the contemporary situation of the subject.69 Thus, where initially he only saw an analogy between the believer and the revolutionary subject, as being two species of the same genus, in ieks more recent work he analyses the latter in terms of the former.70 It may not come as a surprise, then, that in the introduction to The Fragile Absolute iek pleads for an alliance between Christianity and Marxism.71 In the introduction to The Puppet and the Dwarf, he is even more explicit. There he claims that [the subversive kernel of Christianity] is accessible only to a materialist approachand vice versa: to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian experience.72 Thus, Christian faith seems to be used by iek as a tool to think the possibility of an anti-capitalist praxis. For iek, humans will be able to break away from the logic of capitalism by giving up the logic of tragic desire and re-entering the domain of the drive and the domain of love. Such praxis is described by him in the following terms: freely assuming the excess of Life, leap into faith, to live in Christ, imitatio Christi and religious suspension of the ethical. Unfortunately, as already outlined above, iek leaves one almost entirely in the dark about what such praxis of freely assuming the excess of Life could mean in actual practice. The example he offers of Brideshead Revisited does not go very far towards clarifying this issue. What is clear, however, is that the transition from desire to drive implies a complete abandonment of any superior transcendence. Indeed, all superior transcendencesbe they the truly superior transcendence of the JudeoChristian tradition or its many immanent substitutes, be they an ultimate principle of reality or a utopiathey all seem to be condemned as just so
520 Frederiek Depoortere many appearances of the Thing preserving the logic of desire and, therefore, modern capitalism. As a result, re-entering the domain of the drivewhich is nothing other than the domain of the closed circular palpitation which nds satisfaction in endlessly repeating the same failed gesturecannot but imply a radical ontological closure. Leaving the domain of tragic desire requires relinquishing the belief that there is some radical Otherness which makes our universe incomplete. Or, to put it differently, entering the domain of the drive means renouncing every opening, every belief in the messianic Otherness.73 iek thus effectively denies any and all superior transcendence. ieks claim that one has to abandon every form of superior transcendence in order to make a denitive break with capitalism raises two major questions. (1) On the one hand, is iek not merely (mis)using Christianity by putting it in service to his own critical endeavours? Perhaps one may even take the risk here of charging iek with using Christianity, interpreted along Hegelian and Lacanian lines, as the ancilla of his Marxist aspirations. Moreover, ieks handling of the Christian legacy raises serious methodological questions. The same applies, it should be noted, with regard to Girards work. The fact that both authors pretend to be able to offer the one true meaning of the Christ-event (as non-sacricial), implying that generations of Christians were (and still are) mistaken (by thinking it was a sacrice), seems, at best, highly problematic. (2) On the other hand, there is also the question whether proclaiming the end of superior transcendencesincluding utopias such as the Kingdom of God or the classless societydoes not end up precisely advancing capitalism instead of combating it. Might not the absence of alternatives for the current capitalist status quo be contributing to the post-revolutionary climate characterizing contemporary Western culture? Moreover, in what way can the subject of drivelocked up as it is in its eternal, circular movement ever become the basic unit of a new revolutionary movement? And is the problem of capitalism not, by contrast, more accurately described as a problem of perverted desire, of desire disconnected from a superiorly transcendent aim, rather than a problem of desire as such? Are we therefore not in need of a truly superior transcendence in order to heal our desire and our world from the onslaught of capitalism? On this last point hinges a major difference between iek and Girard. iek claims that the Incarnation of Christ should be understood as the complete abolishment of Gods transcendence. For on his view God is just the excess of Life projected onto some gure of the Other; Christ thereby frees us from this Divine Thing and this liberation must lead to the abolishment of all (superior) transcendences. For Girard, by contrast, Christ reveals the true character of the truly superior transcendence: the truly transcendent reality is not violent but loving. As Girard claims, Christ liberates us from our excessive violence, but he could only do so by being completely without
The End of Gods Transcendence? 521 violence himself, thereby truly transcending our violence. So, in contradistinction to iek, Girard seems to leave room for transcendence. A provisional conclusion may therefore be as follows: in regard to both for the struggle against capitalism and for Christianity, the work of Girard seems to be, at least at rst sight, more promising than that of iek. But, of course, further investigation, both of Girard and of iek, is necessary before we can draw out that conclusion in more denitive ways. That task, however, is the work of another essay.
NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Thomas Luckmann, Shrinking Transcendence, Expanding Religion?, Sociological Analysis, Vol. 51 no. 2 (Summer 1990), pp. 127138. Slavoj iek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York, NY: Verso, 1989), p. 7. Slavoj iek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London and New York, NY: Verso, 1999). Slavoj iek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London and New York, NY: Verso, 2000). Slavoj iek, On Belief (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2001). Slavoj iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). Slavoj iek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (London and New York, NY: Verso, 2001). William Desmond, Hegels God: A Counterfeit Double? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 34. Luckmann, p. 128. Tjeu van Knippenberg, Transcendence and Personal History/Life Stories, in Hans-Georg Ziebert et al. (eds), The Human Image of God (Leiden, Boston, MA, and Kln: Brill, 2001), p. 263. All descriptions taken from John Bussanich, Plotinuss Metaphysics of the One, in Lloyd P. Gerson (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 38; except for the second one, which is taken from Dominic J. OMeara, Plotinus: An Introduction to the Enneads (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 52. David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought. Second edition, edited by D. E. Luscombe and C. N. L. Brooke (London and New York, NY: Longman, 1988), p. 34. Louis Dupr, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 163. To refer to the famous answer given by French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace to Napoleons question why God was absent from his system: Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. trans. and edited by Paul Gruyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 117 (= B XXX). Eric von der Luft, Sources of Nietzsches God is dead! and its Meaning for Heidegger, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 45 no. 2 (1984), p. 269. Deland Anderson, The Death of God and Hegels System of Philosophy, Sophia: International Journal for Philosophical Theology and Cross-cultural Philosophy of Religion, Vol. 35 no. 1 (1996), p. 37. Desmond, Hegels God, p. 206 (second emphasis in quotation added). Ibid., p. 207. Ibid., p. 88 (my emphasis). This is most explicitly done in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, pp. 5051. iek, The Fragile Absolute, pp. 157158. See also: Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, p. 45. iek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, pp. 4649. iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 15 and p. 53. iek, On Belief, pp. 144145.
12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
522 Frederiek Depoortere

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 110. Ibid., p. 170. iek, On Belief, p. 131. Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., pp. 129130 and 132. Ibid., pp. 130131. This is further illustrated by iek, in his typical style, with some references to movies: [Christ] is fully human, inherently indistinguishable from other humans in exactly the same way Judy is indistinguishable from Madeleine in [Hitchcocks] Vertigo, or the true Erhardt is indistinguishable from his impersonator in [Alan Johnsons] To Be Or Not To Be [1983][. . .] (Ibid., p. 90). Ibid., p. 131. Ibid., pp. 8990. iek, The Ticklish Subject, pp. 3637. Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), p. 46. iek, On Belief, pp. 103104. Life thus loses its tautological self-satisfactory evidence: it comprises an excess which disturbs its balanced run (p. 102). Life becomes marked/ stained by an excess, containing a remainder which no longer ts the simple life process. To live no longer means to pursue the balanced process of reproduction, but to get passionately attached or stuck to some excess, to some kernel of the Real, whose role is contradictory: it introduces the aspect of xity or xation into the life processman is ultimately an animal whose life is derailed through the excessive xation to some traumatic Thing (pp. 102103). As a result, human life is never just life, it is always sustained by an excess of life (p. 104). iek, The Ticklish Subject, pp. 3637. As iek puts it: The ultimate function of the symbolic Law is to enable us to avoid the debilitating deadlock of drivethe symbolic Law already reacts to a certain inherent impediment on account of which the animal instinct somehow gets stuck and explodes in the excessive repetitive moment, it enables the subject to magically transform this repetitive movement through which the subject is stuck with and for the drives cause-object, into the eternal open search for the (lost/prohibited) object of desire (iek, On Belief, pp. 9798). What iek designates as the universalization of addiction (Ibid., p. 102). For a rst acquaintance with jouissance, I refer the reader to Frederiek Depoortere, Jouissance fminine? Lacan on Berninis The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa Versus Slavoj iek on Lars von Triers Breaking the Waves, in Lieven Boeve, Hans Geybels, and Stijn Van den Bossche (eds.), Encountering Transcendence: Contributions to a Theology of Christian Religious Experience (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2005), pp. 3234. The being of pleasure may then go back to an identication with an object, simultaneously it only lives by (and as) the distance that it keeps from it. . . . The function of the thing is thus as paradoxical as double: it shows how the being of pleasure is both its object and its relation to that object. See Marc De Kesel, Eros & ethiek: Een lectuur van Jacques Lacans Sminaire VII (Leuven en Leusden: Acco, 2002), pp. 115116 (my translation). iek, On Belief, p. 97. Philippe Van Haute, Against Adaptation: Lacans Subversion of the Subject (New York, NY: Other Press, 2002), p. 151. iek, On Belief, p. 89. Ibid. Ibid., p. 89 and pp. 9091. Ibid., p. 90 and p. 92 respectively. Ibid., p. 90. Ibid. Ibid., p. 94. Yet, it is important to understand iek correctly: This does not mean that [the partners] ordinary (pathological, in the Kantian sense of the term) esh-and-blood body is transubstantiated into a contingent embodiment of the sublime impossible Thing, holding (lling out) its empty place. . . . What makes [the material support of the objet petit a] an innitely desirable object whose mystery cannot ever be fully penetrated, is its nonidentity to itself, i.e. the way it is never directly itself. The gap which eternalizes drive,
33 34 35 36 37
38 39
40 41
42
43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51
The End of Gods Transcendence? 523

turning it into the endlessly repetitive circular movement around the object, is not the gap that separates the void of the Thing from its contingent embodiments, but the gap that separates the very pathological object from itself (pp. 9495). Ibid., p. 99. Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., p. 105. See also in The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 22: Original Sin [is] the abyssal disturbance of primeval Peace, the primordial pathological Choice of unconditional attachment to some specic object (like falling in love with a specic person who, thereafter, matters to us more than anything else). iek, On Belief, pp. 99100. Ibid. Ibid., p. 100. Moreover, even in that case the comparison to money seemingly does not hold good. For, within pre-symbolic nature, money is less than other objects (it has no use value). Christ, by contrast, does not seem to lack anything within the realm of pre-symbolic nature. So the conclusion seems justied that Christ is not completely as money. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 90. iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 80. iek, On Belief, p. 140. Ibid., p. 90. Ibid., p. 149: At the novels end, Julia refuses to marry Ryder (although they have both recently divorced their respective partners for that very reason) as part of what she ironically refers to as her private deal with God: although she is corrupt and promiscuous, perhaps there is still a chance for her if she sacrices what matters most to her, her love for Ryder . . . The religious suspension of the ethical thus consists in a purely negative gesture of meaningless sacrice, of giving up what matters most to us and God, iek adds, is ultimately the name for such a completely meaningless gesture (p. 150). See, for instance, Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred (London: Athlone Press, 1988) and Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (London: Athlone Press, 1987). iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 81 and p. 103. Jason Glynos, Symptoms of a Decline in Symbolic Faith, or, ieks Anti-capitalism, Paragraph, Vol. 24 no. 2 (July 2001), p. 87: The suggestion here is that Lacans logic of desire and the logic of capitalism share a deep homology in structuring contemporary subjectivity. This is because, just as the subject of capitalism is empty, so too is the subject of desire. In both cases, the logics are purely formal and independent of the particular concrete contexts wherein they function. The discourse of capitalism can only have as its main objective the failure to satisfy desire, thereby keeping desire alive, sustaining an insatiable desire for new products, new commodities, thereby leading to a kind of fetishism of the new whose consequence is the ever-expanding frontiers of capitalist market relations. iek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 3840. Michael Moriarty, iek, Religion and Ideology, Paragraph, Vol. 24 no. 2 (July 2001), p. 129: The situation is slightly different in ieks more recent work. For here we nd explicitly theological concepts being invoked to theorize the condition of the subject, as if without them the modern predicament of choice could not be analysed. Ibid., pp. 130131: It is clear that the analogy of proletarian and religious commitment is not quite the same as in the earlier work. The former is no longer interpreted merely as resembling the latter, but by means of concepts drawn from the latter. iek, The Fragile Absolute, p. 2. iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 6. Slavoj iek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York, NY: Verso, 1997), pp. 3031.
52 53 54
55 56 57 58
59 60 61 62 63 64
65 66 67
68 69
70 71 72 73

Incarnation in The Works of Zizek

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Incarnation in The Works of Zizek

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Modern Theology 23:4 October 2007 ISSN 0266-7177 (Print) ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

THE END OF GODS TRANSCENDENCE? ON INCARNATION IN THE WORK OF SLAVOJ IEK

Figure 1: Existence under the Law: the metonymy of desire

Figure 2: The death drive: addiction and transgression

2007 The Author Journal compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Figure 3: The Jewish relationship to the suprasensible dimension

Figure 4: Drive and love

514 Frederiek Depoortere

surplus value (<labour) MONEY money = incarnation of surplus value

2007 The Author Journal compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

522 Frederiek Depoortere

2007 The Author Journal compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

The End of Gods Transcendence? 523

2007 The Author Journal compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen