Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Slavoj Žižek
Institute of Sociology
University of Ljubljana
Ljubljana 1000
Slovenia
Abstract
This is a response to John Milbank that further unfolds our debate pub-
lished as The Monstrosity of Christ edited by Creston Davis and published by
MIT Press, 2009. My response to Milbank takes its point of departure from
Pascal’s wager.
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010, 1 Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, London SW3 5SR.
Žižek The Atheist Wager 137
the other, since you must of necessity choose… But your happiness? Let us
weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God.
You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to
cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have
been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are
people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of
an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by
acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc…
One can argue that the core of his argument does not directly concern
belief but acting: one cannot decide to believe, one can only decide to act
AS IF one believes, with the hope that belief will arise by itself; perhaps,
this trust that, if you act as if you believe, belief will arise, is the wager.
Perhaps, the only way out of these impasses is what, in his unpublished
“secret” writings, Denis Diderot elaborated under the title of the “mate-
rialist’s credo.” In “Entretien d’un Philosophe avec la maréchale de ***,”
he concluded: “Après tout, le plus court est de se conduire comme si le vieillard
existait… même quand on n’y croit pas./After all, the most straightforward way
is to behave as if the old guy exists…even if one doesn’t believe it./” This
may appear to amount to the same as Pascal’s wager apropos the custom:
even if you don’t believe in it, act as if you believe… However, Diderot’s
point is exactly the opposite one: the only way to be truly moral is to
act morally without regard to God’s existence. In other words, Diderot
directly turns around Pascal’s wager (the advice to put your bets on the
existence of God): “En un mot que la plupart ont tout a perdre et rien a gagner
a nier un Dieu renumerateur et vengeur. /In a word, it is that the majority of
those who deny a remunerating and revenging God has all to lose and
nothing to gain./”2 In his denial of the remunerating and vengeful God,
the atheist loses everything (if he is wrong: he will be damned forever)
and gains nothing (if he is right: there is no God, so nothing happens). It
is this attitude which expresses true confidence in one’s belief, and makes
me do good deeds without regard to the divine reward or punishment.
Authentic belief is to be opposed to the reliance on (or reference to)
a(nother) subject supposed to believe: in an authentic act of belief, I
myself fully assume my belief, and thus have no need of any figure of the
Other to guarantee my belief—to paraphrase Lacan, an authentic belief ne
s’authorise que de lui-meme. In this precise sense, authentic belief not only
does not presuppose any big Other (is not a belief in a big Other), but, on
the contrary, presupposes the destitution of the big Other, the full accep-
tance of the inexistence of the big Other.
This is also why a true atheist is at the opposite end of those who want to
save religion’s spiritual truth against its “external” dogmatic-institutional
Eliza to put the broken pieces of her family’s world back together in an
unexpected act of selflessness and love.
This act is the movie’s final epiphany: the entire film drives toward
Eliza’s momentous decision, a choice which enables catharsis for the
whole family. So how does Eliza order the family chaos? At the climactic
moment of the spelling competition, in front of TV cameras, when the
right answer would make her national champion, she decides to get a word
wrong on purpose. While the father is broken, the other two members of
the family are relieved, happily smiling, and even Eliza herself, till now a
kind of catatonic monster, manages a spontaneous mischievous smile—
what really happens here? Even such a mainstream figure like Roger Ebert
got it right here: “Eliza’s decision to insist on herself as a being apart from
the requirements of theology and authority, a person who insists on exer-
cising her free will. This is a stick in the eye of her father. What Eliza is
doing at the end of Bee Season is Eliza’s will. Does that make her God? No.
It makes her Eliza.” Her act allows her to break out of the enslavement to
father’s desire: no longer her father’s instrument, she creates a space for
herself and for the family to restore its free balance. It is thus the mistake
itself, the crack of disharmony which interrupts the perfect series of her
correct answers, which restores harmony.
However, the film gets its theology wrong (or, at least, it presents its
highly sanitized version): in Kaballah, God first withdrew into himself to
open up the space for creation; then, he bungled the job of creation, making
a deeply flawed and fractured universe—THIS is what we, humans, have
to patch up. Happily, the story itself corrects this wrong theology: what
if God’s mistake was to create a flawless universe, and what if humans
patch things up by introducing into it imbalance and disharmony? One
might venture here another problematic speculation: this insight goes
beyond the limits of Judaism and brings us into the central paradox of
Christianity.