The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Short Circuits) [Paperback]

After reading the definitive indictment of Zizek's work published by Adam Kirsch in The New Republic, I thought I was through with Zizek. In that article, the Slovenian philosopher is exposed for what he is: a deadly jester, who speaks up for communist dictatorship, calls for the violent upheaval of the social order, and stands against democracy, human rights, and footnotes. So why read another Zizek book, especially one that takes the form of a dialogue with a Catholic thinker I couldn't care less about? The answer lies partly in Zizek's compulsive readability, in his ability to mix high brow references with pop trivia, and in his taste for paradox and dialectical reversals. Reading Zizek is fun, at least if you don't take him seriously.

But here I must confess that there was also a kind of perverse curiosity at play. Would Zizek inflict the same treatment to religion as he does to other sacred issues like democracy or tolerance? Would he take his title to its blasphemous extreme and compare Jesus to a Hollywood monster creature, or read the Scriptures in parallel with Alien or The Return of the Undead? After all, he was the one who compared the Passion of the Christ to a gore movie in The Parallax View, or who wrote in Lost Causes that "Catholic priests' pedophilia is a phenomenon that is inscribed into the very functioning of the Church as a socio-symbolic institution." Less controversially, I was interested to know where Zizek would stand with regard to the return of the religious in contemporary philosophy. Would he align with his Trotskyist associate Alain Badiou in his violent rejection of all things clerical, or side with the late Derrida for whom the uttering of a prayer was possible?

The Monstrosity of Christ didn't live up (down?) to my worst expectations, but that doesn't mean I would endorse it or recommend its reading to non-Zizek fans. First, it is written in heavy Hegelese. Indeed, the expression "monstrosity of Christ" comes from Hegel's Philosophy of Religion and designates the appearance of God in the finite flesh of a human individual that culminates in the Crucifixion. Here is how Zizek's prose goes: "In order for (human) subjectivity to emerge out of the substantial personality of the human animal, cutting links with it and positing itself as the I=I dispossessed of all substantial content, as the self-relating negativity of an empty singularity, God himself, the universal Substance, has to 'humiliate' himself, to fall into his own creation, to 'objectivize' himself, to appear as a singular miserable human individual in al its abjection, i.e., abandoned by God."

But of course Zizek doesn't stick to the historical Hegel: "To act like a full Hegelian today is the same as to write tonal music after the Schoenberg revolution." His Schoenberg takes the figure of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and his atonality consists in giving Hegel a perverse twist, reversing all commonly held notions into their obscene counter-narrative.

Zizek finds in Meister Eckart (as read by Reiner Schurmann) the topological figure typical of Lacanian thought: "while one's [human] being has a center outside of it, in God, God's [being] too has a corresponding excentricity". This is the figure of extimacy, of the externality of God with regard to himself. "God himself can relate to himself only through man, and Christ had to emerge to reveal God not only to humanity, but to God himself." In the end, God is abandoned by himself, and he rebels against himself. For Zizek, following Chesterton, the cry from the cross ("Father, why have you forsaken me?") is the central mystery of Christianity: "Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king." "While, in all other religions, there are people who do not believe in God, only in Christianity does God not believe in himself."

For Zizek, "God (the divine) is a name for that which in man is not human, for the inhuman core that sustains being human." This is where Zizek's religion reconciles with his politics. He is drawn to the most disturbing aspects of Christ's teaching; the Sermon on the Mount (taken literally), Jesus' unsettling statements that he brings the sword, not peace; that "if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters-yes even his own life-he cannot be my disciple." Zizek concurs with Kierkegaard that true neighborly love is that for which I am ready to kill my neighbor, for "the only good neighbor is a dead neighbor."

In the end, of course, this is just a big joke: Zizek is neither a serial killer nor a believer, and his materialist theology is as distant from religion as his calls to revolutionary violence are to real revolutions. Terry Eagleton had it right when he noticed that Zizek "signs on almost all Christian doctrine except for a belief in God, which is rather like loving everything about Coca-Cola except its taste." As The Coca-Cola Company and Jacques Lacan would have it: Enjoy!