Slavoj Žižek

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Review of The Fragile Absolute, or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?

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SOURCE: Crockett, Clayton. Review of The Fragile Absolute, or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, by Slavoj Žižek. Theoria, no. 99 (June 2002): 141-43.

[In the following review, Crockett lauds Žižek's unique cultural perspective in The Fragile Absolute and recommends the volume to “scholars and thinkers working at the intersections of philosophy, cultural and political theory, and religious thought.”]

Slavoj Žižek is one of the most creative and original thinkers on the contemporary scene. His philosophical juxtaposition of Hegel and Lacan, his political commitment to a certain Marxism which has affinities with Althusser and the Frankfurt School, along with his engaging prose that illuminates movies and other aspects of contemporary culture, combine to make his voice unique and important. The Fragile Absolute, a follow-up to The Ticklish Subject, unites social and political analysis with a consideration of religion.

As the subtitle suggests, Žižek deals less with Christianity itself than with a specific legacy, here based on Alan Badiou's reading of St. Paul. On this reading, “Christianity and Marxism should fight on the same side of the barricade against the onslaught of the new spiritualisms” (p. 2). New age spiritualisms converge with perverse aspects of a well-intentioned tolerance and multiculturalism that represses national and racial conflict only to see such conflicts break out anew all the more virulently, in a return of the repressed. These new age spiritualisms and multiculturalist ideologies mask the true enemy, capitalism, which both Marxism and Christianity (properly understood) provide tools to identify and oppose.

Žižek moves effortlessly and dazzlingly from topic to topic, from the Balkan conflicts to Diet Coke to the film Blue, and his prose is very clear, although at times understanding hovers tantalizingly just out of reach. Žižek uses Lacanian concepts of imaginary, symbolic and real to express political insights. He argues that “the struggle for hegemony within today's postmodern politics … encounters the Real when it touches the point of actually disturbing the free functioning of capital” (p. 55). Our liberal, multicultural celebrations of difference are an imaginary fantasy which allows us to ignore the brutality of capitalism as it expands and destroys all opposition. Our fantasy is imagining that we are free subjects capable of resting in a place outside capitalism in order to resist it, and believing that multiplying cultural differences actually opposes rather than supports the unifying process of creating a global market. We need a symbolic discourse and practice that directly engages capitalist oppression.

Although Žižek opposes many contemporary forms of postmodernism, he ultimately critiques the modern stance of opposition to the system of capitalist power. His strategy wagers that unreserved identification with the cultural forms of capital ultimately exposes the vacuity of its logic. This is a “surprising radical gesture” which has affinities with Deleuze and Guattari's attempt to push capitalism to its limit in Capitalism and Schizophrenia and also Baudrillard's ironic embrace of simulacra. Here, “the subject is actually ‘in’ (caught in the web of) power only and precisely insofar as he does not fully identify with it but maintains a kind of distance towards it; on the other hand, the system (of public Law) is actually undermined by unreserved identification with it” (p. 148). This gesture is a quasi-miraculous event that possesses affinity with Paul's notion of agape. On this reading of Pauline Christianity (using Hegelian language), “the suprasensible [God] is the appearance as such” (p. 105). Furthermore, Christian charity, as opposed to pagan wisdom and justice, uncouples one from enslavement to the Law and allows an experience of the Absolute in moments of fragile and fleeting beauty (p. 118).

Žižek conclusions are both evocative and provocative. The scope of his treatment in such a concise work loses some of the fine-grained complexity of both Christian thought and contemporary Marxist theory, but his creative juxtaposition demands that the reader grapple with his ideas. Actually, since most of the analysis is cultural and political, the invocation of Christianity appears almost like a spirit conjured up to validate his theoretical discussions of cultural phenomena and global capital. Nonetheless, this book is highly recommended for scholars and thinkers working at the intersections of philosophy, cultural and political theory, and religious thought.

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