Slavoj Žižek

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On Belief

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SOURCE: Wheatley, David. Review of On Belief, by Slavoj Žižek. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5136 (7 September 2001): 33.

[In the following review, Wheatley offers a positive assessment of On Belief, calling the work “an honest and admirable meditation on what belief may mean today.”]

Slavoj Zizek takes the question of belief very seriously. On Belief begins with a description of a recent episode of the Larry King Show in which a rabbi, a Catholic priest and a Southern Baptist are discussing ecumenism. The rabbi and the priest agree that, irrespective of creed, a truly good person can rely on divine grace and redemption. The Baptist thinks otherwise: only those who “live in Christ” can be saved, which means that sadly “a lot of good and honest people will burn in hell”. Zizek wants us to dwell on this as an illustration of the basic premiss of On Belief: that to “break the liberal-democratic hegemony”, an authentic radical position must be prepared to “endorse its materialist version”. He goes on to discuss the radical legacies of Christianity and a more recent religion, Marxism-Leninism. Zizek argues that the suppression of the Cathar heresy by the Church was prompted not by its divergence from orthodox teaching, but by its laying bare of the inherently transgressive content of orthodoxy itself. For an ideology to achieve hegemonic status, it must lose contact with the violence of its founding moment, revivals of which it then repudiates as heretical.

Comparisons with the Stalinist experience of “actually existing socialism” as a Marxist heresy are acutely drawn, though his attempts to revisit Leninism as “the politics of truth” quickly meet the stumbling block of its particular “materialist version”, which, as Bertolt Brecht reminds us, involved putting large amounts of people up against walls and shooting them.

Zizek's books have been compared to rock albums, such is the level of expectation generated among fans by each new release, and On Belief is not without a touch of a “greatest hits” syndrome. A sentence on Leibniz and cyberspace on page 26 seems to have taken his fancy, as he repeats it verbatim on page 52. This book can be contrary and perverse, but it is, none the less, an honest and admirable meditation on what belief may mean today.

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