Abstract
This paper will argue that the work of Slavoj Žižek can be fruitfully understood as a response to mystical theology as it has been received in two strands of 20th century French thought—psychoanalysis and phenomenology—and that Žižek's work in turn offers intriguing possibilities for the re-figuring of mystical theology by feminist philosophy of religion. Twentieth century French psychoanalysis is dominated by the work of Jacques Lacan and by his students Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. All three of these figures engage in significant ways with mystical theology—particularly with the works and figures of female mystics—as a crucial resource for theorising gender and subjectivity. A second strand of the 20th century French reception of mystical theology is the phenomenological tradition, specifically the work of Jacques Derrida. This paper will argue that, drawing on and challenging both of these elements of recent French engagement with mystical theology, Žižek's work offers a materialist ontology which seeks to locate transcendence within immanence and materiality, offering to feminist philosophy of religion the resources for re-thinking the relationship of the mystical to the material.
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Notes
See, for example, Denys Turner’s discussion of the development of the Christian mystical tradition in The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–5; or Grace Jantzen’s summary of the same process in Grace, Death and the Displacement of Beauty. Volume One: Foundations of Violence (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 357.
For a more detailed discussion of how these issues play out in subsequent Christian theology, see my article ‘The body and ethics in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae’ in New Blackfriars 94.1053 (2013), 540–551.
The relationship of negative or mystical theology to continental philosophy has proved a fertile theme for recent works in theology and philosophy of religion. Examples include Amy Hollywood’s ‘Beauvoir, Irigaray and the Mystical’ in Hypatia 9.4 (1994), 158–185 and ‘Mysticism, Death and Desire in the Work of Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément’ in Religion in French Feminist Thought: Critical Perspectives, eds. Morny Joy, Kathleen O’Grady and Judith L. Poxon (London: Routledge, 2003), 145–161, and Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002); Arthur Bradley’s Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2004); Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, eds., Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Jeffrey L. Kosky, ‘Contemporary Encounters with Apophatic Theology: The Case of Emmanuel Levinas’ in Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 1.3 (2000), http://www.jcrt.org/archives/01.3/kosky.shtml; Harold Coward and Toby Foshay’s edited volume, Derrida and Negative Theology (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992); and William Franke (ed.) On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature and the Arts. Volume 1: Classic Formulations (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).
This article originated as a paper delivered at the 2013 conference ‘Mystical Theology: Eruptions from France’ and so focuses on Žižek’s work in relation to French thought specifically (with a brief foray into the work of the Belgian philosopher Julia Kristeva. There is also much to be said about Žižek’s relationship to mysticism in Western thought more generally and particularly to the trajectory of mystical theology in Germany, a line of descent by which mystical ideas made their way via Meister Eckhart and Jakob Böhme into the work of Hegel and Heidegger.
Published in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1–28. David Newheiser points out, however, that Derrida was engaging with the negative theology of Dionysius the Areopagite as early as 1952 (Unforeseeable God (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Chicago, 2012), 59).
‘Différance’, 6.
For example, in ‘Post-Scriptum: Aporias, Ways and Voices’ (translated by John P. Leavey Jr. in Derrida and Negative Theology, eds. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992)), Derrida acknowledges the multiplicity of apophatic theology (283), its transgression of boundaries (284), its disruption of identity (311), and its relationship to both death and desire (285, 291).
In ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ (translated by Ken Frieden in Derrida and Negative Theology, eds. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992)), Derrida divides negative theology into that which proceeds according to the logic of the agathon, the Platonic idea of the Good as the source and goal of being, and the khora, the ungraspable opening which is neither being nor non-being (101, 104).
Hugh Rayment-Pickard points out that many of Derrida’s key notions share the structure of the chiasmus, ‘the “other” of the circle” which resists and disrupts economy and closure, yet which offered not instead of the circle but as internal to it (Impossible God: Derrida’s Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 159.
Derrida describes the paradoxical nature of hospitality, the way in which ‘one can become virtually xenophobic in order to protect or claim to protect one’s own hospitality, the own home that makes possible one’s own hospitality’ (‘Foreigner Question’ in Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 53).
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 11.
For example: ‘the problem with the Derridean approach is that it systematically overlooks the Hegelian character of its own basic operation’ (For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 2008), 32); ‘Derrida’s criticism of Lacan is a case of prodigious misreading [but if we] tackle the problematic nature of their relationship en détail … a series of unexpected connections open up’ (The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality (London: Verso, 2005).
Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 264.
Less than Nothing, 377.
Less than Nothing, 342.
The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 167.
The Metastases of Enjoyment, 195–196.
So, for example, in Less than Nothing Žižek criticises Derrida because he ‘has privileged the side of desire/lack, conceiving the process of différance as always failed and lacking with regard to the goal of Messianic Justice’ (377), whereas his own work privileges the drive which ‘turns failure into triumph – in it, thevery failure to reach its goal … generates a satisfaction of its own’ (498).
As Grace Jantzen discusses at length in Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Catherine Malabou, Changing Difference: The Feminine and the Question of Philosophy trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge and Maldon: Polity, 2011), 21.
Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, 108. Whilst it is possible to argue, as Andrew Louth does in his Denys the Areopagite (London: Chapman, 1989), that Dionysius’ work ought to be situated in his liturgical and ecclesial context, his negative theology relies primarily on theological and philosophical arguments rather than the appeal to individual experience which came, over time, to be seen as characteristic of mystical theology (a process which, again, Jantzen’s Power, Gender, and Christian mysticism traces).
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge. Encore 1972–1973, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Bruce Fink (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1998).
Seminar XX, 34.
In contrast to the Neoplatonism which sees everything which exists as emerging from the simplicity of the One, ultimately to return to it, Lacan rejects the notion of ‘a closed one’ as ‘a mirage’, a ‘false unity’ (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1998), 26. This represents a double transformation of the basic model which underlies much Christian theology in general and mystical theology in particular. First, rather than seeing God as the One from whose desire the world emerges, it is the subject, the desire of the individual which is given priority. Second, the longing for union which is characteristic of so much mystical theology is taken not as the deepest longing of the human heart but as a false hope, a fantasy, which prevents the subject from confronting the fact that insofar as she is one at all this one is ‘the one of the split, of the stroke, of rupture’ (Seminar XI, 26).
Seminar XX, 57.
Seminar XX, 76.
This process of gathering the many into one is, Lacan argues, a fantasy, it is simply not possible, and it was precisely to explain this impossibility that Freud introduced the notion of the death drive (Seminar XX, 66–67).
Lacan does in fact mention Nygren in passing, describing him as ‘no stupider than anyone else’ (Seminar XX, 75).
‘Mother’ is the role that women play in the sexual relationship within which they are positioned as objet petit a (35); the figure of the woman is the fantasy of a ‘prediscursive reality’ which does not exist (32).
Although Lacan acknowledges that there is such a thing as a ‘lady analysts’ he does not, apparently consider it worth his while to name any of them, let alone cite them (Seminar XX, 57).
In a 1995 interview, Irigaray suggests that her work can be understood to consist of three stages: first, a critique of the masculine subject as all-encompassing, refusing to make space for the feminine other; second, an attempt to articulate subjectivity from the perspective of this feminine other; and third, an attempt to understand subjectivity in terms of intersubjectivity and a dialectic of self and other, subjectivity and objectivity (Elizabeth Hirsh, Gary A. Olson, and Gaëton Brulotte, “‘Je-Luce Irigaray’: A Meeting with Luce Irigaray,” Hypatia 10, no. 2 (1995), 96–97). As Elizabeth Grosz argues, fundamental to all of these stages is the assertion that ‘sexual difference is the engine or force involved in the production of all other differences and thus has an ontological status that is radically different from… other differences’ (Elizabeth Grosz, ‘The Nature of Sexual Difference: Irigaray and Darwin’ in Angelaki 17.2 (2012), 73).
Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 191.
So, for example, for Kristeva, ‘feminine faith’ can be said to identify ‘more with the crucible of mysticism than with a dogma, whatever it may be’; when Eckhart asks God to rid him of God, he is envisioning ‘that nonplace, that unthinkable outside’ which belongs to the ‘feminine or the maternal’, where the feminine is not the opposite of the masculine but something which precedes it, which comes ‘“before the beginning”’, before the creation which ‘comes out of a cut’, out of separation (in Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva, The Feminine and the Sacred trans. Jane Marie Todd (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 60, 73, 152). Similarly, elsewhere, Kristeva argues that ‘mysticism… is vouchsafed only to those who take the “maternal” upon themselves’, the maternal being ‘the ambivalent principle that derives on the one hand from the species and on the other hand from a catastrophe of identity…that somehow involves our imaginary representations of femininity, non-language, or the body’ (‘Stabat Mater’ ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, in Poetics Today 6.1 (1985), 134).
Metastases of Enjoyment, 159–160.
Metastases of Enjoyment, 155.
Žižek argues that even in their attempts to reject male clichés about the feminine ‘in itself’, Kristeva and Irigaray account for femininity, nonetheless, in terms of male clichés, precisely because ‘the male representation of woman is the same as woman in herself; the difference concerns only the place, the purely formal modality of the comprehension of the same content’ (The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), 160.
For Žižek it is both the case that the body is formed by language, that it is ‘enmeshed in the signifier’s network’ and ‘survives as dismembered, mortified’ by language (The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 136), and also that language is that which ‘sticks out from the (human) body, disfiguring its unity’ (Parallax View, 84).
Again, specifically in contrast to Irigaray and Kristeva’s attempts to traverse the ‘frontier’ which separates feminine enjoyment from ‘(the male) discourse’, femininity is not that which lies beyond the limit but ‘this structure of the limit as such’, so that ‘all we perceive in this Beyond (the Eternal Feminine, for example) are our own fantasy projections’ (Metastases of Enjoyment, 151).
The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2000), 254; see also In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 66 where Žižek compares his account of gendered subjectivity to Christian monotheism is in contrast to the dualistic ‘New Age’ notion of the necessity of balancing cosmic masculine and feminine principles.
Insofar as there is any justification in Žižek's work for this association of masculinity with desire and femininity with drive it functions according to the logic of the preferential option for the poor in liberation theology: that the fact of patriarchy means that women are so often forced to perform a particular function in the narcissistic economy of men that it is harder for them to entertain narcissistic fantasies of omnipotence.
For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 2008), 100.
This shift took place around 1994 and is discussed both by Adam Kotsko in Žižek and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 6–7 and by Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher in Žižek and Politics: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 111.
Less than Nothing, 6–7.
Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000), 6.
Foundations of Violence, 35.
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Rose, M. The Mystical and the Material: Slavoj Žižek and the French Reception of Mysticism. SOPHIA 53, 231–240 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-014-0407-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-014-0407-3