Abstract
This chapter seeks to demonstrate the necessity of a serious metaphysical discussion on the nature of modern materialism, backed by the use of sophisticated theological concepts. While practically all branches of contemporary philosophy define themselves as materialistic, they are often grounded in premises which undermine the very existence of matter and make them, more or less implicitly, nihilistic. Here I concentrate mostly on Slavoj Žižek who, despite all his explicit use of theology, appears strangely unaware of his Gnostic bias: his system of ‘transcendental materialism’ is trapped in the major aporia which consists in its inherent inability to affirm the emergence of the material universe. I also juxtapose Žižek with Derrida. The ironic outcome of this confrontation is that while Žižek explicitly declares himself to be a materialist, he ultimately engages in the Gnostic negation of being as an error, whereas Derrida, often accused by the former of the idealist leanings, manages to affirm the status of the emergent material being as ‘something proper’: something in the existence of which we, the subjects, can believe.
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Notes
- 1.
A term parallel to ‘religious illiteracy,’ coined by Diane Moore in her book Overcoming Religious Illiteracy (Moore 2007).
- 2.
See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, where he deplores the loss of stable and all-encompassing conceptual frameworks which were called by Nietzsche ‘horizons’: ‘The forms of revealed religions continue very much alive, but also highly contested. None forms the horizon of the whole society in the modern West’ (Taylor 1989, 17).
- 3.
The term ‘transcendental materialism’ derives from Adrian Johnston’s Žižek’s Ontology (Johnston 2008, 275).
- 4.
Lacan quotes here Paul Valery’s poem The Sketch of a Serpent in which the demonic snake, personifying the force of death in the garden of paradise, speaks with the voice of yet another Serpent, the Goethean Mephisto: ‘Then better ’twere that naught should be / Thus all the elements which ye / Destruction, Sin, or briefly, Evil, name / As my peculiar element I claim’ (Goethe 1994, 42). In his review of Žižek’s opus magnum, Peter Osborne comments: ‘It is in the ironic tension between what the book says and what it performs (Žižek would presumably call it a symptom) that the philosophical meaning of Less Than Nothing resides as in many ways a decidedly unHegelian text […] First and foremost, Hegel must become “Hegel-Lacan”’ (Osborne 2013, 19–20).
- 5.
Comp. Johnston: ‘The transcendental materialist theory of the subject is materialist insofar as it maintains that this thus generated ideal subjectivity thereafter achieves independence from the ground of its material sources and thereby starts to function as a set of possibility conditions for forms of reality irreducible to explanatory discourses allied to traditional versions of materialism’ (Johnston 2008, 275). In my reading of both Žižek and Derrida, I propose to call this openly a theological materialism, and for the same reasons: the Subject is a form of reality irreducible to the entities populating modern materialisms of Substance.
- 6.
The pervasive negativity of Žižek’s metaphysics was well spotted in yet another review of Less Than Nothing: ‘Žižek’s synthetic ontology is nothing less than an attempt to understand the real as the failed attempt’ (Oprisko 2013, 1). I take one step further and call this universalism of failure/fall simply Gnostic.
- 7.
‘This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being’ (Hegel 1976, 19).
- 8.
On the modern political context of the ‘overcoming of Gnosticism’ and the tension it creates between the ‘realists’ and the ‘purists,’ see Vassilios Paipais, ‘Overcoming “Gnosticism”? Realism as Political Theology’ (Paipais 2016).
- 9.
For Blumenberg, the late medieval emergence of the Nominalist deus fallax is the unmistakable sign that the Catholic fortress, raised by the first ‘overcoming of Gnosis’ undertaken by Saint Augustine, is crumbling—and thus paves way to modernity: ‘The God Who places no constraints on Himself, Who cannot be committed to any consequence following from His manifestations, makes time into a dimension of utter uncertainty. This affects not only the identity of the subject, the presence of which at any given moment does not guarantee it any future, but also the persistence of the world, whose radical contingency can transform it, from one moment to the next, from existence into mere appearance, from reality into nothingness’ (Blumenberg 1985a, 161–162: my emphasis). For Hegel, the role of modern philosophy will be to revert this process and convert mere appearance back into existence and nothingness back into reality.
- 10.
‘At the same time, side by side with the Gnostic outlook [of the Lurianic system], we find a most astonishing tendency to a mode of contemplative thought that can be called “dialectic” in the strictest sense of the term as used by Hegel. This tendency is especially prominent in attempts to present formal explanations of such doctrines as that of tsimtsum, the breaking of the vessels, or the formation of the partsufim [the divine countenances]’ (Scholem 1978, 143). On this topic, see also my ‘God of Luria, Hegel, Schelling: The Divine Contraction and the Modern Metaphysics of Finitude’ (Bielik-Robson 2017).
- 11.
With which he, as he himself somewhat shamefully admits, became acquainted thanks to the internet site called sparknotes.com (Žižek 2014, 142n). The reference to the theosophical speculation according to which ‘prior to creating something, God had to create nothing, to withdraw, to clear the space for creation,’ appears also in the prequel to Absolute Recoil, that is, Less Than Nothing, where Žižek calls it wrongly a ‘Talmudic idea.’ Yet, the sense remains the same as in the later version: creation of the void is the first activity of the divine subject, involving an expense of energy within the indifferent and neutral infinity of Ein-Sof (Žižek 2012, 944).
- 12.
‘But the result of this process is not empty nothing; instead it is being that is identical with negation, which we call being-there-and its significance proves to be, first of all, this: that it is what has become’ (Hegel 1991, 146).
- 13.
This retroactive projection of the Void proper by the Subject is what differentiates Žižek’s position from Schelling or any other traditional Gnostic: while the latter truly believes that subjectivity is the awakening of the primordial perfect kenoma, which will allow the movement of reversio, that is, the return to the lost origin in the perfect Void, Žižek sees it merely as an effect of Subject’s self-recognition acting as the ‘agent of nothingness proper.’ In fact, there never was a ‘true Void’ as the original form of Substance before it ‘cheapened’ itself; the only true Void is the Voiding Subject, carrying in itself all the Hegelian ‘tremendous power of the negative.’ Although a significant difference, it nonetheless does not alter the general Gnostic sense of absolute nihilism which perceives being as worth nothing it itself (or, in the words of Goethe’s Mephisto, the subjective agent of the primordial Abyss, nur wert, dass es zugrunde geht, ‘only worth of being destroyed’).
- 14.
Lacan, very well aware that the late-modern climate of superficial materialism does not eliminate the Gnostic-negative attitude towards matter but merely silences it, says: ‘On the subject of hatred, we’re so deadened (etouffées) that no one realizes that a hatred, a solid hatred, is addressed to being’ (Lacan 1998, 99).
- 15.
All these elements of Žižek’s revolutionary morals: (1) that any time is dense enough for the revolutionary action; (2) that any regime is ‘ancient’ enough to be overthrown; (3) that the revolutionary subject is a ‘gap’ embodied and as such an agent of the annihilating death drive; and (4) that there is a (worrying) primacy of the revolutionary pars destruens over the constructive part, are confirmed by Vassilios Paipais in his account: ‘Revolution occurs when some individuals—or even a single one—take the risk of jumping into that empty “space” consciously affirming history’s contingency. This is what Žižek calls an “act”: a jump beyond the symbolic order, beyond the signifier’s security’ (Paipais 2018, 10). On the other hand, Paipais states also that compared to Badiou or Agamben, who indeed may be accused of strong Gnostic leanings, Žižek’s ‘apocalypticism’ avoids fetishization of the Void, by presenting it as rather a means to an end (‘act’) than a goal in itself. True, but what is then a real goal, if any newly emergent being is doomed a priori? The only answer then is to see Revolution of Voiding as, in the Benjaminian phrase, a pure means, that is, a means without end.
- 16.
Žižek rightly recognizes Derrida’s messianic investment in the structure of desire (Žižek 2012, 377n), but fails to give full justice to Derrida’s modification of this structure, which now contains its own disappointment as the reverse side of belief. The messianic desire is inherently frustrated, yet it still does not lose, as in the case of the drive, a motivating object-oriented force—or, simply, faith.
- 17.
The little by little rule of the messianic-deconstructive work is best explained by Derrida in his penultimate seminar on the death penalty, where he juxtaposes Shakespeare’s line, ‘Mercy seasons justice,’ with a similar line in Victor Hugo, ‘the gentle [douce] law of Christ will finally permeate the legal code and radiate out from there,’ and comments: ‘Little by little, the legal code, written law, historical law, will be irrigated, inspired, vivified, spiritualized, by gentleness, the gentle law of Christ’ (Derrida 2014, 201). This is not very far from Derrida’s own belief in the patient work of deconstruction, the role of which is to work through the laws of social reality in order to make them ‘inspired and vivified’ by an attentive investment in singular beings with their irreducible differences, which he calls voyous, the rogues, or the future citizens of the ‘democracy to come’ (Derrida 2005). While, for Žižek, the very idea of a legal system brings an automatic association with an ancient regime , dysfunctional, full of violence, chaos, and disregard for the individual—as in Franz Kafka’s Castle, where the Law is portrayed, in the paradigmatic Gnostic vein, as the sloppy ‘whatever’ principle of being, or as in the authoritarian regimes where the so-called law serves merely to keep the fake spectacle of power—for Derrida, the law of the ‘democracy to come’ can be transformed from Indifferenz towards more and more subtle differentiation, though only ‘little by little.’
- 18.
According to Henry Silton Harris, ‘the fountain-head of this highly original development of Hume’s theory of belief was apparently Hamann’ (Harris 1977, 47). In the letter to Jacobi devoted to his Socratic Memorabilia, Hamann writes: ‘Our own existence and the existence of all things outside must be believed, and cannot be determined in any other way […] What one believes does not, therefore, have to be proved, and a proposition can be ever so incontrovertibly proved without on that account being believed […] Faith is not the work of reason, and therefore cannot succumb to its attack, because faith arises just as little from reason as tasting and seeing do’ (Hamann 1967, 167, 169).
- 19.
On the implications of Derrida’s metaphor of ‘counterfeit money’ for modern capitalist economy, especially in the context of credit as ‘given time,’ see a fragment from Philip Goodchild’s Capitalism and Religion (Goodchild 2002, 113–119).
- 20.
‘The illusory being in essence is not the illusory being of an other, but is illusory being in itself, the illusory being of essence itself’ (Hegel 1991, 397–398).
- 21.
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Bielik-Robson, A. (2020). A Matter of Faith: Derrida, Žižek, and the Fourth ‘Overcoming of Gnosis’. In: Paipais, V. (eds) Theology and World Politics. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37602-4_4
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