Abstract
A proper work of reception history of Paul in the intellectual activities of Slavoj Žižek can take advantage of interesting links between the philosopher’s intellectual production and the roots of some these ideas in the biography as well as from the historical context of post-Communist Slovenia. An early phase of Žižek’s intellectual trajectory that seeks to delegitimize and unmark political power is marked by an absence of Paul, while the latter work—from The Ticklish Subject (1999) onward—seeks to legitimize a radical political leftism that is expressed through simultaneous engagements with the figure of Paul the Apostle and Lenin the revolutionary.
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Notes
- 1.
Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2008), 488.
- 2.
The adjective “Paulinian”, instead of “Pauline”, signals that this philosopher might not be acquainted with New Testament scholarship.
- 3.
Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2008 ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 78.
- 4.
In this case, an illustration of “the elementary operation of the point de capition” in Lacan. Ibid.
- 5.
As in Ian Parker, Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 5.
- 6.
Briefly referred to in Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 188. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 4.
- 7.
Žižek sometimes defines himself as a typical case of an obsessional neurotic.
- 8.
Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek, 2010 ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 39.
- 9.
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 2008 ed. (London: Verso, 1989), xxiv.
- 10.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 2006 ed. (New York: Free Press, 1992), xi.
- 11.
Peter Dews and Peter Osburne, “Lacan in Slovenia: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek and Renata Salecl”, Radical Philosophy, no. 58 (1991): 30.
- 12.
Parker, 33.
- 13.
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, xxvii–xxviii.
- 14.
Ibid., 35.
- 15.
Parker, 11–12. Evert van der Zweerde also emphasizes Žižek’s historical experience, when he writes that “it is precisely his experience, as a critical Marxist, with a system that presented itself not merely as ‘real’, but as the incarnation of ‘true society’, while in fact it was neither the one nor the other, but based on systematic denial of its ‘lie’, that made him sensitive to the fact that all alleged social and political ‘reality’ is in a sense ‘fake’”. Evert van der Zweerde, “Special Issue: The Many Faces of Slavoj Zizek’s Radicalism”, Studies in East European Thought 56, no. 4 (2004): 252.
- 16.
See, for instance, “a personal experience” of “this inherent obscenity of Power” from Žižek’s experience in the old Yugoslav People’s Army in the 1970s, where an unfortunate soldier was humiliated, being forced to masturbate in front of a doctor and fellow soldiers, which Žižek comments upon in the following way: “All of us in the room, including the doctor himself, accompanied the spectacle with obscene laughter; the unfortunate soldier himself soon joined us with an embarrassed giggle, exchanging looks of solidarity with us while continuing to masturbate … This scene brought about in me an experience of quasi-epiphany: in nuce, there was everything in it, the entire dispositive of Power—the uncanny mixture of imposed enjoyment and humiliating exercise of Power, the agency of Power which shouts severe orders, but simultaneously shares with us, his subordinates, obscene laughter bearing witness to a deep solidarity…” Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), 2–3.
- 17.
Žižek and Daly, 30–31.
- 18.
Ibid., 35.
- 19.
Parker, 12.
- 20.
Dews and Osburne, 26.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Sarah Kay, Žižek: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 15.
- 23.
Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, 3.
- 24.
The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), 54.
- 25.
Ibid., 61.
- 26.
For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 266–267.
- 27.
The first instance is found in Slavoj Zižek and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 78.
- 28.
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, xxix.
- 29.
Dews and Osburne, 28.
- 30.
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 165–166.
- 31.
For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 3.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, 211.
- 34.
Ibid., 221.
- 35.
Quoted in The Sublime Object of Ideology, 24.
- 36.
Ibid., 25.
- 37.
Ibid., 27.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
As he does in, for instance, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality, 63. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 2008 ed. (London: Verso, 1999), 261.
- 40.
Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. II (London: Routledge, 2005).
- 41.
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, xxx.
- 42.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 23.
- 43.
Ibid., 87.
- 44.
Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 61.
- 45.
Ibid., 67.
- 46.
How to Read Lacan (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), 9, 10.
- 47.
Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, 2008 ed. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 120.
- 48.
How to Read Lacan, 28.
- 49.
Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, 115.
- 50.
Ibid., 116.
- 51.
The term “dogmatic” does not yield exclusively negative connotations within continental philosophical discourses. Immanuel Kant contrasted the attempt to acquire pure knowledge with concepts alone as “dogmatism”, while “the dogmatic procedure” was the metaphysical approach which Kant defined, for instance, in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason: “This critique is not opposed to the dogmatic procedure of reason in its pure knowledge, as science, for that must always be dogmatic, that is, yield strict proof from sure principles a priori. It is opposed only to dogmatism, that is, to the presumption that it is possible to make progress with pure knowledge, according to principles, from concepts alone (those that are philosophical), as reason has long been in the habit of doing; and that it is possible to do this without having first investigated in what way and by what right reason has come into possession of these concepts. Dogmatism is thus the dogmatic procedure of pure reason, without previous criticism of its own powers”. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Beijing: China Social Sciences Publishing House, 1999), 32.
- 52.
Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, 116.
- 53.
Kierkegaard started to compose Philosophical Fragments and gave the sermon that would end his education in the practical-theological seminary in Copenhagen. The text that the student Kierkegaard was expected to base his preaching on was Paul’s First letter to the Corinthians, with its verses about the cross as foolishness for the wise of this world. Though perhaps the most visible trace of this Pauline influence is in the recurring motif of the God who “took the form of a servant” (Phil 2:7). Søren Kierkegaard and Knut Johansen, Filosofiske Smuler, Eller En Smule Filosofi (Oslo: Damm, 2004), 20.
- 54.
Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, 109.
- 55.
Rex Butler, Slavoj Zizek: Live Theory (New York: Continuum, 2005), 22.
- 56.
Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, 107.
- 57.
Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London; New York: Verso, 2012), 104.
- 58.
The criticism referred to is by the scholar Yirmiyahu Yovel.
- 59.
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 228.
- 60.
Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, 119.
- 61.
Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, 96.
- 62.
John D. Caputo and Linda Martín Alcoff, St. Paul among the Philosophers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 39.
- 63.
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 256.
- 64.
Slavoj Žižek, John Milbank, and Creston Davis, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 260.
- 65.
Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, 114.
- 66.
For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 66.
- 67.
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (Letchworth: Hogarth Press, 1939), 30.
- 68.
In his introduction to an anthology on the turn to Paul in continental philosophy, the editor presupposes the last of the two options: “Their starting point is their own philosophy, and not the Pauline corpus. In their philosophizing, they need Pauline thought only to the extent that it corroborates ideas already articulated in their systems of thought. This applies more or less to all Continental philosophers”. Frick, 7.
- 69.
Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, 4.
- 70.
The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, xxv.
- 71.
Badiou, 6.
- 72.
Ibid., 12.
- 73.
Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 150.
- 74.
Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, 76.
- 75.
Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso, 2001), 16.
- 76.
Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality, 212–213.
- 77.
As in Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, 2009 ed. (London: Profile books, 2008), 119. Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), 5.
- 78.
The word “polemic” is deliberately chosen over “criticism”, since Žižek performs a misreading of Derrida which cannot lead to a substantial criticism. Danielle Sands, “Thinking through Différance: Derrida, Žižek and Religious Engagement”, Textual Practice Textual Practice 22, no. 3 (2008).
- 79.
Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, 14.
- 80.
The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 159.
- 81.
Ibid., 248.
- 82.
Ibid., 284.
- 83.
Ibid., xxvii.
- 84.
Ibid.
- 85.
Ibid., 272.
- 86.
Ibid., 151.
- 87.
The Sublime Object of Ideology, xxviii.
- 88.
The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 154.
- 89.
Ibid., 162–163.
- 90.
Ibid., 167.
- 91.
Ibid., 165.
- 92.
Ibid., 168.
- 93.
Ibid., 166.
- 94.
Ibid., xxvi.
- 95.
Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, 66.
- 96.
Ibid., 68.
- 97.
Lacan quoted in Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 177–178.
- 98.
In Defense of Lost Causes, 488.
- 99.
One could also emphasize Žižek’s need for becoming a political thinker as a reason for his turn to Paul, as Roland Boer does, when he sees Žižek’s return to Paul embarked on in his 1999 book as a response to the challenges raised by Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau in their 2000 dialogue. Roland Boer, Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), 338–342. This criticism is nicely captured in Laclau’s utterance: “Žižek’s thought is not organized around a truly political reflection but is, rather, a psychoanalytic discourse which draws its examples from the politico-ideological field”. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 276.
- 100.
To quote this author more extensively: “Žižek’s image of Judaism is a Catholic image, and it is being revived by him now exactly at a time when Catholic Slovenia is reasserting its Christian heritage against both the formerly formally-atheist Yugoslavia and the current revival of the Orthodox Church in Serbia. Although Žižek makes a distinction in The Puppet and the Dwarf between the ‘perverse’ ideological universe of ‘really existing Christianity’ and the redemptive new beginning promised by Christ that he aims to retrieve from that universe, his favourite texts are those of reactionary Catholic writers like G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis—and he draws attention with great delight, as he did already ten years back (in EYW), that Hitchcock too was an English Catholic”. Parker, 120. Marcus Pound also opposes this reading of Žižek’s way to Paul and Christianity. He also draws attention to the fact that Parker erroneously labels one of those whom he regards as a “reactionary” author, C. S. Lewis, as a Catholic, when he was actually Anglican. Marcus Pound, Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2008), 5. One cannot but wonder why Parker sees Catholicism everywhere in Žižek’s interest in religion, including his dubious suggestion that Žižek’s image of Judaism is Catholic. As will be indicated by references to the Protestant reception of Paul in this study, Protestantism has by no means been innocent of anti-Judaism.
- 101.
Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, 171.
- 102.
Ibid., 181.
- 103.
Ibid., 118.
- 104.
The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 22.
- 105.
Ola Sigurdson, “Slavoj Žižek, the Death Drive, and Zombies: A Theological Account”, Modern Theology 29, no. 3 (2013): 376. Sigurdson points to Žižek in How to Read Lacan, which is very illustrative of this dismissiveness of premodernity. “And, perhaps, one should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian philosophical revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, while with Kant, the excess to be fought is immanent and concerns the very core of subjectivity itself”. Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 47.
- 106.
“From Job to Christ: A Paulinian Reading of Chesterton”, in St. Paul among the Philosophers, ed. John D. Caputo and Linda Alcoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 39.
- 107.
The Fragile Absolute, or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, 2008 ed. (London; New York: Verso, 2000), xxx.
- 108.
“All great ‘dialogues’ in the history of philosophy were so many cases of misunderstanding: Aristotle misunderstood Plato, Thomas Aquinas misunderstood Aristotle, Hegel misunderstood Kant and Schelling, Marx misunderstood Hegel, Nietzsche misunderstood Christ…” This was “a productive misreading”. Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, Routledge Classics ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004), xix.
- 109.
Caputo and Alcoff, 178–179.
- 110.
Ibid., 160–161.
- 111.
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 160.
- 112.
“Theology announces here a unique experience, alluded to in the following fragment published after Benjamin’s death: ‘In Eingedenken, we make an experience which forbids us to conceive history in a fundamentally atheological way.’ We cannot translate this Eingedenken simply by ‘remembrance’ or ‘reminiscence’; the more literal translation, ‘to transpose oneself in thoughts/into something’, is also inadequate.” Ibid., 153.
- 113.
Ibid.
- 114.
Gadamer’s hermeneutics is arguably the opposite, to a great extent. The meaning of a text transcends the epoch or the time in which it was written.
- 115.
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 161.
- 116.
Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, 193.
- 117.
Ibid., 17.
- 118.
The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality, 129.
- 119.
“Throughout his own work, Lacan, in turn, modifies Heidegger’s motif of language as the house of being. Language is not man’s creation and instrument, it is man who ‘dwells’ in language: ‘Psychoanalysis should be the science of language inhabited by the subject.’ Lacan’s ‘paranoiac’ twist, his additional Freudian turn of the screw, comes from his characterization of this house as a torture-house: ‘In the light of the Freudian experience, man is a subject caught in and tortured by language.’” Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, 870.
- 120.
In Žižek’s words, “the fatal flaw of precipitate historicization”. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 79.
- 121.
Ibid., 153.
- 122.
Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, 697.
- 123.
“And do we not find a similar shift in the history of hermeneutics? When, two centuries ago, the advance of natural sciences rendered a literal reading of the Bible more and more problematic, hermeneutics emerged as the study of how one can still understand the Bible in a meaningful way; from then on, it expanded into the art of proper understanding of ancient texts. As such, hermeneutics was a specific introductory art which, later, had to give way to (philosophical) reasoning proper: once we understand the author properly, we can start to engage with him. Afterward, however (with Heidegger and Gadamer), hermeneutics was elevated into the thing itself, the fundamental ontology: if, as Gadamer put it, being, insofar as it is understood, is language—that is to say, if the way being is disclosed to us is articulated in the horizon of pre-understanding embedded in language—then ontology itself (…) becomes a matter of hermeneutics.” The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, 180.
- 124.
Living in the End Times, xiii.
- 125.
“An Interview with Slavoj Zizek. ‘On Divine Self-Limitation and Revolutionary Love’”, Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 1, no. 2 (2004): 32.
- 126.
Mads Peter Karlsen, “Alain Badious Paulus-Læsning”, Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift 73, no. 1 (2010): 59.
- 127.
Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, 6.
- 128.
Ibid., 1.
- 129.
Žižek, “An Interview with Slavoj Zizek. ‘On Divine Self-Limitation and Revolutionary Love’”, 32.
- 130.
Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917, 2004 ed. (London: Verso, 2002), 317.
- 131.
Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, 697.
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Løland, O.J. (2018). Slavoj Žižek’s Way to Paul: The Hegelian Paulinist. In: The Reception of Paul the Apostle in the Works of Slavoj Žižek. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91728-3_2
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