Tuesday, February 15, 2005
(10:03 PM) | Dave Belcher:
Žižek and Badiou: Paul Without Paul
[THIS IS A REALLY LONG POST]For a Christian believer, the fact that he does not do certain things is based not on prohibitions (which then generate the transgressive desire to indulge precisely in these things) but the positive, affirmative attitude of Love which renders meaningless the accomplishment of acts which bear witness to the fact that I am not free. (Žižek, Ticklish Subject, 150)
While Žižek and Badiou can both agree on a revolutionary politics through Pauline “universalism,” the way this universalism gets articulated is a point of contention. Let’s take a brief look. For Badiou, the ontological realm is always characterized by “a Law defining a specific community at the expense of excluding the members of other ethnic, etc. communities, while Divine Grace is truly universal, that is, non-exclusive, addressing all humans independently of their race, sex, social status, and so on” (paraphrased by Žižek in TS, 147). The truth of the Event of Resurrection in Badiou is connected with something like a non-ontological realm of “immortality” (non-ontological because it takes place retrospectively, since the event isn’t true until the decision has been made to be faithful to the event, and thus it is in some sense “transcendent”) through a graced fidelity to that event (graced because a shred of the real punctures the symbolic order, creating the possibility for something new). The ontological, on the contrary, is the realm of death—the Law brings death, and the truth-event beyond the Law is the opening of a universalism that moves beyond death and the particularity of the Law. Notice the language: “Divine Grace is truly universal, that is, non-exclusive, addressing all humans independently of their race, sex, social status, and so on.” This is precisely where Žižek departs.
Badiou, according to Žižek is still hanging on to an Ideal outside the Symbolic Order. And, this is precisely Žižek’s critique of communism, and specifically the specific brand of communism espoused by Deleuze and Guattari.[1] Žižek’s problem with Badiou, then, is that he is still caught up in the Kantian “spurious infinity”: “for Badiou, the ultimate goal of political activity is to achieve presence without representation, that is, a situation no longer redoubled in its State” (TS, 170n.32). Which is to say that, for Žižek acceptance of the death drive—particularly the sacrifice of the simultaneous executioner and executed Christ—opens up “the domain of Love beyond Law” (TS, 153). His universalism is particular to those who accept the death drive: the death of Christ is the condition for the possibility of the Truth-event, or Lacan’s “act.” Or, as Žižek puts it in Tarrying with the Negative, Christ's death is his resurrection. It is at the moment when Christ is raised from the dead, when--in unmatched Hegelese--the community of the Spirit is founded, that Christ dies. Thus, Christian love is the transgression of the Law (the death of the Law) that restricts the freedom of the political subject; love is the creation of a free subjectivity—free from the binding of the Law, and thus the guilt incurred by sin through the Law, and free for pure action not from the State (which is "Law," for Žižek in the sense of "Symbolic Order), but against it.
Both Badiou and Žižek can agree, however, that the resurrection did not need to take place in order for the event to be true. Thus, whether the truth-event is pre-ontological (Žižek) or non-ontological (Badiou), the event itself—whether or not Jesus’ dead body was raised from the tomb—is a moot point. Thus, the eschatological dimension of Christianity, and particularly of Paul, then, is flattened out. The move beyond the Law for both Žižek and Badiou is the move into the immanent plane where everything has always-already happened. Just as there is no sin previous to the Law (Spinoza[2])—since the Law is the introduction of sin ontologically for Spinoza—the transgression of the Law also leaves sin in its wake. With the removal of both the Law and sin all that is left is the apparent “subversive kernel” of an antinomian Christianity. But, this is completely contrary to Paul’s thoroughly eschatological gospel, as we shall see below.
Let’s begin with Paul’s statement, for example, in 1 Corinthians 15:12-20:
Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.
The fact that neither Žižek nor Badiou believe the Resurrection actually happened is not merely incidental, but is a result, rather, of their immanentization of Paul’s eschatology. For Paul it really does matter that Christ has been raised from the dead, not because this event opens up the possibility for transformation of the political order, but because this event points to the coming of God—the new creation of all things (which will result in “transformation” of the political order—if by transformation you mean decimation—but not without the destruction of everything else that is opposed to Christ). Look at verses 17-19: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” If there is no end, for Paul, if “everything has always-already happened” (Žižek On Belief, 125), then all is futile. This is made even clearer in verses 28-31: “God will be all in all. Otherwise, what will those people do who receive baptism on behalf of the dead? ... And why are we putting ourselves in danger every hour? I die every day!”
The “danger” Paul speaks of here is martyrdom. Death is not to be feared for those who have been baptized into Christ’s death as long as there is an end, as long as death really will be destroyed by the coming of God. Otherwise, all is vain. Otherwise, we may as well say “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1 Cor. 15:32). But, because Christ has been raised from the dead, and because the Lord indeed is near,[3] dying a death like Christ’s is in fact the fulfilling of the Law. This is not the destruction of the Law, however, as for Badiou, nor even the dialectic of Law-Gospel, wherein the Law must always die. Instead, we should highlight the tension that simultaneously holds apart and holds together Law and gospel—Jew and Christian. The best analogy for the holding together while holding apart is Heidegger's notion of "dif-fer-rence." The Law in fact remains because the specificity of Jewish redemption, pointing to the coming of the Messiah, depends upon the Law, though now by faith. The Christian tradition does not break with this specificity, but it does have its own specificity which is not Jewish. The Law still persists because it has an eschatological direction, and is not truly surpassed even in the end when God will be all in all, because the old and new covenants are held together in this dif-fer-rent tension; which means that the now out-dated logism “Judeo-Christianity” needs to be revived. Isn’t this how we are to understand Romans 9-11?
Thus, the hope of the end is not for the debunking of the symbolic order, but, instead for the coming of the kingdom of God. Žižek and Badiou do not grasp this aspect of the Law for two reasons: first of all, they immanentize Paul’s eschatological language; and, secondly, in order to have a revolutionary politics, they have to conflate Judaic Law and Roman law. We have already demonstrated that Paul’s eschatological language is essential for understanding his discourse about the Law. But, even if we concede that Paul is conflating Judaic and Roman Law, which he is not (and in my mind no manner of inductive reading will give you that conclusion), there is still an eschatological element such that the Law persists.
As Paul says in Romans 13, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God” (Rom 13:1). Those who have been baptized into the community of the cross of Christ are to submit themselves to the Law (assuming, again, that there is a conflation of Judaic and Roman Law) which will inevitably lead to their death—or to the realization that their entire existence is death prior to the day of the Lord! This notion of martyrdom is made even clearer in the preceding verses in chapter 12: “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (verses19-21)? Until the coming of the Lord, Paul urges his communities to subject themselves to the Law, which issues in their death. But, this is not the end. For death will have been swallowed up, and has no sting. As I said before (in my first post), far from offering a “radical” politics worked out by the Church (Milbank) on the one hand, or a universalism of love (Žižek and Badiou) on the other, Paul offers us the apocalyptic action of God, who is making all things new.
The immanentism of Žižek and Badiou results in two disastrous mistakes: first, the illusion that there is nothing left to be done, since everything has always-already happened; and secondly, the illusion that the human and the divine can be transposed, such that, because the Father must always be dead (at least for Žižek)—due to the Lacanian necessity of the Oedipal death drive—and because there is always a primordial excess of jouissance to life itself, we are God. What is needed in addition to an honest reading of Paul is an ecclesiology where the transformation of the world and the Church happen not around the question, “What has God done?” but, rather, “What is God going to do next?” And, for this reason, Žižek and Badiou still cannot have Paul, and their persistency to lay claim to Paul is not evidence of the possibility for revolution, but instead, the perpetuation of sin as espoused by both global capitalism, and its Siamese twin, liberalism.
[1] In outlining his revolutionary politics of “love beyond the Law,” Žižek offers a Lacanian critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s clinging to Communism “as a formation which sets free the deterritorializing dynamics of capitalism, liberating it from its constraints” (OB, 18): “the critics of Communism were in a way right when they claimed that Marxian Communism is an impossible fantasy—what they did not perceive is that Marxian Communism, this notion of a society of pure unleashed productivity outside the frame of capital, was a fantasy inherent to capitalism itself” (OB, 19). Žižek’s Lacan sees this in 1968: “we start with the stable symbolic Order; we proceed to the heroic suicidal attempts to break out of it; when the Order itself seems threatened, we provide the matrix of permutations which accounts for how the revolt itself is just the operator of the passage from one to another form of the social link; finally, we confront the society in which the revolt itself is rendered meaningless, since, in it, transgression itself is not only recuperated, but directly solicited by the system as the very form of its reproduction” (OB, 31). The only way out of this cycle, for Žižek, is not the undoing of the inherent contradictions of capitalism, as for the neo-Marxists, but to recover that precious emerald of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary politics at the heart of Christianity, i.e., Pauline love. “Here enters the ‘good news’ of Christianity: the miracle of faith is that it IS possible to traverse the fantasy, to undo this founding decision, to start one’s life all over again, from the zero point” (OB, 148). Love, then, is the opening of a universal politics, for Žižek, that can “traverse the fantasy” of a “society of pure unleashed productivity outside the frame of capital.”
[2] “[T]he teaching of Paul…acknowledges that previous to the law—that is, so long as men are considered of as living under the sway of nature, there is no sin” (Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, 201).
[3] Philippians 4:5-7: “The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
