Saturday, April 16, 2005
(10:47 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Žižek's Article on the Pope
The article shares all the failings of Žižek's writings for the popular press -- quotes copied and pasted from other writings, arguments insufficiently fleshed out. In this case, it has more faults besides. Chief among them: his one-sided view of the pope's "brave moral stance." Certainly a Marxist interpreter could shed more light on the fact that the last pope sold out the radical economic teachings of the church in a bid to placate the conservative factions of the church -- since Žižek so consistently critiques Western liberals for similar behavior, it is more than a little strange that the pope gets a free pass on this front. (JPII was ostensibly an anti-communist socialist, but you would never know it based on what he and his Vatican underlings emphasized in their public proclamations.) In addition, though his critique of "sexual apartheid" in church leadership likely does have some actual analysis behind it, as it stands, he sounds like just another "liberal" critic of the church.From someone who has argued that we need to return to class analysis, etc., and who is looking to Christianity as a partner in a resurgence of the radical left, would not the true betrayal of the church be its abandonment of its socialist and pro-worker tendancies from around the turn of the century? Could he not be championing Latin American liberation theology, or the current anti-imperial scholarship on Paul, or, you know, anything that constitutes actual evidence for the radical left message of Christianity? Why is scholarship from the Christian side that champions a rapprochement between Christianity and Marxism completely absent in his arguments -- so that we get him citing Bultmann of all people in his analysis of Paul in The Puppet and the Dwarf? Is it a reflexive disdain for "real Christian" scholars, or has he just not gotten around to actually reading the stuff that could support his case? That is: is snobbery or ignorance to blame here?
And finally, is he just going to grant that the right-wing version of Christianity is correct and thus be stuck playing this stupid game where the left has to be parasitical on the tactics of the right, because "at least the right knows what it stands for" -- when he knows and has said that historically the right is a parasitical reaction to the left? Obviously I'm generally supportive of the spirit of his project here and think of my scholarly work, such as it is, as an admittedly modest contribution to it -- sometimes I just get impatient with the fact that a lot of Žižek's stuff on Christianity still seems so unserious and unconvincing. The arguments are there to be made, but he's not making them.
