Due in part to his engagement with Jacques Lacan, Žižek regularly addresses Freudian psychoanalytic theory. One of the more helpful for our purposes in examining how Žižek could help the church is Freud’s concept of the death drive. Žižek notes

For Lacan, creative sublimation and the death drive are strictly correlative: the death drive empties the (sacred) Place, creates the Clearing, the Void, the Frame, which is then filled in the object ‘elevated to the dignity of the Thing’. Here we encounter the third kind of suicide: the ‘suicide’ that defines the death drive, symbolic suicide – not in the sense of ‘not dying really, just symbolically’, but in the moreprecise sense of the erasure of the symbolic network that defines the subject’s identity, of cutting off all the links that anchor the subject in its symbolic substance. (The Fragile Absolute, 27)

This provides a helpful starting point for our engagement with Jesus’ destruction of the temple as the model for de(con)structing the ecclesiological trappings of contemporary culture. Here, Žižek’s engagement with Lacan’s reading of Freud creates a chain of signifiers which seeks contextualize this concept for our present day.

At the same time, however – and to put it in the form of a Žižekian negative question – does not this concept and it’s chain of signifiers point back all the way to the first century Event (which contains it’s own signifier in the Olive Tree)? As with Žižek’s habit of negative questioning – and to the possible horror of orthodox theologians – I too am hoping to translate “one system of meanings into another system of meanings,” (Slavoj Žižek, 4) namely Žižek’s engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis into Christian cultural engagement.

The death drive is further explicated in Žižek’s On Belief, where he more explicitly equates it with Christ and Christian praxis. In engaging with Camus’ “only real philosophical problem,” he notes

We can see why Freud use the term “death drive”: the lesson of psychoanalysis is that humans are not simply alive, but possessed by a strange drive to enjoy life in excess of the ordinary run of things – and “death” stands simply and precisely for the dimension beyond ordinary life. (On Belief, 104)

This, Žižek argues, is exemplified by Jesus’ crucifixion, wherein Jesus does not do our work for us, but instead – as he argues repeatedly – opens up the possibility for us to do the work by which we are able to redeem ourselves (see Christ in Postmodern Philosophy, 101; The Fragile Absolute, 119). In the midst of his continued engagement with Christ, including his betrayal and sacrifice, it is a wonder that Žižek never examines Jesus action in the temple, which, we must recognize, is – historically speaking – the precursor to his crucifixion.

Indeed, the temple Event exemplifies the above quotation, in that Jesus not only seeks to “enjoy life in excess of the ordinary run of things,” but to extend this possibility to all. As Žižek notes in the conclusion of his examination of the death drive, Christ came that we might“have life, and that [we] might have it more abundantly.” (On Belief, 104; John 10.10) It is because of this that Jesus purposely rode into town on a donkey and immediately entered the temple, ultimately self-sabotaging himself in fulfillment of his mission to enact God’s Kingdom and thus acting “against [his] own interests.” (Violence, 87; see also Žižek and Theology, 114)

This concept of death drive functions, for Žižek, as a vanishing mediator, a self-referential negativity. While one of Žižek’s regular philosophical engagements, Alain Badiou, sees with the Truth Event as a radical New Beginning in itself, Žižek has asserts that “a negative gesture of detaching oneself from a given situation… is absolutely necessary is something new is to emerge.” (Žižek and Theology, 79) In this way, he agrees with René Girard, who sees the crucifixion as the inevitable result of the failure of Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God and the necessary sacrifice to end all sacrifices.

While Žižek is reticent – if not altogether silent – to discuss Jesus’ “mission,” we should recognize Jesus’ “self referential negativity” not only in his crucifixion, but his continued ministry of “preaching on the hillside [thus] making himself a target of political and religious elites,” (Žižek and Theology, 154) and the culminating judgment on the temple system. (see The Fragile Absolute, 140)

What could this mean for our temple system(s)?

Tags: Alain Badiou, Frederiek Depoortere, Jacques Lacan, René Girard, Sigmund Freud, Slavoj Žižek
Categories: Pages

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