Curtis A. Bronzan

In this post, I continue looking at the deconstruction of the church by engaging with René Girard, who, being trained as an anthropologist and historian, has written extensively upon the inherent violent nature of cultural systems by thoroughly examining literature as well as engaging the founding myths of civilization(s). He is known for articulating the connection between sacrificial violence and religious systems, developing the theory of mimetic desire, and describing the scapegoat mechanism – three concepts intimately intertwined.

Girard argues that only the Judeo-Christian Scriptures give us the possibility of denying such violent, culturally inherited impulses. In Girard and Theology, Michael Kirwan states, “Jesus’ ferocious attack on Israel’s religious leaders is really an assault on a religious system which preserves its authority and integrity at the expense of sacrificial victims.” (GT, 83)

Thus, Girard is a necessary thinker for seeking to fashion a postmodern ecclesiology in light of Jesus destruction of the temple.

Mimetic theory builds on the insights of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who asserted that subjects desire what others possess, in defiance of the tenth commandment! Girard, however, postulates that our desires are even more rudimentary: specifically that we desire what we see others desiring. He stated in an interview that

the root of all conflict is… ‘competition’, mimetic rivalry between persons, countries, cultures. Competition is the desire to imitate the other in order to obtain the same thing he or she has, by violence if need be… Human relations are essentially relations of imitation, of rivalry. (GT, 22-23)

Could we not extend his statement to include even religious communities seeking to increase their attendance? Whenever difficulty arises in a given society, this mimesis leads to violence. To understand why this is so, we must turn our attention toward another of Girard’s theories, the scapegoat mechanism.

In his book The Scapegoat, Girard sets out by engaging with Guillaume de Machaut, a French poet in the mid-fourteenth century, who authored Judgment of the King of Navarre. In it, Guillaume describes what we now refer to as the Black Plague, which he wrongly believes was caused by Jews who purposely poisoned the town’s drinking water. Using this historical event – and more importantly Machaut’s explication of it – allows Girard to explicate how the Jews were scapegoated:

Ultimately, the persecutors always convince themselves that a small number of people, or even a single individual, despite his relative weakness, is extremely harmful to the whole of society. The stereotypical accusation justifies and facilitates this belief by ostensibly acting the role of mediator. (TS, 15)

An obvious corollary is evident in the Gospel accounts. Notice even in Mark, most likely the earliest account, that asserts,

the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have Pilate release Barabbas instead.
“What shall I do, then, with the one you call the king of the Jews?” Pilate asked them.
“Crucify him!” they shouted.
“Why? What crime has he committed?” asked Pilate.
But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!”
Wanting to satisfy the crowd, Pilate released Barabbas to them. He had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified. (Mark 15.11-15)

Within this account we can easily recognize both the scapegoat mechanism applied to Jesus, as one who is presented by Pilate as an innocent victim, as well as mimetic desire, with the chief priests ‘stirring up the crowd’ to release Barabbas instead.

His reading of the Gospel accounts, especially through the lens of myth, leads Girard to continually argue for the victimization and innocence of Jesus. While ultimately, of course, this is undeniable, the way in which Girard does so betrays a historical understanding of Jesus’ temple action and its ramifications.

In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard states, “the Gospels are aware of what they are doing. They not only tell the truth about victims unjustly condemned, but they know they are telling it, and they know that in speaking the truth they are taking again the path of the Hebrew Bible.” (127) By reading the Gospel accounts as primarily literary texts, Girard fails to properly integrate the historical event that undergirds them. Thus, we must further deconstruct Girard’s deconstruction!

Again, without seeking to assert that Jesus’ crucifixion was somehow justified, notice Mark’s explanatory comment following the symbolic temple action and Jesus’ ‘teaching’: “The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching.” (Mark 11.18) While the evangelist has revealed that the ‘chief priests and teachers of the law’ have been seeking to kill Jesus since the early chapters of Mark, it is this quotation that leads directly to the crucifixion.

Thus, Kirwan’s interpretation, that “Jesus symbolically completes his mission to Israel through the cleansing of the Temple, but instead of preaching resentful vengeance he moves towards a loving self-offering as an act of atonement for the collective force of human sin”, (GT, 38) is reversed. Indeed, it is the other way around: Jesus’ loving self-offering leads Him to symbolically complete his mission to Israel through the destruction of the Temple. Of course, as the fulfillment of the promised Messiah, Jesus’ judgment upon the temple system was entirely justified.

Contrary to the charge leveled against deconstruction, Girard’s theory vehemently relinquishes any emphasis on lack. Kirwan asserts,

mimetic theory renounces any kind of ‘pact with the negative’ which makes the sinfulness and need of the human beings the controlling factor in the narrative. The reality is the other way around: we only have a sense of the mess because Christ has been raised from the dead. (GT, 68)

It is striking, then, that both he and Girard include few of the historical implications of Jesus’ counter-temple movement, which need not be confined to the symbolic event that induces the temple authorities at the end of the synoptics, but could also be implied throughout Jesus’ continual mission to extend the Kingdom outside Israel’s central institution. To his credit, Girard does find great significance in Jesus’ quotation of Psalm 118:22; “The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone”, which is found in each of the synoptic Gospels, Acts, and 1st Peter. Kirwan notes, “‘The stone the builders rejected’ means that the fate of the scapegoated victim has become the great hermeneutical principle, enabling us to decode all such instances of persecution.” (GT, 84)

Though he does not engage specifically with Jesus destruction of the temple, we can recognize the importance of Girard’s thinking for our thesis. Indeed, Girard’s insight to the nature of religious systems and their violent foundations helps us recognize the possible implication of Jesus’ death, were we to fully recognize it in the way Girard reveals. And while we may not go so far as to assert that “no religious culture or institution has done a demonstratively better job of ‘deconstructing’ sacred violence than Christianity”, (GT, 123) we could agree that this ought to be the case. Indeed, Girard’s theory does present “a petite idée of infinite applicability, rather than yet another totalizing system”, (GT, 134) especially in light of our project here.

Jesus’ destructive temple action functions as the fulfillment of His counter-cultural, counter-temple movement which sought to emphatically extend the good news of the Kingdom to the other, in which Girard’s theory does assist. Engaging with Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Kirwan explains: “There is no change in ‘me’ without change in my relation to the other; nor is there any change in ‘me’ unless it is initiated by the other.” (GT, 51) This insight is perhaps most helpful, as it pertains specifically to Jesus’ proclamation, that the temple was to be “a house of prayer for all nations”, (Mark 11.17) necessarily implying engagement with the other – and the Other.

T & T Clark, an imprint of Continuum Publisher, is currently releasing a series entitled “Philosophy and Theology.” I first came across Žižek and Theology by Adam Kotsko, the first of the series, and worked through it in an Independent Study based largely upon Žižek’s engagement with Christian theology.

Later, I came across releases devoted to some big names: Derrida, Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. But alas, more recently, I’ve hunted down publication dates for books examining some lesser known names (albeit whose work is just as important): Badiou, Girard, and Vattimo.

It’s bad enough that Baker’s Church and Postmodern Culture series recently released books by Graham Ward and Merold Westphal, and now this!?

Come on Clark, you’re killing me!

I stopped by the Fuller Bookstore before a class I’m taking / TAing with my ThM advisor, Ryan Bolger to pick up In Name Only: Tackling the Problem of Nominal Christianity upon which the course, Evangelizing Nominal Christians, was originally based. The material for the course has since shifted toward engaging the emerging / missional conversation, though I wanted to become acquainted with In Name Only as well, since Gibbs’ other works – including his recent ChurchMorph – are epic.

Stopping by the Fuller Bookstore is extremely helpful, but also exceedingly problematic – at least for my bank account.

Today, before even finding Gibbs’ In Name Only, I encountered James K.A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation (which, along with Derrida and Theology, was on the same Amazon order as In Name Only, that wasn’t due to ship for another couple of weeks!). But I also ran across Graham Ward’s The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Christians and Merold Westphal’s Whose Community, Which Interpretation?: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church, both of which aren’t due out until October 1st!

Needless to say, I picked both up, as well as Hegel and Theology.

Žižek engages the concept of church rarely, and never in “orthodox” terms. Instead, in a rather Hegelian – and possibly somewhat Augustinian – manner, he discusses the community of the Holy Spirit, though, of course, he means something quite different from orthodox pneumatological ecclesiology.

While this engagement is quite important to understand his theological perspective, it is outside the realm of our present study. Thus, I instead seek to examine some of Žižek’s theoretical arguments, in hopes that they can illuminate the role of church in contemporary culture. As above, my engagement with – and application of – Žižek’s thought falls outside the realm of his own purposes, though I seek to follow his example of short-circuiting.

Žižek regularly discusses the notion of jouissance, a French term denoting a deep level of enjoyment. In one sense, we could think of the history of Western spirituality as an attempt to harness some form of jouissance; as the first question of the Westminster Catechism reveals; “What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy him forever.” This fulfillment, however, is always kept at bay, continuously postponed, seemingly forever deferred. It is in light of this reality that the Lacanain notion of the objet petit a is helpful. Kotsko explains

It is an object because the subject experiences it as foreign, as outside of himself or herself… the ‘object-cause of desire’. It is the object of desire in the sense of being the goal that the subject continually pursues, but never reaches. Every time the subject finally reaches some particular object of desire, therefore, it feels like a disappointment – no matter how satisfying, it is somehow still not it, not objet petit a. (Žižek and Theology, 36)

Another Žižekian negative question (in Caputo’s lingua franca): Is this not an apropos metaphor for the church, as it prays and weeps for the coming of the Kingdom? In The Fragile Absolute, Žižek discusses this objet petit a by alluding to the writing of Henry Krips:

the chaperone is an ugly elderly lady who is officially the obstacle to the direct goal-object (the woman the suitor is courting); but precisely as such, she is the key intermediary moment that effectively makes the beloved woman desirable – without her, the whole economy of seduction would collapse. (The Fragile Absolute, 16)

Or, in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Madeleine’s “lock of curly blonde hair” serves as a stand in, “thus enabling us to entertain a livable relationship with it, without being swallowed up by it.” (The Fragile Absolute, 17) Objet petit a, then, provides a valuable metaphor for ecclesiological practice. In a sense, the church can become both the chaperone and the lock of curly blonde hair; it can act as both an obstacle to the Kingdom it is called to bring about (which leads to important questions regarding the church’s purpose or existence) as well as a remainder of that coming Kingdom, through which we can maintain a “livable relationship to it.”

The question is, then, whether the church functions – or should function – as an imitation of the grapes or of the veil (see The Fragile Absolute, xxvi). Or, put more directly, has the church become the place where “we create the illusion that there is, beneath the veil, the feminine Truth.”? (The Fragile Absolute, xxvii)

Žižek’s discussion of Coke as objet petit a also provides an interesting, albeit polemical parallel to church culture. In discussing Coke as the “ultimate capitalist merchandise”, he notes that the soft drink provides no use-value, but instead “has the paradoxical property that the more you drink the thirstier you get, the greater your need to drink more – with that strange, bittersweet taste, our thirst is never effectively quenched.” (The Fragile Absolute, 19) Thus, Coke never delivers on its promise, but instead endlessly defers fulfillment. Do not many contemporary fundamentalist ecclesiologies seek to do precisely the same, with their never-ending attractional, market-driven product of church?

Indeed, many contemporary church structures “are empirical objects contingently elevated to the dignity of the Thing, so that they start to function as embodiments of the impossible thing.” (On Belief, 97) Of course, the problem here is that these ecclesiological bodies exist for themselves, requiring their adherents to continually drink the coke, as it were, instead of following the example of Jesus, who sought not his own fulfillment, but graciously poured himself out as a drink offering to bring about the Kingdom.

In a sense, then, the church – which, as Caputo has put it, is “plan B” (see What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 37) – has been (re)created not for the Kingdom, but for itself (just as Tyler Durden tried to keep his disciples from chanting “his name is Robert Paulson”). Building upon Hegel’s ‘mysteries of the ancient Egyptians that were also mysteries to the ancient Egyptians,’ Žižek notes that “after the notion of God as light and the celebration of plant and animal as divine, where the object of veneration is something found in nature, subjects [later] produce themselves the objects they honor”, (On Belief, 56) like bees building a honeycomb. The church’s (re)creation, then, continually longs for meaning, or, better yet, embodiment. Otherwise, the production of the church becomes a something which does not “meet or satisfy an already given need, but create[s] the need [it] claim[s] to satisfy.” (On Belief, 21)

In an important sense, then, we recognize that true Christian faith “accomplishes a kind of ‘synthesis,’ a partial regression to paganism, by introducing the ultimate ‘icon to erase all other icons,’” (On Belief, 131) instead of creating an icon – or even idol – out of the church, thus recognizing that truth exists outside itself (see Slavoj Žižek, 43). And if our present examination is correct, church as objet petit a is indeed a vice without vice (Violence, 167; and what are online communities but friends without friends?) This brings us to a necessary discussion regarding the Incarnation, which forms an integral aspect of Žižek’s thought, though, not surprisingly, his understanding falls outside the official doctrines of Christendom.

Similar to – and in all probability dependent upon – deconstructive thinker Jacques Derrida, Žižek sees the advent of the Messiah as similar to a waiting room. Quoting Heiner Müller and Jan Hoet, he notes

There would be an announcement: The train will arrive at 18.15 and depart at 18.20 – and it never did arrive at 18.15. Then came the next announcement: The train will arrive at 20.10. And so on. You went on sitting there in the waiting room, thinking, It’s bound to come at 20.15. that was the situation. Basically, a state of Messianic anticipation. There are constant announcements of the Messiah’s impending arrival, and you know perfectly well that he won’t be coming. And yet somehow, it’s good to hear him announced all over again. (The Fragile Absolute, 38)

Similar to his thesis in Violence, here Žižek goes on to note that in Communist Eastern Europe, people’s hope in the Messiah was ultimately lost, and by not engaging in frantic activity which would ultimately distract them (like the West), they were able to notice their surroundings, and ultimately change them. While Žižek recognizes this continual deferral of the Messiah’s arrival, he is also conscious of the importance of Incarnation in the Christian tradition. Though also viewed in light of the Hegelian dialectic, Žižek asserts that “belief in the temporal Event of Incarnation is the only path to eternal truth and salvation”, (The Fragile Absolute, 89) which reveals the extent to which it should be viewed as a religion of Love (to be addressed in greater detail in following posts).