Curtis A. Bronzan

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).

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)?