Slavoj Žižek unabashedly affirms that the central tenet of the Incarnation is Love. Central to this assertion is Žižek’s unorthodox, though extremely helpful (if not ultimately correct), definition of love. In Violence, he alludes to Augustine’s “Love God and do as you please” – alongside both Caputo and Radical Orthodoxy – rightly calling it “[t]he formula of the fundamentalist religious suspension of the ethical.” (Violence, 136)
Instead, he goes on to note “if you really love God, you will want what he wants – what pleases him will please you, and what displeases him will make you miserable.” (Violence, 137) Love, for Žižek, is an action whereby one “singles out, focuses on, a finite temporal object which ‘means more than anything else.” (The Fragile Absolute, 89)
To bring our examination full circle, is this not what is taking place within the Event of Jesus’ temple action? Is he not singling out and focusing on those who have been excluded? Does he not pronounce that the last will be first, and the first last? Is this not the central tenet of Jesus’ parables about sheep and coins and sons and parties?
This element of Jesus’ temple action is most profoundly emphasized in Matthew’s account, which depicts Jesus not merely teaching (as in Mark) but receiving the praise of children as well as healing the blind and lame. In an important sense, then, since Jesus is purposely upsetting the system, he is, what Žižek would term violent, creating “a perturbation of the ‘normal,’ peaceful state of things.” (Violence, 2)
The underlying paradox is that what makes love angelic, what elevates it over mere unstable and pathetic sentimentality, is its cruelty itself, its link with violence – it is this link which raises it ‘over and beyond the natural limitations of man’ and thus transforms it into an unconditional drive. (Violence, 204; see also Violence, 179, where Žižek addresses a “divine violence [that] explodes in a retaliatory destructive rage”)
This, of course, flies in the face of most contemporary versions of love, but may coincide quite closely with the Scriptural notion of divine love, which seeks justice for the widow, orphan and alien. It could be further argued that this notion of love coincides with the original purpose for the temple itself, though this is beyond the present scope of our study.
Jesus’ temple action – instead of a mere cleansing – is his final signifier of the coming Kingdom, around which his entire ministry circulates. Thus, there is a necessary break with the social institutions and religious constructions of his day. As Žižek notes,
It is precisely in order to emphasize this suspension of the social hierarchy that Christ (like Buddha before him) addresses in particular those who belong to the very bottom of the social hierarchy, the outcasts of the social order (beggars, prostitutes…) as the privileged and exemplary members of his new community. (The Fragile Absolute, 115, see also Žižek and Theology, 154)
In addressing social outsiders, Jesus is implicitly not addressing religious insiders (at least not with the same message), but instead calling them to judgment. Furthermore, in this Event within an event, we recognize Jesus’ invitation to and example of de(con)structing the elements of our institutions which do not serve the interests of the coming Kingdom. Thus, contra James K.A. Smith, who questions the validity of Žižek’s insights for Christian praxis since the Kingdom “has no lack,” we must instead recognize that, for us, the Kingdom does lack, precisely because it has not yet fully come, even – or especially – in our churches, much less in the world at large.
In that sense, then, we should follow Žižek’s insight that belief is what we do (see Slavoj Žižek, 67). As he states in The Fragile Absolute
As every true Christian knows, love is the work of love – the hard and arduous work of repeated ‘uncoupling’ in which, again and again, we have to disengage ourselves from the inertia that constrains us to identify with the particular order we were born into. (The Fragile Absolute, 119-120)
Though we may not go so far as to sacrifice sacrifice (see Žižek and Theology, 122) or accept that Jesus frees us from the need for God, (see Žižek and Theology, 97), we can wholeheartedly affirm that the lack – the fact that the Kingdom has not yet come in all it’s fullness – opens up an opportunity to truly believe. We can – with Caputo – recognize that loving our neighbor requires that we accept their smell (Violence, 166) and seek to de(con)struct our institutions that they would be made welcome within them. And all the while hope and pray that we don’t rob one bank only to set up another. (Violence, 209)
Have we?
