Curtis A. Bronzan

A brilliant animation of a Slavoj Žižek lecture addressing the central tenet of his book First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, engaging issues I’ve addressed before. (Hat tip: Michael Jimenez)

I’m thankful for videos like this one, from Above the Influence by the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign. Though I doubt it needs to be said, any attempt at keeping teenagers from trying any kind of drugs is a good thing – and should be supported wholeheartedly.

That said, I fear this ad might actually communicate that by choosing not to “get twisted”, one can expect to be rewarded in some way. I realize this may seem like a kind of backwards, psychoanalytic, deconstructed, Peter Rollins/Slavoj Žižek-like “reading” – but notice how the commercial is shot from the perspective of the man at the counter, instead of the perspective of the students at the table, concluding with the man giving them a free meal.

Again, without seeming to be pessimistic, wouldn’t a truer account be one where the students who choose not to use drugs end up paying for their friends who skip out on the bill? And then, we would be faced with the reality that the true reward isn’t the free meal, it’s not doing drugs.

I’m all for generosity, and encouraging those who don’t “get twisted” in any possible way, but fear that if they “just say no” in hopes of a reward, they’ll miss the reward of being healthy and drug-free. Notice also, right before the man says “we’re straight”, there are straws on the counter that are straight! Coincidence? I think not!

The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, by Slavoj Žižek, John Milbank, and Creston Davis must have sold well. The three are teaming up again with Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology. Amazon’s description asserts:

The rediscovery of the Apostle Paul by atheistic or agnostic European philosophers is one of the most striking developments in recent philosophy – and certainly one of keen interest to the church. These philosophers view Paul as having a revolutionary understanding of authority and politics. Bringing together Radical Orthodox theologian John Milbank, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and Creston Davis, who has been a student of both, this book reflects on Paul’s new moment in secular philosophy. In a debate format, Žižek brings Marxist and post-Marxist ideas into a discussion with Milbank about the influence of Paul. The book also includes a contribution from Catherine Pickstock.

I’ve engaged a bit of this “rediscovery” in Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, which may be engaged by Milbank in chapter 8 of Paul’s New Moment, entitled “Thinking Backwards, Again! Badiou and the Death of Philosophy.” I look forward to possibly reading this one, though Žižek and Milbank’s sparring previously proved a bit tiresome. Adam Kotsko, author of Žižek and Theology has written of Žižek (and then Milbank) some thoughts I’m tempted agree with:

What I do find important is that very bizarre thing that seems to have happened in Christ and in his wake. People who help me, directly or indirectly, to think about that wierd (sic) happening in new or more rigorous ways inspire gratitude in me. People who do not inspire boredom and frustration in me – or in the case of Milbank, both. I think that’s probably a more helpful way of divvying things up, if we must so divvy.

Notice also Baker’s description, which is searching for a different audience, it seems:

Are there moments in Christian history when non-Christians in some ways understand Christianity better than Christians? The church fathers and mothers often did especially acute theology because they could remember well what it meant to inhabit non-Christian philosophies and religions. The Hindu Ghandi saw and acted on something in Christ’s witness that many confessing Christians overlooked. Today, some leading secular thinkers have turned to a surprising source: the Apostle Paul. The rediscovery of Paul by atheistic or agnostic European philosophers is one of the most striking developments in recent philosophy – and certainly one of keen interest to the church.

Bringing together Radical Orthodox theologian John Milbank, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, and Creston Davis, who has been a student of both, this book reflects on Paul’s new moment in secular philosophy. In a debate format, Zizek brings Marxist and post-Marxist ideas into a discussion with Milbank about the influence of Paul. The book also includes a contribution from Catherine Pickstock.

Paul’s New Moment will be of interest to theologians, philosophers, cultural critics, and literary scholars.

Some great thoughts (if repeated from other talks) engaging Jesus, Chesterton, Kierkegaard, the Apostle Paul, Bonhoeffer, and Žižek (if unmentioned), from Peter Rollins at Revolution NYC.

There’s a blog here somewhere, engaging Derrida and Caputo – maybe even Žižek (who argues that love is the end) – but for now I’m just revelling in the lyrics – and melody – of this great song. Reminds me of some Pedro the Lion tracks.

Everything alive must die
every building built to the sky will fall
Don’t try to tell me my
everlasting love is a lie

Everlasting everything
oh nothing could mean anything at all

Every wave that hits the shore
every book that I adore
Gone like a circus, gone like a troubadour
everlasting love for ever more

Oh I know this might sound sad
but everything goes both good and the bad
It all adds up and you should be glad
everlasting love is all you have

I ran across an article this morning by James K.A. Smith in response to John Caputo’s What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church. What would be better? Not much, except maybe Caputo responding to Smith’s response!

The Calvin college professor and prolific author starts out by asserting that he is “already clearly on record as a friend and fan,” but seeks “to push the conversation further, taking the spirit of Jack’s book seriously enough to disagree with it.”

After affirming that the church is deconstructible, Smith goes so far as to affirm that the Kingdom itself is deconstructible as well, since Jesus characterizes the Kingdom “to come,”  revealing it’s “contingency, particularity and finitude.” As such, he asserts that “Catholic orthodoxy actually makes a more radical affirmation of deconstructibility than Caputo’s Derridean Jesus.” Here’s his conclusion:

And here’s the crucial difference: the Trinitarian God of Catholic faith is not scared off by contingency, particularity or deconstructibility. Unlike the Wholly Other of the Derridean Gospel, the Incarnate God exhibits no allergy to the deconstructible. Indeed, this is the very distinctive logic of incarnation: God does not call for the deconstruction and dismantling of the deconstructible on the basis of or with a view to some undeconstructible and impossible kingdom; rather, God condescends to inhabit the deconstructible. If we want to ask ourselves what Jesus would do, we might consider what Jesus did. The Incarnation is the mad story of the undeconstructible God who did not consider undeconstructibility as something to be grasped, nor did he despise deconstructibility, but rather taking the “human, all too human form” of a servant, he humbled himself to the point of inhabiting the very deconstructible structures of human law and culture—even to the point of suffering death at the hands of these institutions. But he did so not with a view to eviscerating the deconstructible, but rather to rightly ordering it such that the contingent, particularity of this deconstructible creation might reach its proper telos (a loose paraphrase of Philippians 2:5-11). It’s not “deconstructibility” that’s the problem; it is the particular, wrongly-ordered configurations of the deconstructible that are at issue.

The scandal of Catholic ecclesiology is that this logic of incarnation then extends to an institution, the church Catholic, which is now configured as the body of which Christ is the head. The same Spirit that inhabited and empowered the incarnate Jesus (e.g., Luke 4:1, 14, 18) is given to the ecclesial community (Acts 1:8). This continues the logic of incarnation: the undeconstructible God continues to condescend and inhabit the very deconstructible institution that is the Church. Far from being infallible or perfect, nonetheless the institution is an extension of this logic and bears within it all the resources it needs to make sense of its own failures. Indeed, two of its most significant seasons (Advent and Lent) are seasons of penitence; it gathers as a community weekly to confess its failures (when was the last time the Democrats got together to do that?!). But in contrast to the logic of purity that seems to motivate the Derridean critique of deconstructibility as itself a problem, the logic of incarnation testifies to a God who inhabits, affirms, and takes up all the messiness of a deconstructible institution. The Catholic affirmation of the institutional church is rooted in this logic of incarnation which is a continuing testimony of what Jesus did.

Some thoughts to ponder. It makes me wonder why Smith questioned David E. Fitch’s use of Žižek’s “lack” for the reformation of the church at the SBL conference last year. Maybe I don’t understand his criticism fully.

Slavoj Žižek’s forthcoming book Living in the End Times has caught my interest.

Biblically speaking, we’ve been in the “end times” since the first century, but any time somebody brings up the apocalyptic, my ears perk up. Usually “end of the world” language comes from fairly conservative Christian circles, like the Left Behind series. Which makes it that much more interesting to me – sociologically speaking – when an atheist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, continental philosopher who thinks everyone should “go through the Christian experience”, like Žižek, writes on the “end times” with reference to the biblical account!

While I’ve enjoyed reading Žižek, most of his overly playful writing is not – in the end – very helpful to my ThM research or service in the church. His engagement with Christianity is interesting to engage with, but much of his writing is so deeply indebted to Lacan, Hegel, and Freud, I have a hard time incorporating it, since I’m not very familiar with them. His indebtedness to Marx is seen clearly in the product description below.

In full disclosure, I’m am not worried about the end times. At all. My faith is in the One who will bring forth “a new heaven and a new earth” and “make everything new” (see Revelation 21). But really, how interesting does this sound (again, sociologically speaking)?:

There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. Slavoj Zizek has identified the four horsemen of this coming apocalypse: the worldwide ecological crisis; imbalances within the economic system; the biogenetic revolution; and exploding social divisions and ruptures. But, he asks, if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it possible for Western society to face up to the end times? In a major new analysis of our global situation, Slavok Zizek argues that our collective responses to economic Armageddon correspond to the stages of grief: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and withdrawal.

After passing through this zero-point, we can begin to perceive the crisis as a chance for a new beginning. Or, as Mao Zedong put it, “There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.” Slavoj Zizek shows the cultural and political forms of these stages of ideological avoidance and political protest, from New Age obscurantism to violent religious fundamentalism. Concluding with a compelling argument for the return of a Marxian critique of political economy, Zizek also divines the wellsprings of a potentially communist culture – from literary utopias like Kafka’s community of mice to the collective of freak outcasts in the TV series Heroes.

I was reminded of these videos created as a final project for a course last fall with Ryan Bolger – Church in Contemporary Culture – when someone made a comment on them via YouTube. Watching them again is like reading an old paper or listening to an old sermon, remembering where I was at and what I was reading back then.

Rob Bell’s latest NOOMA offering, Whirlwind, enters into an interesting conversation centered on the ancient story of Job. In it, Bell quotes at length from the earliest of books in the Hebrew Scriptures, which has played a central role in recent works by Slavoj Žižek and David Bazan (previously addressed here).

Bazan concludes his latest album:

When Job asked you a question
You answered “Who are you?”
That sounds a bit defensive
Did you just bite off more than you could chew?

And Žižek wonders if Job stayed quiet

neither because he was crushed by God’s overwhelming presence, nor because he wanted thereby to indicate his continuous resistance – the fact that God avoided answering his question – but because, in a gesture of silent solidarity, he percieved the divine impotence… What Job suddenly understood was that it was not him, but God himself who was in effect on trial in Job’s calamities, and he failed the test miserably. (The Monstrosity of Christ, 55-56)

After noting such quotations, the assertion that Bell enters into this conversation, as aforementioned, could be rightly questioned. It is by no mere chance, however, that all three thinkers are drawn back in to the same old story that has influenced all three monotheistic world faiths.

This is, of course, because this oldest of all biblical narratives addresses one of the most pressing questions of humanity: Why do we suffer? And what can be done about it? And after a century that was to end all suffering (and even “Christianize the world”), our capitalism, democracy and in some cases, even our faiths (other than capitalism and democracy!?), have led to increased suffering and systemic violence.

And so, we question like – and with – Job.

Žižek and Bazan (who was great at Detroit last night) are wont to conclude that God is impotent to stop it. Bell, on the other hand, concludes

We want answers, don’t we? We want explanations. We want to know why we suffer like we do. Could somebody please explain this? And there are times when the only honest, healthy, human thing to possibly do is to shout your question and shake your fist and rage against the heavens and demand an explanation. But true wisdom, the kind we find here with Job, the kind that endures, the kind that sustains a person through suffering – that kind of wisdom knows when to speak and when to be silent. Because your story is not over. The last word has not been spoken. And there may be way more going on here than any of us realize.

And then he invites:

So may you be released from always having to understand why everything happens the way that it does. May this freedom open you up to all sorts of new perspectives. And may you have the wisdom to know when to say “I spoke once, but now, I will say no more.”

Synecdoche, New York was written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, who also wrote and produced Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, and Being John Malkovich, each of which examines the meaning of life in a rather existential fashion. In some ways, his films function like postmodern reappropriations of Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre novels (or filmed David Bazan’s records):

I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That’s what I want to explore. We’re all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we’re going to die, each of us secretly believing we won’t.

Synecdoche, however – Kaufman’s directorial debut – functions as much more than a surrealist/existentialist musing on the meaning of life, and could be seen as an extended metaphor based upon the Apostle Paul’s metaphor for the church and the importance of narrative – metanarrative even. This emphasis upon Story may be paralled by Donald Miller’s new book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life, especially considering the role of Robert McKee in the work of Kaufman and Miller.

Throughout Synecdoche, Caden Cotard (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) struggles to come to grips with his mortality, and all that entails, as seen in the aforementioned quote. His character is based upon Cotard’s syndrome, which is a nihilistic, neuropsychiatric disorder wherein a person holds the delusional belief that they are dead, do not exist, or have lost their blood or internal organs. In one scene, another character is seen reading Proust’s novel Search of Lost Time which features the charater Dr. Cottard, said to be based upon Proust’s father.

After directing Death of a Salesman, Cotard is awarded a MacArthur grant which allows him to build another body, in a sense, even as his own body fails him. After purchasing a huge dilapidated warehouse, Cotard begins recreating Schenectady, New York with a synecdoche (where a part is used to designate the whole). The recreation of Schenectady, however, begins to overlap with “real” life – and the viewer can become quite confused, at times, knowing which is which.

The actors, then, reenact their own lives, as themselves, based upon the events which take place inside the synecdoche of Schenectady. Caden is “God” inside the synecdoche, handing each actor their part to play, for each day. In hopes of opening the play (after around 40 years of rehearsals), he states

I know how to do it now. There are nearly thirteen million people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They’re all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due.

Near the film’s conclusion, a priest in “Schenectady” muses on the meaning of life whilst officiating a funeral (which almost perfectly parallels Pedro the Lion’s song Priests and Paramedics):

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it’s what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn’t really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so [very] sad, and the truth is I’ve felt so [very] hurt for so [very] long and for just as long I’ve been pretending I’m OK, just to get along, just for, I don’t know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, [forget] everybody. Amen.

These lines recall some of Žižek’s thoughts, of course, about how the train never arrives, though I’m thinking also of his explanation that for the Christian believer the Event has already taken place. And, in light of Paul’s concept of the Body of Christ (written to the Corinthians, no less!), the Event has taken place but also continues to take place through the community of those seeking to follow Jesus, seeking to live faithfully in spite of the bodies and Body that can fail us, knowing ultimately that the Head of the Body – the Author of the Story – never will.