In His Latest Film, Slavoj Žižek Claims “The Only Way to Be an Atheist is Through Christianity”

For some time now, Slavoj Žižek has been show­ing up as an author and edi­tor of the­ol­o­gy texts along­side ortho­dox thinkers whose ideas he thor­ough­ly nat­u­ral­izes and reads through his Marx­ist lens. Take, for exam­ple, an essay titled, after the Catholic G.K. Chester­ton, “The ‘Thrilling Romance of Ortho­doxy’ ” in the 2005 vol­ume, part­ly edit­ed by Žižek, The­ol­o­gy and the Polit­i­cal: The New Debate. In Chesterton’s defense of Chris­t­ian ortho­doxy, Žižek sees “the ele­men­tary matrix of the Hegelian dialec­ti­cal process.” While “the pseu­do-rev­o­lu­tion­ary crit­ics of reli­gion” even­tu­al­ly sac­ri­fice their very free­dom for “the athe­ist rad­i­cal uni­verse, deprived of reli­gious ref­er­ence… the gray uni­verse of egal­i­tar­i­an ter­ror and tyran­ny,” the same para­dox holds for the fun­da­men­tal­ists. Those “fanat­i­cal defend­ers of reli­gion start­ed with fero­cious­ly attack­ing the con­tem­po­rary sec­u­lar cul­ture and end­ed up for­sak­ing reli­gion itself (los­ing any mean­ing­ful reli­gious expe­ri­ence).”

For Žižek, a mid­dle way between these two extremes emerges, but it is not Chester­ton’s way. Through his method of teas­ing para­dox and alle­go­ry from the cul­tur­al arti­facts pro­duced by West­ern reli­gious and sec­u­lar ideologies—supplementing dry Marx­ist analy­sis with the juicy voyeurism of psychoanalysis—Žižek finds that Chris­tian­i­ty sub­verts the very the­ol­o­gy its inter­preters espouse. He draws a con­clu­sion that is very Chester­ton­ian in its iron­i­cal rever­sal: “The only way to be an athe­ist is through Chris­tian­i­ty.” This is the argu­ment Žižek makes in his lat­est film, The Pervert’s Guide to Ide­ol­o­gy. In the clip above, over footage from Scorsese’s The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ, Žižek claims:

Chris­tian­i­ty is much more athe­ist than the usu­al athe­ism, which can claim there is no God and so on, but nonethe­less it retains a cer­tain trust into the Big Oth­er. This Big Oth­er can be called nat­ur­al neces­si­ty, evo­lu­tion, or what­ev­er. We humans are nonethe­less reduced to a posi­tion with­in the har­mo­nious whole of evo­lu­tion, what­ev­er, but the dif­fi­cult thing to accept is again that there is no Big Oth­er, no point of ref­er­ence which guar­an­tees mean­ing.

The charge that Chris­tian­i­ty is a kind of athe­ism is not new, of course. It was levied against the ear­ly mem­bers of the sect by Romans, who also used the word as a term of abuse for Jews and oth­ers who did not believe their pagan pan­theon. But Žižek means some­thing entire­ly dif­fer­ent. Rather than using athe­ism as a term of abuse or mak­ing a delib­er­ate attempt to shock or inflame, Žižek attempts to show how Chris­tian­i­ty dif­fers from Judaism in its rejec­tion of “the big oth­er God” who hides his true desires and inten­tions, caus­ing immense anx­i­ety among his fol­low­ers (illus­trat­ed, says Žižek, by the book of Job). This is then resolved by Chris­tian­i­ty in an act of love, a “res­o­lu­tion of rad­i­cal anx­i­ety.”

And yet, says Žižek, this act—the crucifixion—does not rein­state the meta­phys­i­cal cer­tain­ties of eth­i­cal monothe­ism or pop­ulist pagan­ism. “The death of Christ,” says Žižek, “is not any kind of redemp­tion… it’s sim­ply the dis­in­te­gra­tion of the God which guar­an­tees the mean­ing of our lives.” It’s a provoca­tive, if not par­tic­u­lar­ly orig­i­nal, argu­ment that many post-Niet­zschean the­olo­gians have arrived at by oth­er means. Žižek’s read­ing of Chris­tian­i­ty in The Pervert’s Guide to Ide­ol­o­gy—along­side his copi­ous writ­ing and lec­tur­ing on the subject—constitutes a chal­lenge not only to tra­di­tion­al the­is­tic ortho­dox­ies but also to sec­u­lar human­ism, with its qua­si-reli­gious faith in progress and empir­i­cal sci­ence. Of course, his cri­tique of the vul­gar cer­tain­ties of ortho­doxy should also apply to ortho­dox Marx­ism, some­thing Žižek’s crit­ics are always quick to point out. Whether or not he’s suf­fi­cient­ly crit­i­cal of his com­mu­nist vision of real­i­ty, or has any­thing coher­ent to say at all, is a point I leave you to debate.

via Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Slavoj Žižek’s Pervert’s Guide to Ide­ol­o­gy Decodes The Dark Knight and They Live

Noam Chom­sky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Emp­ty ‘Pos­tur­ing’

A Shirt­less Slavoj Žižek Explains the Pur­pose of Phi­los­o­phy from the Com­fort of His Bed

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness