Malebranche / erection as divine punishment
example · Christian/biblical (Malebranche, Augustine) ·
retold in 3 talks
Žižek cites Malebranche (following Augustine): in paradise, humans were not identified with their bodies but felt sensations as neutral indicators like a machine's readout. The original sin was Adam losing this distance. God's punishment was erection, the one organ a man cannot fully control, as a reminder that he is not master of his body.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 3
“'I will give men, males, only an organ which he will not control: erection. It will happen when he doesn't want it and when he wants it, it will not happen.'”
“God is just in a totally contingent way throwing it around absolutely nothing to do with our virtues”
“God threw us all into sin so that he could save some of us, to show gratitude. So we have here clearly what we call a perverse God.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
contents · one story, 3 jobsuses
surplus enjoyment
×1
materiality of the signifier
×1
symbolic order
×1
Its cast and sources
populated by
Origen (Origenes)1Aaron Bastani1François Fillon1Jack Miles1Isabella Rossellini1Nicolas Malebranche3Tertullian1Lucien Goldmann1
alongside works
Every retelling 3
Žižek cites Malebranche (following Augustine): in paradise, humans were not identified with their bodies but felt sensations as neutral indicators like a machine's readout. The original sin was Adam losing this distance. God's punishment was erection, the one organ a man cannot fully control, as a reminder that he is not master of his body., illustrating sexuality-gender,surplus-enjoyment,religion-theology
Malebranche imagines two farmers, one diligent, one lazy, where rain falls contingently; the lazy one harvests, the diligent one gets nothing. This is Žižek's model for divine grace as pure mechanical contingency with no relation to virtue, which he uses to illustrate how the symbolic order functions like materialist mechanism., illustrating materiality of the signifier,symbolic order,predestination
Nicolas Malebranche argued that God threw humanity into sin specifically so he could save some of us and be thanked, making God a narcissist who stages suffering as a PR spectacle., illustrating perverse God,critique of standard atonement theology