Is God Dead?
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
undated · 0:37:32 · 5,507 words
religion-theologyhegel-dialecticsideologyrevolution-violencephilosophy-generalcommunism-socialism
Žižek delivers a lecture defending a materialist-Hegelian reading of Christianity against the post-modern 'deconstructive theological turn' represented by John Caputo and Gianni Vattimo. He argues that the true core of Christianity lies in the radical kenosis of God himself, not merely a human drawing-back from onto-theology but God's own self-emptying and death, culminating in the Holy Ghost understood as an egalitarian emancipatory collective. He connects this theological reading to a critique of ideology (cynical belief, charity as false love) and to a defense of revolutionary, 'divine violence' against mere harmony-restoring justice.
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The ideas in it 17
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek opens by defending genuine repetition, Kierkegaard-Deleuzian sense, against the fetish of the new: true novelty appears in the form of repetition, exemplified by Pascal repeating orthodoxy in modernity.
Used by Žižek not as liberal good-riddance atheism nor Heideggerian mourning, but as the traumatic core of Christianity whereby the God-of-beyond who guarantees ultimate harmony himself dies on the cross.
The metaphysical positivization of God that post-modern theology claims to dissolve; Žižek argues deconstructive theology only half-dissolves it by retaining an unconditional call or promise.
Caputo's (and Derrida's) position that retains a pure unconditional promise or call while relativizing every determinate instantiation of the divine; Žižek treats this as evading the real death of God.
Hegel's logical category of the monstrous identity of absolute opposites, which Žižek uses to articulate the Incarnation: 'this miserable individual IS God himself'.
as “cynical belief”
The contemporary mode of belief in which one does not believe 'in the first person' but follows rituals or norms whose efficacy operates independently of personal conviction, illustrated by the Niels Bohr horseshoe.
as “objective belief”
Žižek's claim that contemporary subjects believe more than ever, but through external mechanisms (ritual, institutions) they consciously disavow, belief that functions via the object/practice rather than through subjective conviction.
God's self-emptying, which Žižek insists is not merely a human theological operation but God's own self-alienation, our abandonment by God is simultaneously God's self-abandonment.
as “Holy Ghost as emancipatory collective”
Žižek identifies the Holy Ghost not with a spiritual substance but with the egalitarian collective of believers who carry on without any guarantee in the big Other, a collective whose other names include 'revolutionary party' and 'emancipatory movement'.
Žižek identifies the Book of Job as ideology-critique at its zero level: the three friends who insist Job's suffering has a deeper meaning are ideologists; God rejects their meaning-making.
The symbolic guarantee or meta-agent (God, History, Fate) that underwrites the meaning of our acts; Žižek argues the death of Christ entails the collapse of any such guarantee.
Benjaminian concept invoked by Žižek to read Christ's injunctions to 'hate' family and 'bring the sword' as a form of revolutionary violence, hatred out of love that severs attachment to symbolic-institutional roles.
Žižek's reading of Christ's command to hate family: not pseudo-dialectical opposite of love but a Kierkegaardian tension in which one is ready to harm what one loves in fidelity to a higher universal commitment.
Žižek's characterization of Christianity as the religion not of harmonious order but of struggle and imbalance, opposed to any 'holistic' vision of everyone in their proper place.
True Christian universality for Žižek is not the abstract universality of a hierarchic order but the universality constituted by fighting, 'to be universal means to fight'.
as “charity as false love”
Žižek's critique of philanthropic charity (exemplified by Starbucks coffee) as ideology that neutralizes genuine political engagement by letting consumers feel good without addressing structural exploitation.
as “coincidentia oppositorum”
Raised by interlocutor Altizer as the key term distinguishing his dialectical theology from Gnostic dualism; Žižek endorses the distinction.
Stories he reaches for 6
A friend visiting Niels Bohr sees a horseshoe above the door (a superstition against evil spirits) and asks if the scientist believes in it. Bohr answers he doesn't believe in it, but keeps it because 'I heard it works even if you don't believe in it.' Žižek uses this to illustrate how ideology functions today via cynical belief.
“I'm not stupid of course I don't believe in it so why do I have it here because I heard that it works even if you don't believe in it”
Žižek describes Starbucks' message that buying a cup of coffee also supports Guatemalan children's education, etc. He argues this is anti-Christian ideology: it makes exploitation tolerable by letting consumers feel good, replacing genuine political engagement with a guilt-neutralizing purchase.
“when you buy a cup of our coffee you don't buy only a cup of coffee you buy the whole world experience”
In fascist documentaries the leader never applauds himself; in Stalinist ones, Stalin joins the applause for himself as if to say 'it's not me, I'm just one of you.' Žižek uses this as an ironic self-deprecating closing gesture, calling himself a Stalinist in only that sense.
“Stalin and other great luminaries did you notice how when in the central committee they are applauded they always join the applause like you know it's not me I'm just one of you”
Job's three theological friends insist his suffering must have a deeper meaning (testing, punishment for sin); Job resists this. God sides with Job, calling the friends wrong. Žižek reads this as the founding moment of ideology critique: resist the demand that catastrophe have a deeper meaning.
“God appears at the end and says no everything that the three ideologists said is wrong everything that Job said is right”
Žižek observes that people buy expensive half-rotten organic apples not because they genuinely believe them healthier but because the purchase makes them feel part of a larger ecological movement, buying ideology along with the apple.
“when you see that so-called organic apples which are half rotten but cost three times more do you really buy them because you believe that they are less poisonous”
Nixon, Brezhnev, and Honecker each ask God about the future of their countries. God predicts doom for each, Soviet Republic for the USA, Chinese colony for the USSR, and after each prophecy the leader cries. When Honecker asks about the GDR, God himself turns around and starts to cry. Žižek uses this to illustrate the Christological moment of God falling into the same series as his subjects.
“then Honecker German Democratic Republic asks oh so what will be with my beloved GDR you can guess the answer God turns around and starts to cry”
Works invoked 7
The Book of Job other
Žižek calls it the first example of ideology-critique and says he would assign it to children in his imagined Marxist-Hegelian-Christian state; God's vindication of Job's resistance to meaning is the key passage.
Žižek's own co-authored book, referenced as the place where he quotes the Joe Hill labor song to illustrate the Holy Ghost.
Works of Love book
Kierkegaard's book cited for the idea that a true Christian is ready to hate even kill his neighbors out of love, Žižek's warrant for the concept of 'hatred out of love'.
Joe Hill song
The old American labor song in which Joe Hill appears after death and says 'wherever workers strike, I am there', used as Žižek's image of the Holy Ghost as emancipatory collective.
On Religion book
Caputo's book described as 'the ultimate formulation of the Derridean deconstructive messianism'; Žižek uses it as the primary exhibit of what he argues against.
Book co-written by Caputo and Vattimo; Žižek quotes from it to characterize the post-modern theological turn he opposes.
Hegel's text cited twice for the phrase 'the monstrosity of Christ', the absurd infinite judgment whereby this miserable individual is God himself.
People invoked 16
Thomas J. J. Altizer positive
The interlocutor at this event; Žižek expresses one friendly caveat, to resist Gnostic dualism, and endorses Altizer's use of 'dialectic' as the key term distinguishing his theology from dualism.
Blaise Pascal positive
Used as a paradigm case of true creativity via repetition: Pascal's problem of how to remain orthodox in modernity generated something genuinely new, unlike cheap liberal apologists.
Jacques Derrida negative
Caputo is described as 'the ultimate formulation of the Derridean deconstructive messianism'; Derrida's framework is the intellectual target of Žižek's critique of deconstructive theology, though Derrida is not addressed personally.
Gianni Vattimo negative
Žižek calls Vattimo a personal friend but finds his statement that he prays 'more for the love of a tradition', likening God to an aged relative, filled with 'explosive objective cynicism' and illustrative of how ideology functions through detached belief.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Described as Žižek's 'favorite Catholic theologian'; used to support the reading of God's speech to Job as confession of divine bewilderment rather than assertion of transcendence.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Cited favorably for the thesis that everything genuinely new appears in the form of a repetition.
John D. Caputo negative
Žižek critiques Caputo's deconstructive messianism as evading the traumatic core of the death of God by retaining a pure unconditional call while relativizing all particular instantiations; notes an internal inconsistency in Caputo attacking Pauline spirit/letter opposition as anti-Semitic while using the same metaphor himself.
Harold Pinter positive
Žižek recounts Pinter's confrontation with a US diplomat over Kurdish torture in Turkey as an example of Christ's gesture, the truth is in the suffering detail, not the broader harmonizing picture.
Carl Jung negative
The Jungian idea that dialectic means finding a proper balance between extremes is characterized as 'obscurantist' and sharply opposed to Hegelian dialectic.
Martin Heidegger negative
Mentioned as representing the pessimistic reading of the death of God, God abandoned us, we should wait and prepare for God's return, which Žižek rejects.
Walter Benjamin positive
Invoked for the concept of 'divine violence' to read Christ's revolutionary commands.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Cited approvingly for his insistence on the paradox of Christianity (eternity accessible only through time, the leap of faith into singular instantiation) and for his theater metaphor of Incarnation, and for 'hatred out of love' in Works of Love.
Ludwig Feuerbach negative
The Feuerbachian-Marxist position, that God is merely a collective human projection to be reappropriated, is explicitly rejected by Žižek as too simple; kenosis is not reducible to alienation-reappropriation.
Aristotle negative
Invoked to characterize pagan justice as 'proper measure', catastrophe comes from wanting too much, which is the view Christianity's universality of struggle directly overturns.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek consistently invokes Hegel as the thinker who grasped the true Christological content: that the absolute must be grasped as subject not only substance, that kenosis is God's own self-alienation, and that the infinite judgment captures the monstrosity of Incarnation.
Referenced briefly as representing either the 'good riddance' reading of the death of God or the pessimistic narrative; Žižek rejects both Nietzschean framings.
What it argues
death of God as theological core, not liberal evasionkenosis as God's self-alienation, not only human humilityHoly Ghost as egalitarian emancipatory collectivecritique of post-modern deconstructive theology (Caputo, Vattimo)cynical ideology and the Niels Bohr horseshoe mode of beliefdivine violence and Christian revolutionary universalitycharity as false love versus genuine Christian engagement
Dialectical moves 8
“Our alienation from God is at the same time the self-alienation of God himself; what we do with God is what God is doing to himself.”
The move reverses the standard theological asymmetry: the human condition of estrangement from the divine is not one-sided but is God's own kenotic self-division.
“Not only is atheism the truth of Christianity but one can only be a true atheist by passing through the Christian experience.”
Christianity and atheism are not opposed but internally related: genuine atheism requires the Christian death-of-God experience, without which atheism merely displaces the big Other elsewhere.
“It is not that we should trust God; it is that God trusts us.”
Reverses the devotional relationship: the death of Christ dissolves God as guarantor, making the divine dependent on the human collective rather than vice versa.
“The death of God does not mean God abandoned us or was liberatingly dismissed; rather, God is definitively dead, but this death reappears in reverse as the Holy Spirit — the emancipatory collective.”
Converts the apparent negation (death of God) into its positive remainder (Holy Ghost as collective), refusing both nostalgic mourning and cheap celebration.
“What Christ means by 'hate your father and mother' is not literal hatred but hatred of them precisely in their symbolic-institutional function — hatred out of love.”
Reframes Christian 'hatred' not as the pseudo-dialectical opposite of love but as a form of love that severs the subject from symbolic roles in order to sustain a higher universal.
“We believe much more than we think — but in a wrong way, objectively, through mechanisms we consciously disavow.”
Reverses the common self-image of secular modernity as post-believing: cynical distance from belief is itself a mode of belief, not its absence.
“Christianity is the only truly non-holistic religion — the religion not of harmony and proper place but of struggle and imbalance.”
Inverts the common view of religion as cosmic harmony-restoration; Christianity's universality is constituted by conflict, not integration.
“God's answer to Job is not an assertion of divine transcendence over man but God's confession that even he doesn't know what's happening — God is overwhelmed by the mess he created.”
Reverses the standard theodicy reading of Job's divine answer: instead of asserting hierarchical gap, God falls into the same bewildered position as Job.
Claims 15
rejects
Post-modern deconstructive theology (Caputo, Vattimo) eviscerates the genuine traumatic core of Christianity by reducing kenosis to a merely human hermeneutic operation rather than God's own self-emptying.post-modern theological turn / deconstructive messianism
asserts
Kenosis is not just the human drawing-back from onto-theological fetishization but God's own self-alienation — our abandonment by God is simultaneously God's self-abandonment.Christian kenosis / divine self-emptying
asserts
Atheism is the truth of Christianity, and one can only be a true atheist by passing through the Christian experience, since all other atheisms continue to rely on some form of the big Other.atheism and Christianity
asserts
What dies on the cross is not a contingent earthly representative but God-of-the-beyond himself — the God who guarantees that things will ultimately turn out well.the meaning of Christ's death
asserts
The Holy Ghost is an egalitarian collective of believers who operate without any guarantee in the big Other — its secular equivalents are the revolutionary party and the emancipatory collective.the nature of the Holy Ghost
asserts
Christ's injunctions to 'hate' family and 'bring the sword' should be read as a call for revolutionary, divine violence — hatred out of love that severs attachment to symbolic-institutional roles.Christian violence and revolutionary commitment
rejects
Charity (as exemplified by Starbucks-style philanthropy) is ideologically false love because it allows consumers to feel good about exploitation without addressing its structural causes.charity as Christian love
asserts
We believe far more than we think, but in a wrong, cynical, objective way — through mechanisms we consciously disavow, as illustrated by the Niels Bohr horseshoe anecdote.contemporary ideology and belief
asserts
The Book of Job is ideology-critique at its zero level: God vindicates Job's resistance to meaning and condemns the three friends who insisted suffering must have a deeper purpose.Job and ideology-critique
asserts
Christianity is a non-holistic religion of struggle and imbalance, not of harmony — its universality is the universality of struggle, not of everyone occupying their proper place in a hierarchic order.Christian universality versus holism
reframes
The standard reading of God's speech to Job (as asserting the radical gap between God and man) is wrong; it should be read as God confessing his own bewilderment at the mess he created.God's speech to Job
rejects
The metaphor of evil as a disturbing stain that looks harmonious from the right distance is the most disgusting theological metaphor imaginable; it would make God into Satan.theodicy / the painting metaphor for evil
reframes
The message of the death of Christ is not that we are condemned to freedom but that God trusts us — not we trust God, but God trusts us.the theological meaning of Christ's death for human freedom
asserts
True repetition, in the Kierkegaard-Deleuze sense, is more difficult and creative than novelty — genuine innovation appears in the form of repetition.repetition versus novelty
asserts
Hegel's dialectic must be strictly opposed to Jungian-style 'balance between extremes'; dialectic is the opposite of seeking a proper middle ground.Hegelian dialectic versus Jungian balance
Quotes 14
“Not only is atheism the truth of Christianity but one can only be a true atheist by passing through the Christian experience.”Slavoj Žižek · atheism requires Christianity
“Our alienation from God is at the same time the self-alienation of God himself; what we do with God is what God is doing to himself.”Slavoj Žižek · kenosis as divine self-alienation
“It is not that we should trust God; it is that God trusts us.”Slavoj Žižek · reversal of the devotional relation
“Not if your balls are wired to a battery and shot through by electricity — then there is no broader picture.”Slavoj Žižek · the truth is in the suffering detail, not the harmonizing whole
“I heard that it works even if you don't believe in it — that's our standard religion.”Slavoj Žižek · cynical / objective belief as the contemporary mode of ideology
“The God who needs such an element to impose his harmony would be the good old Satan.”Slavoj Žižek · theodicy as Satanism
“To be universal means to fight — the only true universality is the universality of struggle.”Slavoj Žižek · Christian universality as constituted by conflict
“A true Christian doesn't only love his neighbors — he is ready to hate even kill his neighbors out of love.”Slavoj Žižek · hatred out of love / divine violence
“First I'm not a lord but a comrade; second are you crazy talking to fictions I don't exist; and third be cut it short otherwise I'll miss my party cell meeting.”Slavoj Žižek · the God we need: kenotic, non-existent, collectively oriented
“The monstrosity of Christ: this mere miserable individual nobody crucified between two bandits and so on — this is God himself.”Slavoj Žižek · the infinite judgment of Incarnation
“We believe much more than we think — but in a wrong way, objectively, through mechanisms which we don't take seriously.”Slavoj Žižek · objective / cynical belief
“Everything really new appears in the form of a repetition.”Slavoj Žižek · Kierkegaard-Deleuzian repetition as novelty
“If there ever was a non-holistic religion — and if there is a thing that I hate it is the so-called holistic approach — it's Christianity.”Slavoj Žižek · Christianity as anti-holistic religion of struggle
“Holy Ghost is an entity which has different names like revolutionary party, emancipatory collective and so on.”Slavoj Žižek · Holy Ghost as secular emancipatory collective
Transcript 6 turns
Slavoj Žižek
First let me express my gratitude to all starting by you to all my friends who organized my visit here and again to emphasize my honor to be here with Tom you know I discovered Tom only through criticism when some people started to criticize my work and one of the critical points were but what you are telling is just repeating the old stuff already developed I wouldn't like to insult you to go into how many years ago and but my point was what is bad in this I think what is bad in this why always this new new new maybe the most difficult and creative thing is truly to repeat what was already said I agree here and it has great theological consequences with someone that we both like like Kierkegaard and somebody else who maybe we don't both like in the same way like Gilles Deleuze who said very nicely that everything really new appears in the form of a repetition take the modernity who are the idiots of early modernity those who simply trusted oh new technology those cheap liberals but it is Pascal whose problem was precisely how to remain orthodox in the conditions of modernity that really generated something new we read today Pascal we don't read those cheap apologists so again it's my honor to be reduced to your not even successor but repetitor almost in the musical sense you know corepetitor in the opera and so on okay so again being an old fashioned Marxist I like these westerns from the late 40s where you know the good guys are in white the bad guys are in black not too complex so I like the enemy the enemy will be personally a friend today I appreciate him it will be the representatives of so-called post-modern deconstructive theological turn again I have a great respect to them but I think that's the line that separates us what defines the so-called post-modern theological turn here is a quote from a book co-written by Jack Caputo and Gianni Vattimo it's the question how do we get from the post-Christian post-Holocaust and largely secular death of God theologies of the 60s to the post-modern return of religion the answer is that the death of God the secularization of modern Europe somehow clears the slate by obliterating the moral metaphysical God of onto-theology and thus paradoxically opens up the space for the new authentic post-metaphysical religion a Christianity or maybe not even Christianity focused on Agape in exemplary of this attitude is John Caputo's On Religion maybe the ultimate formulation of the Derridean deconstructive messianism Caputo is horrified at the very idea of a religious dogma of the notion of a God who decided to address a particular group at a particular moment according them a privileged access to absolute truth but in this way by Caputo I think religion is reduced to a belief to a simple minimal belief that our miserable reality is not all there is the ultimate that the ultimate truth is elsewhere that there is another world possible a totally de-ontological promise hope of redemption to come which this hope is betrayed by any ontological positivization my question very naive one what then happens here with you know in this post-metaphysical deconstructive post-secular however you call it thought where if I may mock it in a very friendly way the message is of course God is dead there is no grandfather sitting up there but and now I am consciously mocking but in this void from this very absence someone a voice is addressing us an unconditional call and so on and so on my point is what happens here with the basic Christian motive of the death of God what is allowed to die in this deconstructive Christianity as expected only the temporary contingent historic specification of God a quote from Jack Caputo so my theology of the event is prepared to concede if not exactly the death of God at least the mortality or historical contingency of the name of God the separability in principle of the event from the name like a spirit leaving a lifeless body behind for me it's difficult to miss the irony of these lines if you look into Caputo's book a couple of pages earlier he violently attacks as supersessionist potentially racist the Pauline idea of opposing spirit and letter as again potentially anti-Semitic but here all of a sudden we get the metaphor of the dead letter to be dropped so that the spirit survives in this deconstructive way every particular taking sides every instantiation of the divine is relativized has to be taken and practiced with ironic distance whenever we focus on a particular formulation of the divine as we put it in French c'est ne pas ça this is not that within this state space I see no place for the paradox of Christian incarnation in Christ this miserable individual in this miserable individual we see God himself so that his death is the death of God himself I cannot emphasize enough this point how and Hegel saw this clearly and after Hegel Kierkegaard this properly comic comedy aspect of incarnation you know that Kierkegaard in some of his I forgot I'm sorry where openly uses this comparison with theater you know like fanfares at a court arrive a majestic king and then behind the curtain a small ridiculous dog or a dwarf enters that's for Kierkegaard the incarnation we the properly Christian choice is the leap of faith by means of which we take the risk to fully engage in a singular instantiation as the truth embodied with no ironic distance no fingers crossed Christ stands for the very singular point as I see it excluded by Caputo a direct short circuit identity even between a positive singularity and the divine event this is what in German Idealism or Hegel is called the absurdity of infinite judgment or as Hegel puts it two times in his Lessons on the Philosophy of Religion the monstrosity of Christ this mere miserable individual nobody crucified between two bandits and so on this is God himself even Caputo professes his love for Kierkegaard but where is here Kierkegaard's central insight his insistence on the paradox of Christianity eternity is only accessible through time through the belief in Christ's incarnation as a temporal event how then after admitting that every figure of God is culturally conditioned how can we go on praying Caputo's colleague I also appreciate him very much he's my friend as a person Gianni Vattimo answers to this question namely to the question that if all everything we say of God all our doctrines are just temporary approximations which we shouldn't ontologize God remains an otherness and so on how then can we go on praying sorry but what I will read you now although it's meant as a noble gentle thought is for me and I'm an atheist I don't I don't conceal it it's filled up with an probably unintended but explosive objective cynicism here I quote the passage this is Vattimo when I pray I know precisely that the words I am using are not intended to convey some literal truth I pray these words more for the love of a tradition than I do for the love of some mythic reality it is like the relationship you have with an aged relative sorry it means what God is a stupid old man just to plug it but much deeply I think what we do here is make one step towards the cynical functioning of ideology today this is how we usually believe today nobody dares almost to believe in the first person you say oh you know it's usually it's the cultural relativization of belief I don't really believe but I don't want to disappoint my children or it's my life world and so on and so on things of course are here much more mysterious I claim that we believe maybe even more than ever but in a wrong way we believe objectively we believe through the mechanisms which we don't take seriously which is why I'm sorry if I repeat myself but it's worth repeating my favorite model of how we believe today and also how ideology functions today is again I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself if some of you know this joke you know the famous Niels Bohr adventure a friend visited him in countryside and saw a horseshoe above the entrance and asked you know in Europe I don't know how it's here it's a superstition a superstitious item allegedly preventing evil spirits to enter the house and the friend asked him but wait a minute you're a scientist do you believe in this bullshit Bohr's answer wonderful one I'm not stupid of course I don't believe in it so why do I have it here because I heard that it works even if you don't believe in it that's our standard religion beliefs circulate you don't have to take them seriously and so on and so on the lesson is that we believe much more than we think so against this kind of cynical relativization I claim that the only way to redeem the subversive core of Christianity is to return to the death of God theology to repeat its gesture today what gets lost in the soft post-modern theology is the dimension indicated by the very name death of God the traumatic core of the divine kenosis of God's self-emptying in post-modern theology kenosis affects only us humans it turns out to be the deconstructive drawing of the line of separation between the unconditional promise and its contingent instantiations in and through it the divine dimension is emptied of its onto-theological fetishization what is missing here from my perspective is something on which you insist all good Hegelian we insist it is that kenosis and this is for me the very core of Christianity if you take this away Christianity is another version of paganism that kenosis is not just a process of us this is a very Hegelian topic this is what Hegel meant when he said to grasp the absolute not only as substance but as subject our alienation from God is at the same time the self-alienation of God himself what we do with God is what God is doing to himself which is why I hope you noticed this in Christianity our access to God is a totally different one than in other religions it's not God is up there and somehow through some stupid ascetic self-whipping or whatever somehow you can get closer to the guy no what you do is that at the very point when you feel totally emptied alienated from God you discover that your identity is with Christ on the cross which is when God felt abandoned you know the famous father why have you forsaken me from himself it is when you see how experience how your abandonment by God overlaps by the divine self self-abandonment this means something among other things very precise that although I give a very materialist reading of Holy Spirit this Holy Spirit does not mean the simple Feuerbachian Marxist point that oh okay we discover there is no substantial God and it's just that God is just a collective ideological projection of us humans and so on so that all we have to do you know this big Feuerbachian Marxist topic is to reappropriate the alienated substance no precisely this double movement of how what we experience as our abandonment from God is the divine kenosis itself this is the Hegelian core of it now as to ethical consequences from this now I come to the political part I think we should really give this to all children to read if I were to run a kind of a Marxist Hegelian Christian totalitarian state I hope a secret dream of all of us one of the first readings wouldn't be Sayings of President Mao or what but the Book of Job I think this is the zero level the first example that I know of critique of ideology why okay we all know what happens things turn out very bad for Job he loses his animals goats women and so on in that order I think it's described but then something happens you remember the three theological friends come what's their point it's not so much to convince Job that he is guilty but to convince him that his suffering has some deeper meaning they are I think ideologists at its zero level one says God is just so if you suffer you must have done something wrong even if you don't know what the other guy says okay maybe God is just testing you whatever but the point is it has your suffering some deeper meaning and then something unheard of happens as you probably know God appears at the end and says no everything that the three ideologists said is wrong everything that Job said is right this resistance to meaning is crucial when we are confronting potential or actual catastrophes from AIDS to ideological sorry ecological disasters to Holocaust they don't have a deeper meaning and here things get even more complex but then at the end of course we all know Job nonetheless confronts God with what about my suffering I claim and I here I follow my favorite Catholic theologian Gilbert Keith Chesterton I claim that the standard at least to my knowledge predominant reading is totally wrong namely the reading which reads that God's apparently boastful explosion you remember but who are you to say who were you when I was created all those unicorn monsters whatsoever it's usually read as this assertion of the radical gap separating God from man the way I read it following Chesterton is exactly in the opposite way that God's message is you think you are in trouble but look the whole universe is one big mess shit even I don't know what's happening it's kind of a God being overwhelmed by the mess he created God at a loss and now we come to the crucial point so what for me dies on the cross here I follow Hegel when he says what dies on the cross is not an earthly representative of God that's specific to in other religions when you deal with sons messenger it's he's up there we are here he sends a messenger people crucify him screw him up screw things up so then okay son come back maybe in thousand years I'll send you again whatever no as Hegel emphasizes it's precisely that God of the beyond itself which dies what does this mean you I hope remember what I find the most disgusting metaphor that I can imagine of theology the metaphor of a painting you know the idea is when you encounter evil you think it's evil it's it's like when you watch a painting from too close and you just see a disturbing stain and then the idea is withdraw to a proper distance and you will see how what wrongly appeared to you as evil really contributes to global harmony and so on and so on I have problems with this I mean like it would be nice to say how oh why do we bother so much with Gulag Holocaust or let's not limit ourselves just to this or what happened with Congo and what incidentally is happening in Congo today these are just these are just events which if you withdraw and look at the total harmony they contribute to the global peace I mean the God who needs such an element to impose his harmony would be the good old Satan that you mentioned so what I'm saying is that I claim that if there is a spiritual meaning of Christ death it's precisely his abdication from this role Christ is no longer old guy the death of Christ stands for the death of God who somehow guarantees that at the end things will turn out okay you know like we may experience a confused reality but somehow there is old guy up there pulling the strings and so on guaranteeing the happy ending no it's precisely a God who fearlessly throws himself as it were into his own creation not playing this dirty game of when you complain to him things are screwed up oh no you have to see the whole picture no no no the truth is in detail let me tell you an anecdote a couple of anecdotes now very brief ones I read an anecdote about Harold Pinter who was a couple of years ago before his death obviously thrown out of a reception at the US Embassy in Turkey when a US diplomat was praising the Turkish political progress Pinter evoked the brutal torture of the Kurdish guerrillas by the Turkish military the diplomat responded that there are always two side of its story you know you cannot just focus on this you should see the broader picture and then Pinter cut him short with but not if your balls are wired to a battery and shot through by electricity then there is no broader picture and I claim that this is Christ gesture there is no broader picture allow me to make this point absolutely clear to repeat two stories which I really like because they are I think Christology in its purest which I used in one of my books I always like political joke to illustrate theological point from when I was young you remember there was an era when there were monsters like Richard Nixon Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker in East Germany the stories one of these stupid stories you know they all confront God and are allowed to ask God one question Nixon asks what will become from out of United States thirty fifty years from now God says oh it will be a Soviet Republic Nixon be careful how I literally formulate it Nixon turns around and starts to cry then Brezhnev asks with oh so what will become with my Soviet Union God answers sorry guy no better Soviet Union will be a Chinese colony again Brezhnev turns around and starts to cry then Honecker German Democratic Republic asks oh so what will be with my beloved GDR you can guess the answer God turns around and starts to cry this is the proper when you fall in you know you have the series you think God is out he falls into it or to give you a similar example my favorite political joke from there in the late 30s Lubyanka KGB prison three guys found themselves in the same cell and start to explain to each other their position the first guy says I was condemned to five years for opposing Popov Popov a top nomenklatura guy the second guy says ah but the party line then changed and I was condemned to ten years for supporting Popov finally the third one says yes you can guess I am here for life and I am Popov this is the Christological moment you got it how the apparent exception up there falls how to put it falls into the series so not to get too far into this just to conclude so my point is not to be an atheist Christian in the sense of saving the Christian message in atheist form my point is a much stronger one here not only is atheism the truth of Christianity but one can only be a true atheist by passing through the Christian experience all other atheisms continue to rely on some form of the big other Stalinism you have the big other of history which guarantees the meaning of our acts and so on so what happens for me with the death of Christ is what remember and that's crucial after the death of Christ there is no happy return or whatever it's Holy Ghost Holy Ghost is what it's a collective of believers I use the word collective not community an egalitarian collective of believers with no guarantee in the big other basically with the death of Christ the big other any historic guarantee spiritual whatever ontological is is disappears for me the death of Christ means not that the ultimate message of Christianity is we are condemned to our freedom it's not we can rely we should trust God it is God should trust God trusts us now I am approaching the end of time so I will just recapitulate what I wanted to say in the first I want to interpret from here from this crucial notion of Holy Ghost as the community egalitarian community of believers the question of violence this Holy Ghost of course is an engaged collective this is another crucial Christian experience for me that truth can be at the same time universal and engage how to read from here I always like to embarrass my theological friends with just reading them those passages that are of course as an old crazy leftist admire most in the New Testament you know all those horrifying statements by Christ do not think I came to bring peace on the earth I did not come to bring peace but the sword or I have come to cast fire upon the earth or if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and even his own life he cannot be my disciple and so on and so on how to read this it's incredible I'm quite amused at how I get the whole series of excuses like my the standard procedure is that my theological opponents who pretend to be good orthodox Christians all the time turn into some kind of cheap historicist deconstructionist they say you know you should understand the historical circumstances there and so on and so on then then the most blasphemous version I find is the one of trying to relativize it doesn't mean you really have to hate your parents just you shouldn't love them too much sorry that's a blasphemy for me it means you know God some kind of perverse obscene old guy okay okay you can love your wife father but I want to be sure that you love me more how should I put it no and so on all that stuff I think the only way to read this scandalous worlds is precisely along the lines of revolutionary violence what Walter Benjamin developed as divine violence and so on and so on it's not hatred as kind of a pseudo dialectical opposite to love it's hatred out of love this is the wonderful message of Kierkegaard in his Works of Love where he says that a true Christian doesn't only love his neighbors he is ready to hate even kill his neighbors out of love to sustain this tension is for me what we need today and this brings me now really to conclude to what this means for the social order it means something for the reason of which I think apocalyptic Christianity is still the ultimate horizon today which we need it more than ever the idea is a very simple one this is for me what Christ means with hate your father mother not literally hate them kill them but hate them precisely in their symbolic institutional function as mother father and so on the message is a wonderful one it is that social hierarchic order is not the ultimate reality there is a space for an egalitarian collective which as it were cuts across it and not just in this Buddhist way of of in Nirvana we are all the same no no no we can be all the same here on this earth we can organize ourselves as the same here and again this universality is not an abstract universality which is wrongly attributed to Hegel in the sense of the universality of a hierarchic order of you know like you as a mother are a good mother he is a good master you are a good obeying kid and so on we are everyone as our own place this is for me are you aware how revolutionary here Christianity is this is for me the ultimate message to use the fashionable terms if there ever was a non-holistic religion and if there is a thing that I hate is so-called holistic approach it's Christianity it's not the religion of to establish harmonious order it's the religion of struggle of imbalance to be universal means to fight the only true universality is the universality of struggle which is why I think although we should do all possible for the poor people and so on if you want to understand what Christian love is you should first understand what it is not it's not charity charity I really hate as a Christian although atheist Christian my the one of the figures of devil today for me is Starbucks coffee why did you notice the ideology when you enter it it's their propaganda when they all the time it's the same message when you buy a cup of our coffee you don't buy only a cup of coffee you buy the whole world experience you know two percent go to some Guatemala children to educate them for water and so on and so on all that stuff this kind of a charity manipulation how does it function this is false love why because when you see this disgusting poster this is anti-Christianity at its purest you know the poster of some disfigured starving black child and with the words with the price for a cup of a couple of cup of cappuccinos you can save this kid's life but if you read between the line what's the message the message is there are people starving we exploit them and so on but for a price of a couple of cappuccinos we can make you feel good so that you don't have really to worry not only this but you can even feel good that you are doing something don't underestimate this ideological functioning today as a true Christian you should even doubt I think all this organic food bullshit listen when you see that so-called organic apples which are half rotten but cost three times more do you really buy them because you believe that they are less poisonous I think you are here saint skeptic you think maybe but why then do you buy them it makes you feel good you see even when I am buying apples I am part of a larger movement I am hoping mother earth to get better I am you know like it's we are literally more and more buying buying ideology now believe me or not really to conclude I mean so what I am saying is that the legacy of Christianity for me the death of God legacy is neither this kind of a Nietzschean positive or negative narrative in the sense of once there was an authentic God whom we lost now you can read this as a liberating message in the sense of oh finally we got rid of God death of God good riddance and so on or the more pessimistic Heideggerian or others reading God abandoned us now we should wait pray prepare for God to come back no it is God is definitely dead and but this is a reversal but never forget this a reversal in the guise of Holy Spirit in Holy Spirit Christ Christ says what the secret don't remember man he says to his pupils when there will be the love between the two of you I will be there so don't fall into this fetishist trap of searching around where is this jerk no you don't need in your search in the collective he is already here he is alive if you struggle with it in one of my books The Monstrosity of Christ I quote I hope you know it otherwise you don't deserve to be Americans that wonderful old labor song Joe Hill you know when Joe Hill appears to an ordinary worker and the worker says but you died and Joe Hill said no whenever workers strike in Maine I am there and so on and so on that's the Holy Ghost so to conclude please believe me just this what God do we get here it's rather like the God from an old Bolshevik joke from the 1920s this is crucial because at that point such joke was still possible when they still believed that communist propagandist can be effective good about a communist propagandist who suddenly collapsed and died and of course after his death found himself in hell but there being a good propagandist he quickly convinced the guards to let him go out and to heaven when after a week or so the devil notices the absence on his usual regular control notices the absence of this guy he quickly went up took the elevator up paid a visit to God demanding that he returns to hell what belongs to the devil however immediately after the devil addressed God with listen my lord God interrupted him first I'm not a lord but a comrade second are you crazy talking to fictions I don't exist and third be cut it short otherwise I'll miss my party cell meeting this is the God we need today a God who wholly becomes man a comrade among us crucified together with two social outcasts a God who not only doesn't exist but also himself knows this accept his kenotic erasure entirely passing over into the love which binds members of the Holy Ghost which as you know Holy Ghost is an entity which has different names like revolutionary party emancipatory collective and so on and so on in this sense I am unconditionally Christian and I think that in a quite naive way only this basic Christian how should I call it spiritual structure this incredibly important idea of an emancipatory collective which breaks with all this traditional pagan bullshit of the wheel of justice where you know like where the highest value is to be or do what is your duty at your proper place like you know you are too much excess the traditional justice as we know is the justice of proper measure as Aristotle put it catastrophe is when you want too much too much power too much pleasures then fate punishes you balance is re-established the message of Christ is exactly the opposite one the non-holistic extreme one no we can cut cut it short we can totally destabilize the universe thanks very much for your patience even here I will do a communist gesture of God did you notice sorry it's my old joke but I cannot resist telling it did you notice in old Stalinist and fascist documentaries how the leader fascist leader is applauded but he never applauds himself he just receives the while Stalin and other great luminaries did you notice how when in the central committee they are applauded they always join the applause like you know it's not me I'm just one of you and so on and so on only in this sense I'm a Stalinist and I proudly applaud with you thanks very much are these on they are great I think we can stay seated now Dr Altizer do you have a response to Dr no no no no I only wait very good Dr Zizek do you have a response to Altizer's paper in particular sorry do you have a response to his paper in particular then we'll pass no I have just one friendly don't be afraid it will not be another ten minutes literally one sentence I like your very dialectical play with God Satan and so on I just hope you agree that it's crucial here to resist any Gnostic dualistic temptation oh yeah yeah it's not all this absolutely boring disgust no God and devil and then making it's not this it's not this I can sleep calmly I don't have to mobilize KGB to investigate you like it's not Gnostic dualism okay just wanted to be sure his key term for distinguishing this kind of coincidentia
First let me express my gratitude to all starting by you to all my friends who organized my visit here and again to emphasize my honor to be here with Tom you know I discovered Tom only through criticism when some people started to criticize my work and one of the critical points were but what you are telling is just repeating the old stuff already developed I wouldn't like to insult you to go into how many years ago and but my point was what is bad in this I think what is bad in this why always this new new new maybe the most difficult and creative thing is truly to repeat what was already said I agree here and it has great theological consequences with someone that we both like like Kierkegaard and somebody else who maybe we don't both like in the same way like Gilles Deleuze who said very nicely that everything really new appears in the form of a repetition take the modernity who are the idiots of early modernity those who simply trusted oh new technology those cheap liberals but it is Pascal whose problem was precisely how to remain orthodox in the conditions of modernity that really generated something new we read today Pascal we don't read those cheap apologists so again it's my honor to be reduced to your not even successor but repetitor almost in the musical sense you know corepetitor in the opera and so on okay so again being an old fashioned Marxist I like these westerns from the late 40s where you know the good guys are in white the bad guys are in black not too complex so I like the enemy the enemy will be personally a friend today I appreciate him it will be the representatives of so-called post-modern deconstructive theological turn again I have a great respect to them but I think that's the line that separates us what defines the so-called post-modern theological turn here is a quote from a book co-written by Jack Caputo and Gianni Vattimo it's the question how do we get from the post-Christian post-Holocaust and largely secular death of God theologies of the 60s to the post-modern return of religion the answer is that the death of God the secularization of modern Europe somehow clears the slate by obliterating the moral metaphysical God of onto-theology and thus paradoxically opens up the space for the new authentic post-metaphysical religion a Christianity or maybe not even Christianity focused on Agape in exemplary of this attitude is John Caputo's On Religion maybe the ultimate formulation of the Derridean deconstructive messianism Caputo is horrified at the very idea of a religious dogma of the notion of a God who decided to address a particular group at a particular moment according them a privileged access to absolute truth but in this way by Caputo I think religion is reduced to a belief to a simple minimal belief that our miserable reality is not all there is the ultimate that the ultimate truth is elsewhere that there is another world possible a totally de-ontological promise hope of redemption to come which this hope is betrayed by any ontological positivization my question very naive one what then happens here with you know in this post-metaphysical deconstructive post-secular however you call it thought where if I may mock it in a very friendly way the message is of course God is dead there is no grandfather sitting up there but and now I am consciously mocking but in this void from this very absence someone a voice is addressing us an unconditional call and so on and so on my point is what happens here with the basic Christian motive of the death of God what is allowed to die in this deconstructive Christianity as expected only the temporary contingent historic specification of God a quote from Jack Caputo so my theology of the event is prepared to concede if not exactly the death of God at least the mortality or historical contingency of the name of God the separability in principle of the event from the name like a spirit leaving a lifeless body behind for me it's difficult to miss the irony of these lines if you look into Caputo's book a couple of pages earlier he violently attacks as supersessionist potentially racist the Pauline idea of opposing spirit and letter as again potentially anti-Semitic but here all of a sudden we get the metaphor of the dead letter to be dropped so that the spirit survives in this deconstructive way every particular taking sides every instantiation of the divine is relativized has to be taken and practiced with ironic distance whenever we focus on a particular formulation of the divine as we put it in French c'est ne pas ça this is not that within this state space I see no place for the paradox of Christian incarnation in Christ this miserable individual in this miserable individual we see God himself so that his death is the death of God himself I cannot emphasize enough this point how and Hegel saw this clearly and after Hegel Kierkegaard this properly comic comedy aspect of incarnation you know that Kierkegaard in some of his I forgot I'm sorry where openly uses this comparison with theater you know like fanfares at a court arrive a majestic king and then behind the curtain a small ridiculous dog or a dwarf enters that's for Kierkegaard the incarnation we the properly Christian choice is the leap of faith by means of which we take the risk to fully engage in a singular instantiation as the truth embodied with no ironic distance no fingers crossed Christ stands for the very singular point as I see it excluded by Caputo a direct short circuit identity even between a positive singularity and the divine event this is what in German Idealism or Hegel is called the absurdity of infinite judgment or as Hegel puts it two times in his Lessons on the Philosophy of Religion the monstrosity of Christ this mere miserable individual nobody crucified between two bandits and so on this is God himself even Caputo professes his love for Kierkegaard but where is here Kierkegaard's central insight his insistence on the paradox of Christianity eternity is only accessible through time through the belief in Christ's incarnation as a temporal event how then after admitting that every figure of God is culturally conditioned how can we go on praying Caputo's colleague I also appreciate him very much he's my friend as a person Gianni Vattimo answers to this question namely to the question that if all everything we say of God all our doctrines are just temporary approximations which we shouldn't ontologize God remains an otherness and so on how then can we go on praying sorry but what I will read you now although it's meant as a noble gentle thought is for me and I'm an atheist I don't I don't conceal it it's filled up with an probably unintended but explosive objective cynicism here I quote the passage this is Vattimo when I pray I know precisely that the words I am using are not intended to convey some literal truth I pray these words more for the love of a tradition than I do for the love of some mythic reality it is like the relationship you have with an aged relative sorry it means what God is a stupid old man just to plug it but much deeply I think what we do here is make one step towards the cynical functioning of ideology today this is how we usually believe today nobody dares almost to believe in the first person you say oh you know it's usually it's the cultural relativization of belief I don't really believe but I don't want to disappoint my children or it's my life world and so on and so on things of course are here much more mysterious I claim that we believe maybe even more than ever but in a wrong way we believe objectively we believe through the mechanisms which we don't take seriously which is why I'm sorry if I repeat myself but it's worth repeating my favorite model of how we believe today and also how ideology functions today is again I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself if some of you know this joke you know the famous Niels Bohr adventure a friend visited him in countryside and saw a horseshoe above the entrance and asked you know in Europe I don't know how it's here it's a superstition a superstitious item allegedly preventing evil spirits to enter the house and the friend asked him but wait a minute you're a scientist do you believe in this bullshit Bohr's answer wonderful one I'm not stupid of course I don't believe in it so why do I have it here because I heard that it works even if you don't believe in it that's our standard religion beliefs circulate you don't have to take them seriously and so on and so on the lesson is that we believe much more than we think so against this kind of cynical relativization I claim that the only way to redeem the subversive core of Christianity is to return to the death of God theology to repeat its gesture today what gets lost in the soft post-modern theology is the dimension indicated by the very name death of God the traumatic core of the divine kenosis of God's self-emptying in post-modern theology kenosis affects only us humans it turns out to be the deconstructive drawing of the line of separation between the unconditional promise and its contingent instantiations in and through it the divine dimension is emptied of its onto-theological fetishization what is missing here from my perspective is something on which you insist all good Hegelian we insist it is that kenosis and this is for me the very core of Christianity if you take this away Christianity is another version of paganism that kenosis is not just a process of us this is a very Hegelian topic this is what Hegel meant when he said to grasp the absolute not only as substance but as subject our alienation from God is at the same time the self-alienation of God himself what we do with God is what God is doing to himself which is why I hope you noticed this in Christianity our access to God is a totally different one than in other religions it's not God is up there and somehow through some stupid ascetic self-whipping or whatever somehow you can get closer to the guy no what you do is that at the very point when you feel totally emptied alienated from God you discover that your identity is with Christ on the cross which is when God felt abandoned you know the famous father why have you forsaken me from himself it is when you see how experience how your abandonment by God overlaps by the divine self self-abandonment this means something among other things very precise that although I give a very materialist reading of Holy Spirit this Holy Spirit does not mean the simple Feuerbachian Marxist point that oh okay we discover there is no substantial God and it's just that God is just a collective ideological projection of us humans and so on so that all we have to do you know this big Feuerbachian Marxist topic is to reappropriate the alienated substance no precisely this double movement of how what we experience as our abandonment from God is the divine kenosis itself this is the Hegelian core of it now as to ethical consequences from this now I come to the political part I think we should really give this to all children to read if I were to run a kind of a Marxist Hegelian Christian totalitarian state I hope a secret dream of all of us one of the first readings wouldn't be Sayings of President Mao or what but the Book of Job I think this is the zero level the first example that I know of critique of ideology why okay we all know what happens things turn out very bad for Job he loses his animals goats women and so on in that order I think it's described but then something happens you remember the three theological friends come what's their point it's not so much to convince Job that he is guilty but to convince him that his suffering has some deeper meaning they are I think ideologists at its zero level one says God is just so if you suffer you must have done something wrong even if you don't know what the other guy says okay maybe God is just testing you whatever but the point is it has your suffering some deeper meaning and then something unheard of happens as you probably know God appears at the end and says no everything that the three ideologists said is wrong everything that Job said is right this resistance to meaning is crucial when we are confronting potential or actual catastrophes from AIDS to ideological sorry ecological disasters to Holocaust they don't have a deeper meaning and here things get even more complex but then at the end of course we all know Job nonetheless confronts God with what about my suffering I claim and I here I follow my favorite Catholic theologian Gilbert Keith Chesterton I claim that the standard at least to my knowledge predominant reading is totally wrong namely the reading which reads that God's apparently boastful explosion you remember but who are you to say who were you when I was created all those unicorn monsters whatsoever it's usually read as this assertion of the radical gap separating God from man the way I read it following Chesterton is exactly in the opposite way that God's message is you think you are in trouble but look the whole universe is one big mess shit even I don't know what's happening it's kind of a God being overwhelmed by the mess he created God at a loss and now we come to the crucial point so what for me dies on the cross here I follow Hegel when he says what dies on the cross is not an earthly representative of God that's specific to in other religions when you deal with sons messenger it's he's up there we are here he sends a messenger people crucify him screw him up screw things up so then okay son come back maybe in thousand years I'll send you again whatever no as Hegel emphasizes it's precisely that God of the beyond itself which dies what does this mean you I hope remember what I find the most disgusting metaphor that I can imagine of theology the metaphor of a painting you know the idea is when you encounter evil you think it's evil it's it's like when you watch a painting from too close and you just see a disturbing stain and then the idea is withdraw to a proper distance and you will see how what wrongly appeared to you as evil really contributes to global harmony and so on and so on I have problems with this I mean like it would be nice to say how oh why do we bother so much with Gulag Holocaust or let's not limit ourselves just to this or what happened with Congo and what incidentally is happening in Congo today these are just these are just events which if you withdraw and look at the total harmony they contribute to the global peace I mean the God who needs such an element to impose his harmony would be the good old Satan that you mentioned so what I'm saying is that I claim that if there is a spiritual meaning of Christ death it's precisely his abdication from this role Christ is no longer old guy the death of Christ stands for the death of God who somehow guarantees that at the end things will turn out okay you know like we may experience a confused reality but somehow there is old guy up there pulling the strings and so on guaranteeing the happy ending no it's precisely a God who fearlessly throws himself as it were into his own creation not playing this dirty game of when you complain to him things are screwed up oh no you have to see the whole picture no no no the truth is in detail let me tell you an anecdote a couple of anecdotes now very brief ones I read an anecdote about Harold Pinter who was a couple of years ago before his death obviously thrown out of a reception at the US Embassy in Turkey when a US diplomat was praising the Turkish political progress Pinter evoked the brutal torture of the Kurdish guerrillas by the Turkish military the diplomat responded that there are always two side of its story you know you cannot just focus on this you should see the broader picture and then Pinter cut him short with but not if your balls are wired to a battery and shot through by electricity then there is no broader picture and I claim that this is Christ gesture there is no broader picture allow me to make this point absolutely clear to repeat two stories which I really like because they are I think Christology in its purest which I used in one of my books I always like political joke to illustrate theological point from when I was young you remember there was an era when there were monsters like Richard Nixon Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker in East Germany the stories one of these stupid stories you know they all confront God and are allowed to ask God one question Nixon asks what will become from out of United States thirty fifty years from now God says oh it will be a Soviet Republic Nixon be careful how I literally formulate it Nixon turns around and starts to cry then Brezhnev asks with oh so what will become with my Soviet Union God answers sorry guy no better Soviet Union will be a Chinese colony again Brezhnev turns around and starts to cry then Honecker German Democratic Republic asks oh so what will be with my beloved GDR you can guess the answer God turns around and starts to cry this is the proper when you fall in you know you have the series you think God is out he falls into it or to give you a similar example my favorite political joke from there in the late 30s Lubyanka KGB prison three guys found themselves in the same cell and start to explain to each other their position the first guy says I was condemned to five years for opposing Popov Popov a top nomenklatura guy the second guy says ah but the party line then changed and I was condemned to ten years for supporting Popov finally the third one says yes you can guess I am here for life and I am Popov this is the Christological moment you got it how the apparent exception up there falls how to put it falls into the series so not to get too far into this just to conclude so my point is not to be an atheist Christian in the sense of saving the Christian message in atheist form my point is a much stronger one here not only is atheism the truth of Christianity but one can only be a true atheist by passing through the Christian experience all other atheisms continue to rely on some form of the big other Stalinism you have the big other of history which guarantees the meaning of our acts and so on so what happens for me with the death of Christ is what remember and that's crucial after the death of Christ there is no happy return or whatever it's Holy Ghost Holy Ghost is what it's a collective of believers I use the word collective not community an egalitarian collective of believers with no guarantee in the big other basically with the death of Christ the big other any historic guarantee spiritual whatever ontological is is disappears for me the death of Christ means not that the ultimate message of Christianity is we are condemned to our freedom it's not we can rely we should trust God it is God should trust God trusts us now I am approaching the end of time so I will just recapitulate what I wanted to say in the first I want to interpret from here from this crucial notion of Holy Ghost as the community egalitarian community of believers the question of violence this Holy Ghost of course is an engaged collective this is another crucial Christian experience for me that truth can be at the same time universal and engage how to read from here I always like to embarrass my theological friends with just reading them those passages that are of course as an old crazy leftist admire most in the New Testament you know all those horrifying statements by Christ do not think I came to bring peace on the earth I did not come to bring peace but the sword or I have come to cast fire upon the earth or if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and even his own life he cannot be my disciple and so on and so on how to read this it's incredible I'm quite amused at how I get the whole series of excuses like my the standard procedure is that my theological opponents who pretend to be good orthodox Christians all the time turn into some kind of cheap historicist deconstructionist they say you know you should understand the historical circumstances there and so on and so on then then the most blasphemous version I find is the one of trying to relativize it doesn't mean you really have to hate your parents just you shouldn't love them too much sorry that's a blasphemy for me it means you know God some kind of perverse obscene old guy okay okay you can love your wife father but I want to be sure that you love me more how should I put it no and so on all that stuff I think the only way to read this scandalous worlds is precisely along the lines of revolutionary violence what Walter Benjamin developed as divine violence and so on and so on it's not hatred as kind of a pseudo dialectical opposite to love it's hatred out of love this is the wonderful message of Kierkegaard in his Works of Love where he says that a true Christian doesn't only love his neighbors he is ready to hate even kill his neighbors out of love to sustain this tension is for me what we need today and this brings me now really to conclude to what this means for the social order it means something for the reason of which I think apocalyptic Christianity is still the ultimate horizon today which we need it more than ever the idea is a very simple one this is for me what Christ means with hate your father mother not literally hate them kill them but hate them precisely in their symbolic institutional function as mother father and so on the message is a wonderful one it is that social hierarchic order is not the ultimate reality there is a space for an egalitarian collective which as it were cuts across it and not just in this Buddhist way of of in Nirvana we are all the same no no no we can be all the same here on this earth we can organize ourselves as the same here and again this universality is not an abstract universality which is wrongly attributed to Hegel in the sense of the universality of a hierarchic order of you know like you as a mother are a good mother he is a good master you are a good obeying kid and so on we are everyone as our own place this is for me are you aware how revolutionary here Christianity is this is for me the ultimate message to use the fashionable terms if there ever was a non-holistic religion and if there is a thing that I hate is so-called holistic approach it's Christianity it's not the religion of to establish harmonious order it's the religion of struggle of imbalance to be universal means to fight the only true universality is the universality of struggle which is why I think although we should do all possible for the poor people and so on if you want to understand what Christian love is you should first understand what it is not it's not charity charity I really hate as a Christian although atheist Christian my the one of the figures of devil today for me is Starbucks coffee why did you notice the ideology when you enter it it's their propaganda when they all the time it's the same message when you buy a cup of our coffee you don't buy only a cup of coffee you buy the whole world experience you know two percent go to some Guatemala children to educate them for water and so on and so on all that stuff this kind of a charity manipulation how does it function this is false love why because when you see this disgusting poster this is anti-Christianity at its purest you know the poster of some disfigured starving black child and with the words with the price for a cup of a couple of cup of cappuccinos you can save this kid's life but if you read between the line what's the message the message is there are people starving we exploit them and so on but for a price of a couple of cappuccinos we can make you feel good so that you don't have really to worry not only this but you can even feel good that you are doing something don't underestimate this ideological functioning today as a true Christian you should even doubt I think all this organic food bullshit listen when you see that so-called organic apples which are half rotten but cost three times more do you really buy them because you believe that they are less poisonous I think you are here saint skeptic you think maybe but why then do you buy them it makes you feel good you see even when I am buying apples I am part of a larger movement I am hoping mother earth to get better I am you know like it's we are literally more and more buying buying ideology now believe me or not really to conclude I mean so what I am saying is that the legacy of Christianity for me the death of God legacy is neither this kind of a Nietzschean positive or negative narrative in the sense of once there was an authentic God whom we lost now you can read this as a liberating message in the sense of oh finally we got rid of God death of God good riddance and so on or the more pessimistic Heideggerian or others reading God abandoned us now we should wait pray prepare for God to come back no it is God is definitely dead and but this is a reversal but never forget this a reversal in the guise of Holy Spirit in Holy Spirit Christ Christ says what the secret don't remember man he says to his pupils when there will be the love between the two of you I will be there so don't fall into this fetishist trap of searching around where is this jerk no you don't need in your search in the collective he is already here he is alive if you struggle with it in one of my books The Monstrosity of Christ I quote I hope you know it otherwise you don't deserve to be Americans that wonderful old labor song Joe Hill you know when Joe Hill appears to an ordinary worker and the worker says but you died and Joe Hill said no whenever workers strike in Maine I am there and so on and so on that's the Holy Ghost so to conclude please believe me just this what God do we get here it's rather like the God from an old Bolshevik joke from the 1920s this is crucial because at that point such joke was still possible when they still believed that communist propagandist can be effective good about a communist propagandist who suddenly collapsed and died and of course after his death found himself in hell but there being a good propagandist he quickly convinced the guards to let him go out and to heaven when after a week or so the devil notices the absence on his usual regular control notices the absence of this guy he quickly went up took the elevator up paid a visit to God demanding that he returns to hell what belongs to the devil however immediately after the devil addressed God with listen my lord God interrupted him first I'm not a lord but a comrade second are you crazy talking to fictions I don't exist and third be cut it short otherwise I'll miss my party cell meeting this is the God we need today a God who wholly becomes man a comrade among us crucified together with two social outcasts a God who not only doesn't exist but also himself knows this accept his kenotic erasure entirely passing over into the love which binds members of the Holy Ghost which as you know Holy Ghost is an entity which has different names like revolutionary party emancipatory collective and so on and so on in this sense I am unconditionally Christian and I think that in a quite naive way only this basic Christian how should I call it spiritual structure this incredibly important idea of an emancipatory collective which breaks with all this traditional pagan bullshit of the wheel of justice where you know like where the highest value is to be or do what is your duty at your proper place like you know you are too much excess the traditional justice as we know is the justice of proper measure as Aristotle put it catastrophe is when you want too much too much power too much pleasures then fate punishes you balance is re-established the message of Christ is exactly the opposite one the non-holistic extreme one no we can cut cut it short we can totally destabilize the universe thanks very much for your patience even here I will do a communist gesture of God did you notice sorry it's my old joke but I cannot resist telling it did you notice in old Stalinist and fascist documentaries how the leader fascist leader is applauded but he never applauds himself he just receives the while Stalin and other great luminaries did you notice how when in the central committee they are applauded they always join the applause like you know it's not me I'm just one of you and so on and so on only in this sense I'm a Stalinist and I proudly applaud with you thanks very much are these on they are great I think we can stay seated now Dr Altizer do you have a response to Dr no no no no I only wait very good Dr Zizek do you have a response to Altizer's paper in particular sorry do you have a response to his paper in particular then we'll pass no I have just one friendly don't be afraid it will not be another ten minutes literally one sentence I like your very dialectical play with God Satan and so on I just hope you agree that it's crucial here to resist any Gnostic dualistic temptation oh yeah yeah it's not all this absolutely boring disgust no God and devil and then making it's not this it's not this I can sleep calmly I don't have to mobilize KGB to investigate you like it's not Gnostic dualism okay just wanted to be sure his key term for distinguishing this kind of coincidentia
unknown
oppositorum
oppositorum
Slavoj Žižek
from dualism is dialectic so when he says dialectic it's absolutely non-dualism absolutely right
from dualism is dialectic so when he says dialectic it's absolutely non-dualism absolutely right
unknown
which is why
which is why
Slavoj Žižek
we should also strictly oppose Hegel to this Jungian obscurantist idea that you know you should avoid one extreme and the other extreme and find a proper balance although this is usually taken as dialectic it's not
we should also strictly oppose Hegel to this Jungian obscurantist idea that you know you should avoid one extreme and the other extreme and find a proper balance although this is usually taken as dialectic it's not
unknown
right
right