Whither the „Death of God“: A Continuing Currency?
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009-11-08 · 1:16:01 · 11,024 words
with David Horowitz
religion-theologyhegel-dialecticsideologypsychoanalysisrevolution-violencecommunism-socialismcapitalismphilosophy-general
Žižek delivers a lecture at a theology symposium alongside Thomas Altizer and other death-of-God theologians, arguing that postmodern deconstructive theology (Caputo, Vattimo) evacuates Christianity's traumatic core by relativizing every concrete instantiation of the divine. He contends that kenosis, God's self-emptying, must be read as God's own self-alienation, not merely a human hermeneutic stance, and that the death of Christ signals the death of the transcendent guarantor (the 'big Other'), leaving behind the Holy Spirit as an egalitarian, emancipatory collective with no external guarantee. He draws on Hegel, Kierkegaard, Chesterton, and the Book of Job to argue that atheism is the truth of Christianity, and that true Christian love is not charity but a universality of struggle. A Q&A follows with respondents Raschke, O'Regan, Kotsko, Boscaljon, and Crockett.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 18
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek's self-description in relation to Altizer: not even a successor but a musical rehearsal accompanist (correpetitor), repeating and practicing what has already been thought.
The traumatic theological event Žižek re-reads as the elimination of the transcendent guarantor (the big Other) rather than a metaphor for secularization or onto-theological critique.
The metaphysical conception of God as a grounded, positive being, which postmodern theology critiques but, in Žižek's view, only replaces with a deferred, equally fetishistic promise.
The Hegelian logical form Žižek invokes to describe the monstrous identity of the singular empirical individual (Christ) with the divine, 'this miserable nobody is God himself.'
as “objective belief”
The condition in which we believe 'through the mechanisms which we don't take seriously', ideology functions even when no individual subjectively endorses it, as illustrated by the horseshoe anecdote.
as “divine kenosis”
Used interchangeably with kenosis but specifically to emphasize that God's self-emptying is an event within the divine itself, not merely a description of how humans relate to the divine.
God's self-emptying, which Žižek insists is not merely a human hermeneutic move but God's own self-alienation, our abandonment by God overlaps with the divine self-abandonment.
as “Holy Spirit as emancipatory collective”
Žižek redefines the Holy Spirit not as a divine entity but as an egalitarian collective of believers with no big Other, equivalent to what he elsewhere calls a revolutionary party or emancipatory collective.
Žižek identifies Job's refusal to accept that his suffering has a deeper meaning as the 'zero level' of ideology critique, resistance to imposed meaning.
The symbolic guarantee that things will ultimately make sense or turn out okay; Žižek argues the death of Christ means this guarantee is definitively abolished.
Benjamin's concept invoked by Žižek to read Christ's scandalous sayings about bringing a sword and hatred, a revolutionary violence that is hatred out of love, not pseudo-dialectical opposition to it.
Žižek's reading of Kierkegaard's Works of Love: a true Christian is ready to hate or even kill neighbors out of love, sustaining a tension that is the formula for revolutionary commitment.
Christianity characterized as the religion of struggle and imbalance, not harmonic order, true universality means to fight, not to find one's proper place in a totality.
The Hegelian sublation which Žižek and Raschke argue the death of God on the cross resists, it cannot be aufgehoben into a concretized universal.
Invoked by respondent Raschke as the object of desire that various theologized theologies chase, contrasted with the jouissance Žižek's materialism aims at.
Used by Raschke to characterize the kind of excess Žižek's theological materialism must address beyond the mere objet petit a of deconstructionist theologies.
as “theological materialism / transcendental materialism”
Žižek's (and Raschke's label for his) project: a materialism that can only be accessed through the Christian experience of the death of God, not a simple inversion of idealism.
Implicitly present in Žižek's discussion of capitalist belief during the financial crisis, the claim that restoring 'faith' required a trillion dollars shows belief operating as a real material force.
Stories he reaches for 5
A friend visiting Bohr sees a horseshoe over the door and asks if the scientist believes in such superstition. Bohr replies he doesn't believe in it, but keeps it because he heard it works even if you don't believe in it. Žižek uses this as his favorite model of how ideology and belief function today.
“I am not stupid, of course I don't believe in it. So why do you have it here? Because I heard that it works even if you don't believe in it.”
When you buy a Starbucks coffee you are sold the idea that you are funding Guatemalan children's education, so you can feel good without confronting the systemic exploitation. Illustrates false love / charity as ideological pacification.
“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 receives applause but never claps himself; in Stalinist footage Stalin and the central committee join the applause as if to say 'it's not me, I'm just one of you.' Žižek performs this gesture at the end to make a comic-theological point about the God who becomes comrade.
“Only in this sense I'm a Stalinist and I proudly applaud with you.”
Consumers buy overpriced half-rotten organic apples not out of genuine conviction they are less poisonous but because it makes them feel part of a larger ecological movement, they are literally buying ideology.
“We are literally more and more buying ideology.”
Nixon, Brezhnev, and Honecker each ask God what will become of their country; each answer is worse than expected (USA becomes Soviet, USSR becomes Chinese colony, GDR likewise), and each leader cries, then finally God himself turns and cries. Illustrates the Christological moment where the apparent exception falls into the series it supposedly governs.
“Then Honecker asks, oh so what will be with my beloved GDR? You can guess the answer. God turns around and starts to cry.”
Works invoked 13
The Book of Job book
Žižek calls it 'the zero level, the first example of critique of ideology,' arguing that Job's resistance to meaning and God's ultimate validation of Job over the ideological friends is a paradigm for confronting catastrophe without false consolation.
Žižek's own co-authored book with Milbank, mentioned as containing the Joe Hill quotation and as a key statement of his theological materialism; discussed extensively by respondents.
Orthodoxy book
Chesterton's book cited for the passage where he describes the Eli Eli moment as God briefly not believing in himself, Žižek calls this 'breathtaking' and uses it repeatedly across his work.
Deleuze's book cited by respondent Crockett for the claim that Kantian transcendental philosophy introduces the form of time into thought, which in turn signifies the death of God, the fractured I, and the passive self.
The Fragile Absolute book
Žižek's own book cited by a respondent for the concept of 'perverse betrayal', betrayal of theology for the sake of divine love.
Žižek's own book cited by Raschke as his most important, noted as taking its title from Hegel's phrase (itself drawn from Mephistopheles in Faust).
Žižek's own book cited by Raschke as describing transcendental materialism as 'essentially unambiguously Christian' and 'the subversive kind of Christianity accessible only to a materialist approach.'
Works of Love book
Kierkegaard's text cited for the thesis that a true Christian is ready to hate and kill neighbors out of love, Žižek invokes this to ground revolutionary violence in Christian theology.
Faust play
Mentioned by Raschke: Hegel's phrase 'tarrying with the negative' is drawn from Mephistopheles' 'verweile doch' in Goethe's Faust.
Joe Hill song
Old American labor song cited by Žižek as a model for the Holy Ghost, the dead organizer lives on wherever workers strike, illustrating presence through collective struggle.
On Religion book
Caputo's book cited as 'the ultimate formulation of the Derridean deconstructive messianism', Žižek holds it up as the exemplary case of postmodern theology that reduces religion to a minimal de-ontological promise.
A Theology of Money book
Philip Goodchild's book cited by respondent Crockett in the context of capital as theology.
Zizek and Theology book
Adam Kotsko's own book, mentioned by Kotsko: it claims Žižek is most like Altizer among theologians, which the panel confirms.
People invoked 22
Appears as a character in the political joke about God weeping alongside Brezhnev and Honecker.
Thomas J. J. Altizer positive
Žižek is presenting alongside Altizer, describing it as an honor; he is Altizer's 'correpetitor,' repeating and extending the death-of-God theology. He shares Altizer's Hegelian dialectical reading of kenosis while noting they differ on whether kenosis entails plerosis.
Adam Kotsko positive
Respondent and author of Zizek and Theology; Žižek appreciates him and uses Kotsko's question about sexuality and reproduction to develop his psychoanalytic counter-argument.
Blaise Pascal positive
Held up as an example of genuine creativity through fidelity to orthodoxy under conditions of modernity, we still read Pascal, not the cheap liberal apologists of early modernity.
Gianni Vattimo negative
Quoted as saying he prays 'for the love of a tradition' rather than any literal truth, comparing God to an aged relative, Žižek reads this as 'explosive objective cynicism' and a textbook example of today's ideological belief.
Carl Raschke positive
Respondent who summarizes Žižek's position as 'transcendental materialism'; Žižek jokes that he knows what Žižek wanted to say better than Žižek does.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Žižek's 'favorite Catholic theologian,' cited for his reading of Job and for the passage in Orthodoxy where God, at the moment of the cross, briefly doesn't believe in himself, the unique Christian moment of divine atheism.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Cited approvingly for the observation that 'everything really new appears in the form of a repetition,' which Žižek uses to justify his own repetition of established ideas.
John D. Caputo negative
Žižek's main target: Caputo's deconstructive post-metaphysical theology evacuates the concrete Incarnation, reduces Christianity to a minimal hope without ontological commitment, and inconsistently uses the spirit/letter metaphor he condemns as supersessionist.
Listed alongside Schelling and Kierkegaard as post-Hegelians who sought a hard extra-rational foundation after what they saw as Hegel's self-referential sophistry.
Harold Pinter positive
Cited approvingly for cutting off a diplomat's 'two sides' argument about Kurdish torture with the remark that there is no broader picture when your balls are wired to a battery, the Christ-gesture of insisting on singular truth.
Martin Heidegger negative
Heidegger's reading of the death of God as abandonment (we should wait and prepare for God's return) is one of two inadequate responses Žižek rejects.
Cyril O'Regan positive
Respondent who raises the gnostic challenge to Žižek's reading; Žižek takes the question seriously but runs out of time, promising future engagement in his Hegel book.
Mentioned as part of the post-Hegelian turn toward extra-rational reality (the reality of the will, already in late Schelling), which Žižek sees as responding to a caricature of Hegel.
Walter Benjamin positive
Invoked for the concept of divine violence, which Žižek applies to Christ's scandalous sayings about bringing a sword, revolutionary violence as hatred out of love.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Invoked for the paradox of Christianity, the leap of faith, the absurdity of the Incarnation as a temporal event, and Works of Love on hatred out of love. Žižek notes affectionately that Kierkegaard's Hegel is a caricature.
Ludwig Feuerbach negative
Žižek rejects the Feuerbachian Marxist move of re-appropriating alienated substance (God as collective human projection) because it merely replaces divine positivity with human positivity rather than sustaining the kenotic split.
Cited by respondent Crockett for the claim that today everything is theology except what declares itself to be such.
Mentioned by respondent Kotsko as having already proposed sexual regulation for reproductive purposes in the Laws, without religious justification, cited to show the secular logic underlying 'religious' sexual conservatism.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek identifies as 'an old-fashioned Marxist' and references the Feuerbachian-Marxist tradition, though he critiques the humanist re-appropriation strand within it.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central reference throughout: Žižek deploys Hegel's dialectics, his reading of the death of God and the monstrosity of Christ, the Phenomenology's notion of grasping the absolute as subject not substance, and the infinite judgment. Argues Hegel is still an unthought enigma.
Referenced as one possible framing of the death of God (the 'good riddance' liberatory narrative), which Žižek rejects alongside the Heideggerian elegiac version.
What it argues
death of God as Christianity's traumatic corekenosis as divine self-alienation, not just human hermeneuticspostmodern deconstructive theology's evasion of the Incarnation paradoxHoly Spirit as egalitarian emancipatory collectiveideological belief without subjective convictionChristian love versus charity as ideologythe big Other's disappearance and human freedom
Dialectical moves 8
“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 opposites but internally related: the death of God theology is the condition of possibility for genuine atheism, which other atheisms (relying on a substitute big Other) fail to achieve.
“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 kenotic reversal: human abandonment by God is not a one-sided human experience but structurally identical with the divine self-emptying, collapsing the gap between human and divine alienation.
“It is not that we should trust God — it is that God trusts us.”
The direction of reliance is reversed: the death of Christ means not that humans must have faith in a reliable God but that the abandoned God has entrusted existence to the human collective.
“The death of God legacy is neither Nietzschean liberation ('good riddance') nor Heideggerian mourning ('we should wait for God to return') — it is: God is definitely dead, but this is a reversal in the guise of Holy Spirit.”
Both the celebratory and the elegiac reading of the death of God miss the dialectical point: the death does not leave an absence but produces a new form of presence, the emancipatory collective.
“When God's answer to Job overwhelms him with the monstrous creation, it's not an assertion of the radical gap between God and man — it is God saying: 'You think you are in trouble, but look, the whole universe is one big mess, even I don't know what's happening.'”
The apparent divine boast in Job is reread as God's own admission of helplessness and loss, the transcendent guarantor is himself at a loss, which vindicates Job's refusal of meaning.
“Christianity is, if there ever was one, a non-holistic religion — not the religion of harmonious order but the religion of struggle and imbalance. The only true universality is the universality of struggle.”
The holistic reading of Christianity as reconciliation of differences is inverted: its essential gesture is to rupture every given social order rather than integrate subjects into their proper places.
“The negative in Hegel has no miraculous resolution — kenosis in itself is its own solution: you just shift the perspective and see that the kenotic movement is itself its own solution.”
Against the standard reproach that Hegel cheats with a happy negation-of-negation, Žižek argues the kenotic movement requires no external rescue, the loss is itself the resolution, perspectivally.
“For a brief moment, as Chesterton says, God himself doesn't believe in himself — becomes an atheist.”
The Eli Eli lama sabachthani moment is read not as a temporary crisis that resolves into reunion but as an irreversible inner split within the divine itself, making Christianity the only religion to include divine unbelief.
Claims 16
rejects
Postmodern deconstructive theology (Caputo, Vattimo) saves only the contingent form of God while evacuating the traumatic core of the Incarnation, reducing religion to a minimal hope that 'there is another world possible.'postmodern deconstructive theology
asserts
Kenosis is not merely a human hermeneutic act of relativizing onto-theological fetishization, but God's own self-alienation — our abandonment by God is identical with God's self-abandonment.kenosis and divine self-alienation
asserts
What dies on the cross is not an earthly representative or messenger of God but God himself as the transcendent guarantor — the God 'who somehow guarantees that at the end things will turn out okay.'the death of Christ
asserts
Atheism is the truth of Christianity, and one can only be a true atheist by passing through the Christian experience; all other atheisms (including Stalinism) continue to rely on some form of the big Other.the relationship between atheism and Christianity
asserts
The Holy Spirit is an egalitarian collective of believers with no guarantee in the big Other, equivalent to a revolutionary or emancipatory collective.the Holy Spirit
asserts
People today believe more than ever, but in an objective, displaced way — through mechanisms they don't take seriously — rather than in first-person subjective conviction.contemporary ideological belief
asserts
The Book of Job enacts the zero level of ideology critique because God ultimately validates Job's refusal to accept any deeper meaning for his suffering, against the ideological friends who insist suffering must mean something.the Book of Job and ideology critique
rejects
Charity (as exemplified by Starbucks-style 'buy coffee, save the world' marketing) is false love and anti-Christianity at its purest because it lets consumers feel good without confronting systemic exploitation.charity as Christian love
reframes
Christ's scandalous sayings about bringing a sword and hating one's parents must be read along the lines of revolutionary violence — not literal hatred but hatred out of love, rejecting symbolic-institutional roles.Christ's sayings on violence and hatred
asserts
The properly Christian gesture is the leap of faith that fully engages with a singular instantiation as the truth embodied, with no ironic distance — the very move excluded by Caputo's deconstructive theology.Christian Incarnation and the leap of faith
reframes
The message of Christ's death is that God trusts us, not that we should trust God — the death of God reverses the direction of reliance.the theological meaning of the Crucifixion
rejects
The idea that sex is properly human only when oriented toward reproduction is backwards: animals have sex purely for reproduction; humanity emerges through sexuality being cut off from reproduction.Catholic doctrine on sexuality and reproduction
rejects
Vattimo's statement that he prays 'for the love of a tradition' rather than any literal truth reduces God to a stupid old man and exemplifies the cynical functioning of ideology today.Vattimo's account of prayer
asserts
Hegel is still an enigma and has not been truly thought even today; the post-Hegelian turn toward hard extra-rational reality (Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Marx) responded to a caricature of Hegel.Hegel's unthought radicality
asserts
The present financial crisis is a crisis of capitalist belief — restoring confidence required spending over a trillion dollars to re-establish faith, demonstrating that capitalism operates on belief.capitalism and belief
asserts
Everything really new appears in the form of a repetition, and the most difficult and creative thing is to truly repeat what was already said.novelty, repetition, and creativity
Quotes 15
“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 as the immanent truth of 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 theological reliance after the death of Christ
“I heard that it works even if you don't believe in it. That's our standard religion.”Slavoj Žižek · objective belief / ideology functioning without subjective conviction
“Not if your balls are wired to a battery and shot through by electricity, then there is no broader picture.”Slavoj Žižek · truth is in the singular detail, not the harmonizing overview
“If there ever was a non-holistic religion, it's Christianity. It's not the religion of harmonious order, it's the religion of struggle, of imbalance. The only true universality is the universality of struggle.”Slavoj Žižek · Christianity as non-holistic, universality of struggle
“Holy Ghost is an entity which has different names like revolutionary party, emancipatory collective and so on.”Slavoj Žižek · Holy Spirit redefined as emancipatory collective
“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.”Slavoj Žižek · the God needed today — self-knowing kenotic comrade
“The three theological friends come. They are ideologists at its zero level.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology critique: insisting suffering must have a deeper meaning
“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 — Kierkegaardian revolutionary Christian love
“We believe much more than we think. We believe objectively. We believe through the mechanisms which we don't take seriously.”Slavoj Žižek · objective unconscious belief underlying apparent cynical distance
“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.”Slavoj Žižek · Starbucks charity as ideological pacification
“Hegel is still an enigma. Something happens in Hegel which is not yet really thought even today.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's unexhausted radicality
“For a brief moment God himself doesn't believe in himself, becomes an atheist.”Slavoj Žižek · Chesterton on Eli Eli — divine self-unbelief as Christianity's unique feature
“Kenosis in itself is its own solution. You just shift the perspective and see that the kenotic movement is itself its own solution.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian negativity as self-resolving without external miraculous rescue
Transcript 39 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, correpetitor 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 postmodern deconstructive theological turn. Again, I have great respect to them, but I think that's the line that separates us. What defines the so-called postmodern 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 postmodern 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, ce n'est 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. 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 is 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 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'm 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 deeper, 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 are a scientist, do you believe in this bullshit? Bohr's answer, wonderful one: I am not stupid, of course I don't believe in it. So why do you 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 there that we believe much more than we think. So against this kind of cynical relativization, I claim that the only way to redeem this subversive core of Christianity is to return to the death of God theology, to repeat its gesture today. What gets lost in the soft postmodern 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 postmodern 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 top, 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 notice 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 with the divine self-abandonment. This means something among other thing 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 discovered 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 re-appropriate 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 confronted 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 here I follow my favorite Catholic theologian, Gilbert Keith, 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, is 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 create, 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 is up there, we are here, he sends a messenger, we 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 as 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 mention. So what I'm saying is that I claim that if there is a spiritual meaning of Christ's 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 each 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 and 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 story is 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 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 joy, 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 years for supporting Popov. Finally the third one says, yes you can guess, I'm here for life and I am Popov. This is the Christological moment. You got it? How the apparent exception up there falls, how should I 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 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 historical 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'm 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 Spirit of course is an engaged collective. This is another crucial Christian experience for me that truth can be at the same time universal and engaged. How to read from here, I always like to embarrass my theological friends with just reading them those passages that I 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 deconstructionists. 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 these scandalous words 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. Which 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 we are everyone has their 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? Is there 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, 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: oh with a 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 a 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 a sane skeptic. You think maybe. But why then do you buy them? It makes you feel good. You see, even when I'm buying apples, I'm part of a larger movement, I'm hoping mother earth to get better, I'm you know, it's we are literally more and more buying buying ideology. Now believe me or not, really to conclude, I mean you know... So what I am saying is that the 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. You remember when 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 who... 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 propagandists 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 am not a Lord but a comrade. Second, are you crazy talking to fictions? I don't exist. And third, please 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'm 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 egalitarian 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. Thank you. Are these on? They are? Great. I think we can stay seated now. Dr. Altizer do you have a response to... No no no. Very good. I'd love you to respond. No no, let's wait. Let's wait. 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... No, I have just one friendly, don't be afraid, it will not be another 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. It's not all this absolutely boring disgust oh God and devil and then making... it's not this. It's you, 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 then. Just wanted to be sure. His key term for distinguishing this kind of *coincidentia oppositorum* from dualism is dialectic. So when he says dialectic it's absolutely non-dualistic. Absolutely. Which is why 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. Well... We have an audience microphone I understand. I can't see it... there. So I'll call up now the people on our dance list and our first speaker will be Carl Raschke. Is it in the middle? There's two, thanks. Another time. Well, I was going to respond but I think I'll try to summarize Slavoj here. I like this Stalinist point: you know better than me what I wanted to say and you will tell it to me now. Right, yeah. Okay. I don't know, you actually you know better what I wanted to say than I could ever imagine. But I want to talk about what this means for those of us who want to think or speak theologically. And I'm saying that what we're hearing here in the bringing back the discourse of the death of God is a new theological materialism, or what Zizek himself calls transcendental materialism. That in *The Puppet and the Dwarf* he says is essentially unambiguously Christian. A theological materialism that is, quote, "the subversive kind of Christianity accessible only to a materialist approach." And that's Zizek's claim and indirectly also Altizer's claim, as well as that of all the death of God theologians over the last years. Now this claim is obviously counter-intuitive, but that's not the main point. If transcendental materialism is not simply an inversion of historical Christian idealism, Platonism for the mob la Nietzsche, and it surely is not, what is it? What's really at stake here? Overall Zizek is saying that this subversive kernel has something profoundly to do with the force of the negative. That the Hegelian dialectic rips off from the critical valence of Kant's critical philosophy and is engendered in the over-determined dialectical materialism of revolutionary Marxism. Both philosophy and theology therefore are in the business of tarrying with the negative, the title of Zizek's most important book in my mind at least, as well as one of Hegel's most important phrases, which Hegel himself rips right out of the mouth of Mephistopheles in Goethe's *Faust*. Hegel's *verweilen*, *verweilen* or tarrying is the same for *verweile doch* of Mephistopheles, the spirit that denies. So what does Christianity deny historically speaking other than the world? It what does it deny besides what the Germans call the *Gegebenheit* of everyday matters, materialism in the crudest sense? As Zizek shows, Christianity powerfully denies as well the possibility of the singular event as the death of God on the cross ever being sublated, *aufgehoben* in an Hegelian word, into a concretized universal. The death of God is the key metonymic moment for the radical subjectification of God himself, opening up the *Abgrund*, the abyss, the groundless grounding of all transcendental thinking, of Zizek's theological materialism. This theological materialism I submit is the guiding thread, but I would challenge all God-is-dead thinkers to think beyond this well-established grounding of theologies as secular, radical, material, transcendental material, or whatever. Because genuine theological thinking requires no grounding, as Zizek is pushing us to recognize. Even a groundless one. It has its own
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, correpetitor 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 postmodern deconstructive theological turn. Again, I have great respect to them, but I think that's the line that separates us. What defines the so-called postmodern 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 postmodern 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, ce n'est 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. 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 is 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 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'm 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 deeper, 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 are a scientist, do you believe in this bullshit? Bohr's answer, wonderful one: I am not stupid, of course I don't believe in it. So why do you 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 there that we believe much more than we think. So against this kind of cynical relativization, I claim that the only way to redeem this subversive core of Christianity is to return to the death of God theology, to repeat its gesture today. What gets lost in the soft postmodern 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 postmodern 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 top, 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 notice 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 with the divine self-abandonment. This means something among other thing 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 discovered 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 re-appropriate 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 confronted 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 here I follow my favorite Catholic theologian, Gilbert Keith, 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, is 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 create, 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 is up there, we are here, he sends a messenger, we 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 as 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 mention. So what I'm saying is that I claim that if there is a spiritual meaning of Christ's 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 each 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 and 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 story is 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 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 joy, 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 years for supporting Popov. Finally the third one says, yes you can guess, I'm here for life and I am Popov. This is the Christological moment. You got it? How the apparent exception up there falls, how should I 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 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 historical 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'm 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 Spirit of course is an engaged collective. This is another crucial Christian experience for me that truth can be at the same time universal and engaged. How to read from here, I always like to embarrass my theological friends with just reading them those passages that I 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 deconstructionists. 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 these scandalous words 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. Which 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 we are everyone has their 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? Is there 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, 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: oh with a 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 a 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 a sane skeptic. You think maybe. But why then do you buy them? It makes you feel good. You see, even when I'm buying apples, I'm part of a larger movement, I'm hoping mother earth to get better, I'm you know, it's we are literally more and more buying buying ideology. Now believe me or not, really to conclude, I mean you know... So what I am saying is that the 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. You remember when 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 who... 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 propagandists 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 am not a Lord but a comrade. Second, are you crazy talking to fictions? I don't exist. And third, please 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'm 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 egalitarian 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. Thank you. Are these on? They are? Great. I think we can stay seated now. Dr. Altizer do you have a response to... No no no. Very good. I'd love you to respond. No no, let's wait. Let's wait. 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... No, I have just one friendly, don't be afraid, it will not be another 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. It's not all this absolutely boring disgust oh God and devil and then making... it's not this. It's you, 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 then. Just wanted to be sure. His key term for distinguishing this kind of *coincidentia oppositorum* from dualism is dialectic. So when he says dialectic it's absolutely non-dualistic. Absolutely. Which is why 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. Well... We have an audience microphone I understand. I can't see it... there. So I'll call up now the people on our dance list and our first speaker will be Carl Raschke. Is it in the middle? There's two, thanks. Another time. Well, I was going to respond but I think I'll try to summarize Slavoj here. I like this Stalinist point: you know better than me what I wanted to say and you will tell it to me now. Right, yeah. Okay. I don't know, you actually you know better what I wanted to say than I could ever imagine. But I want to talk about what this means for those of us who want to think or speak theologically. And I'm saying that what we're hearing here in the bringing back the discourse of the death of God is a new theological materialism, or what Zizek himself calls transcendental materialism. That in *The Puppet and the Dwarf* he says is essentially unambiguously Christian. A theological materialism that is, quote, "the subversive kind of Christianity accessible only to a materialist approach." And that's Zizek's claim and indirectly also Altizer's claim, as well as that of all the death of God theologians over the last years. Now this claim is obviously counter-intuitive, but that's not the main point. If transcendental materialism is not simply an inversion of historical Christian idealism, Platonism for the mob la Nietzsche, and it surely is not, what is it? What's really at stake here? Overall Zizek is saying that this subversive kernel has something profoundly to do with the force of the negative. That the Hegelian dialectic rips off from the critical valence of Kant's critical philosophy and is engendered in the over-determined dialectical materialism of revolutionary Marxism. Both philosophy and theology therefore are in the business of tarrying with the negative, the title of Zizek's most important book in my mind at least, as well as one of Hegel's most important phrases, which Hegel himself rips right out of the mouth of Mephistopheles in Goethe's *Faust*. Hegel's *verweilen*, *verweilen* or tarrying is the same for *verweile doch* of Mephistopheles, the spirit that denies. So what does Christianity deny historically speaking other than the world? It what does it deny besides what the Germans call the *Gegebenheit* of everyday matters, materialism in the crudest sense? As Zizek shows, Christianity powerfully denies as well the possibility of the singular event as the death of God on the cross ever being sublated, *aufgehoben* in an Hegelian word, into a concretized universal. The death of God is the key metonymic moment for the radical subjectification of God himself, opening up the *Abgrund*, the abyss, the groundless grounding of all transcendental thinking, of Zizek's theological materialism. This theological materialism I submit is the guiding thread, but I would challenge all God-is-dead thinkers to think beyond this well-established grounding of theologies as secular, radical, material, transcendental material, or whatever. Because genuine theological thinking requires no grounding, as Zizek is pushing us to recognize. Even a groundless one. It has its own
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*jouissance* as opposed to the countless varieties of the theological *objet petit a* in everything from post-liberal to radical orthodoxy to so-called deconstructionist or constructionist, all these what Zizek
*jouissance* as opposed to the countless varieties of the theological *objet petit a* in everything from post-liberal to radical orthodoxy to so-called deconstructionist or constructionist, all these what Zizek
Slavoj Žižek
might call hystericized theologies. Here's where Zizek should take himself, I would finally say, at his own word. He should consider should consider taking a real leap la Kierkegaard from Hegel to becoming a materialist knight of faith. A leap by virtue of the absurd from Schelling to Sartre. From the dead singular *corpus dei* on the cross to the surreal experience of enjoying a messianic banquet of raw fish with the true not-one-all on the beach at Galilee. I mean tarrying not just with the negative but with the absurd faith. That is, as Kierkegaard might say, the absurd acceptance and appropriation of this impossible illusory truth that for Zizek himself renders all truth ineffectual in the subject's relationship to the singular. Through the event of the eternal as temporal. This dreadful freedom of absurd faith is another way of what
might call hystericized theologies. Here's where Zizek should take himself, I would finally say, at his own word. He should consider should consider taking a real leap la Kierkegaard from Hegel to becoming a materialist knight of faith. A leap by virtue of the absurd from Schelling to Sartre. From the dead singular *corpus dei* on the cross to the surreal experience of enjoying a messianic banquet of raw fish with the true not-one-all on the beach at Galilee. I mean tarrying not just with the negative but with the absurd faith. That is, as Kierkegaard might say, the absurd acceptance and appropriation of this impossible illusory truth that for Zizek himself renders all truth ineffectual in the subject's relationship to the singular. Through the event of the eternal as temporal. This dreadful freedom of absurd faith is another way of what
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Zizek in *The Fragile Absolute* portrays as the perverse betrayal. In this case, a betrayal of theology for the sake of the singularity that is inexorable divine love. Not as Nietzsche would say Dionysus versus the Crucified, but the *jouissance* of faith versus the trauma
Zizek in *The Fragile Absolute* portrays as the perverse betrayal. In this case, a betrayal of theology for the sake of the singularity that is inexorable divine love. Not as Nietzsche would say Dionysus versus the Crucified, but the *jouissance* of faith versus the trauma
Slavoj Žižek
of God's death. That is theological materialism. It is also the formula for a globalized, globo-Christian, post-identitarian, post-secular, post-constructionist, post-deconstructionist, post-liberal, post-evangelical, post-postmodern theologically political revolution of the saints. In Lacan's sense of minimal
of God's death. That is theological materialism. It is also the formula for a globalized, globo-Christian, post-identitarian, post-secular, post-constructionist, post-deconstructionist, post-liberal, post-evangelical, post-postmodern theologically political revolution of the saints. In Lacan's sense of minimal
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difference, the saints of minimal difference. In other words, those who as Paul says will rule the world. Thank you Dr. Raschke. Was that a good summary? Was that a good summary? Any objections to... No no, I will really I will try to say what you really wanted to say if there will be time.
difference, the saints of minimal difference. In other words, those who as Paul says will rule the world. Thank you Dr. Raschke. Was that a good summary? Was that a good summary? Any objections to... No no, I will really I will try to say what you really wanted to say if there will be time.
Slavoj Žižek
Okay then. Is Dr. Cyril
Okay then. Is Dr. Cyril
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O'Regan here? Yes I am. Good, please. I want to make two different sets of comments and I'll divide them sort of in order of the speakers. I take it that what we have
O'Regan here? Yes I am. Good, please. I want to make two different sets of comments and I'll divide them sort of in order of the speakers. I take it that what we have
Slavoj Žižek
experienced is the monstrosity of the theologian, the prophetic theologian, and the monstrosity of the heteroglossic
experienced is the monstrosity of the theologian, the prophetic theologian, and the monstrosity of the heteroglossic
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philosopher. I will, unlike Zizek, not have the inability to end, but the inability to begin. Nonetheless sort of what I want to suggest is that we have two apocalyptic theologians even if that is not necessarily the description of Zizek. I want to on the one hand acknowledge their intertextual relationship to Hegel, both in terms of dialectic and in terms of apocalyptic. and I want to query and possibly challenge their self-description in very different modalities with very different reasons as to why they should be considered as authentic representatives of Christian apocalyptic, the definite article, and why it would not be conceivable that either of them could be classed as gnostic apocalypticists. So let me just try sort of and make
philosopher. I will, unlike Zizek, not have the inability to end, but the inability to begin. Nonetheless sort of what I want to suggest is that we have two apocalyptic theologians even if that is not necessarily the description of Zizek. I want to on the one hand acknowledge their intertextual relationship to Hegel, both in terms of dialectic and in terms of apocalyptic. and I want to query and possibly challenge their self-description in very different modalities with very different reasons as to why they should be considered as authentic representatives of Christian apocalyptic, the definite article, and why it would not be conceivable that either of them could be classed as gnostic apocalypticists. So let me just try sort of and make
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some points to that particular effect. Intertextually then, and I have read *The Monstrosity of Christ* then not necessarily for Joe Hill. I take it that you have something incredibly deep in common when you have Hegel in common when you're talking about the death of God. You can talk about the death of God in any number of ways and you could certainly prioritize Nietzsche and neither of you do it, at least not in terms of the process of argument and not in terms of the order of priority. You have apocalyptic versions of the Hegelian death of God. And in a certain sense Zizek is a repetition of a repetition of a repetition of Tom, who is a repetition of Blake and a repetition of Hegel. That is, there are two different things going on on the philosophical level, obviously one is going to talk about a order of dialectic and using Zizek's terms, that can be contrasted with respect to paradox. Of course both of you realize you don't have exactly the same sense of Hegelian dialectic but you have it going. You also have the theological correlative and the theological correlative of course is kenosis as both of you sort of have indicated. The apocalyptic vision at least for Tom is the self-negation of the divine and its movement from its self-possession to dispossession. Tom of course will also parse kenosis in a way rather different than Zizek. That is, kenosis is the operation of its own recuperation. That is, that we are going to have the self-collecting of deity as other than the deity in which we began. That is the Father sort of indeed is dead but the spiritual community is alive, so Hegelian recollection sort of is front and center with respect to this operation which is better described as a plerosis operation than in fact a kenotic operation properly understood. With respect to Thomas's relationship to traditional Christianity, which he has spelled out so eloquently here and elsewhere. One of the ways in which you could think of Thomas vindicating secularity is: he vindicates secularity by constitutively by the memory of the death of God. In other words, without the memory of the death of God, secularity is not the kind of secularity of which he can approve. The kind of approval that Thomas will give is a kind of approval with respect to the self-elevation of the divine to the place the self-elevation of the human to the place that was once occupied by the divine. It is a reoccupation technique. Lastly with respect to Thomas and we have had this dialogue going on for a number of years as to what is the genre of Altizer's apocalyptic. My assumption is that Thomas's denial that he gives a version of gnostic apocalypse is in fact a response before the fact to myself. Thomas's argument is that given Hegel and Romanticism and all the other kinds of cultural discourse that approve of world as world, one could not possibly be persuaded that his particular version is gnostic because on this assumption, gnosticism is dualistic, gnosticism is going to have an eternal temporal split and so forth. But what if you argue that that is based upon an improper reading of gnostic texts? What if you argue that gnostic texts themselves have the negative capability precisely for that kind of affirmation and that the self-saving feature is in fact the feature? If that's the case, then I'm afraid Thomas is not quite off the hook. Now to Zizek.
some points to that particular effect. Intertextually then, and I have read *The Monstrosity of Christ* then not necessarily for Joe Hill. I take it that you have something incredibly deep in common when you have Hegel in common when you're talking about the death of God. You can talk about the death of God in any number of ways and you could certainly prioritize Nietzsche and neither of you do it, at least not in terms of the process of argument and not in terms of the order of priority. You have apocalyptic versions of the Hegelian death of God. And in a certain sense Zizek is a repetition of a repetition of a repetition of Tom, who is a repetition of Blake and a repetition of Hegel. That is, there are two different things going on on the philosophical level, obviously one is going to talk about a order of dialectic and using Zizek's terms, that can be contrasted with respect to paradox. Of course both of you realize you don't have exactly the same sense of Hegelian dialectic but you have it going. You also have the theological correlative and the theological correlative of course is kenosis as both of you sort of have indicated. The apocalyptic vision at least for Tom is the self-negation of the divine and its movement from its self-possession to dispossession. Tom of course will also parse kenosis in a way rather different than Zizek. That is, kenosis is the operation of its own recuperation. That is, that we are going to have the self-collecting of deity as other than the deity in which we began. That is the Father sort of indeed is dead but the spiritual community is alive, so Hegelian recollection sort of is front and center with respect to this operation which is better described as a plerosis operation than in fact a kenotic operation properly understood. With respect to Thomas's relationship to traditional Christianity, which he has spelled out so eloquently here and elsewhere. One of the ways in which you could think of Thomas vindicating secularity is: he vindicates secularity by constitutively by the memory of the death of God. In other words, without the memory of the death of God, secularity is not the kind of secularity of which he can approve. The kind of approval that Thomas will give is a kind of approval with respect to the self-elevation of the divine to the place the self-elevation of the human to the place that was once occupied by the divine. It is a reoccupation technique. Lastly with respect to Thomas and we have had this dialogue going on for a number of years as to what is the genre of Altizer's apocalyptic. My assumption is that Thomas's denial that he gives a version of gnostic apocalypse is in fact a response before the fact to myself. Thomas's argument is that given Hegel and Romanticism and all the other kinds of cultural discourse that approve of world as world, one could not possibly be persuaded that his particular version is gnostic because on this assumption, gnosticism is dualistic, gnosticism is going to have an eternal temporal split and so forth. But what if you argue that that is based upon an improper reading of gnostic texts? What if you argue that gnostic texts themselves have the negative capability precisely for that kind of affirmation and that the self-saving feature is in fact the feature? If that's the case, then I'm afraid Thomas is not quite off the hook. Now to Zizek.
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Zizek's Hegel is rather different. *The Monstrosity of Christ* I think makes that perfectly plain. Dialectic is different in so far as dialectic is not recuperation. Kenosis is different in so far as it cannot be plerosis. Thomas's *Divina Comedia* in which sort of we have the self-becoming of God with the self-becoming of the human, that *Divina Comedia* as a matter of fact is obliterated and we have the comic as such. So I take it that that sort of announces a difference. A question to Zizek and I have two is what is the power of the genealogy of the death of God with
Zizek's Hegel is rather different. *The Monstrosity of Christ* I think makes that perfectly plain. Dialectic is different in so far as dialectic is not recuperation. Kenosis is different in so far as it cannot be plerosis. Thomas's *Divina Comedia* in which sort of we have the self-becoming of God with the self-becoming of the human, that *Divina Comedia* as a matter of fact is obliterated and we have the comic as such. So I take it that that sort of announces a difference. A question to Zizek and I have two is what is the power of the genealogy of the death of God with
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respect
respect
Slavoj Žižek
to your own hallowing of the secular? Your own critique of the secular secular
to your own hallowing of the secular? Your own critique of the secular secular
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and your demand that
and your demand that
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the secular sort of should at least allow the role of religion? Is this in terms of the genealogy functioning as Benjamin's aura? Do we actually then have something sort of to hallow in fact the hollow? So what role is religion playing with respect to identification of the secular? My last query will have got to do not so much with respect to your use of Chesterton, probably which I would protest against, but look at the content sort of that you brought forward. Chesterton is looking at Job and the God of Job looks as if this God is an incompetent, the one who is overwhelmed. And you're arguing and very nicely arguing that the ultra-orthodox Chesterton is heterodox by other means and his death of God theologian by other means and Zizekian by other means. But let me give you another textual site. So if this if Chesterton is apocalyptic and he provides a literary code for your apocalyptic, let me recall the *Gospel of Truth*, one of the most famous gnostic texts, and see how you would get exactly the same result. It is true that gnostic texts usually start out in terms of the presupposition of a pleromatic realm, none greater than which can be thought. But we all know the world comes into being and the world is a messy and messy chaotic world. Actually, just exactly the kind of world that Chesterton describes when he's talking about Job or the Book of Job describes. But we know of course in gnostic texts that there is in fact a God who is incompetent and that incompetent God is the demiurge. So how about this, Zizek? You're a gnostic by taking away the alpha and omega of the narrative of a gnostic text and leaving the in-between. Thank you Dr. O'Regan. Do you want to respond briefly or do we go to the next speaker? Briefly? Let's go to the next speaker. I would love to, I mean but what I'm afraid is that then I will be in my Fidel Castro mood and we will... Adam Kotsko. I'd like to begin by saying that I'm very personally gratified to see this panel occurring because at the end of my book *Zizek and Theology*, I claim that among theologians, Zizek is most like Altizer and so we have a public demonstration of my correctness. and who would not enjoy seeing that? Um but rather than address directly what they've said I I would like to address kind of the elephant in the room which is the obvious question, how can we talk about the
the secular sort of should at least allow the role of religion? Is this in terms of the genealogy functioning as Benjamin's aura? Do we actually then have something sort of to hallow in fact the hollow? So what role is religion playing with respect to identification of the secular? My last query will have got to do not so much with respect to your use of Chesterton, probably which I would protest against, but look at the content sort of that you brought forward. Chesterton is looking at Job and the God of Job looks as if this God is an incompetent, the one who is overwhelmed. And you're arguing and very nicely arguing that the ultra-orthodox Chesterton is heterodox by other means and his death of God theologian by other means and Zizekian by other means. But let me give you another textual site. So if this if Chesterton is apocalyptic and he provides a literary code for your apocalyptic, let me recall the *Gospel of Truth*, one of the most famous gnostic texts, and see how you would get exactly the same result. It is true that gnostic texts usually start out in terms of the presupposition of a pleromatic realm, none greater than which can be thought. But we all know the world comes into being and the world is a messy and messy chaotic world. Actually, just exactly the kind of world that Chesterton describes when he's talking about Job or the Book of Job describes. But we know of course in gnostic texts that there is in fact a God who is incompetent and that incompetent God is the demiurge. So how about this, Zizek? You're a gnostic by taking away the alpha and omega of the narrative of a gnostic text and leaving the in-between. Thank you Dr. O'Regan. Do you want to respond briefly or do we go to the next speaker? Briefly? Let's go to the next speaker. I would love to, I mean but what I'm afraid is that then I will be in my Fidel Castro mood and we will... Adam Kotsko. I'd like to begin by saying that I'm very personally gratified to see this panel occurring because at the end of my book *Zizek and Theology*, I claim that among theologians, Zizek is most like Altizer and so we have a public demonstration of my correctness. and who would not enjoy seeing that? Um but rather than address directly what they've said I I would like to address kind of the elephant in the room which is the obvious question, how can we talk about the
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death of God when there's all this religion and resurgence of it and all this? Um and in order to do that I would like to although I do advocate kind of the more expansive vision of the death of God that Altizer and Zizek do in their different ways, kind of ground it historically in the modern era which is the specifically modern experience of religion as what I would call the drama of the soul with its God. and that historically, the death of God first took place as a loss of that experience, a sense that that it was no longer meaningful, it had no more purchase. Um and I think that in this context, the idea that the death of God has been just proven by events is missing the point. that um we need to look at the unavailability of this experience of the drama of the soul with its God, the loss of the realm that in the modern era had been known as distinctively religious. This loss doesn't entail the the eradication of everything that had been defined as religious. Um and I don't think that any serious thinker of the death of God has expected such a clean sweep to occur. Um instead what has occurred is a displacement of the energy that had once been directed toward that. Um I'm going to say there are two paths that this energy took. The first is directed toward basically the same realm as classically modern religion in the form of self-fashioning or spirituality, and what is at stake here is not really anything like God at all but rather the human self and its development, growth and health, even when it proceeds by way of traditional religious exercises like yoga or something. Um another direction that energy can go is toward a certain political tribalism of the religious right type. Um this version is also directed toward the same general intimate or private realm that old-time religion wants to address but instead of seeking the cultivation of individual excellence, it seeks to cultivate life as such and to relegate the means, sexuality, by which life is engendered. Once again, there is nothing like God at play here. Instead, there is an attempt to subordinate women in order to gain control of their reproductive power and also to try to police any form of sexuality not directed toward reproduction. None of this strictly requires religious justification, even if arguments from religious authority are used in in practice. This whole regime of sexual regulation based on reproduction was already proposed by Plato in the *Laws*, Plato of course being completely ignorant of Leviticus, Romans or the Quran. The second version of religion after the death of God could be called cultural in the strict literal sense of cultivating or growing human beings. and its natural affinity with nationalism should therefore come as no surprise. Sexuality is of course not the only thing on the agenda. In the US, for instance, there is a question of evolution or prayer in schools, but notice how closely both questions are tied to children and the role of education in maintaining the continuity of a certain cultural identity. This religion is a distinctively secular and new form of religion, one that is aimed firmly and exclusively at shaping our shared world. It is a religion that implicitly recognizes the death of God insofar as God can no longer take care of himself. It is not enough for the faithful
death of God when there's all this religion and resurgence of it and all this? Um and in order to do that I would like to although I do advocate kind of the more expansive vision of the death of God that Altizer and Zizek do in their different ways, kind of ground it historically in the modern era which is the specifically modern experience of religion as what I would call the drama of the soul with its God. and that historically, the death of God first took place as a loss of that experience, a sense that that it was no longer meaningful, it had no more purchase. Um and I think that in this context, the idea that the death of God has been just proven by events is missing the point. that um we need to look at the unavailability of this experience of the drama of the soul with its God, the loss of the realm that in the modern era had been known as distinctively religious. This loss doesn't entail the the eradication of everything that had been defined as religious. Um and I don't think that any serious thinker of the death of God has expected such a clean sweep to occur. Um instead what has occurred is a displacement of the energy that had once been directed toward that. Um I'm going to say there are two paths that this energy took. The first is directed toward basically the same realm as classically modern religion in the form of self-fashioning or spirituality, and what is at stake here is not really anything like God at all but rather the human self and its development, growth and health, even when it proceeds by way of traditional religious exercises like yoga or something. Um another direction that energy can go is toward a certain political tribalism of the religious right type. Um this version is also directed toward the same general intimate or private realm that old-time religion wants to address but instead of seeking the cultivation of individual excellence, it seeks to cultivate life as such and to relegate the means, sexuality, by which life is engendered. Once again, there is nothing like God at play here. Instead, there is an attempt to subordinate women in order to gain control of their reproductive power and also to try to police any form of sexuality not directed toward reproduction. None of this strictly requires religious justification, even if arguments from religious authority are used in in practice. This whole regime of sexual regulation based on reproduction was already proposed by Plato in the *Laws*, Plato of course being completely ignorant of Leviticus, Romans or the Quran. The second version of religion after the death of God could be called cultural in the strict literal sense of cultivating or growing human beings. and its natural affinity with nationalism should therefore come as no surprise. Sexuality is of course not the only thing on the agenda. In the US, for instance, there is a question of evolution or prayer in schools, but notice how closely both questions are tied to children and the role of education in maintaining the continuity of a certain cultural identity. This religion is a distinctively secular and new form of religion, one that is aimed firmly and exclusively at shaping our shared world. It is a religion that implicitly recognizes the death of God insofar as God can no longer take care of himself. It is not enough for the faithful
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remnant to hold fast to God's laws and let the rest go to hell. What's more, no strong concept of God has any real credibility. For instance, the seemingly interminable battle between predestination and free will has been decisively won by the free-will crowd, I would say, but not through superior argumentation. Rather, it's through attrition. Who really cares about predestination anymore? There's a theologian of predestination. Okay. Um certainly there are some but they're a dwindling remnant. Um in short, both what we call secularism and what we now call religion are operating within the space cleared out by the death of God. What distinguishes them is not their form, religion versus secularism, but solely their content. On the one side, there is the technocratic management of capital and the spiritual exercises that help you to conform to it. On the other side, the regulation of sexuality in service of a tribal identity. Um and the first step in defeating both may well to be to recognize that they are both competing on the same plane. Thank you Adam Kotsko. Next speaker is Daniel Boscaljon. I'm even taller. Is that better? Okay, great. Um I'm just going to answer the question: whither the death of God? in five minutes or less. Hopefully less. Um the first question is in the form of the state or my answer is in the form of the statement that we're still living in the time of the death of God. and I think that's apparent from Tom's original confession of the death of God as being manifest in a series of repetitions: first in Blake, then in Hegel, then
remnant to hold fast to God's laws and let the rest go to hell. What's more, no strong concept of God has any real credibility. For instance, the seemingly interminable battle between predestination and free will has been decisively won by the free-will crowd, I would say, but not through superior argumentation. Rather, it's through attrition. Who really cares about predestination anymore? There's a theologian of predestination. Okay. Um certainly there are some but they're a dwindling remnant. Um in short, both what we call secularism and what we now call religion are operating within the space cleared out by the death of God. What distinguishes them is not their form, religion versus secularism, but solely their content. On the one side, there is the technocratic management of capital and the spiritual exercises that help you to conform to it. On the other side, the regulation of sexuality in service of a tribal identity. Um and the first step in defeating both may well to be to recognize that they are both competing on the same plane. Thank you Adam Kotsko. Next speaker is Daniel Boscaljon. I'm even taller. Is that better? Okay, great. Um I'm just going to answer the question: whither the death of God? in five minutes or less. Hopefully less. Um the first question is in the form of the state or my answer is in the form of the statement that we're still living in the time of the death of God. and I think that's apparent from Tom's original confession of the death of God as being manifest in a series of repetitions: first in Blake, then in Hegel, then
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in Kierkegaard
in Kierkegaard
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perhaps, onward
perhaps, onward
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onward. There's a series of repetitions but they're meaningful
onward. There's a series of repetitions but they're meaningful
Slavoj Žižek
repetitions. Each repetition gains something or it has historically a new dimension is added,
repetitions. Each repetition gains something or it has historically a new dimension is added,
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something is given to it that expands it
something is given to it that expands it
Slavoj Žižek
beyond what
beyond what
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it was. So why
it was. So why
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is there the question that you asked originally? Why do we have to even question whether there is the death of God or whether that's still functional in this day and age? The answer is because the language of God has lost its meaning and power. The word God as a symbol no longer communicates as clearly. You hear it manifest not in vain, God is dead, there is no taking of the name in vain, but emptily, vacuously. "OMG, I can't believe I just said that." In in those sorts of situations, it's a symbol or a shorthand with no meaning or power anymore. Do you have something, Tom? No, no, no. No? Okay. You were leaning forward. Um so but what manifests is in terms of two different crises of despair that still let us know that we're in the time of the death of God. The first crisis of despair is that of meaninglessness. and this is the one that's been brought to us courtesy of postmodernity. It's a series of just shifting terms or deferred meanings that go forward and back and on and forth where we're confronted by the meaninglessness. On the one hand, it's powerful and attractive, people want to revel in it. It's possibility and it's the possibility that's opened up by the death of
is there the question that you asked originally? Why do we have to even question whether there is the death of God or whether that's still functional in this day and age? The answer is because the language of God has lost its meaning and power. The word God as a symbol no longer communicates as clearly. You hear it manifest not in vain, God is dead, there is no taking of the name in vain, but emptily, vacuously. "OMG, I can't believe I just said that." In in those sorts of situations, it's a symbol or a shorthand with no meaning or power anymore. Do you have something, Tom? No, no, no. No? Okay. You were leaning forward. Um so but what manifests is in terms of two different crises of despair that still let us know that we're in the time of the death of God. The first crisis of despair is that of meaninglessness. and this is the one that's been brought to us courtesy of postmodernity. It's a series of just shifting terms or deferred meanings that go forward and back and on and forth where we're confronted by the meaninglessness. On the one hand, it's powerful and attractive, people want to revel in it. It's possibility and it's the possibility that's opened up by the death of
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God. Without a keystone name in place, without the onto-theological metaphysical being in in-centered in everything, we can have those kinds of possibilities. But it can open up a crisis of despair which can in turn meaningfully still connect people to the dead body of God invoked by Altizer earlier this afternoon. The second main crisis is that of meaningfulness. and this is what Professor Zizek instructed us about. It's the meaningfulness of getting a cup of coffee. I can't just drink coffee. I have to consider every single ramification of my cup of coffee. If it's fair trade coffee, if it's shade-grown coffee, how much they were paid to pick the coffee, how much the baristas are paid, how much I tip the barista. I can't just buy a cup of coffee, I can't just drink coffee in good or bad conscience. Everything I do is meaningful. My clothing is meaningful. What I drive is meaningful. There's no empty action anymore. and it's a crisis, it's paralyzing, and it's just as paralyzing as meaninglessness. In Kierkegaardian language, they're the twin crises of possibility and necessity. In both, as they did for Kierkegaard, still open up an access to the God who has died, but a God who still has power. So that's about it. We still need the language of the kingdom of God. Um and I think that's important because it reminds us that there's something beyond the crisis of despair. and when the kingdom of God arrives, it will do so in a new language. The notion of God doesn't just go away, the death of God just doesn't disappear, it doesn't go out of currency. It's more like Heidegger's work of art, it's a true occurrence. and in order to be displaced, we need a new language to come, a new prophet to arise, a new form of painting, a new economic system, we need something that will reconfigure or inaugurate a new age. and that age might not use the language of God, it might use something different, but it will be something that resets or redefines the terms of our very existence. It in turn will probably also perpetuate a series of crises. It's not like that life will get magically better, but it will become different and it will be a time when we know that the kingdom of God has arrived. Thank you. Thanks Dan Boscaljon. Clayton Crockett. Thanks Lisa, thanks Tom, thanks Slavoj for doing this. I claim also that the death of God is the precondition for any serious theological thinking today and I honor both Altizer and Zizek although my understanding of the death of God and what it means is slightly distinct from each. and in fact more along the lines of Gilles Deleuze in *Difference and Repetition* where he says that the Kantian transcendental philosophy introduces the form of time into thought as such, and then this pure and empty form in turn signifies indissolubly the death of God, the fractured I and the and the passive self. Altizer and Zizek are important because they suggest that radical
God. Without a keystone name in place, without the onto-theological metaphysical being in in-centered in everything, we can have those kinds of possibilities. But it can open up a crisis of despair which can in turn meaningfully still connect people to the dead body of God invoked by Altizer earlier this afternoon. The second main crisis is that of meaningfulness. and this is what Professor Zizek instructed us about. It's the meaningfulness of getting a cup of coffee. I can't just drink coffee. I have to consider every single ramification of my cup of coffee. If it's fair trade coffee, if it's shade-grown coffee, how much they were paid to pick the coffee, how much the baristas are paid, how much I tip the barista. I can't just buy a cup of coffee, I can't just drink coffee in good or bad conscience. Everything I do is meaningful. My clothing is meaningful. What I drive is meaningful. There's no empty action anymore. and it's a crisis, it's paralyzing, and it's just as paralyzing as meaninglessness. In Kierkegaardian language, they're the twin crises of possibility and necessity. In both, as they did for Kierkegaard, still open up an access to the God who has died, but a God who still has power. So that's about it. We still need the language of the kingdom of God. Um and I think that's important because it reminds us that there's something beyond the crisis of despair. and when the kingdom of God arrives, it will do so in a new language. The notion of God doesn't just go away, the death of God just doesn't disappear, it doesn't go out of currency. It's more like Heidegger's work of art, it's a true occurrence. and in order to be displaced, we need a new language to come, a new prophet to arise, a new form of painting, a new economic system, we need something that will reconfigure or inaugurate a new age. and that age might not use the language of God, it might use something different, but it will be something that resets or redefines the terms of our very existence. It in turn will probably also perpetuate a series of crises. It's not like that life will get magically better, but it will become different and it will be a time when we know that the kingdom of God has arrived. Thank you. Thanks Dan Boscaljon. Clayton Crockett. Thanks Lisa, thanks Tom, thanks Slavoj for doing this. I claim also that the death of God is the precondition for any serious theological thinking today and I honor both Altizer and Zizek although my understanding of the death of God and what it means is slightly distinct from each. and in fact more along the lines of Gilles Deleuze in *Difference and Repetition* where he says that the Kantian transcendental philosophy introduces the form of time into thought as such, and then this pure and empty form in turn signifies indissolubly the death of God, the fractured I and the and the passive self. Altizer and Zizek are important because they suggest that radical
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theology
theology
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is not external but internal
is not external but internal
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to philosophy, a caesura within the thought of among others Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Lacan, etc. and in terms of the currency, the currency of the death of God, I would affirm Carl Schmitt's claim in a letter that today everything is theology
to philosophy, a caesura within the thought of among others Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Lacan, etc. and in terms of the currency, the currency of the death of God, I would affirm Carl Schmitt's claim in a letter that today everything is theology
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except what declares itself to be such. and nothing
except what declares itself to be such. and nothing
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is more theological than money and capital. and here I would refer to Philip Goodchild's recent book, *A Theology of Money*. Today capitalism is imploding in on itself, having reached global limits of growth including resource extraction, debt accumulation and atmospheric emissions. We are witnessing the collapse of the largest asset bubble ever inflated and we are on the verge of an unprecedented depression because we're running out of cheap energy and thus cannot fuel another bubble. I think that we need a materialist theology that can think life in terms of self-organization, iterative chaotic complexity, that is not background dependent and views energy conversion as the essence of life in a non-dualistic way as both spiritual and material at once. and also finally in a way that moves us beyond thermodynamics. Thank you. Thanks Clayton Crockett. The next speaker is Andrew Haas. I'm conscious Lisa that we are already beyond our time and there's no dialogue going on here. I'm willing to kenotically empty my questioning to invite dialogue again if if we want to or I could continue to pose a question. Um but I throw that out as as a way to try to get dialogue going if our speakers want to respond to anything so far. Thank you. Response? Would you like to respond? You start. No no no no. Go ahead. Okay. Okay. Okay I will try to be. You see there is sorry, there is one problem here. First I'm deeply really I'm not this is not this kind of rhetorical concession and so on patronizing. I'm really deeply honored, affected by these questions and this is the big problem, to properly answer just one of them would have taken another session and so on and so on. It would be now nice if we were allowed just to close the door here, the faithful ones, the inner party circle, how should I put it, no? And go on. Then dialogue. Yes I totally agree I would like to begin with the last very generous thank you point about dialogue. But I cannot resist a provocative observation. Are we aware how rarely dialogues really function? I think mostly it's especially when you appear to to listen to the other and so on I don't which is why the more I'm getting old, the more I like dialogues but the late dialogues by Plato, you know where one guy talks all the time and then every five minutes the other guy says something like: by Zeus you are right, so it is, and so on. Don't I mean I'm not saying dialogues genuine dialogues don't happen, but you know, please this is a true traumatic encounter is a very rare thing. So to be
is more theological than money and capital. and here I would refer to Philip Goodchild's recent book, *A Theology of Money*. Today capitalism is imploding in on itself, having reached global limits of growth including resource extraction, debt accumulation and atmospheric emissions. We are witnessing the collapse of the largest asset bubble ever inflated and we are on the verge of an unprecedented depression because we're running out of cheap energy and thus cannot fuel another bubble. I think that we need a materialist theology that can think life in terms of self-organization, iterative chaotic complexity, that is not background dependent and views energy conversion as the essence of life in a non-dualistic way as both spiritual and material at once. and also finally in a way that moves us beyond thermodynamics. Thank you. Thanks Clayton Crockett. The next speaker is Andrew Haas. I'm conscious Lisa that we are already beyond our time and there's no dialogue going on here. I'm willing to kenotically empty my questioning to invite dialogue again if if we want to or I could continue to pose a question. Um but I throw that out as as a way to try to get dialogue going if our speakers want to respond to anything so far. Thank you. Response? Would you like to respond? You start. No no no no. Go ahead. Okay. Okay. Okay I will try to be. You see there is sorry, there is one problem here. First I'm deeply really I'm not this is not this kind of rhetorical concession and so on patronizing. I'm really deeply honored, affected by these questions and this is the big problem, to properly answer just one of them would have taken another session and so on and so on. It would be now nice if we were allowed just to close the door here, the faithful ones, the inner party circle, how should I put it, no? And go on. Then dialogue. Yes I totally agree I would like to begin with the last very generous thank you point about dialogue. But I cannot resist a provocative observation. Are we aware how rarely dialogues really function? I think mostly it's especially when you appear to to listen to the other and so on I don't which is why the more I'm getting old, the more I like dialogues but the late dialogues by Plato, you know where one guy talks all the time and then every five minutes the other guy says something like: by Zeus you are right, so it is, and so on. Don't I mean I'm not saying dialogues genuine dialogues don't happen, but you know, please this is a true traumatic encounter is a very rare thing. So to be
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really short. One of the focal points in the first and second intervention was this problem Hegel, Kierkegaard and so on. I'm so sad I don't have time now to go into this, just to maybe arouse if you are not too not to despair at my at my at my overproductivity, that now being tired of those political books, I'm in the middle of writing, already almost finished, a seven, eight hundred pages book on Hegel and religion. and there I will go in detail into this and my thesis is the following one, to put it very simply, that don't dismiss Hegel too easily. Something happens in Hegel which is not yet really thought even today. and this really traumatic dimension of Hegel is covered up by this in a truly Freudian sense *Deckerinnerung*, screen memory of this
really short. One of the focal points in the first and second intervention was this problem Hegel, Kierkegaard and so on. I'm so sad I don't have time now to go into this, just to maybe arouse if you are not too not to despair at my at my at my overproductivity, that now being tired of those political books, I'm in the middle of writing, already almost finished, a seven, eight hundred pages book on Hegel and religion. and there I will go in detail into this and my thesis is the following one, to put it very simply, that don't dismiss Hegel too easily. Something happens in Hegel which is not yet really thought even today. and this really traumatic dimension of Hegel is covered up by this in a truly Freudian sense *Deckerinnerung*, screen memory of this
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ridiculous Hegel
ridiculous Hegel
David Horowitz
that we all know and love. You know, Hegel, that idiot who thought he possesses absolute knowledge, he can read the mind of God, he can deduce develop the whole reality out of a self movement of a notion and so on and so on. I claim that I claim that if anything, this famous post-Hegelian turn towards some kind of a hard absurd extra-rational positive reality—it can be the reality of the will as it is already in late Schelling and Schopenhauer, it can be for Kierkegaard this unique individual absurd faith, it can be for Marx real productive—but but the movement is always the same. That is to say, as if the idealist tradition reaches its absurd point in this purely self-referential sophistic ratiocination by Hegel and then we need a real foundation. I think we don't. I think Hegel is still an enigma. Which is why I'm tempted to say that with my all, I mean I love Kierkegaard, but the way he relates to Hegel, he relates to this caricature of Hegel. There is another story to be told about this. As to the question of I am very appreciative of the second intervention, there especially I feel almost physically the pain of not being able to respond fully. but the only thing I would maybe disagree and I mean this really, I don't play these academic games, you know, I don't know how it is here but in the UK if you say: I totally agree with you I just would put slightly a different accent, it means you're a total idiot or something like that, no. I
that we all know and love. You know, Hegel, that idiot who thought he possesses absolute knowledge, he can read the mind of God, he can deduce develop the whole reality out of a self movement of a notion and so on and so on. I claim that I claim that if anything, this famous post-Hegelian turn towards some kind of a hard absurd extra-rational positive reality—it can be the reality of the will as it is already in late Schelling and Schopenhauer, it can be for Kierkegaard this unique individual absurd faith, it can be for Marx real productive—but but the movement is always the same. That is to say, as if the idealist tradition reaches its absurd point in this purely self-referential sophistic ratiocination by Hegel and then we need a real foundation. I think we don't. I think Hegel is still an enigma. Which is why I'm tempted to say that with my all, I mean I love Kierkegaard, but the way he relates to Hegel, he relates to this caricature of Hegel. There is another story to be told about this. As to the question of I am very appreciative of the second intervention, there especially I feel almost physically the pain of not being able to respond fully. but the only thing I would maybe disagree and I mean this really, I don't play these academic games, you know, I don't know how it is here but in the UK if you say: I totally agree with you I just would put slightly a different accent, it means you're a total idiot or something like that, no. I
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really mean it, that I slightly
really mean it, that I slightly
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disagree with that when you say: the place of God reoccupied by man. Where that this kind of again Feuerbach or already humanism and here I'm very critical of Marxism is precisely what I want to avoid. My point is that
disagree with that when you say: the place of God reoccupied by man. Where that this kind of again Feuerbach or already humanism and here I'm very critical of Marxism is precisely what I want to avoid. My point is that
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this
this
Slavoj Žižek
is why, and this would also answer the next question why in secular universe why the need to speak about theology, precisely this gesture I want to avoid: from the positivity of God to the positivity of man. I want something like a desperate impotent split in himself God relating to no less desperate split in itself whatever you put it human being. and this is the Chesterton that I refer to. I tend to accept that criticism, but just I would like to state where I my point where I would have developed it. You know that the quote from Chesterton that I refer to in almost all my books is from his *Orthodoxy* where in a wonderful way he says something breathtaking. He says that in all other religions you of course have they relate to non-believers, people who don't believe in God. Only in Christianity you have of course Chesterton refers to that unique point of *Eli Eli lama sabachthani*, Father why you have. that you have a point where as Chesterton puts it in his *Orthodoxy*, for a brief moment God himself doesn't believe in himself, becomes an atheist. and I think we shouldn't read this in a simple pseudo-Hegelian way of: okay, who of us doesn't have a moment of crisis you doubt but then son goes back to father, big happy family. No, something happens there. The loss in this is also the lesson of Hegelian dialectics. I'm so sad I don't have time to go into it. You know the stupid reproach to Hegel: negativity, okay things go bad, but when then where does this miracle then come from? The reproach to Hegel is that there is always a miraculous resolution, negation of negation. You made this point well, yeah yeah yeah I got it yeah, that that in Hegel there is no resolution. It's just that you kenosis in itself you just shift the perspective and see that the kenotic movement is itself its own solution. Just two three brief points. Um the Kotsko whom I also appreciate of course very much when a he mentioned this problem of sexual reproduction. Can you help me with a totally stupid naive, maybe I'm here primitive Balkan European, I never got it how pope and other distinguished Catholics can claim that sex is human, properly human when it's done for reproduction or with a reproduction in view, but that if you do it just for lust and so on it's animal. I'm sorry, but I think it's exactly the opposite. It's animals who do it just for reproduction. It's precisely when you are passionately in love, it's neither reproduction nor it's precisely that something which originally was meant for reproduction becomes as it were a medium for something spiritual to appear. Humanity, that's the lesson of psychoanalysis, humanity emerges through sexuality being cut off from reproduction. Okay but that's another story. Fourth point the God we still be you know again my point would have been that don't buy this bullshit that we don't believe today. We are superstitious, we believe more than ever today. I don't have time to develop this but we just pretend not to believe, as I said we believe through the others, you know like you don't believe in Santa Claus, you say I'm not an idiot, uh but I pretend to believe for my sons. Of course if I ask your son, he will say I'm not stupid to believe, I pretend not to disappoint... We believe through others more than ever. You see that's how it can function, nobody empirically has to believe but we all believe. Yes, it's good as long as you are at this level. You would make me afraid if you would move to another level, sorry just the last point. What it was said about capitalism, I cannot emphasize also enough the Crockett how important this topic is. If there is a lesson of the present financial crisis is that what was... the hook... they need to pull him off with a hook... the cane... Okay I modestly no I just wanted to say that this present crisis is the crisis of capitalist belief. They openly said they had to spend over one thousand billion to re-establish faith and so on. But that's another point, so I sit to this brutal proto-fascist violence and...
is why, and this would also answer the next question why in secular universe why the need to speak about theology, precisely this gesture I want to avoid: from the positivity of God to the positivity of man. I want something like a desperate impotent split in himself God relating to no less desperate split in itself whatever you put it human being. and this is the Chesterton that I refer to. I tend to accept that criticism, but just I would like to state where I my point where I would have developed it. You know that the quote from Chesterton that I refer to in almost all my books is from his *Orthodoxy* where in a wonderful way he says something breathtaking. He says that in all other religions you of course have they relate to non-believers, people who don't believe in God. Only in Christianity you have of course Chesterton refers to that unique point of *Eli Eli lama sabachthani*, Father why you have. that you have a point where as Chesterton puts it in his *Orthodoxy*, for a brief moment God himself doesn't believe in himself, becomes an atheist. and I think we shouldn't read this in a simple pseudo-Hegelian way of: okay, who of us doesn't have a moment of crisis you doubt but then son goes back to father, big happy family. No, something happens there. The loss in this is also the lesson of Hegelian dialectics. I'm so sad I don't have time to go into it. You know the stupid reproach to Hegel: negativity, okay things go bad, but when then where does this miracle then come from? The reproach to Hegel is that there is always a miraculous resolution, negation of negation. You made this point well, yeah yeah yeah I got it yeah, that that in Hegel there is no resolution. It's just that you kenosis in itself you just shift the perspective and see that the kenotic movement is itself its own solution. Just two three brief points. Um the Kotsko whom I also appreciate of course very much when a he mentioned this problem of sexual reproduction. Can you help me with a totally stupid naive, maybe I'm here primitive Balkan European, I never got it how pope and other distinguished Catholics can claim that sex is human, properly human when it's done for reproduction or with a reproduction in view, but that if you do it just for lust and so on it's animal. I'm sorry, but I think it's exactly the opposite. It's animals who do it just for reproduction. It's precisely when you are passionately in love, it's neither reproduction nor it's precisely that something which originally was meant for reproduction becomes as it were a medium for something spiritual to appear. Humanity, that's the lesson of psychoanalysis, humanity emerges through sexuality being cut off from reproduction. Okay but that's another story. Fourth point the God we still be you know again my point would have been that don't buy this bullshit that we don't believe today. We are superstitious, we believe more than ever today. I don't have time to develop this but we just pretend not to believe, as I said we believe through the others, you know like you don't believe in Santa Claus, you say I'm not an idiot, uh but I pretend to believe for my sons. Of course if I ask your son, he will say I'm not stupid to believe, I pretend not to disappoint... We believe through others more than ever. You see that's how it can function, nobody empirically has to believe but we all believe. Yes, it's good as long as you are at this level. You would make me afraid if you would move to another level, sorry just the last point. What it was said about capitalism, I cannot emphasize also enough the Crockett how important this topic is. If there is a lesson of the present financial crisis is that what was... the hook... they need to pull him off with a hook... the cane... Okay I modestly no I just wanted to say that this present crisis is the crisis of capitalist belief. They openly said they had to spend over one thousand billion to re-establish faith and so on. But that's another point, so I sit to this brutal proto-fascist violence and...