According to Slavoj Zizek, what
constitutes, as per the sub-title of this book, the "perverse core"
of the Christian religion?  In a properly Lacanian fashion, Zizek
counter-intuitively characterizes perverts not as Sadean rebels thoroughly
throwing off the shackles of the reigning normative order, but, rather, as
covert, closet conservatives, as secretly wedded to the prohibitive authority
they loudly claim to heedlessly defy.  Simply put, the pervert’s pleasure is
contingent upon the familiar "forbidden fruit" effect;  his/her
transgressions take on their alluring, titillating hue only so long as the
perverse subject believes in the existence of (to put it in Lacan’s terms) an
effective socio-symbolic "big Other."  Zizek’s point about perversion
here can be illustrated through recourse to the inverting twist on Dostoyevsky
that Lacan proposes in his seventeenth seminar:  "If God is dead, then
nothing is permitted."  That is to say, the pervert needs "God" qua
the prohibitory big Other in order to sustain his/her peculiar libidinal
economy.  Thus, Zizek concludes, perversion is ultimately about setting up and
sustaining this Other, an Other Lacan declares not to exist ("Le grand Autre
n’existe pas").  Perverse subjectivity desperately attempts to evade
the confrontation with the big Other’s non-existence.  Similarly, as Zizek
points out in the concluding paragraphs of this volume, the end of analysis,
involving the "dissolution of the transference" and the fall of the
"subject supposed to know"–the analyst is no longer related to by
the analysand as an omniscient master possessing the secret to his/her
unconscious being, his/her "true nature"–amounts to nothing less
than the painful acceptance that the big Other does not exist, that one is, on
a certain fundamental level, profoundly and inescapably alone with nothing and
nobody to provide reassuring guarantees of any sort.

So, what connects Christianity with
perversion here?  Obviously, in terms of its official, established theology,
the Christian religion, like all monotheistic religions, affirms the existence
of God (the biggest big Other of them all).  And, moreover, it distinguishes
itself by virtue of its absolutely central assertion that God became man in the
figure of Jesus Christ.  But, Zizek maintains, this very figure internally
subverts the accepted theological framework of the religion bearing his name. 
On several occasions (including the final paragraph of the book), Zizek
highlights the moment when the dying Christ, hanging from his cross, lapses in
his belief, loses his faith, and agonizingly laments, "Father, why hast
Thou forsaken me?"  At this moment, the supposed "Son of God"
faces, in his darkest hour, the possibility that the divine, paternal Other
isn’t really out there, that this Father is non-existent, that no reply or
response is forthcoming.  In identifying with Christ, the Christian believer
(unwittingly and inadvertently) identifies with this anguished position of
doubt and disbelief.  Perhaps the Christian believer is a "pervert"
insofar as he/she "knows full well, but nonetheless," namely, he/she
disavows, in the precise psychoanalytic sense of Verleugnung, this core
message of the big Other’s non-existence that the Christian religion itself
conveys yet is unable to accept (this moment of Christ-on-the-Cross would
therefore be, in relation to Christianity, something "extimate," that
is, an intimate-yet-alien kernel, an inner foreignness).  What replaces God qua
the transcendent Other is the "Holy Spirit" as the symbolic community
immanent to this world.  On the Zizekian reading, Christianity is the religion
of immanence (as opposed to, for example, the Judaism Zizek links to the
Levinasian-Derridean theme of the transcendence of the infinitely withdrawing
Other–as he notes, the Christian notion of God-become-man emphasizes
"sameness" rather than "otherness," stressing how divinity
is not antithetical to humanity).  Paradoxically, Christianity can only fully
become itself by destroying itself, by discarding its theological trappings and
affirming its "atheistic" confrontation with the absence of any big Other
beyond its fragile symbolic community of forsaken followers.

Furthermore, Zizek deftly exploits
the figure of Christ to effectuate a series of dialectical reversals of
standard oppositions and familiar dichotomies.  To begin with, he describes (in
an avowedly Schellingian style) God’s becoming man not as a demeaning,
devaluing descent in which an omnipotent and infinite divine entity voluntarily
shackles itself to the constraints of temporal finitude through embodied
incarnation in human flesh, but, instead, as a liberating ascent out of the
sterile, lifeless enclosure of immobile timelessness.  In this myth, the
"fall" of God into finite existence is itself a sort of redemption. 
Hence, Zizek here upends the normal contrast between the prison-house of
temporal finitude and the ecstatic transcendence of eternity–time is
tantamount to the clearing of openness, whereas timelessness represents a
frozen, closed space.  Along related thematic lines, Zizek insists that,
"incompleteness is, in a way, higher than completion" (pg. 115).

In the Zizekian theological schema
here, it isn’t the case that, initially, there exists the separation between
God and man, and, subsequently, Christ arises as a bridge spanning this
divide.  Rather, "God" (as Christ) is the name for the very gap
between divinity and humanity:  divinity isn’t just divinity, but the divinity
within humanity; correlatively, humanity isn’t just humanity, but the humanity
within divinity.  Likewise, Zizek dwells upon meaning-of-life sorts of
questions apropos of the preceding notions.  He insists that life only has
value so long as it contains within itself a certain excessiveness–"What
makes life ‘worth living’ is the very excess of life:  the awareness
that there is something for which we are ready to risk our life (we may call
this excess ‘freedom,’ ‘honor,’ dignity,’ ‘autonomy,’ etc.).  Only when we are
ready to take this risk are we really alive" (pg. 95).  Or, as he puts it
a few pages later, "It is crucial… to assert some kind of primordial
excess or too-muchness of life itself:  human life never coincides with itself;
to be fully alive means to be larger than life, and a morbid denial of life is
not a denial of life itself, but, rather, the denial of this excess" (pg.
98).  Humanity is material-biological life once it takes on something more than
itself, something over-and-above itself (i.e., its preservation, its survival)
as a measure of significance or worth.  Being reduced to the state where the
sole value is clinging to material-biological life at all costs is, therefore,
dehumanizing.  And, as Zizek argues, this Nietzschean "Last Man"
stance ultimately devalues the same life it pathetically clings to at the
expense of the value-bestowing "excess of life"–"What if, when
we focus on mere survival, even if it is qualified as ‘having a good time,’
what we ultimately lose is life itself?" (pg. 94).  One could speculate
that this distinction between life and its excess coincides with the
distinction between the all-too-human and the divine-within-the-human.

The Puppet and the Dwarf
also revisits familiar Zizekian topics and problematics, especially in terms of
further developments of his ongoing discussions of the issue of freedom and the
register of the Real.  Zizek contends that, "Freedom is not a blissfully
neutral state of harmony and balance, but the very violent act which disturbs
this balance" (pg. 31).  The Lacanian Act (qua a sudden, seemingly ex
nihilo break with the status quo "run of things") creates
the space for autonomous subjectivity by shattering the constraints of a
present order (calm, reflective deliberation by a subject doesn’t precede an
act as a calculated intervention in a certain state of affairs–rather, the
subject is a result of an act having catalyzed it into effective existence). 
Although all of this is, by now, quite familiar to his long-time readers–he
also reiterates the thesis (from the 1991 book For they know not what they
do) that freedom can only be seen and appreciated retroactively, rather
than directly experienced by agents during the process of an engaged historical
struggle–Zizek here proposes two new specifications regarding his analysis of
freedom.  First, he portrays subjective autonomy as inextricably linked to or
conditioned by the confrontation with "the opacity of the Other’s
desire" (pg. 129).  On the Lacanian account, the (Real) Other, as the
enigmatic, impenetrable "Thing" (i.e., Freud’s Nebenmensch
[neighbor] as das Ding, akin to the unknowable Kantian Ding an sich),
is an eternal mystery for the subject.  As Zizek maintains elsewhere (most
notably, in the 1997 essay on Schelling entitled "The Abyss of
Freedom"), subjectivity itself is, at least in part, an effect of Lacan’s
"Che vuoi?" (i.e., the question "What does the Other
want?").  In the face of the irreducible inscrutability of the desires of
others, the subject is thrown back upon itself, forced to be "free"
insofar as there is no determinate mandate from the Other that could be clung
to as something safe and solid.  Zizek then proceeds to observe, "how
lucky we are to be able to act ethically," that, "autonomy and grace
are intertwined" (pg. 159).  In an implicitly Badiouian manner, he hints
that autonomous subjectivity isn’t a permanent default status of the human
individual.  Rather, such subjectivity is literally extra-ordinary (or, as
Badiou describes it, "rare" and "exceptional"), a momentary
blessing of "grace" in terms of an opportunity-to-be-free that
briefly flashes upon the surface of mundane reality with certain privileged and
unpredictable occurrences.

A general exegetical consensus
amongst commentators on Zizek’s work is that his central obsession, persisting
throughout the entire span of his rapidly expanding corpus, consists in
repeated (re-)elaborations of the Lacanian register of the Real.  Building upon
portions of his 2001 text On Belief, his 2002 foreword to the second
edition of For they know not what they do, and Alenka Zupancic’s
recently developed Lacanian reading of Nietzsche (The Shortest Shadow:  Nietzsche’s
Philosophy of the Two), Zizek adds further inflections and nuances to his
understanding of the Real.  In a key passage, he states, "The Real is… simultaneously
the Thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle that prevents
this direct access; the Thing that eludes our grasp and the distorting screen
that makes us miss the Thing.  More precisely, the Real is ultimately the very
shift of perspective from the first standpoint to the second…  what prevents us
from accessing the Thing directly is the Thing itself" (pg. 77).  In On
Belief, Zizek suggests that the Real reflects within itself the tripartite
structure of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary;  the Real consists of a
Real Real (as what is unbearably, traumatically horrible), a Symbolic Real (as
pure material signifiers with a structure devoid of meaning or significance),
and an Imaginary Real (as a mysterious je ne sais quoi embedded within
the surface of appearances that gives them their alluring, moving powers).  In
the above quotation from The Puppet and the Dwarf, another tripartite
reading of the Real is advanced (one could describe this triad in Kantian
language, which would be appropriate, since Zizek utilizes Kant and Hegel in
this context to elaborate all of this:  the noumenal Real (as the inaccessible
Thing-in-itself), the phenomenal Real (as the "distorting screen" of
positioned subjective-perspectival mediation barring immediate, undistorted
contact with the Thing-in-itself), and the gap itself between the noumenal Real
and the phenomenal Real (as the ultimately unrepresentable discrepancy between
noumena and phenomena).  He also reaffirms his more recent emphasis (contrasted
with his depiction of the Real in such early texts as The Sublime Object of
Ideology [1989]) on the notion that the Real is entirely immanent to
(Imaginary-Symbolic) phenomenal reality.  That is to say, the Real isn’t the
"beyond" of an exteriority/anteriority.  Rather, "The multiple perspectival
inconsistencies between phenomena are not an effect of the impact of the
transcendent Thing–on the contrary, this Thing is nothing but the
ontologization of the inconsistency between phenomena" (pg. 66).  Instead
of being a "hard kernel" qua underlying noumenal bedrock of
ontological substance, the Real is, in this account, a residual
appearance-effect, an ephemeral by-product generated for the purposes of
rendering an inconsistent reality apparently consistent.

In various places, Zizek refers to
examples of "substances deprived of their substance" (such as, for
example, caffeine-free diet cola).  The Puppet and the Dwarf, through
the audacious and startling conceptual inversions that have become well-known
hallmarks of a distinctively Zizekian method of procedure, offers something
similar:  a paradoxical religion without religion, more specifically,
"Christianity as the religion of atheism" (pg. 171).  Zizek ends by
calling for the Christian religion to shed its religiosity so as to preserve
and affirm its atheistic "essence" (i.e., its implicit confrontation
with the non-existence of the big Other).  Assuming that this could ever even
happen, what would result from such an Aufhebung-like
self-cancellation?  What would arise from the ashes of an internally generated
implosion of Christianity?  What would be gained by embracing an atheism
specifically arrived at vis-à-vis the detour of a passage through
monotheistic theology?  Readers are left waiting for answers yet-to-come.

© 2004 Adrian
Johnston

Adrian Johnston, Ph.D. holds a position
as interdisciplinary research fellow in psychoanalysis at Emory.

Categories: Religion, Psychoanalysis