Incarnation in the Works of Zizek

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THE END OF GODSTRANSCENDENCE? ONINCARNATION IN THE WORK OFSLAVOJ IEK

FREDERIEK DEPOORTERE

In 1990, Thomas Luckmann published an article entitled Shrinking Tran-scendence, Expanding Religion?1 This title summarizes well the presentreligious situation in Western Europe. For Europeans, belief in the personaland transcendent God of Christianity seems to be irrevocably on the retreat.

This trend, however, should not be taken to imply that Europeans are any lessinclined to believe in God than they were before. What has changed forEuropeans is that God is now increasingly considered as immanent anddescribed in non-personal terms as, for example, an energy or force. Thus,contemporary forms of religiosity in Europe tend to stress inner-worldlinessand immanence of the Divine, which is not to say that Europeans are any less(or more) religious. This shift towards conceiving the Divine as inner andimmanent is also reflected in a number of influential contemporary thinkers,such as the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo and the Slovenian thinker

Slavoj iek. Both have argued in their recent work that the incarnationshould be understood as the end of Gods transcendence.

In this essay, I will focus on Slavoj iek (b. 1949), a philosopher, Lacanianpsychoanalyst and professor at the Department of Philosophy, in the Facultyof Arts, at the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). His thinking moves withinthree co-ordinates: Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian philosophy andMarxism. As outlined by iek in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989),his first work to be published in English, Hegel is not the author of

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panlogicism, but on the contrary a thinker of contingency and difference.This can only be demonstrated, however, if one reads Hegel with Lacan.2

Since the publication of his 1999 major work The Ticklish Subject3 one can

discern in iek an increasing interest in Christianity, even to the point thatone can perhaps legitimately speak of a religious turn in his work. Evi-dence for such a claim can be gleaned from the fact that iek has written

books with titles such as The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian LegacyWorth Fighting For? (2000),4 On Belief(2001),5 and The Puppet and the Dwarf:The Perverse Core of Christianity (2003).6 Religion also plays a major role (as atopic of reflection) in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (2001).7

The current essay aims at evaluating ieks claim that the Incarnationshould be understood as the end of Gods transcendence. In the first part, I

introduce the problem of transcendence; in the second and major part, Idiscuss the theme of the Incarnation as it appears in ieks recent work; andin the third part I assess ieks claim that Gods transcendence ends with theIncarnation.

1. The Problem of Transcendence

In the first part of this essay, I consider what transcendence is and what its fatehas been in modern philosophy.

1.1. God and Other TranscendencesTranscendence is a word with many meanings. It refers both to somethingthat is beyond us and to a movement of going beyond. During his discus-sion of Hegels concept of God, William Desmond helpfully differentiatesthree kinds of transcendence.8 First, there is exterior transcendence. This isthe transcendence of external beings as other in nature, which consists intheir not being the product of our thinking. This kind of transcendencethus refers to the fact that external reality exists independently of us. This

kind of transcendence is also described by Luckmann in his article men-tioned at the outset. There Luckmann speaks about the fact that humanbeings always exist in time and spacewhich implies that there was once atime when we did not yet exist and that there also will come a time that weshall no longer exist. Existing in space is another way of speaking abouthuman contingency; humans are located in a certain place and not in count-less other places. Moreover, humans are not able to control everything.Things happen to us which we would prefer not to have happen.9 As weconstantly bump into limits, we are confronted with transcendences, that

which is beyond us and which we cannot control. Second, Desmond identi-fies what he calls interior transcendence. This is the transcendence of self-b i th lf i f th h b i H b i

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themselves, to come to the realization that they are not limited to themselvesand do not belong to themselves.10 Third, Desmond also speaks about supe-rior transcendence. This transcendence is both in excess of determinate

beings, as their original ground and the most possibilizing source of ourself-transcendence. According to Desmond, both exterior and interior tran-scendence point towards this third kind of transcendence. The existence of anexternal reality which escapes our control gives rise to the question of theorigin of being and to the wonder of why there is something rather thannothing. The possibility of human self-transcendence, in turn, gives rise tothe question of the ultimate aim of human striving.

The question of the ultimate origin and aim has probably occupied thehuman mind since the dawn of civilization. Western civilization, for its part,

has sprung forth from a fusion between two different sets of answers to thesefundamental questions; namely, Greek philosophy and Biblical faith. From thebeginning, Greek philosophers have sought to explain being in terms of afundamental principle. The earliest of these, the Milesian philosophers Thales,Anaximander and Anaximenes (sixth century BCE), put forward the idea of aprimeval substance as the source of all that is and to which everything returns.So, from the very start, philosophy has tried to grasp the whole of reality bythinking its ultimate principle. An eminent example of this endeavour can befound in the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus. Plotinus spoke about the One,

which he conceived as the ultimate source (arch) of all beings, the singlesource of all reality, but also as the ultimate goal (telos) of all aspirations.The One is the indemonstrable first principle of everything, the transcen-dent infinite being and, as such, the supreme object of love.11 In the courseof history, moreover, the term God has also frequently been used by phi-losophers to designate this highest principle of thought and reality.

Such a God as the ultimate principle of reality, however, can hardly beconsidered compatible with the Biblical God. For the God of the Bible is fullypersonal. He precedes nature and has called creation into being ex nihilo, as

the other than Himself. Although the Bible conceives God as separated fromcreation, God is nevertheless present in the world and involved in the historyof humankind with whom He enters into relationship. God is a loving Godand acts to redeem humankind. The God of the philosophers, by contrast, isimpersonal. As a result, humans cannot enter into a personal relationshipwith him. He is the ultimate principle underlying visible and ever changingnature, but cannot be said to be radically different from nature. Such a Godcannot love nor can he act in order to redeem humankind.

Thus one encounters two different conceptions of superior transcendence. The

Greek Divine, on the one side, can be designated as the other ofnature andcan only be considered as transcendent insofar as it grounds the flux ofh i i ibl t d i thi i d d b d i ibl

The End of Gods Transcendence? 499


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created nature, only He can be said to truly transcend nature. The GreekDivine only transcends the ever changing multitude of visible nature, but notnature as such, inasmuch as the Divine is the most fundamental principle of

that nature itself. Therefore, the Greek Divine can only rightly be consideredas immanent transcendence, as transcendence within the realm of nature.

1.2. The Fate of Transcendence in Modern PhilosophyDespite the obvious irreconcilability of the Greek and Biblical concept ofGod, at least from a contemporary perspective, the patristic authors, who laidthe foundations for medieval Christian thought and, as such, for Westerncivilization, succeeded in achieving something of a synthesis between boththe Greek and Biblical legacies. This was only possible, however, because the

Church Fathers treated the inheritance of Greek philosophy as a body ofascertained knowledge on which one could draw for illustration and expla-nation, [but] not as a bundle of questions to discuss or opinions to criticize.12

According to Augustine and most medieval thinkers in his line, revelation asfound in Scripture was primary. The work of pagan philosophers was ofsecondary importance and only useful to the extent that it elucidated Biblicalrevelation. Or, to put it differently, the medieval synthesis between Greekphilosophy and Biblical faith was only possible because philosophy lost herindependence, becoming merely the ancilla theologiae, the handmaid of the-

ology, who alone ruled as the queen of sciences.While pre-modern Christian thinkers could still start from revelation asreceived in Scripture and continued in the Tradition of the Church, usingphilosophy merely as a tool to formulate intelligibly their faith (fides quaerensintellectum), modern philosophy, due to the disintegration of the originalontological synthesis13 at the end of the Middle Ages, necessarily had to

begin with the autonomous subject. In this way, they were forced to search theway to God starting from a self-enclosed subject, separated from the Divineand surrounded by a nature that was both alien and mute (intellectus quaerens

fidem). This attempt, understandably, led to an increasingly abstract God.First, deism reduced God to a distant Prime Mover, who had created theworld but immediately afterwards withdrew to some remote corner of theuniverse. As the natural sciences developed, God became more and more anunnecessary hypothesis.14

It was against this background of philosophy ultimately becoming inher-ently atheistic that Immanuel Kant wrote his Critique of Pure Reason. As heoutlined in the introduction to the second edition of this epoch-making work,one has to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.15 Kants

dichotomy between knowledge and faith, however, relegated God to a realmfar beyond the everyday reaches of the world and reduced Him to nothingb t t ti f littl l th t d d f b l t l d t 16



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ing to solve the Kantian dichotomy, Hegel brought to a climax the moderndiremption between, on the one hand, reason, claiming to be autonomousand self-sufficient, and, on the other, divine transcendence, claiming to be

beyond reason. Or, as Desmond puts it,if Kant sought a religion within the bounds of reason alone, Hegelentirely agrees, except he also says reason has no bounds, and hence cantake within itself everything, including religion. He does not betray theproject of bringing religion within the bounds of reason, but by expand-ing reason, while claiming to complete Kant, he ends up with a moreradical rationalization of religion: there is no other to reason, there is nobeyond, there is no transcendence.18

Thus, Hegel ends up with a thinking that disallows any real transcendence,any transcendence that is truly other, and thus a thinking that remains boxedup in its own self-enclosed circle of self-determining, self-expanding andself-completing thought.19 Hence Desmond claims that Hegels God cannot

but be a counterfeit double, which turns out to be merely a religiousrepresentation for the Whole of all wholes. As Desmond notes, this leaves noroom for any God who is beyond the whole. For, the whole is all there is. Or,as Desmond puts it in reference to Parmenidess One: The true is the One

[or, to use a phrase from Hegel: the true is the whole (das Wahre ist dasGanze)]. For as there is only one whole, so it seems, so there is only one One.Outside of this there is nothing, and no God also beyond the whole.20

On the basis of Desmonds three kinds of transcendence distinguished inthe previous section, one may now say that modernity witnessed the loss of trulysuperior transcendence. Modernity experiences nature as a self-sufficientwhole no more in need of the Biblical Creator-God as its transcendent sourcebeyond nature. Concomitantly, human self-transcendence is no longer auto-matically linked with the God of the Bible as a truly transcendent aim. As a

result, both exterior and interior transcendence are no longer grounded in atranscendence which is truly beyond nature. This loss of truly superior tran-scendence found its culmination in Hegels system. Simultaneously, moder-nity gave rise to a number of immanently superior transcendences, replacingthe abolished truly superior transcendence, namely the classless society ofMarxism and other modern utopias, all of which offered an overarchingframe of reference and an ultimate goal for human striving. In the mean-time, however, post-modernity has also experienced the imputation anddeconstruction of the immanent superior transcendences as hegemonic and

violent master narratives. Thus, we may conclude that while modernity sawa secularization and immanentization of superior transcendence andl d t l i t d ith i tl i t



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fore, rejecting as totalitarian any attempt to reduce that reality to a unity, awhole or an ultimate principle.

This all-too-brief and sketchy survey brings us back to iek, who adopts

Hegels view, put forward in the latters Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion,that the God of Beyond dies on the cross and passes into the Holy Spirit as thecommunity of believers. This basic idea, although most clearly endorsed inDid Somebody Say Totalitarianism?21, actually forms the foundation of allieks writings on Christianity. So, with regard to Christianity, iek is inthe first place a Hegelian, even before he is a Lacanian. This, of course, raisesthe question whether Desmonds critique of Hegels God also applies toiek. Indeed, the question should be asked whether iek ends up denying,as did Hegel, true transcendence.

2. On Incarnation in the Work of Slavoj iek

In what follows I consider how iek develops, with the help of the work ofLacan, the understanding of the meaning of the Incarnation which he adoptsfrom Hegels Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.

2.1. The Deadlock of the Sacrificial Interpretation ofChrists Death on the Cross

In the last pages ofThe Fragile Absolute, iek questions the traditional viewaccording to which Christ, Gods only-begotten son, died on the cross inorder to redeem humanity. According to this account, in ieks view,Christs death on the cross is reduced to a sacrificial gesture in theexchange between God and man and this immediately gives rise to somevery disturbing questions: Why does God have to sacrifice his son? Is thereperhaps some higher authority or necessity above God to which God has tocomply? If so, then God can no longer be considered as omnipotent. God isthen very much like a Greek tragic hero subordinated to a higher Destiny:

His act of creation, like the fateful deed of the Greek hero, brings aboutunwanted dire consequences, and the only way for Him to re-establish thebalance of Justice is to sacrifice what is most precious to Him, His ownson. If, on the other hand, we want to hold on to the claim that God isomnipotent, then the only possible conclusion seems to be that God is aperverse subject who plays obscene games with humanity and His own son:He creates suffering, sin and imperfection, so that He can intervene andresolve the mess He created, thereby securing for Himself the eternal grati-tude of the human race.22

This dilemma is taken up again and elaborated upon in Did Somebody SayTotalitarianism? If one considers Christs death as a ransom for human sins,th th ti i Wh k d f i th fi t l ? Wh



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however,leadstothestrangespectacleofGodandtheDevilaspartnersinanexchange.A second possibility is that God is the plaintiff. For, human sin hasoffended Gods honour and that offended honour should be satisfied. Yet,

humanityisnotcapableofprovidingthissatisfactiononitsown.OnlyGodcanand does so by sending his Son, Jesus Christ, the God-man. Being God, JesusChrist is able to accomplish the required satisfaction; being human, he canreplace us in doing so. This view has been defended byAnselm of Canterbury.It is, however, not without serious difficulties. Does not the success of thedefence come at the price of turning God into a cruel, merciless and jealouscreature? For what kind of God demands such a bloody satisfaction merely

because his honour has been offended by human sin? Moreover, why shouldGod comply with the need to satisfy an offended honour? Why does God not

simply forgive humanity directly, without having recourse to a bloody sacri-fice? This brings us to a third possibility, namely that God could indeed haveforgiven humanity directly, but nevertheless sent his son in order to set theultimateexamplethatwouldevokeoursympathyforhim,andthusconvertusto him. This position has been adopted by Abelard, who stated that the sonof God took our nature, [. . .], thus binding us to himself through love. This,however, is not really a satisfying solution. For, as iek remarks,

it is easy to see that something is amiss in this reasoning: is this not astrange God who sacrifices his own Son, what matters most to him, justto impress humans? Things become even more uncanny if we focus onthe idea that God sacrificed his Son in order to bind us to himself throughLove: what was at stake, then, was not only Gods love for us, but also his(narcissistic) desire to be loved by us humansin this reading, is not Godhimself strangely akin to the mad governess from Patricia HighsmithsHeroine, who sets the family house on fire in order to be able to proveher devotion to the family by bravely saving the children from the ragingflames?23

This, in brief, constitutes the perverse core of Christianitythe subtitle ofieks The Puppet and the Dwarf. Indeed, how could one but fail to notice theperverse strategy of God in Genesis 2 and 3? If God really wanted to avoidhuman sin, why put the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in theGarden of Eden in the first place? And where did the snake come from? Onecannot avoid the impression that the whole mise en scne was precisely aimedat letting Adam and Eve sin, in order that God would be able to save human-ity later on through Christs sacrifice.24

Furthermore, as iek points out in On Belief, does not Christianity burden

humanity with an even stronger (impossible?) debt by presenting Christsdeath on the cross as an inexplicable act of Mercy, of paying our debt? Onef d t thi h b t ti th t Ch i t i i l t



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through paying this price for us Himself [through his Son], that the ChristianGod of Mercy establishes itself as the supreme superego agency: I paid thehighest price for your sins, and you are thus indebted to me forever . . . 25

Does an excess of mercy without proportion to what I deserve not auto-matically lead to an excess of guilt without proportion to what I actuallydid?26 And should we not think in this regard of the example of the spousewho, during a domestic quarrel, answers to her desperate husbands ques-tion But what do you want from me? with a firm Nothing!? What shereally means to say, of course, is: Nothing in particular! She is thereforeasking for total surrender beyond any negotiated element. And is the samenot true for Christ? For, as iek puts it,

when the falsely innocent Christ-like figure of pure suffering and sacrificeforoursaketellsus:Idontwantanythingfromyou!,wecanbesurethatthis statement conceals a qualification . . . except your very soul. Whensomebody insists that he [sic] wants nothing that we have, it simply meansthat he has his eye on what we are, on the very core of our being.27

It is however possible, according to iek, to offer an account of Christianitythat does not fall in the trap of this perversionbut on condition that oneabandon the idea that Christs death was a sacrifice. In what follows, Iexamine this alternative account of Christianity.

2.2. From God as Wholly Other Thing to God as Barely NothingIn On Belief, iek refers to the way science-fiction horror films depict thealien. There are two different ways that this is accomplished. On the onehand, the alien is depicted as wholly Other, as a terrible Thing, a monsterwhose sight one cannot endure, usually a mixture of reptile, octopus andmachine. On the other hand, the alien is presented as exactly the same as we,ordinary humanswith, of course, some barely nothing which allows usto identify them [as aliens] (the strange gleam in their eyes; too much skin

between their fingers . . .).28

According to iek, it is precisely this differencebetween the alien as a wholly Other Thing and the alien who is almostcompletely identical to ordinary humans, except for some barely nothing,that acts as a heuristic for understanding the difference between the God of

Judaism and the God of Christianity.In Judaism, God is, according to iek, the transcendent irrepresentable

Other. Judaism states that the suprasensible dimension (the Sublime) isbeyond the sensible, is the Real behind the curtain of the phenomena, andthat it tries to render that Real precisely by renouncing all images.29 To

elaborate on this, I refer the reader to ieks discussion of Jewish icono-clasm, the prohibition of making images of God. It is important, however, nott i d t d thi i l It i l t t t th t d



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prohibited because they would humanize [a] purely spiritual Entity. Thisrationale is incorrect, according to iek. Pagans did not believe their imagesto be gods and they did not even believe these images to be, in any way,

adequate representations of the gods. And this is why iconoclasm can nevermake sense for paganism. Images of the gods are neither true nor adequateanyway. So, the Jewish prohibition of making images of God can, accordingto iek, only be intelligible on the assumption that the Jews believed thatsuch an image

would show too much, rendering visible some horrifying secret betterleft in shadow, which is why they had to prohibit itthe Jewish prohibitiononly makes sense against the background of this fear that the imagewould reveal something shattering, that, in an unbearable way, it would

be true and adequate.30

But what horrifying secret would have emerged had the Jews in fact madeimages of their God? In order to trace this secret iek claims, in contrast to thecommon view, that what the Jews did was completely to personalize andanthropomorphize God. Their God, in other words, is just another person inthe fullest sense of the term. Indeed, the Jewish God experiences full wrath,revengefulness, jealousy, etc., as every human being. Thus, Jewish icono-clasm should rightly be understood, not as a reaction to previous pagan

religiosity, but as a necessary consequence of Judaisms own full personaliza-tion of God. For, an image would render [the Jewish God] all too faithfully, asthe ultimate Neighbour-Thing and the Jewish iconoclasm is precisely aimedat avoiding this traumatic experience of God as just another person.31

What brings the secret of Judaism to light, according to iek, is Christian-ity, and it does so by asserting not only the likeness of God and man, buttheir direct identity in the figure of Christ. So, Christianity brings to a logicalconclusion the process of Gods personalization already begun but not fullycompleted by Judaism. It accepts God as just another human being, as a

miserable man indiscernible from other humans with regard to his intrinsicproperties.32 In this way, only Christianity really escapes from paganism,really sublates it, while Judaism still remains an abstract/immediatenegation of anthropomorphism, and, as such, attached to it, determined by itin its very negation.33 Or, to put it differently, Christianity rejects the Godof Beyond and can thus be described as a radical desublimation, in thesense of the descendence of the sublime Beyond to the everyday level. So,Christianity makes the transition from God as the wholly Other Thing tothe Divine as barely nothing, as the imperceptible something that makes

Christ divine, a pure appearance which cannot ever be grounded in asubstantial property. But what is this barely nothingthis imperceptiblethi ? O t h it diff tl h t i th Di i ?34 I d t



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2.3. An Excess of Life that Makes Us HumanIn The Ticklish Subject, iek discusses the transition from nature to culturefrom the human being as a mere animal to the human being as a being of

language bound by the symbolic Law. According to iek, the commonsense view, in which the Law aims at controlling our natural passions andinclinations, should be rejected. Rather, what the Law is directed against isnot our natural instincts, but something completely unnatural, that is, amoment of thoroughly perverted, denaturalized, derailed nature which isnot yet culture. There is thus no smooth, evolutionary development fromnature to culture on ieks account. Rather, the transition from nature toculture is brought about by something that is no longer nature but is also notyet culture. This vanishing mediator, this In-between, is nothing more

and nothing less than the appearance of the drive.35

It is important to keep in mind the distinction, made by Freud, betweendrive (German: Trieb) and instinct (German: Instinkt). Instincts are bio-logical needs, such as the need to eat, drink and copulate. They have arelatively fixed and innate relationship to an object. Their most distinguish-ing characteristic is that they can be satisfied by, for instance: eating, drinkingor copulating. Drives, by contrast, are not linked to a particular object. Theydiffer from biological needs in that they can never be satisfied, and do notaim at an object but rather circle perpetually round it.36 This distinction

between biological needs (instincts) and drivesor to put it differently, thedistinction between animal and human beingcan be clarified further withthe help of one of ieks favourite anecdotes concerning a laboratory experi-ment with rats, once described by Jacques-Alain Miller, son-in-law and self-proclaimed heir of Lacan:

In a labyrinthine set-up, a desired object [actually an object of biologicalneed] (a piece of good food or a sexual partner) is first made easilyaccessible to a rat; then, the set-up is changed in such a way that the rat

sees and thereby knows where the desired object is, but cannot gainaccess to it; in exchange for it, as a kind of consolation prize, a series ofsimilar objects of inferior value is made easily accessiblehow does therat react to it? For some time, it tries to find its way to the true object;then, upon ascertaining that this object is definitely out of reach, the ratwill renounce it and [put up with] some of the inferior substitute objects.In short, it will act as a rational subject of utilitarianism. It is only now,however, that the true experiment begins: the scientists performed asurgical operation on the rat, messing about with its brain, doing things

to it with laser beams about which, as Miller put it delicately, it is betterto know nothing.S h t h d h th lt d t i l t l i th



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and [never] resigned itself to one of the inferior substitutes, but repeat-edly returned to it, attempted to reach it. In short, the rat was in a sensehumanized, it assumed the tragic human relationship toward the unat-

tainable absolute object which, on account of its very inaccessibility,forever captivates our desire. (Millers point, of course, is that this quasi-humanization of the rat resulted from its biological mutilation: the unfor-tunate rat started to act like a human being in relationship to its object ofdesire when its brain was butchered and crippled by means of anunnatural surgical intervention.) On the other hand, it is this veryconservative fixation that pushes man to continuing renovation, sincehe never can fully integrate this excess into his life process. So we can seewhy Freud used the term death drive: the lesson of psychoanalysis is

that humans are not simply alive but are possessed by a strange drive toenjoy life in excess of the ordinary run of thingsand death standssimply and precisely for the dimension beyond ordinary biological life.37

To sum up, in the first part of the experiment the rat is a mere animallooking for objects that can satisfy its biological needs (food, a partner). Whenconfronted with an object that would meet these needs in a very satisfactoryway, but that is inaccessible, the rat simply renounces the object and is contentwith another object, even if it is less satisfying. In the second part of the

experiment, after the rat has been humanized, by messing about with itsbrain, it shows, in contrast, a stubborn attachment to the impossible object.The object in question has become a Thing, something to which the rat isexcessively attached. The rat nevertheless comes back to its Thing again andagain, trying to reach it. It is precisely this endless repetition of the samefailed gesture, this closed loop, which is the drive.

The drive is thus not to be understood as a remainder of animal nature inhuman persons, lurking under a small layer of civilization imposed on them

by the Law of culture, but still ready to take control again in a moment should

one lapse into inattentiveness. Quite the contrary; the drive should rather beunderstood as thoroughly unnatural. Recall that the rat only enters the domainof the drive after its brain has been messed up, after some malicious experi-ment allowed the smooth course of spontaneous, biological life to derail. Thedrive is an excessive love of freedom, . . . , which goes far beyond obeyinganimal instincts. The drive is an uncanny unruliness that seems to beinherent in human nature, a wild unconstrained propensity to insist stub-

bornly on ones own will, cost what it may.38

The Law of culture aims at pacifying this excessive love of freedom and

at returning to a new kind of naturalness, namely that of culture, which is,according to iek, the actual nature of human beings. The Law prohibits theThi th i ibl bj t f f ll ti f ti d i t d i thi th



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endless circular course around the impossible object, is forced open andreplaced by a succession of substitutes for the forbidden Thing. In this way,closure is replaced by radical openness. For, since the satisfaction obtained by

a substitute always fails miserably in comparison to the satisfaction expectedfrom the Thing, the succession of desired objects is endless.39

This transition from drive to desire, effected by the Law of the symbolicorder,is,ontheonehand,areturntoakindofnaturalness,sinceasindicatedabovethe rat as mere animal quickly turned to substitutes and this broughtiek to the remark that in that case the rat acted as a rational subject ofutilitarianism. On the other hand, however, the naturalness effected by theLaw is not a return to spontaneous animal life. For human desire isnot a return

tobiologicalneed.ThehumanizedanimaldoesnotreallygiveupitsThingandremainsstubbornlyattachedtoit(asexpressedbythedottedlineinthefigure).Moreover, the course of desire is sustained by the illusion that full satisfaction(thepossessionoftheThing)wouldbepossibleifonlytheLawdidnotpreventit. Or, to put it differently, the Law calls into being the fantasy that the Thing isnot really impossible, but only forbidden and fosters in this way the expecta-tion that one day possession of the Thing will become possible. It is thisexpectation, then, which drives human culture and has caused human evolu-tions ever-accelerating pace, while the chimpanzeesour closest relatives in

the animal kingdom, with whom we share more than 98% of our geneticmaterialhave almost remained unaltered for the past six million years.Furthermore, the Law is not able to prevent a resurgence of the drive. In

contrast to biological need, and like the drive, desire is not linked to particularobjects. Anything can become an object of human desire; this is demonstrated

by the fact that human beings can become addicted to anything, be it ciga-rettes, coffee, chocolate, gambling, pornography or even collecting stamps.40

These addictions make clear that human beings desire beyond what is nec-essary for survival and even beyond what is necessary to live a pleasurable

life. Humans can even desire at the expense of their own well-being. Ciga-rettes, coffee and chocolate are bad for ones health. Addiction to cigarettes,bli d h i i bli i

Figure 1: Existence under the Law: the metonymy of desire



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the unpleasant consequences of their addiction, they simply cannot give uptheir bad habit by an exertion of the will. This makes it clear that striving forpleasure (German: Lust) is not the primary principle in human life.

The pleasure principle, which dictates our daily functioning, implies thathuman beings strive for pleasure and avoid pain. It is effected by the Law ofthe symbolic order and aims at restoring the bond between desire and object, a

bond which was lost when biological need became derailed as drive. Thepleasure principle forbids humans from pursuing their desire and states thathumans should instead take consequences into account. It states that humansshould always make a rational calculation of costs and benefits. As Freudhimself has already made clear with his reality principle (which isin con-trast to common opinionnot contrary to the pleasure principle, but an

integral part of it), one might be better off renouncing a pleasure in the shortterm in order to gain an even greater pleasure in the long term. Despite itscentrality, however, the pleasure principle does not entirely succeed master-ing the excessiveness of human desire. For human beings can always gobeyond the pleasure principle, to use the title of Freuds famous 1920 essay.Beyond the pleasure principle lies the domain of the Thingthat Thing forwhich we are prepared to sacrifice everything: all we possess, our well-beingand even our very life. This is the domain ofjouissance (German: Genu),ofanexcessive enjoyment in pain beyond all limits that is no longer pleasant in the

ordinary sense of the term.41

Entering the domain beyond the pleasure principle, however, implies theend of the human being as a symbolic subject, as a being of language, which,as desiring, only exists in its distance from the Thing and which is thatdistance.42 Entering the domain of the Thing is therefore lethal. In Beyond thePleasure Principle, Freud identified the death drive, the drive towards thelethal Thing, as the primary force in human life. The symbolic Law andlanguage, pleasure and desire, are all secondary phenomena: they are finallyineffective defences against the unbearable jouissance of the Thing to which

the death drive drives us. As can be seen in figure 2 below, the death drive isessentially transgressive and aims at reaching the jouissance of the Thing byeliminating the Law:



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The transgressor, however, runs the risk of getting stuck in what we can (inHegelian terms) describe as a bad infinity, the result of which is that he orshe will need ever greater transgressions to experience the same effect. It is as

with a drug addict who always needs greater doses and it is the same with thenovels of the notorious Marquis the Sade, which report an endless repetitionof transgressions. In effect, the endless metonymy of desire has only beenreplaced by another kind of endlessness, which is the breaking of the Law.Moreover, the transgressor still remains, despite his or her intention to befree of the Law, actually attached to the Law. For he/she finds jouissancenotin reaching the Thing (which always remains elusive)but precisely in trans-gressing the Law. This is due to the fact that, though the transgressor breaksthe Law, its hidden foundation, namely fantasy, continues to remain opera-

tive. Hence the perpetrator is still victim to the illusion that the Thing is onlyinaccessible because it is forbidden by the Law and that it suffices to gobeyond the Law to possess it.

2.4. The Coming of Christ: the Death of the Divine ThingThe discussion in the previous section seems to imply that we are forced tochoose between two possibilities: on the one hand, tragic desire and dullpleasure under the reign of the Law and, on the other, lethal transgression ofthe Law towards the domain of the Thing (with its promise of unlimitedjouissance, which, however, always remains unfulfilled; because, beyond theLaw, full satisfaction remains inaccessible). Yet, is this not similar to the choice

between pestilence and cholera? According to iek, thankfully, there are yetother possibilities and it is precisely in this regard that the above-mentionedtransition from God as the wholly other Thing to the Divine as barelynothing becomes the prime example.

But before turning to this, let me first introduce another important Laca-nian category, namely the objet petit a (or object little a, an expression thatLacan insisted should not be translated). In order to do this, I have to take upthe Thing once more. As already noted, the Thing, being the impossible/forbidden object in which desire would find its complete satisfaction, isnothing but its own absence: it is a hole in the centre of the symbolic orderaround which that order pivots. In that empty space, however, objects canappear; they are, in other words, raised to the dignity of the Thing (this

being the Lacanian formula for sublimation) by virtue of the fact that theyinhabit that empty space where the Thing is lacking. These objects are thusdesignated by Lacan as objets petit a. Traditionally, there are four such objects,namely the breast, the faeces, the voice and the gaze. According to iek,however, anything and everything can be become an objet petit a and, as such,an incarnation of (the lack) of the Thing. As he puts it:



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and lobjet petit a . . . mediates between the a priori void of the impossibleThing and the empirical objects that give us (dis)pleasureobjets a areempirical objects contingently elevated to the dignity of the Thing, so that

they start to function as embodiments of the impossible Thing.43

However, it is more correct to speak, as Philippe Van Haute does in hisAgainst Adaptation, about the objet petit a as the dis-incarnation, as it were, ofthe lack. For, on the one hand, it indeed gives a concrete, bodily filling-in ofthe absence of the Thing (incarnation), but on the other hand it remainsforever elusive (dis-incarnation).44

Given this background, the difference between paganism, Judaism andChristianity comes more sharply into focus. Both paganism and Judaism

believe in a suprasensible plenitude beyond the symbolic order. As alreadynoted above, pagans do not believe their idols to be adequate representationsof the gods. Nevertheless, they try to grasp something of the suprasensibledimension through creating a multitude of images, or, as iek puts it,through the overwhelming excess of the sensible, like the Indian statueswith dozens of hands. Judaism, by contrast, renounces all images togetherand tries to render the suprasensible dimension precisely in this way.45 So,to formulate it differently, while the pagans seek comfort for the absence ofthe Thing and the harshness of the symbolic Law by having recourse to theimaginary, such a consolation is refused to the Jews. They keep open thespace between themselves and the Law (the space which is filled-up bypaganism with imaginary constructions). In this way, however, they aredirectly confronted with the Law in all its arbitrariness, as is depicted infigure 3 below:

Despite their differences, however, both pagans and Jews share the beliefin a sublime beyond. To put it differently, they both believe in God as theThing and thus both share the fantasy that the Divine Thing is far too sublime,

far too elevated for human beings to be able to handle direct confrontationwith it.Withth i fCh i t th d th fthi Di i Thi F i Ch i t

Figure 3: The Jewish relationship to the suprasensible dimension



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thingisnothingotherthanthesurplusonaccountofwhichmancannoteverfully become man, self-identical. So, according to iek, the Divine is not theHighest in man, the purely spiritual dimension towards which all humans

strive, not someinaccessible/prohibitedsublimeplenitudebeyondtheworldof visible phenomena. Beyond the phenomena, there is nothing, nothing butthe imperceptible X that changes Christ, this ordinary man, into God. This X,however, is precisely the excess of human life, the too much that makes usinto humans (and not mere animals), but which at the same time can never becontained within smooth biological life. The Divine is nothing other than theobstacle that, paradoxically, makes us human, preventing our ever becomingself-identical. Given this analysis, one is better able to understand the centralproclamation of Christianity, which is, according to iek, the absolute iden-

tity ofman and God. The Divine, inother words, is nothing more and nothingless than that which makes us human beings instead of mere animals. This iswhat has been revealed by Christ.47

The coming of Christ does imply the end of the God of Beyond. In this regard,iek speaks of desublimation: the descendence of the sublime Beyond tothe everyday level or the coincidence, identity even, between the sublimeand the everyday object.48 This corresponds to a transition from the Thing tothe objet petit a, and the transition from desire to drive. As noted above, desirethrives under the Law, which forbids the impossible Thing and thus gener-

ates the distance to the Thing, the distance which is the subject of desire. Thelogic of desire is indeed based on placing an impossible Thing in an inacces-sible Beyond as forbidden. Desire is the endless movement from one substi-tute to the next, without ever reaching an end. Therefore, desire is inherentlytragic: every substitute is not It. Or, as iek puts it, the obtained satisfactionnever equals the sought-for satisfaction and it is precisely in this gap thatdesire thrives.49 As displayed in the figures above, this subject position issustained by virtue of a fantasy that says The Thing is not impossible assuch, but only because it is forbidden by the Law.

The coming of Christ, however, shatters this fantasy: the Divine Thing doesnot exist and it is only its own absence, nothing but an empty space. In thisone is able to leave the domain of tragic desire behind and to (re-)enter the domainof drive. The drive clings to some particularpathological (in the Kantiansense of the word)object that is also the support of a something that ismore than the object itself and that we can designate, in Lacanian terms, asthe objet petit a. The domain of drive is also the one of love. Love preciselyconsists in the identification of some very clumsy and miserable being asthe locus from which another dimension shines forth. iek puts it this way:

Love [in contrast to desire] fully accepts that this is thatthat the womanwith all her weaknesses and common features is the Thing I unconditionallyl 50 L th th t thi f i t th b d f



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material support of the objet petit a and the outer circle stands for the drive,the circular movement of the subject around this spectral oject.

According to ieks logic, one can thus conclude that, while Judaism is thereligion of desire, Christianity is the religion of love. Judaism desires a God who,precisely as the Sublime Beyond, remains inaccessible. Yet the coming ofChrist as the true God/man does not imply, as one might think, that inChristianity one can simply renounce transcendence completely. For accord-ing to iek, in Him the transcendent realm becomes accessible as immanenttranscendence.52 Christ is not merely a stand-in for God, not one substitute forthe impossible Divine Thing among many possibilities. He is not a contin-

gent material (pathological) embodiment of the suprasensible God. Christis God. With his coming, the God of Beyond has died and the Divine isreduced to nothing but the aura of a pure Schein that shines through thisfellow human being.53 But precisely in this way it makes itself accessible to usfor our attachment in love.

2.5. The Crucified Christ: the Ultimate objet petit aAs stated in section 2.1 above, iek firmly rejects the sacrificial interpretationof Christs death as perverse. Yet, according to him, it is possible to offer a

non-perverse reading of this event. In the light of the discussion in the threeprevious sections, I am now in a position to formulate this alternative expla-nation. Perhaps the best way to begin is by returning to the story of the Fall.According to iek, in Genesis Paradise stands for human life not yetcontaminated by its excess; sin is then precisely this excess of Life whichmakes [us] human and the Fall is the moment when the human animalcontracted [this] excess.54

To clarify the way Christ relates to this excess, iek makes use of acomparison which demonstrates how his Marxist background plays a role in

his interpretation of Christ. His comparison is the following: Christ is amonghuman beings in the way that money is among ordinary commodities. Adit h ld b f ll di ti i h d f bj t (f h t

Figure 4: Drive and love



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by contrast, is an object of symbolic exchange in the market. It acquires acertain surplus value (or excess) through the labour invested in it. This

surplus value is expressed in an amount of money. Money, however, is anexceptional object/commodity because it is without use value (outside of thesymbolic exchange of the market it is completely uselessconsider, forexample, what benefit money would be to surviving on a deserted island).Nevertheless, and precisely in this vein, money enables the symbolicexchange. As a result, money is the commodity as such: the incarnation ofsurplus value uncontaminated by use value and, therefore, the universalequivalent [that] exchanges/gives itself for all other excesses.55

Table 2 below then makes clear in which way Christ is among human

beings what money is among ordinary commodities. As money is the mate-rial substratum to which the excess that is surplus value (which is in itselfnothing but an aura of some incorporeal dimension) attaches itself, soChrist is the material support for an incarnation of the excess of human life.He directly embodies/assumes the excess that makes the human animal aproper human being. And as money is the commodity as such, Christ isman as such.56

The question that remains, however, is what is the equivalent of money asmaterial object without use value in the second table? In short, what doesCh i t i if ithi b li t ? If i l f ll th l

Table 1: Money among the commodities

PRE-SYMBOLIC NATURE EXCESS ORDER OF SYMBOLICEXCHANGE

Objects with use value(satisfying biological needs)

surplus value(


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not very clear on this point (and maybe his intention wasnt to stretch thecomparison as far as I am attempting to do herebut because one shouldalways be attentive to what is not said as well as what is said, as psychoanaly-

sis teaches us, the question is worth asking). Although iek is unclear, hedoes provide some clues. For instance, he states that Christ was the Pure one,without excess, simplicity itself.57 iek seemingly implies that Christ waswithout the excess of life that characterizes humanity. Is iek translatinghere the orthodox view that Christ was without sin? This conclusion seems

justified on the basis of his interpretation of the story of the Fall, mentionedabove, where he renders sin as the excess of life. Yet, since this excess isprecisely what turns the human animal into a human being of language,does this not imply that iek is actually saying that Christ was not a real

human being? But then again maybe orthodox Christianity is doing the same,albeit implicitly, when it states that Christ has been tempted in every way,just as we areyet was without sin (Heb. 4:15). Yet, what is a human beingwithout sin, without his/her constitutive excess? Merely an animal again?But how seriously can one take iek if he would be really claiming thatChrist was merely a human animal?58

This last point warrants further elaboration: take ieks statement thatChrist as man = God is the unique case of full humanity.59 If Christ is afulfilled or completed human being, he should indeed be without excess,

for, as has already been repeatedly indicated, that excess is precisely theobstacle on account of which man cannot ever fully become man, self-identical.60 But does this necessarily imply a return to pre-symbolicnature? What if, in fact, it is the opposite? This is indeed what iek seemsto imply: that Christ is the first case of a thoroughly denaturalized human

being. In this way, the relationship between Adams Fall and the Redemp-tion brought by Christ, the Second Adam, appears in a completely newlight. The Fall is not a pitiful incident, but already the first act of redemp-tion. Moreover, the coming of Christ is not aimed at rectifying the effects of

the Fall, but at fulfilling them. The Fall is the first step on the way fromhuman animal to full humanity. The problem is that after the Fall humanityremains stuck at the level of a negation of nature. It is only in Christ, thefirst case of full humanity, that the human animal is completely sublated.Therefore, Christ is, as iek puts it, more than man. In this regard, iekeven makes an explicit reference to Nietzsches bermensch: And whyshould we not take the risk here of referring to Nietzsche: [Christ] is over-man?precisely insofar as one can say, apropos of his figure: Ecce homo,precisely insofar as he is a man kat exochen, as such, a man with no dis-

tinctions, no particular features (the ultimate Mann ohne Eigenschaften, theman without properties).61

H i h t d t d th l i th t Ch i t



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ieks statements when by applying what he is saying to the moment of thecrucifixion. For at that moment, a particular human being is stripped of all hisparticular characteristics and reduced to man as such. At that moment, he

is disgorged by the symbolic order (he had already died symbolically, so tospeak, he dwelt in what Lacan designated as the domain between the twodeaths) and therefore he reduces to nothing but a piece of waste, the excre-ment of the symbolic order. Only at that precise moment, then, does Christtruly become Christ, the ultimate objet petit a62, the incarnation of the humanexcess as such, that excess which can never be contained within the symbolicorder of exchange. And precisely in this way Christ effects our redemption.For, by becoming the ultimate objet petit a, he assume[d], contract[ed] ontohimself, the excess (Sin) which burdened the human race. iek elaborates

on the character of this redemption as follows:By taking upon himself all the Sins and then, through his death, payingfor them, Christ opens up the way for the redemption of humanityhowever, by his death, people are not directly redeemed, but given thepossibility of redemption, of getting rid of the excess. This distinction iscrucial: Christ does not do our work for us, he does not pay our debt, hemerely gives us a chancewith his death, he asserts our freedom andresponsibility, i.e. he merely opens up the possibility, for us, to redeemourselves through the leap into faith, i.e. by way of choosing to live inChristin imitatio Christi, we repeat Christs gesture of freely assumingthe excess of Life, instead of projecting/displacing it onto some figure ofthe Other.63

Of course, this promising fragment, which concludes the second part ofOnBelief, raises the question about what iek means by freely assuming theexcess of Life. Unfortunately, he does not concretize this. Moreover, theother expressions in the fragment quoted just above seem to refer to the kindof praxis that is now expected from usnamely, a leap into faith, or an

injunction to live in Christ by means of imitatio Christi. All these remainvague without further specification. Moreover, it is also not immediately clearwhat iek precisely means by projecting/displacing [the excess of Life]onto some figure of the Other, seemingly our usual way to deal with thisexcess. Perhaps a clue is to be found in the last pages ofOn Beliefwhere iekmentions the religious suspension of the ethical. Apart from one referenceto a novel, namely Evelyn Waughs Brideshead Revisited64, this religious sus-pension of the ethical is not concretized either, and, furthermore, it is notimmediately clear how we should understand the link between the religious

suspension of the ethical and the assumption of the excess of life. As a result,iek leaves his readers with a strong feeling of dissatisfaction. For despitehi f i ti l h d l h t i d d b t h



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2.6. ConclusionI wish to conclude this investigation of the theme of the Incarnation in iekswork by showing how iek and the French literary critic and philologist

Ren Girard share a common inspiration. By so doing, it will become clear, Ihope, that ieks intuitions about the Incarnation are neither as peculiar noras far-fetched as may be thought when first encountering them, for they arealso found among other contemporary thinkers, Girard serving as a case inpoint.

Ren Girard has repeatedly and consistently advanced the thesis that thereis a close connection between the sacred and violence.65 There are indeedimportant points of agreement between Girards violence of the sacred andieks excess of life:

1. Both Girard and iek trace the origins of human culture back to themoment when the human animal was contaminated by something,causing that animal to leave the domain of smooth, spontaneous biologicallife and to become truly human.

2. This something, which makes us human, is, according to both thinkers,a too much, an excess. In the case of Girard, it is an excess of violenceand, in the case of iek, it is an excessiveand for this reason also aviolentattachment to a Thing.

3. This excess, although it is indispensable to what makes us human, is also

what most threatens us. As Girard mentions, violence can result in com-plete destruction of human society and, as iek makes clear, the stubbornattachment to a Thing can lead to an addiction at the cost of our ownhealth, well-being or even life itself (which is, by the way, the reason Freudintroduced his concept of the death drive).

4. Furthermore, in both cases, culture (Girards sacrificial order, ieks Lawof culture) aims at restricting and controlling this too much, without,however, ever completely succeeding in that aim. A return to smooth andspontaneous, biological life is impossible. Or, to employ the root metaphor

of Genesis 3, the way back to Paradise has been blocked by the cherubim,and a flaming sword which turns every way (Gen. 3:24).

It is against this background that both Girard and iek interpret the Incar-nation of Christ:

5. Both authors offer an alternative interpretation of sin: sin is the excess bywhich the human being is contaminated.

6. Moreover, they both adopt the traditional view that Christ was without sin(without violence, without excess).

7. But precisely in this way, by being without excess himself, Christ was ableto redeem humankind of its too much, either by showing humanity thet f i l ( Gi d t t ) b h i h it h it



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In this way, both authors reject the traditional view according to which Christwas the sacrifice needed to satisfy Gods honour offended by human sin.

But it is important to understand that ieks account of the incarnation is

not a matter of merely substituting the old, incorrect view (the sacrificial,legalistic one) for a newer, correct one (one which would no longer besacrificial nor legalistic). His point rather is precisely that, within the horizonof Christs death on the cross, this redemptive event could not have been readother than in the wrong waythat is, in the legalistic way, as being asacrifice. Christs death can only become the access to something completelyNew by simultaneously being the absolute culmination point of the Old. So,it is precisely by becoming the ultimate sacrifice that Christ breaches thesacrificial order and inaugurates a life which needs no sacrifice any longer.

For, after Christs Crucifixion, every further sacrifice has become useless forthe single reason that, in Christ, God sacrificed Himself to Himself and, in thisway, the highest sacrifice possible has already been offered.66

3. The End of Gods Transcendence?

In the final section I will evaluate ieks claim that Gods transcendenceends with the Incarnation. In order to proceed with this assessment, I willdiscuss the way iek deals with human self-transcendence and raise the

question of whether his work leaves any room for some form of superiortranscendence, as identified by William Desmond. As already noted above,human self-transcendence can be designated as the self-surpassing powerof the human being. This self-surpassing power can, according to iek,

be linked with the movement of desire. Despite the fact that the movement ofdesire also underlies the ever-accelerating pace of human cultural evolution,iek claims that it is a secondary phenomenon, principally because it is away of dealing with a much more fundamental manifestation of the drive;namely, the stubborn attachment characterizing the human being, the excess

of freedom that can never again be integrated into smooth, biological life.Desire comes into being when the invention/intervention of the Law placesthe impossible object of the drive into an inaccessible Beyond as a forbiddenThing. In this way, iek appears to advance a kind of Feuerbachian theory ofprojection: his theory of desire, in other words, seems to imply that thesuperior transcendence of the Divine Thing is the result of the projection ofthe impossibility inherent in human existence into an inaccessible Beyond.Perhaps this is what iek means when he speaks about projecting/displacing [the excess of Life] onto some figure of the Other. With his plea

for a transition from the Thing to the objet petit a, and from tragic desire tolove/drive, iek seems to be placing himself in the line of the Left Hege-li f i t i th li f F b h iti f li i j ti



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longer stands accused, but is, on the contrary, commended. Indeed, iekadopts Christianityat least its teaching on the Incarnationas an importanttool in his own critical endeavours.

According to Jason Glynoss analysis of ieks anti-capitalism, there is adirect link between the way the subject of desire moves from the one substi-tute for the impossible/forbidden Thing to the next, and the way that thesubject of capitalism endlessly consumes one commodity after the other.67

Thus, as iek expects, breaking away from the logic of desire will enable abreak with capitalism. And since Christianity offers us, at least according toiek, the eminent example of such a break with the logic of desire, heconsiders Christianity as a main source for the anti-capitalist struggle.Indeed, in order to think the revolutionary subject iek falls back on Chris-

tianity. Initiallyfor instance in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)iekmerely stated that a revolutionary praxis asks for a moment of decision whichcan be compared with the leap of faith and he used the example of thefamous Pascalian wager to illustrate this point.68 Yet, in his more recent work(from the 1999 The Ticklish Subject onwards), the content of Christianity has

become increasingly central to ieks work. As Michael Moriarty observesin his discussion of ieks use of religion, were it not for theological notionsiek would not (or no longer) be able to analyse the contemporary situationof the subject.69 Thus, where initially he only saw an analogy between the

believer and the revolutionary subject, as being two species of the samegenus, in ieks more recent work he analyses the latter in terms of theformer.70 It may not come as a surprise, then, that in the introduction to TheFragile Absolute iek pleads for an alliance between Christianity and Marx-ism.71 In the introduction to The Puppet and the Dwarf, he is even more explicit.There he claims that [the subversive kernel of Christianity] is accessible onlyto a materialist approachand vice versa: to become a true dialectical mate-rialist, one should go through the Christian experience.72

Thus, Christian faith seems to be used by iek as a tool to think the

possibility of an anti-capitalist praxis. For iek, humans will be able to breakaway from the logic of capitalism by giving up the logic of tragic desire andre-entering the domain of the drive and the domain of love. Such praxis isdescribed by him in the following terms: freely assuming the excess of Life,leap into faith, to live in Christ, imitatio Christi and religious suspen-sion of the ethical. Unfortunately, as already outlined above, iek leavesone almost entirely in the dark about what such praxis of freely assumingthe excess of Life could mean in actual practice. The example he offers ofBrideshead Revisited does not go very far towards clarifying this issue.

What is clear, however, is that the transition from desire to drive implies acomplete abandonment of any superior transcendence. Indeed, all superiort d b th th t l i t d f th J d



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many appearances of the Thing preserving the logic of desire and, therefore,modern capitalism. As a result, re-entering the domain of the drivewhich isnothing other than the domain of the closed circular palpitation which finds

satisfaction in endlessly repeating the same failed gesturecannot butimply a radical ontological closure. Leaving the domain of tragic desirerequires relinquishing the belief that there is some radical Otherness whichmakes our universe incomplete. Or, to put it differently, entering thedomain of the drive means renouncing every opening, every belief in themessianic Otherness.73 iek thus effectively denies any and all superiortranscendence.

ieks claim that one has to abandon every form of superior transcen-dence in order to make a definitive break with capitalism raises two major

questions. (1) On the one hand, is iek not merely (mis)using Christianityby putting it in service to his own critical endeavours? Perhaps one may eventake the risk here of charging iek with using Christianity, interpreted alongHegelian and Lacanian lines, as the ancilla of his Marxist aspirations. More-over, ieks handling of the Christian legacy raises serious methodologicalquestions. The same applies, it should be noted, with regard to Girardswork. The fact that both authors pretend to be able to offer the one truemeaning of the Christ-event (as non-sacrificial), implying that generations ofChristians were (and still are) mistaken (by thinking it was a sacrifice), seems,

at best, highly problematic.(2) On the other hand, there is also the question whether proclaiming theend of superior transcendencesincluding utopias such as the Kingdom ofGod or the classless societydoes not end up precisely advancing capi-talism instead of combating it. Might not the absence of alternatives for thecurrent capitalist status quo be contributing to the post-revolutionary climatecharacterizing contemporary Western culture? Moreover, in what way canthe subject of drivelocked up as it is in its eternal, circular movementever become the basic unit of a new revolutionary movement? And is the

problem of capitalism not, by contrast, more accurately described as aproblem of perverted desire, of desire disconnected from a superiorly tran-scendent aim, rather than a problem of desire as such? Are we therefore notin need of a truly superior transcendence in order to heal our desire and ourworld from the onslaught of capitalism?

On this last point hinges a major difference between iek and Girard.iek claims that the Incarnation of Christ should be understood as thecomplete abolishment of Gods transcendence. For on his view God is justthe excess of Life projected onto some figure of the Other; Christ thereby

frees us from this Divine Thing and this liberation must lead to the abolish-ment of all (superior) transcendences. For Girard, by contrast, Christ revealsth t h t f th t l i t d th t l t d t



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violence himself, thereby truly transcending our violence. So, in contradis-tinction to iek, Girard seems to leave room for transcendence. A provi-sional conclusion may therefore be as follows: in regard to both for the

struggle against capitalism and for Christianity, the work of Girard seems tobe, at least at first sight, more promising than that of iek. But, of course,further investigation, both of Girard and of iek, is necessary before we candraw out that conclusion in more definitive ways. That task, however, is thework of another essay.

NOTES

1 Thomas Luckmann, Shrinking Transcendence, Expanding Religion?, Sociological Analysis,

Vol. 51 no. 2 (Summer 1990), pp. 127138.2 Slavoj iek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York, NY: Verso, 1989), p. 7.3 Slavoj iek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London and New

York, NY: Verso, 1999).4 Slavoj iek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London

and New York, NY: Verso, 2000).5 Slavoj iek, On Belief(London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2001).6 Slavoj iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 2003).7 Slavoj iek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion

(London and New York, NY: Verso, 2001).8 William Desmond, Hegels God: A Counterfeit Double? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 34.

9 Luckmann, p. 128.10 Tjeu van Knippenberg, Transcendence and Personal History/Life Stories, in Hans-Georg

Ziebert et al. (eds), The Human Image of God (Leiden, Boston, MA, and Kln: Brill, 2001),p. 263.

11 All descriptions taken from John Bussanich, Plotinuss Metaphysics of the One, in LloydP. Gerson (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996), p. 38; except for the second one, which is taken from Dominic J. OMeara,Plotinus: An Introduction to the Enneads (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 52.

12 David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought. Second edition, edited by D. E. Luscombeand C. N. L. Brooke (London and New York, NY: Longman, 1988), p. 34.

13 Louis Dupr, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (NewHaven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 163.

14 To refer to the famous answer given by French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-SimonLaplace to Napoleons question why God was absent from his system: Sire, I have no needof that hypothesis.

15 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. trans. and edited by Paul Gruyer and Allen W. Wood(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 117 (= B XXX).

16 Eric von der Luft, Sources of Nietzsches God is dead! and its Meaning for Heidegger,Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 45 no. 2 (1984), p. 269.

17 Deland Anderson, The Death of God and Hegels System of Philosophy, Sophia: Interna-tional Journal for Philosophical Theology and Cross-cultural Philosophy of Religion, Vol. 35 no. 1(1996), p. 37.

18 Desmond, Hegels God, p. 206 (second emphasis in quotation added).19 Ibid., p. 207.

20 Ibid., p. 88 (my emphasis).21 This is most explicitly done in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, pp. 5051.22 iek The Fragile Absolute pp 157158 See also: Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? p 45



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26 iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 110.27 Ibid., p. 170.28 iek, On Belief, p. 131.29 Ibid., p. 95.

30 Ibid., pp. 129130 and 132.31 Ibid., pp. 130131.32 This is further illustrated by iek, in his typical style, with some references to movies:

[Christ] is fully human, inherently indistinguishable from other humans in exactly thesame way Judy is indistinguishable from Madeleine in [Hitchcocks] Vertigo, or the trueErhardt is indistinguishable from his impersonator in [Alan Johnsons] To Be Or Not To Be[1983][. . .] (Ibid., p. 90).

33 Ibid., p. 131.34 Ibid., pp. 8990.35 iek, The Ticklish Subject, pp. 3637.36 Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London and New York,

NY: Routledge, 1997), p. 46.

37 iek, On Belief, pp. 103104. Life thus loses its tautological self-satisfactory evidence: itcomprises an excess which disturbs its balanced run (p. 102). Life becomes marked/stained by an excess, containing a remainder which no longer fits the simple life process.To live no longer means to pursue the balanced process of reproduction, but to getpassionately attached or stuck to some excess, to some kernel of the Real, whose role iscontradictory: it introduces the aspect of fixity or fixation into the life processman isultimately an animal whose life is derailed through the excessive fixation to some traumaticThing (pp. 102103). As a result, human life is never just life, it is always sustained by anexcess of life (p. 104).

38 iek, The Ticklish Subject, pp. 3637.39 As iek puts it: The ultimate function of the symbolic Law is to enable us to avoid the

debilitating deadlock of drivethe symbolic Law already reacts to a certain inherent

impediment on account of which the animal instinct somehow gets stuck and explodes inthe excessive repetitive moment, it enables the subject to magically transform this repetitivemovement through which the subject is stuck with and for the drives cause-object, into theeternal open search for the (lost/prohibited) object of desire (iek, On Belief, pp. 9798).

40 What iek designates as the universalization of addiction (Ibid., p. 102).41 For a first acquaintance with jouissance, I refer the reader to Frederiek Depoortere, Jouis-

sance fminine? Lacan on Berninis The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa Versus Slavoj iek on Lars vonTriers Breaking the Waves, in Lieven Boeve, Hans Geybels, and Stijn Van den Bossche (eds.),Encountering Transcendence: Contributions to a Theology of Christian Religious Experience(Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2005), pp. 3234.

42 The being of pleasure may then go back to an identification with an object, simultaneouslyit only lives by (and as) the distance that it keeps from it. . . . The function of the thing is

thus as paradoxical as double: it shows how the being of pleasure is both its object and itsrelation to that object. See Marc De Kesel, Eros & ethiek: Een lectuur van Jacques LacansSminaire VII (Leuven en Leusden: Acco, 2002), pp. 115116 (my translation).

43 iek, On Belief, p. 97.44 Philippe Van Haute, Against Adaptation: Lacans Subversion of the Subject (New York, NY:

Other Press, 2002), p. 151.45 iek, On Belief, p. 89.46 Ibid.47 Ibid., p. 89 and pp. 9091.48 Ibid., p. 90 and p. 92 respectively.49 Ibid., p. 90.50 Ibid.

51 Ibid., p. 94. Yet, it is important to understand iek correctly: This does not mean that [thepartners] ordinary (pathological, in the Kantian sense of the term) flesh-and-blood body istransubstantiated into a contingent embodiment of the sublime impossible Thing, holding



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turning it into the endlessly repetitive circular movement around the object, is not the gapthat separates the void of the Thing from its contingent embodiments, but the gap thatseparates the very pathological object from itself (pp. 9495).

52 Ibid., p. 99.

53 Ibid., p. 95.54 Ibid., p. 105. See also in The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 22: Original Sin [is] the abyssaldisturbance of primeval Peace, the primordial pathological Choice of unconditional attach-ment to some specific object (like falling in love with a specific person who, thereafter,matters to us more than anything else).

55 iek, On Belief, pp. 99100.56 Ibid.57 Ibid., p. 100.58 Moreover, even in that case the comparison to money seemingly does not hold good. For,

within pre-symbolic nature, money is less than other objects (it has no use value). Christ, bycontrast, does not seem to lack anything within the realm of pre-symbolic nature. So theconclusion seems justified that Christ is not completely as money.

59 Ibid., p. 91.60 Ibid., p. 90.61 iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 80.62 iek, On Belief, p. 140.63 Ibid., p. 90.64 Ibid., p. 149: At the novels end, Julia refuses to marry Ryder (although they have both

recently divorced their respective partners for that very reason) as part of what she ironicallyrefers to as her private deal with God: although she is corrupt and promiscuous, perhapsthere is still a chance for her if she sacrifices what matters most to her, her love for Ryder . . .The religious suspension of the ethical thus consists in a purely negative gesture ofmeaningless sacrifice, of giving up what matters most to us and God, iek adds, isultimately the name for such a completely meaningless gesture (p. 150).

65 See, for instance, Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred (London: Athlone Press, 1988) andThings Hidden since the Foundation of the World (London: Athlone Press, 1987).66 iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 81 and p. 103.67 Jason Glynos, Symptoms of a Decline in Symbolic Faith, or, ieks Anti-capitalism,

Paragraph, Vol. 24 no. 2 (July 2001), p. 87: The suggestion here is that Lacans logic of desireand the logic of capitalism share a deep homology in structuring contemporary subjectivity.This is because, just as the subject of capitalism is empty, so too is the subject of desire. In

both cases, the logics are purely formal and independent of the particular concrete contextswherein they function. The discourse ofcapitalism can only have as its main objective the failureto satisfy desire, thereby keeping desire alive, sustaining an insatiable desire for new products, newcommodities, thereby leading to a kind of fetishism of the new whose consequence is theever-expanding frontiers of capitalist market relations.

68 iek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 3840.69 Michael Moriarty, iek, Religion and Ideology, Paragraph, Vol. 24 no. 2 (July 2001), p. 129:The situation is slightly different in ieks more recent work. For here we find explicitlytheological concepts being invoked to theorize the condition of the subject, as if withoutthem the modern predicament of choice could not be analysed.

70 Ibid., pp. 130131: It is clear that the analogy of proletarian and religious commitment is notquite the same as in the earlier work. The former is no longer interpreted merely asresembling the latter, but by means of concepts drawn from the latter.

71 iek, The Fragile Absolute, p. 2.72 iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 6.73 Slavoj iek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York, NY: Verso, 1997), pp. 3031.



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Documents

Incarnation in the Works of Zizek