Slavoj Žižek, "The
Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity"
By Harvey Blume
Though born in Slovenia (then part of Yugoslavia) in 1949, Slavoj
Zizek belongs to that most slippery school of recent French thought: he's a
Lacanian. Jaques Lacan, who died in 1981, was a Parisan psychoanalyst whose
tantalizing departures from orthodox Freudianism prompted the English writer
Adam Phillips to label him an "inspired" albeit "bizarre
analyst." Lacan's work resists simple capsulization, but you can get a
taste for the kind of post-Freudian hi-jinks that have made Zizek's high-flying
academic reputation just by taking a good look at the front and back covers of
"The Puppet and the Dwarf."
On the front, we see a reproduction of "The Virgin and the
Christ Child," by Antonio Boltraffio, a student of Leonardo's. The
painting partakes of Da Vinci's humanism, with its comely, curly-headed and
contented baby Jesus being suckled by a gently smiling Virgin. The back cover
is a cryptic rejoinder to all this naive and, as Zizek would have it,
"vulgar" humanism. At its center we see a photograph of a divan from
the Freud Museum in London. It is enclosed on all sides, except the front, and
swaddled with bold tapestries. At the upper left of this striking piece of
furniture, facing the viewer, there hangs a reproduction of Gustave Courbet's
"The Origin of the World," with its realistic rendering of a vagina.
Directly below, reclining on the divan, there is the master of this ceremony,
Zizek himself.
One obvious question might be, why pay mind to such esoteric stuff?
A simple answer is that there is a flourishing give and take between French
high culture and American mass media. Jean Luc Godard, sees Hollywood gangster
epics and is inspired to make New Wave classics that galvanize a new generation
of American film-makers. Theorist Jean Baudrillard popularizes the concept of a
simulacrum, in which reality plays second fiddle to media representations of
it. Not only does this become all the rage in the academy for a spell; it also
translates into "Wag the Dog," starring Robert De Niro, and "The
Truman Show," starring Jim Carrey. Michel Foucault expands, in
"Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison," upon Jeremy
Bentham's notion of a panopticon, a prison in which activity is monitored from
an all-seeing center. Subsequently, HBO comes out with its prison series,
"Oz," predicated on a panopticon that oversees much more trauma than
it does rehabilitation.
Who, then, would provide the American parallel to the Zizek of
"The Puppet and the Dwarf?" No need to look far. His name, believe it
or not is Mel Gibson. It's not just that both belong to the A list of their
respective systems: Gibson to Hollywood and Zizek to the international academic
circuit. The parallel runs deeper. Both Gibson and Zizek share the same aim: to
reformulate Christianity and boost it to the top of the world's cultural
agenda. We tend to think of the impact of Gibson's "The Passion of the
Christ" as a function of America's peculiar obsession with religion.
Zizek's book indicates that the French are just as likely to relish a bit of
the old-time schism, maybe not at the box office, but in the refined reaches
and elite discourses of the academy.
By now, of course, Gibson's Christ needs no introduction. He's the
messiah who can take a punch, the redeemer who absorbs the worst that
cold-blooded Jews, brutal Romans, and Satan himself throw at him and who still,
when it's over, rises. Some students of American religion -- Stephen Prothero,
for one, author of "Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon"
-- see Gibson's Jesus as a rebuff to America's warm, fuzzy Christs and good
vibe messiahs. Gibson reinstates the edifying value of ordeal. He calls viewers
back to a harsher faith, when Masses were in Latin and Jews couldn't squirm out
of their share of responsibility for killing the Lord (after all, as Gibson's
said often enough lately, those weren't *Swedes* turning Christ over to Pilate,
were they?)
Zizek's Christ isn't nearly as blood-stained, which doesn't mean
understanding him is necessarily less painless than watching Gibson's Jesus
being mauled and murdered. The truly stunning thing about "The Puppet and
the Dwarf," is that it is far more overtly and dully-wittedly anti-Semitic
than Gibson's movie. The book even raises various anti-Jewish canards Gibson
doesn't have time for, or mercifully, has never heard of. Zizek complains that
Judaism has become "the hegemonic ethico-spiritual attitude of today's
intellectuals." He's thinking of the late Emmanuel Levinas, an influential
philosopher inspired, in part, by the Torah and its commentaries, and of Jaques
Derrida, who has become increasingly engaged with Jewish tradition. What Zizek
wants to do is drive a Christian wedge through this Jewish
"ethico-spiritual" pack by means of a Lacan inspired Christ.
It's demoralizing enough that a supposedly risque thinker such as
Zizek can't come up with anything better to do at the beginning of the
twenty-first century than to rekindle religious rivalry. The way he goes about
it makes it worse. For all of his argument's cultivation of cleverness,
wordplay, and paradox, when it comes to Christianity's relationship to Judaism,
Zizek is an unreconstructed (indeed, a "vulgar") supersessionist.
This means he thinks Christianity isn't sufficient unto itself. Its value
chiefly derives from its claims to improve upon, complete and thereby supersede
Judaism. In the supersessionist view, everything that was latent in Judaism
becomes manifest in Christianity; all that was obscure is revealed. In this
view, Judaism is merely preparation for what was fated to succeed it. Jewish
scripture is a caterpillar, Christian scripture, is, well, you get it.
Supersessionism has been subjected to withering criticism by a host
of Christian writers, including James Carroll in "Constantine's Sword: The
Church and the Jews." But Zizek is not even remotely aware that his view
is contested, or that a Christianity so heavily dependent on knocking Judaism,
or, for that matter, other faiths (Zizek takes swipes at Eastern religions,
too) might thereby be exposing weaknesses of its own.
Zizek's view of religion hardly provides much in the way of
spiritual sustenance to believers, which may be the very thing our sly, ever
mischievous author likes most about it. "The secret to which the Jews
remain faithful," he writes, "is the horror of the divine impotence."
In Zizek's view, Job suffers pointlessly and needlessly. Instead of explaining
why He allowed torture, God changes the subject, blithering and blustering from
out of his whirlwind. Christ goes through a worse ordeal on the cross, and
Christ isn't just mortal. He's also divine, for all the good it does him. With
the crucifixion, God's impotence can no longer be concealed. This is a deity
who can't help himself, much less man, a God who gets himself crucified to
illustrate that very point.
Zizek thinks this idea
constitutes some sort of a theological breakthrough because it is an advance
over Judaism's "obscene obscurities" about a potent deity. Oddly,
though, Zizek's Christ is not so terribly different from Gibson's. Both are too
busy being annihilated (physically, in Gibson's case, spiritually in Zizek's)
to lend humanity a hand.
It's hard to tell if this is a rebirth of Christianity at the start
of a new millennium or a glorified post-mortem.
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