Rhetoric, Class, and Christ

The Slovenian cultural critic Slavoj Žižek quips that "every true philosophical dialogue" is but "an interaction of two monologues" (MC, 235). Dialogue, for Žižek, is as tired as political correctness and multiculturalism. Not just tired: the desire for dialogue is a symptom of liberal false consciousness, the explicit commitment to open exchange that elides the presupposed rules and conditions governing that exchange. The liberal pluralist, the Catholic, the Jew, the Hindu, and the Muslim can sit around the campfire and sing songs that celebrate their differences, but they sing to the beat of the liberal pluralist. It is tempting to respond that the insidious hegemony of the liberal pluralist is evaded when the dialogue is goal-oriented, when the participants share a common political aim. The dialogue between Žižek, Judith Butler, and Ernesto Laclau, published as Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, was seemingly motivated by such an aim.¹ But might this pragmatic motivation for dialogue involve a second-order false consciousness? The official motivation is no longer celebrating difference, it is mobilizing for action, but the effect is the same: the desire for action that purports to unite all is the contagious desire of the pragmatist just as the supposedly shared celebration of difference is actually the contagious merriment of the liberal pluralist.

Neither Žižek nor his interlocutor in The Monstrosity of Christ, the Anglo-Catholic theologian John Milbank, wants a dialogue (Milbank penned an article heralding "The End of Dialogue").² Milbank and Žižek share a distaste for the liberal, the pluralist, the pragmatist, the secular, the tolerant—and the capitalist. They share a taste for orthodoxy, for socialism, for provocation, for avant-garde theory, and for Christianity. Milbank tends toward the Catholic, Žižek toward the Protestant; Milbank tends toward the aestheticist, Žižek toward the materialist. If Milbank and Žižek were to wallow in their similarities and differences, or were to consider how to attack similar goals from their different positions, The Monstrosity of Christ would be a dialogue. Žižek can plausibly claim that it is not a dialogue because, although its authors have substantive differences, their primary difference is not on matters of substance. It is, or at least it seems to be, the difference between the two authors' stances toward matters of substance.

Both Žižek and Milbank understand themselves as rhetoricians. Milbank takes the role of the theologian to be that of "out-narrating" the partisans of modernity and postmodernity. Christianity offers a different picture of the world, a peaceful, beautiful picture opposed to both the cold, controlled violence of modernity and the joyous, effervescent violence of postmodernity. The theologian does not speak about this peaceful world; the theologian's words constitute it. Or, more precisely, it is constituted by the words and actions of Christians, doing and saying what Christians say and do. The theologian describes the world and constitutes it at once by speaking true words about God. These true words, like the words of all Christians, constitute in their performance, but the performance of these words is a meta-performance: their content (about Christianity) describes their effects (constituting Christianity as an alternative metanarrative to modernity and postmodernity).

Milbank is also doing something subtler. He is staking out territory distinct from both the poststructuralist and the Hegelian. The territory he is staking out is the territory of theology, the territory of philosophy as theology, a territory that opens up when theology refuses to subordinate itself to "secular reason." Milbank marks this territory with the term "paradox." It is arrived at when we take the equation of the good, the true, and the beautiful seriously. Milbank describes this territory in ontological terms. It refuses both the univocal and the equivocal. He compares it to a misty landscape. On the one hand, the mist envelops everything, makes everything look the same. On the other hand, the mist brings forth each...