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11. Militant Love: Zizek and the Christian Legacy
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171 ∞∞ Militant Love Zizek and the Christian Legacy TYLER ROBERTS What can one make of episodes like this, unforeseen, unplanned, out of character? Are they just holes, holes in the heart, into which one steps and falls and then goes on falling? —J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello Acts and Passages When scholars invoke the ‘‘turn to religion’’ in Continental philosophy , they generally are referring to a trajectory of phenomenological thought rooted in Heidegger and developed most prominently by Levinas, Marion, and Derrida. But today the question of religion is arising in new ways in other Continental thinkers, notably in the Marxist and Lacanian work of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek. We should proceed carefully before calling this another ‘‘turn to religion.’’ For one thing, both Badiou and Zizek position themselves in staunch opposition to phenomenological postsecularism and its ethics of the other. In contrast to the messianism of this ethics, Badiou’s and Zizek’s commitment to Marxist politics leads them to focus on radical change in the present and on the importance of community and universalism. For his part, Badiou argues that he really has no interest in ‘‘religion’’ per se, but rather appeals to St. Paul and offers significant readings of Pauline love, hope, and faith in order to extract their ‘‘secular’’ meaning for a world in which, he thinks, the ‘‘fables’’ of religion can no longer exert a serious claim. Zizek’s case, however, is perhaps more complex. Zizek agrees with Badiou that the particular form of universalism first articulated by Paul can ground a contemporary anti-liberal and anti-capitalist politics. But his interest in Paul extends to Chris- Tyler Roberts 172 tianity more generally and to the complex relationship between Judaism, Christianity, and Marxist materialism. Most importantly, it extends to the claim that Christian love—agape—is the key to radical politics. It is this ‘‘turn to agape’’ that I want to explore here. Badiou and Zizek theorize radical change in terms of a revolutionary break from established social and historical structures of meaning and value: Badiou calls the break the ‘‘Event’’; Zizek calls it the ‘‘Act.’’ For Zizek, though, there is much more than a difference in terminology here. Badiou, he argues, fails to theorize adequately the ‘‘passage’’ from the revolutionary break of Act/Event to new meaning and commitment, a passage Zizek attempts to theorize through the psychoanalytic category of ‘‘sublimation.’’ Basically, sublimation , for psychoanalytic theory, is ‘‘the process by which the energy of the drives is taken up and directed toward ‘higher,’ more creative aims.’’1 Sublimation , in other words, is the process by which meaning and subjectivity is created from the meaningless, machine-like movement of the drives. What is it about Zizek’s understanding of sublimation that he thinks distinguishes him from Badiou? And what is the role of love in this ‘‘passage’’ from the Act? These questions are my focus here. Zizek’s thinking on this has gone through at least two phases. In The Ticklish Subject, Zizek argues that where Badiou focuses on the reconstruction of the symbolic order in fidelity to the Event—Badiou calls this reconstruction a ‘‘truth-procedure’’—Zizek follows Lacan by stressing the ‘‘symbolic death’’ of the break itself.2 This has important consequences for their views of subjectivity , according to Zizek. Badiou claims that we only really become ‘‘subjects’’ when, in fidelity to the Event, we participate in the creation of new meaning. Zizek, by contrast, argues that the Lacanian position he embraces views the subject as the (negative) Act, the break itself. Here, then, it appears that it is Badiou, not Zizek, who is focused on the passage to new meaning. However, in a more recent engagement with Badiou, Zizek has addressed this issue, in large part, it seems, in response to a reading of Lacan’s negativity offered by Bruno Bosteels. Bosteels contends that by stressing the negativity of the break, Lacan is forced to denounce as ‘‘illusory’’ every effort to forge a passage beyond it with the creation of a new order.3 Any sublimation, then, any new meaning emerging from the break, will be grounded in a false consciousness that represses or distorts the fundamental negative reality. But Zizek counters Bosteels by claiming that Lacanian ‘‘sublimation’’ is the movement from the ‘‘shattering encounter of the Real,’’ in the Act, to ‘‘the ensuing arduous work of transforming this explosion of negativity into a new order’’ (PS 177). But this sounds a lot like Badiou as Zizek described him in...