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136 theopoetics: the insistence of theology s e v e n Gigantomachean Ethics Žižek, Milbank, and the Fear of One Small Word And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” —Matthew 27:45–46 Žižek’s rereading of Hegel is more radical and disruptive than Malabou ’s. Žižek sees the Hegel of the au revoir coming, the Hegelian Absolute inching its way home through its peregrinations through world history, and he stops it in its tracks. In its place Žižek puts a more deeply doubly negative dialectic, where the Spirit does not come home, where it never had a home, where there never really was a “Spirit.” Adieu to the Spirit, good riddance. No, we will not meet again. No, no, we never met in the first place. Stop trying to recollect something that never happened. In Žižek, the death of God takes the radical form of a Lacanian Good Friday, neither Christian nor speculative-Hegelian, a Calvary of confronting the cold truth the Real deals to us, that nothing is coming to save us and we are on our own. Inasmuch as the chance of death is built into the event of life, this is of no little interest to a theology of “perhaps,” especially as there is the promise of another more spectral Hegel here, of a displacement of the Spirit by a specter, a spectral undead, Žižek’s own es spukt. Hegel prevents the event, the peut-être, from above, by raising it up into a higher divine economy. Malabou finds a way around this only by replacing Hegel with Heidegger at the crucial moment. Žižek prevents the event from below. He unquestionably releases the event from the grip of an overarching divine providence, but he does so by means of a massive metaphysical attack on the old God. He introduces a radical negation so deep that it ends up suppressing the peut-être not from above, not by safely installing negation within the divine economy, but from below, by consigning the event to a fated loss, a fatal forsaken Lacanian lema sabachthani, and to metaphysical violence, constituting a kind of predestination ad infernum. The question Žižek poses for us is this: if as he likes to say “postmodernists” have created gigantomachean ethics 137 a purely “scarecrow” Hegel, has Žižek created a scarecrow of his own? Is Žižek in his own perverse way afraid of one small word? Žižek and the Death of God Žižek’s version of Hegel is sufficiently heretical for anyone’s taste. He denies that the death of God is a moment in the life of God that leads to ultimate reconciliation, resolution, and rebirth. For him, it is atheism redoubled, doubled down, a double negation that does not mean affirmation , but a doubly reinforced negation: no, I repeat, I really mean no. No, and it is worse than that. God is dead and furthermore there never was a God to die anyway (MC, 72).1 If by identifying the plasticity of the Aristotelian theos Malabou has reinvented twentieth-century process theology , Žižek’s double negation has resurrected the atheistic death-of-God theology of the 1960s, which is why he has recently been citing Altizer (MC, 260–67). But Altizer is a much more orthodox Hegelian than Žižek. Altizer is not a Lacanian and he does not share Žižek’s theory of double negation. In Hegel and Altizer, the death of God is God’s coming to life in space and time, the death of the transcendent otherworldly God and the birth of the God with us, the immanent infinite womb of divine life that sustains us. God is dead—long live God. The au revoir of the Father and Son are superseded in a final rendezvous in the Spirit, which is an imaginative religious way to visualize what we philosophers can conceptualize as the movement that takes place in the Absolute, by which an sich sein and für sich sein are mediated and reconciled in the an und für sich sein of the Spirit. But Žižek will have none of that. In Hegel the Spirit is not “somebody” (it’s not a finite being) who “does” things (it’s not a personal agent) but rather an undergirding substance (infinite Being) expressing itself in the subjectivity...

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