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8. Žižek and the Failure of the Subject
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8 ŽIŽEK AND THE FAILURE OF THE SUBJECT ■ The psychoanalytic problematic concerning identification and its failure is, if anything, more pertinent than ever in today’s world. —Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek The somewhat recent claim of Žižek to speak to the religious academy as a “theologian,” more precisely as a Christian thinker, has unsettled traditional practitioners of the profession. Žižek’s exchanges with John Milbank, the would-be guardian of orthodox Christianity against secularist postmodernism, in the volume entitled The Monstrosity of Christ, and his impromptu monologue about the “death of God” (which was supposed to be a dialogue) on the same platform with Altizer at the American Academy of Religion meeting in November 20091 have both entranced the field and left many scratching their heads. Even more puzzling is Žižek’s declaration on the book jacket of The Monstrosity of Christ: “My claim is that it is Milbank who is effectively guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism; in my paganism, I am more Christian than Milbank.” Here Žižek, of course, is making a claim similar to that of Altizer, whom he discovered not too long before propounding this position. But what makes Žižek’s recent forays into topic areas that European philosophers since Hegel have left largely untouched is the implications of his arguments and statements for the problem of religious theory rather than theology. Like Derrida a generation earlier, Žižek has cultivated his own kind of celebrity presence by relentlessly S O U R C E S 166 applying a novel theoretical procedure—the Lacanian analysis of the split subject as applied simultaneously to popular culture, neo-Marxist politics, and the history of modern philosophy—in a repetitious manner that gorges itself routinely on the intellectual fads and fashions of the day by means of an endless juggernaut of published books and articles. However, what does, and most likely will, endure as Žižek’s legacy is his resuscitation of German idealism as the authentic precursor of postmodern philosophy.2 His omnivorous Lacanianism will most likely fade into the historical background of ideas. Yet as a result we will perhaps realize once and for all that the road routinely followed from Kant through Kierkegaard to Heidegger and beyond makes a fateful , but barely noticed, bend in its brief, initial passage from the critical philosophy to Hegel. The occasion for this fateful turn is the philosophy of Schelling, whom Žižek regards as the true wild card in the career of “ontotheology.” Prior to Žižek, Schelling, a contemporary of all the German idealists, was regarded largely as a strange sidebar to the philosophical revolution of the Napoleonic era, or at most the missing link in the patrimony of Hegelianism. The “Barred” Subject Nevertheless, it was not Kierkegaard’s assertion of the absolute primacy of Existenz as the original foil to Western philosophy’s inveterate logocentrism, but Schelling’s insistence on an Ungrund, a “Not-ground,” a “God before God” that is responsible both for the creative nature of God and the historic-conceptual process of opposition , strife, and differentiation that makes possible the overcoming of metaphysics and the inauguration of the age of signification. Žižek obviously over-Lacanizes Schelling. There is far more to the odyssey of Schelling’s work and its long-term effects than Lacan’s radical Freudianism can freight. But in the current sepulchral twilight of the once scintillating poststructuralist project, which fronted for Lacan for a long while just as Marxism fronted for Hegel, Žižek’s persistence has forced us to confront not the arbitrariness so much as the lack of intellectual transparency commonly attributed to postmodern thought. So much of Žižek’s exposition of Schelling, if we bracket the Lacanian lense through which he reads most of his sources, derives from the latter’s key statement in his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom that “the law of the ground [Gesetz des Grundes] is just as original as the law of identity.”3 What Žižek [3.239.214.173] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:45 GMT) Ž I Ž E K A N D T H E FA I L U R E O F T H E S U B J E C T 167 adds to the postmodern “dialectic,” which runs the entire gamut from the Hegelian negation of the negation, to Derridean différance as the anomaly of the passage from utterance...