From Žižek's Monstrous Politics to the Political Theology of Kierkegaard's Housing Project

Slavoj Žižek's leading question is how we are to reformulate a leftist anti-capitalist project in an era of global capitalism. In attempting to answer this question, Žižek often uses Kierkegaard's insights to add weight to his analysis of the problems associated with our social and political reality. Yet when one reads Žižek's work on Kierkegaard one is struck by the sheer number of inconsistencies that are generated. Žižek considers Kierkegaard from the point of view of the political in such a way that he avoids the religious, but Kierkegaard is clear that if a proper politics is to exist, it must be grounded in religious selfhood. The single individual, as Kierkegaard makes clear in Two Ages, is "an essentially human person in the religious sense." Kierkegaard's views are directed by a religious notion of selfhood. Politics without this source is a form of despair. By failing to see ourselves as religious beings, we are in despair. This despair cannot be the basis from which to transform the coordinates of our current position.

Kierkegaard's philosophy provides us with a radical opening from which to re-think political theology from the position of the single individual to come. The program that Žižek upholds is not adequate for the transformation of society or self because it does not have a religious understanding of the individual. As such, Žižek's position is grounded in despair, not love.