Slavoj Zizek and the Imperial/Colonial Model of Religion

Hegelian Prelude

This earliest form of religion—although one may well refuse to call it religion—is that for which we have the name “magic.” (Hegel 1998a, 226)

The religion of magic is still found today among wholly crude and barbarous peoples such as the Eskimos. (229)

The Negroes have an endless multitude of “divine images” which they make into their gods or their “fetishes.” (234–35)

[Africa] is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it—that is in its northern part—belong to the Asiatic or European World. (Hegel 1988b, 92)

World history goes from East to West: as Asia is the beginning of world history, so Europe is simply its end. In world history there is an absolute East, par excellence (whereas the geographical term “East” is in itself entirely relative); for although the earth is a sphere, history makes no circle around that sphere. On the contrary, it has a definite East which is Asia. It is here that the external physical sun comes up, to sink in the West: and for that same reason it is in the West that the inner Sun of self-consciousness rises, shedding a higher brilliance. (ibid.)

This inner dialectic of civil society thus drives it—or at any rate drives a specific civil society—to push beyond its own limits [colonial expansion] and seek markets, and so its necessary means of subsistence, in other lands which are either deficient in the goods it has overproduced, or else generally backward in industry, &c. (Hegel 1967, 151)

The same consideration justifies civilized nations in regarding and treating as barbarians those who lag behind them in institutions which are the essential moments of the state. Thus a pastoral people may treat hunters as barbarians, and both of these are barbarians from the point of view of agriculturists, &c. The civilized nation is conscious that the rights of barbarians are unequal to its own and treats their autonomy as only a formality. (219)

Introduction

In their efforts to develop a general theory of religion, scholars often employ an evolutionary/hierarchical model. These models became evident at least as early as the eighteenth century and reached their zenith in the nineteenth century. Almost invariably, they exhibit the following schemata: from simple to complex religion, from primitive to civilized, from religions of the South to those of the North, from religions of the East to those of the West, from the religions of Africa, aboriginal Australia, and native America to the religions of Europe. This evolutionary and hierarchical model of religion is more properly called the imperial/colonial model of religion.¹ I shall argue that Slavoj Zizek's recent book The Fragile Absolute, or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (2000a) is a legacy of this model of religion, the most systematic version of which is found in the work of Hegel. I shall argue, further, that Zizek's and Hegel's models share Eurocentric presuppositions—historical, cultural, political, and economic—that are troubling. What I will not argue is that Zizek intends to recapitulate the imperial/colonial model of religion. On the contrary, he stumbles into this model. He does so, precisely, because he does not intend to. He does not think about the ethics and politics of religion and representation at all. Instead, he speaks the “common sense” of his culture, which distinguishes invidiously between Christianity and other religions, viewing Christianity alternately, if not simultaneously, as the height of religious evolution and as a revelation whose very “absurdity” confounds and throws into utter disarray preexisting notions of religion, ethics, and politics. Zizek holds this common sense constant and beyond question—it does not even reach the threshold of critique—as he queries “our” culture's common sense on other matters. What he holds constant, I put into “play.”

The appellation imperial...