The Postmodern Guise of Christ

Our focus here is the Christological themes in two recent works, one by Frederiek Depoortere, and the other an exchange between Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank. Because the scope of the works extends far beyond Christology, e.g., Depoortere’s discussion of the scientific aspects of mimesis and Žižek’s scintillating roman-candle-like excursi and interpretations of literature, political theory, popular culture, history, ethics, etc., much will be neglected. Although Depoortere’s excellent book Christ in Postmodern Philosophy begins with a brief study of Gianni Vattimo, which he characterizes as a return to Thomas Altizer’s “Death of God” theology, for sheer practical reasons, we will omit this discussion.

René Girard

The center of Depoortere’s book is the two key elements of René Girard’s theory of religion: the imitative character of human desire and the victimage or scapegoating mechanism (34). Girard claims that desire is always triangular: In spite of a constitutive naïvety about the objective values of things as the source of our desires, in truth, our desires for a certain object are always aroused by an other who directs our attention to that particular object by his or her desire for the object—and it is this which makes the object desireable. The other is thus a shadow presence in the subject’s desiring something; the other is both a model of desire and action as well as the obstacle. For Girard, (envy of?) the other is assigned the dominant role in the account of desire. There is no pure desire of the other, but rather because the other shapes the subject in her desire by reason of modeling a fuller (enviable?) plenitude of life by way of pursuing the desire, the desiring subject aims to take from the other her being, to be the other, while remaining herself. But as long as the other exists as mediating other to the desiring subject, she is an obstacle and a rival. But when the desiring subject acquires the desired object, the aura attached to the object, by reason of the mediation by the other’s desires, dissipates. And the object, thus reduced to its objective qualities, provokes the exclamation: “Is that all it is?!” (38). Although this, Girard believes, demonstrates the absurdity of the triangularity of desire, the desiring subject will not admit this and will not give up the belief in “acquiring the fullness of being through the possession of an object.” Rather, the desiring subject becomes a victim of an endless succession of mediators and/or objects until she may finally hit upon an object that is absolutely inaccessible and forbidden by a mediator. “By doing so, the subject can both save his or her desire and protect him/herself from another disillusion.” Having grown tired of the futile undertaking, yet haunted by a treasure too precious to give up, “he begins to look for a stone which is too heavy to lift—he places all his hopes in that stone and he will waste all his remaining strength on it” (39).

Excursus: Postmodern Feuerbachianism

Before we follow further Depoortere on Girard, we may profitably turn to Depoortere’s sketch of a similar move in Žižek. In both cases, we certainly overhear Feuerbach’s theory of “God” as the deep distinguishing secret of human existence: there is a propensity, a capacity, to infinitize oneself, and to believe in this infinitized aspect of oneself and thus to dissociate and alienate oneself and to identify with this alienated aspect of oneself. This dissociated objectified aspect of oneself in an alien entity displaces the burden of negotiating the infinite aspiration in a hostile environment. For Žižek, this secret lies in the human “drive” (also called “desire”) which is to be distinguished from needs and instincts and ordinary desires. Drive does not aim at an object but rather circles perpetually around it. As such, the person as rooted in drive is always off-balance, because life is never “just life” but sustained by an excess of life. Thus the person is constitutively bound to get attached or addicted to, or...