the New Pantagruel

A Revolutionary Community: Repositioning Justification by Faith

by Geoff Holsclaw

mid the onslaught of New Age spirituality and a surfacing religious awareness in the 21st Century, what is a poor ‘dialectical materialist’ to do? When Capitalism is taken for granted as a force of nature, where might an ailing Marxist find support? For Slavoj Žižek, shelter is found under the wings of an unlikely source. In his latest book, The Fragile Absolute, Žižek contends that the most important repositioning in these ‘postmodern times’ should and will be a reconciliation between Christianity and Marxism. The Fragile Absolute is remarkable for its unbridled attempt to appropriate the subversive core of the Christian legacy as a means of breaking out of the logic of Capitalism: the desire of “unbridled productivity” and “unbridled consumption.” Though Žižek succeeds in surprising ways, his work ultimately fails because he is unable to fully appropriate the Christ of Christianity.

A Revolutionary Community

Žižek argues that Marx was not radical enough in his break from Capitalism because he shared with Capitalism the goal of unbridled productivity. “Socialism failed because it was ultimately a subspecies of capitalism, an ideological attempt to ‘have one’s cake and eat it,’ to break out of capitalism while retaining its key ingredient.” Žižek explains that Communism/Socialism is the utopian dream, or fantasy of Capitalism; the desire of limitless productivity which is consumed by limitless desire. According to Žižek, Marx’s mistake was to think that the object of desire (unbridled productivity) would remain even when its cause/obstacle (oppressive capitalist social relations) was abolished. However, as the history of Socialism reveals, this was never to be the case. Rather than escaping the logic of Capitalism, Marx extended it into an unrealizable ideal.

The Fragile Absolute takes many twists and turns as Žižek skillfully weaves together Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis to the conclusion that only the Christian legacy “breaks out” of the vicious cycle of Law and Desire. As he notes, “[t]here is always a gap between the object of desire and its cause, the mediating feature or element that makes this object desirable.” This cause/obstacle makes the object desirable; the object is not desirable in or of itself. If you take away the obstacle then the desire dissipates.

Capitalism thrives within the production and maintenance of this cause/obstacle. Christianity escapes this logic not by fulfilling the Desire, or by removing the Law, but by means of Love, which unites the object of Desire and its Cause. “In love, the object is not deprived of its cause; it is, rather, that the very distance between object and cause collapses.” Love is directed toward the object of desire in and for itself, even in spite of itself. Love desires the object, in a sense, in spite of its lack of desirability; Love loves in spite of what it loves, not because of it. This breaking out of the cycle of Law and Desire begets an alternative community, “uncoupled” from social hierarchy and oppressive relationships. The community so created is revolutionary, escaping regulation by the Capitalist production of desire and difference, and instead offering universal humanity to all. This “authentic psychoanalytic and revolutionary political collective” is Žižek’s distillation of Christianity indentured to the rehabilitation of a 20th Century political dream gone bad.

What is to be done with this suggestion? Do we affirm this appropriation of Christianity as a politics of love beyond desire, or reject it as the hopeless task of joining religion and politics? By means of a detour through “justification by faith” I hope to evaluate and critique Žižek’s proposal thereby repositioning and rearticulating the real “break out” of Christianity.

Luther’s Desire and Justification’s Degeneration

All Pages | 1 |  2  |  3