Amid 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
In his short book, The Justice of God, James Dunn briefly outlines how part of our understanding of “justification by faith” was obscured during the Reformation. Becoming overly individualistic, exceedingly introspective, and excessively judicial in imagery, Dunn argues, the doctrine lost its communal and relational focus. Dunn goes on to point out that for Martin Luther, God was to be feared, not loved. While Luther was an Augustinian monk, situated within a Roman Catholicism of indulgences and purgatory, his conscience ached with guilt over his sin before “the justice of God,” i.e., that God punishes all unrighteousness. But under a prolonged reading of Romans, grappling with the strange manner in which Paul refers to “the justice of God” as a means of salvation, Luther made his critical “discovery.” He realized that the decisive (f)act of God is not that He is “Just” (condemning the wicked), but that He is also “Justifying” (acquitting the wicked). From this emerged his doctrine of “justification by faith” not by works, buttressed by the attendant theories of substitutionary atonement and imputed righteousness. However, Dunn has argued that Luther read much of his own medieval Roman Catholicism into Paul’s letters and distorted what the Apostle was really saying. Luther assumed Paul had gone through the same agonies of conscience and guilt over sin before a blameless and just God. Luther further assumed that Judaism, like his own Catholic Church, was a legalistic religion of human striving, or works righteousness. From these Luther reasoned that the doctrine of “justification by faith,” by which he received God’s Righteousness, set him free from the system of earning God’s favor.
The problem with Luther’s likely assumptions, as Dunn and others have recently contended, is that Paul does not read as if he is plagued by a guilty conscience, and Judaism does not read much like a works-based religion. Paul nowhere sounds like he has a guilty conscience before God because of his sins. Instead he says he was blameless in regards to righteousness within the law. Also, the Judaism of Paul’s day, and the one we read about in the Old Testament, was based in God’s gracious election of Israel, His giving of the Law as a means of a covenant relationship, and His continued dwelling with His people Israel even in the midst of their sin. The frequent prophetic recollection of God’s continuing righteous actions toward an unworthy nation bear witness to this. Thus, in significant ways, Luther retrojected his context back into Paul’s situation, and distorted “justification by faith” by turning it into a doctrine focused on personal salvation. This distinction facilitated an Enlightenment and modernity conceived and experienced as a radically individualistic revolt.
Israel’s Desire and Law’s Degeneration
Luther, however, was not the only one who misunderstood God’s purposes concerning salvation. Within Paul’s context, the doctrine of “justification by faith” is not meant simply to answer the question “How is one saved?” but rather “Who is in the covenant community of God?” As N.T. Wright notes, “The purpose of the covenant was never simply that the creator wanted to have Israel as a special people, irrespective of the rest of the world. The covenant was there to deal with the sin, and bring about the salvation, of the world.” The point of the covenant was the restoration of God’s righteousness in the world and the reconstitution of humanity to its radical potential. However, Wright explains that during Paul’s time,
…while Gentiles are discovering covenant membership, characterized by faith, Israel, clinging to the Torah which defined covenant membership, did not attain to the Torah. She was determined to have her covenant membership demarcated by works of Torah, that is, by the things that kept that membership confined to Jews and Jews only, and, as a result, she did not submit to God’s covenant purposes, his righteousness.
This brings us full circle, back to Žižek: Israel’s vicious cycle of Law and Desire did not deal with sin and guilt as Luther believed (and as many Protestants still do). The Law was certainly the cause/obstacle which sustained their Desire, but the object of this Desire was not what the Law forbade. Rather, their object of Desire was initially God, who gave them the Law. But covenant Law degenerated into the symbolic Law when Israel allowed her Desire for God to collapse into the maintenance of a boundary distinguishing Israel from the Gentiles, becoming a justification of Jewish nationalism. The maintenance of Law became their object of desire, which led to their failure to attain the universal purposes of God. The logic of the Law was inverted from its universal intention, degenerating into a boundary delineating Jewish particularity.
Paul’s Doctrine of Justification
For Paul the issue at stake in the doctrine of “justification by faith” is not primarily one of soteriology (how one might be saved), but of ecclesiology (how we define the church or covenant community). As Dunn writes, “the Christian doctrine of justification by faith begins as Paul’s protest not as an individual sinner against Jewish legalism, but as a protest on behalf of Gentiles against Jewish exclusivism.” Paul’s Damascus road experience was a conversion from a ‘zealous’ attachment to Israel’s distinctiveness preserved by Law, particularly as expressed through circumcision and dietary rules. Paul was a rigid nationalist who had forgotten that Israel’s election was meant for the benefit of the Gentiles also, not for their exclusion. But through his dramatic encounter with Jesus, Paul was converted from the particularity of the nation of Israel, to the particularity of Jesus, the God-man through whom the universality of God’s intention was restored.
Justification by faith for Paul was therefore not merely the conviction that sinners cannot rely on their own merit to earn God’s favor, although Paul would certainly agree with this. Rather, it is the conviction that God’s grace is no longer limited to a particular people (i.e., those who follow the Law), but that through faith God’s goodness and mercy are made universal to all peoples, regardless of social and ethnic hierarchy. Through Christ, all are justified, because God’s grace is not locked into a certain people, but mediated through a certain person, our Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Messiah, Savior.
Christ’s Universal Community
This, then, is the “break out” of Christianity—the formation of an alternative community. Beyond the structural antagonisms, differences, and desires of consumer Capitalism which splinters race, class, and gender, the universality of humankind is realized and revealed in the community gathered around the particular man, Jesus. It is through faith in this work of the particular Jesus that we are un-coupled from social hierarchies, not merely through Žižek’s Love beyond Desire. Israel affirmed the universality of God through the particularity of their human community according to Law. Žižek, denying God, affirms the universality of mankind beyond the Law through Love. But Christians affirm the universality of mankind through faith in the particularity of God, i.e., the particular identification of Jesus as divine. This community is based in Christ, through whom the law of sin and death, desire and difference, has been destroyed. In Him community is uncoupled from antagonistic relationships, and humanity is freed from oppressive social hierarchies to the universality of God’s design.
Or, put another way, only through an individual can individualism—that menace of modernity—be subverted. Only through the particular man can we enter a community beyond the particular differences of mankind. If Luther is a type of consumer individualist, and the Judaism of Paul’s day is a type of global, tribal sectarianism, then the community of Christ breaks out of both, fusing the particularity of the man Jesus with the universality of God’s grace to all humanity. Christ is the only basis for a revolutionary politics beyond the Capitalist production of desire. He is the only basis of an alternative politic which can “ease the grip of the liberal-capitalist hegemony.”
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