Slavoj Zizek skewers the West

Slavoj Zizek continues his exhilarating onslaught on Western thought, this time through an op-ed column in the New York Times. The occasion for this column is the attempt by China to regulate the reincarnation laws of the Buddhist faith, but Zizek uses this focus on the East to skewer the West. He accomplishes this by (1) showing how Western (Christian) states have regulated religion in a similar way, (2) demonstrating how the Chinese government has taken a uniquely Western approach in controlling Tibet, and (3) arguing that Western intellectual sophistication is just as backwards and absurd as the Chinese government. In the end, Zizek succeeds in critiquing modern American intellectualism, political correctness and the doctrine of toleration, and the general Western conception of “culture.” I highly recommend this column.

I want to point out one passage in particular, which deals with the second point listed above. In this column, Zizek brilliantly attacks capitalism, as he often does in his writings. He does so here by looking at the way China attempts to control Tibet:

In recent years, the Chinese have changed their strategy in Tibet: in addition to military coercion, they increasingly rely on ethnic and economic colonization. Lhasa is transforming into a Chinese version of the capitalist Wild West, with karaoke bars and Disney-like Buddhist theme parks.

In short, the media image of brutal Chinese soldiers terrorizing Buddhist monks conceals a much more effective American-style socioeconomic transformation: in a decade or two, Tibetans will be reduced to the status of the Native Americans in the United States. Beijing finally learned the lesson: what is the oppressive power of secret police forces, camps and Red Guards destroying ancient monuments compared to the power of unbridled capitalism to undermine all traditional social relations?

This is the real evil of capitalism: its subversion of all traditional social relations. I am always surprised by the way traditionalist Christians so eagerly defend capitalism. I receive a continuous stream of pro-capitalistic propaganda from family members who are blind to the way capitalism destroys the very social relations they claim to uphold. Capitalism is certainly not an unqualified evil; but its benefits by no means outweigh its destructive global influence.

One last section from this column deserves mention. Zizek closes with a stinging criticism of Western “tolerance” and cultural appreciation, in which he points out that our sophistication is built on a “proper distance” from one’s cultural that allows us to treat culture like an object. Zizek writes:

The significant issue for the West here is not Buddhas and lamas, but what we mean when we refer to “culture.” All human sciences are turning into a branch of cultural studies. While there are of course many religious believers in the West, especially in the United States, vast numbers of our societal elite follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores of our tradition only out of respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong: Christmas trees in shopping centers every December; neighborhood Easter egg hunts; Passover dinners celebrated by nonbelieving Jews.

“Culture” has commonly become the name for all those things we practice without really taking seriously. And this is why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as “barbarians” with a “medieval mindset”: they dare to take their beliefs seriously. Today, we seem to see the ultimate threat to culture as coming from those who live immediately in their culture, who lack the proper distance.

Because we think ourselves capable of surveying the world from an Olympian height, we can treat culture like an object for us to appreciate, but not as an identity that really shapes who we are. Culture is a set of practices that we voluntarily enjoy, but which demand nothing from us. We are lords of our own cultural-religious identity. Is it any wonder, then, that Christianity in modern sophisticated America has become just another cultural object from which we are trained to maintain the “proper distance”?

Slavoj Zizek: living in the desert of the real (part 2)

My former professor of political science at Wheaton College, Ashley Woodiwiss, published an excellent essay on the political-religious thought of Slavoj Zizek in Books & Culture late last year. The title of the essay: “Philosophy at the End of the World: The Gospel According to Slavoj Zizek.” Woodiwiss does a fine job of capturing the sheer idiosyncratic brilliance of Zizek by engaging with some of his more pressing publications—i.e., those which address current issues central to our social existence in a world post-9/11.

Woodiwiss quotes Zizek from his pop-philosophy book, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, on politics after Sept. 11:

[T]he USA, which until now perceived itself as an island exempt from this kind of violence, witnessing it only from the safe distance of the TV screen, is now directly involved. So the alternative is: will the Americans decide to fortify their "sphere" further, or risk stepping out of it? Either America will persist in—even strengthen the deeply immoral attitude of "Why should this happen to us. Things like this don't happen here!" … Or America will finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen that separates it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival in the Real world, making the long overdue move from "A thing like this shouldn't happen here!" to "A thing like this shouldn't happen anywhere!"

Part of the problem, however, is that the U.S. throughout its history has indeed adopted (a version of) the idea: “A thing like this shouldn't happen anywhere!” There is a sense in which anti-Communist America during the Cold War had this kind of pseudo-altruistic spirit. On a certain level, the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war appears similar to this, but Woodiwiss notes, in light of Zizek’s philosophy:

Caught in the grip of this ideology of excess, the U.S. regime has erected a Fortress America model, justifying unilateralism abroad, surveillance at home. What are such moves seemingly (pre-)determining? With the next big terrorist act always imminent, always already en route but never from a known origin, what arises inevitably is the permanent emergency state.

I don’t have time here to expound much upon Zizek’s political thought, especially since Woodiwiss has already done a fine job of this. I will simply conclude by noting a couple phrases in Zizek’s philosophy which I think hold much potential for theological reflection. The following are two statements quoted by Woodiwiss:

An act does not occur within the given horizon of what appears to be 'possible'—it redefines the very contours of what is possible.

The 'utopian' gesture is the gesture which changes the co-ordinates of the possible.

Based on these two statements, we might speak of a “utopian act”—an act which interrupts the framework of present possibilities and reorders reality towards “the construction of a u-topic space, a social space outside the existing parameters, the parameters of what appears to be 'possible' in the existing social universe.” It seems that there are a lot of fruitful connections to theology, particularly the work of Eberhard Jüngel, who views justification by faith as a divine act which also “redefines the very contours of what is possible”; in fact, justification is not only an act of redefinition, but it is in fact an act of reconstitution. Justification is a divine event in which being is remade ex nihilo, in which the contours of actuality are destroyed on the cross and the new horizon of divine possibilities is established instead.

Thus, in his essay, “The World as Possibility and Actuality” (Theological Essays I, 95-123), Jüngel writes:

The absolutizing of actuality and the distinction between the actual and the non-actual as the measure of the world is subject to fundamental critique from the event of justification, a critique which understands the world . . . out of the resurrection of the dead—as creation out of nothing. Theology must establish that the radical nothingness of Good Friday is the other dimension of the being of this world. This is not in order that we may indulge in some profound ontology of nothingness, but rather that we may think of God as the creator and of his creation as justified. Theology does this by establishing the distinction between the possible and the impossible as incomparably more fundamental than the distinction between the actual and the not-yet-actual. Where the distinction between the possible and the impossible is made, we are concerned with truth (as opposed to actuality). The distinction between the possible and the impossible is incomparably more fundamental because it concerns the distinction between God and the world. And in the distinction between God and the world we are not concerned primarily with actuality, but with truth. (110-11)

God is to be thought of out of the event of justification as the one who in the very act of distinguishing himself from the world relates himself to it. In this way he is, and remains, God He has shown himself to exist in this way in the indissoluble unity of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Because of this, there is no true proclamation of the cross which does not take place in the power of the resurrection, and even less is there true proclamation of the risen one which does not proclaim him to be the crucified. The Easter message, the gospel, is the word of the cross. Out of this word, we have to say that God himself is the one who makes the possible to be possible and the impossible to be impossible, and in this distinction between possibility and impossibility lets the world be actual. Beyond the distinction between possibility and impossibility, God himself is equiprimordially both, or, to say the same thing, God is and his being is in becoming. (112)