The Cut of Christ
I am nearing the completion of a short commissioned project that focuses on comparing and contrasting the theology of Joseph Ratzinger and philosophy of Slavoj Žižek.
Those familiar with Žižek might know that, among his many lines of argumentation, he includes a consideration of the philosophical and political importance of Jesus Christ, going as far as to devise his own idiosyncratic Christology, one in which the influence of the philosophy of G.W.F Hegel and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, and ultimately the “death of God”, loom large. As such, one key point of comparison within the project centres on their respective Christologies.
Žižek’s Christology makes much of what psychoanalysis calls “the Big Other”, which can be loosely described as the object to which all our desires, energies and being are oriented towards. This “Big Other” has such power over us because, it plays the role of the Father in Freud’s notion of psychoanalysis.
In Freud’s schema, the Father’s role comes in the form of imposing laws and taboos which prevent someone from having full sexual access to its mother. In Freud’s schema, the subject undergoes a “castration”, a cutting off from that full access. This has a twofold effect. On the one hand, through the cut, the person comes to know of itself as a subject through those laws and taboos. on the other hand, the person is also, in a sense, incomplete, and thus seeks fullness by being constantly oriented towards that which imposed the law and taboos (ie the Big Other).
This is then given a linguistic twist in Lacan, for which the laws and taboos function as a symbolic economy through which the subject comes to make sense of himself and the immediate world around him. This immediate world Lacan calls “the imaginary”, because it only has semblances of fullness. True fullness lies beyond the imaginary and even the symbolic economy, in what he calls “the Real”. So in Lacan’s terms, all subjects, because they are mediated subjects, are always in some ways, cut from the Real.
In both cases, what occurs is that our identities, desires, investments and directions are the products of someone else’s act of castration, and are governed by some form of lack imposed by this “Big Other”.
Žižek’s contribution to the literature has been identifying the many ways - whether it is in pieces of confectionary, movies or metaphysical thinking - in which this constant orientation is regrettable, yet unavoidable. Regretable because this orientation to the Big Other always constitutes a form of dependency. Unavoidable because all attempts at so called liberation, have in spite of their best efforts, been unable to fully jettison this Big Other. That is, at least, until the Christ Event.
In his Christology, Žižek posits Christ as someone, because he is divine, identifies with the Big Other of God the Father, who imposed on us subjects the law and all its concomitant relations of debt. At the same time, because he is also human, he identifies with us as subjects.
The crucial juncture comes when Žižek considers the importance of Christ’s crucifixion, which he details in The Monstrosity of Christ. Like orthodox Christianity, Žižek sees this culmination of the passion as the fulcrum of our salvation. Unlike orthodox Christianity however, Žižek’s notion of salvation that Christ puts into effect involves completing the cutting off of oneself from the Big Other.
Žižek makes much of Christ’s cry of dereliction on the cross. What happens in that moment, Žižek argues, is that Christ finally comes to an important realisation, that God cannot save us. In his cry of dereliction, Christ fully embraces his status as fully abandoned by God.
Strangely, orthodox Christianity seems to follow Žižek here. Ratzinger calls this cry of dereliction the mark of the status of a “forsaken creature”. Even more surprisingly, G.K. Chesterton (whom Žižek frequently refers to in his own work), takes this one step further. In his cry of dereliction, Chesterton says in his Orthodoxy that God “seemed for an instant to be an atheist”.
Building on orthodox Christianity, Žižek then argues that Christ represents the crucial step towards the path of true atheism, because Christ manifests God’s cutting of oneself from God. Departing from orthodox Christianity, however (the result of his reliance of Hegel), Christ then passes that cut through to us in the form of what he calls “the holy spirit in the community of believers”. What this makes the church then the vehicle of salvation, comes in the form of bringing together the community abandoned by God, and realising that salvation must “come from ourselves”.
While fascinating, the contrast with orthodox Christianity cannot be starker. While this Hegelian and Lacanian reading yields a Christ who completes the cut from God, something very different happens in orthodox Christianity. As I argued in Redeeming Flesh, Christ does advance our status as human subjects, but unlike Žižek, orthodox theology says that Christ does this by not only fully embracing his forsakenness, but in the face of that nothingness of forsakenness, he does not play the role of the Lacanian analysand. Instead, he takes the role of high priest, offering up that nothingness (that all being tends towards) back to the Father, in whom all being actually finds its fulfilment.
Liberation then comes not from an abandonment of dependency, but realising that freedom comes from our dependency on the abundance of the Father.
If you enjoyed reading this and would like to see more, check out Matthew Tan’s other works on LinkTree.
