Zizek visits Rollins College

Last week my friend, Slavoj Zizek headed to the warm south to visit Rollins College. He was a guest in my Christianity class and lectured on Michelangelo's drawing "Christ on the Cross" in the Cornell Fine Arts Museum. Even tho this was a closed session somehow over a 100 folks showed. His talk focused on the tension that appears between the face (submissive toward the Father) and the right hand (which is showing a sign of contempt toward the Father). This tension gave Slavoj all he needed to go off on his dialectical twists and meditations on the internal division that was introduced within the trinity--the death of Christ becomes the appearing of the unfathomable void that founds subjective freedom via the Holy Spirit. For only within the Holy Spirit can one's individuated singularity appear--and this beomces the imago dei for Zizek. This image, moreover, births a process of simulacrum whereby human beings are deficient copies of divinity (finite substance vs. infinite substance) and being deficient actually turns God himself from a transcendent "removed" substance beyond being into an abyss beyond all properties, that is, a person. Thus, God is not only an essential substance, but also a person (in the subjective sense).

This division allows us to situate the difference between "the God of the philosophers" (i.e. a God of primordial simplicity of the Cause (Aristotle)), and the Trinitarian God that is an unfathomable mystery--the void as such. The void is the dialectical synthesis that sublates both the face and the hand of Christ--it is that which both gives the ground for both obedience and for disobedience--for the positive and the negative that only resoles itself in the spiritual substance of the religious community that is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit thus becomes something like an Alien substance in science fiction (think of the Terminator). This substance cannot be stopped--it may slow down, but finally, it keeps on moving, unfolding and releasing being through itself.

In the final analysis Zizek's view of the Incarnation is indebted to an Ariusian logic whereby the Son's divinity is compromised finally by death--and this, by extension compromises the Father's transcendence such that everything finally empties itself out of the transcendent God-Father and God-Son relation into the spiritual substance of the Holy Spirit. Here Slavoj follows Hegel and Derrida's student and admirable philosoher in her own right, Catherine Malabou.

What we start to envision is a debate afoot that returns us to the founding of Christianity dogma itself: the debate between Arius (Zizek) and Athanasius (Milbank). Will the founding plenitude that keeps exceeding itself beyond substance as such be locatable within Trinitarian relations or is this movement only situated within the immanent horizon of desire organized in the spiritual substance of the Holy Spirit sundered from the father and the son (who have decomposed into the Holy Spirit) the Church.

On Tuesday night, Slavoj lectured to the public on the Neighbor, which is the founding exception of the universal (in a nice Kantian twist). Instead of ethics being founded on a generic universality subtracted from the situation, for Zizek, the universal is itself founded on the abyss of the "undead" Neighbor. The terror of the Other (as totally other) is that on which a true universal ethic works, which gives us a marked relief from Levinas' "face of the other" that secretly hides one's own unchallenged subjective truth. For Levinas, the other always rests on the assumption that the subject must first pick which "other" will appear to them as transcendent. So, Levinas' "transcendent" Other is really a hidden Feuerbachian anthropology that is projected from the Ego into "otherness" without knowing it. By contrast Zizek's other is the horror of the Other that rocks one's subjective 'center-point' off kilter and introduces into the symbolic order something external to itself (as the Real). The Other for Zizek is Other beyond symbolic domesticity. It is interesting to note that both Milbank and Zizek are critical of Levinas in the same way. But their respective "other" (or otherness that resist the status quo etc.) appears in the world differently, very differently. For Milbank the other remains beyond a reductive logic of anxiety that must put the terror of otherness into a domesticated middle-class space. The other transcendes subjectivity and for Milbank, in a radical move, actually found subjectivity as such in the middle between a self-exceeding movement beyond the coagulation of substance (in the pre-Hegelian sense). Milbank's "other" and Zizek "other" are in a way similar: They each resist symbolization or nihilistic domesticity. John's other gives us a way to resist the logic of capitalism (which is more like Levinas's view of otherness that really is constitutive upon subjective choice, that is, pure ideological fantasy!). Why, because there is something that is finally beyond the univocal logic of capitalism that is not what it is--the unknown-unknown! And this is where Zizek's other too relates to John's. They both, in the end of it all, enspouse a logic of the Real beyond substance. In a strange way then, John's "content" too has finally emptied itself into "form" like Slavoj's.

This lecture attracted about 500 folks at Rollins.