The End

Political Theology: The Continental Shift (published by Equinox)

2009-06-29T12:30:00.000-07:00

I am excited about editing a special issue for the Equinox journal, Political Theology . The journal takes seriously the thesis that Political Theology need not submit to Carl Schmitt's anti-Christian distinction between friend and enemy, but is rather radically open to debate; indeed this issue opens the doors of debate about the very nature of Political Theology post Schmitt. Not only does Schmitt's political theology not make sense in our world today, but this issue argues that it never fully made sense ever! Schmitt's indebtedness to Hobbesian demonic version of what constitutes the theoretical space called "the sovereign" needs to be rejected because of its appeal to un-checked violence in the name of state security. By contrast, this issue asks us to re-think the very nature of political theology not in the guise of state security vis-a-vis its threat/enemy etc., but rather by the radical notion of love, of belonging (prior to autonomy), of risk! Thus the thesis of this issue is that there is no one version that defines Political Theology as such, but a debate that resists a vulgar reduction down to a singular and absolutist view of "the Political" or "the Theological". Political Theology is thus an inherently dynamic process and not a status boring reruns of the same episode called "the State".

In this issue we have contributions from some of the most brilliant philosophers, theologians, and critics alive today.

Toni Negri contributes a piece he wrote in prison in 1999 on Jacob Taubes's view of Political Theology.

The Article is entitled: "The Eclipse of Eschatology: Conversing with Taubes’s Messianism and the Common Body" and adds to the already very active debate between Taubes and Schmitt on the meaning of St. Paul and Political Theology

Mary-Jane Rubenstein, considered by some to be the best theorist on religion in her generation challenges the very logic of Christianity and how this relates to the political in our time. Her essay is entitled, "Capital Shares: The Way Back into the With of Christianity."

Clayton Crockett & Jacques Derrida's brilliant student, Catherine Malabou team up to discuss the need to re-think the nature of theology and its future in order to outthink the deadlocks of capitalist ideologies (and its supplement fundamentalism). Their article entitled, "Plasticity and the Future of Philosophy and Theology" extends Crockett and Malabou's thinking beyond Christian orthodox versions of theology and politics.

Dan Bell's article "The Fragile Brilliance of Glass: Empire, Multitude, and the Coming Community" extends his radical version of theology by engaging Negri's political ontology.

Ken Reinhard contributes an article called "There is Something of One (God): Lacan and Political Theology" which show without a doubt that Lacan (and psychoanalysis) is a leading actor in the new political theology debate.

Chad Pecknold's essay "Migrations of the Host: Fugitive Democracy and the Corpus Mysticum" brings the brilliance of Sheldon Wolin into the heart of the debate.

And if that were not enough, we have another round of the Zizek/Milbank debate. In two never before published pieces, this issue will print the most intense moments of the Zizek/Milbank debate, which I edited for The MIT Press released earlier this year.

Milbank picks up the debate where it left off... He continues the debate with the title:

"Without Heaven there is only Hell on Earth: 15 verdicts on Zizek’s response"

and Zizek's responds with: "An Atheist Wager" which puts the debate in overdrive.

Here is a foretaste: (please do not distribute or reproduce the following):

Milbank:

2. Moreover, Zize also confirms my thesis that without a realist belief in a transcendent God and heaven, the ontological ground for hope for a transformed human future is removed. This is shown in the fact that the consequence of removing the ‘naively’ dramatic character of Orthodox Christianity – whereby one really proceeds from cross to resurrection, from sorrow to joy, from tragedy to resolution, from life to death – is that the significance of human historicity is abolished also. Hence Zizek in his own way proclaims an Hegelian ‘end of history’ by saying that the hell of human history cannot be transformed, but can nevertheless be seen from an altogether different and ‘rosier’ perspective which does not remove, entirely overlaps with and yet does not touch its crucified aspect.

Zizek:

The only appropriate way for me to conclude the exchange is to add a footnote on Pascal’s notion of wager, confronting (Milbank’s) theist wager and (my) atheist wager. The first thing that strikes the eye is that Pascal rejects all attempts to demonstrate the existence of God: he concedes that "we do not know if He is," so he seeks to provide prudential reasons for believing in God: we should wager that God exists because it is the best bet:

In the Book Review section we will have reviews of The Monstrosity of Christ, Marcus Pound's book on Zizek: A (Very) Critical Introduction, a review of William Connolly's book Capitalism and Christianity: American Style by Dan Barber (with a response by Connolly) and a roundtable discussion by Alex Andrews, Sarah Azaransky, and Floyd Dunphy on Charles Taylor's book A Secular Age.

WILL THE CAT ABOVE THE PRECIPICE FALL DOWN? Slavoj Zizek

2009-06-24T10:53:00.001-07:00

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, its dissolution as a rule follows two steps. Before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down…

In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman simply withdrew; in a couple of hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although there were street fights going on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game is over. Is something similar going on now?

There are many versions of the events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western “reform movement” along the lines of the “orange” revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, etc. – a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution. They support the protests as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic secular Iran freed of Muslim fundamentalism. They are counteracted by skeptics who think that Ahmadinejad really won: he is the voice of the majority, while the support of Mousavi comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth. In short: let’s drop the illusions and face the fact that, in Ahmadinejad, Iran has a president it deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the cleric establishment with merely cosmetic differences from Ahmadinejad: Mousavi also wants to continue the atomic energy program, he is against recognizing Israel, plus he enjoyed the full support of Khomeini as a prime minister in the years of the war with Iraq.

Finally, the saddest of them all are the Leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad: what is really at stake for them is Iranian independence. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence, exposed elite corruption and used oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority – this is, so we are told, the true Ahmadinejad beneath the Western-media image of a holocaust-denying fanatic. According to this view, what is effectively going on now in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a West-financed coup against the legitimate president. This view not only ignores facts: the high electoral participation – up from the usual 55% to 85% – can only be explained as a protest vote. It also displays its blindness for a genuine demonstration of popular will, patronizingly assuming that, for the backward Iranians, Ahmadinejad is good enough – they are not yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular Left.

Opposed as they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests along the axis of Islamic hardliners versus pro-Western liberal reformists, which is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants more personal freedom and market economy, or a member of the cleric establishment whose eventual victory would not affect in any serious way the nature of the regime? Such extreme oscillations demonstrate that they all miss the true nature of the protests.

The green color adopted by the Mousavi supporters, the cries of “Allah akbar!” that resonate from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness, clearly indicate that they see their activity as the repetition of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, as the return to its roots, the undoing of the revolution’s later corruption. This return to the roots is not only programmatic; it concerns even more the mode of activity of the crowds: the emphatic unity of the people, their all-encompassing solidarity, creative self-organization, improvising of the ways to articulate protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline, like the ominous march of thousands in complete silence. We are dealing with a genuine popular uprising of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution.

There are a couple of crucial consequences to be drawn from this insight. First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but a genuine corrupted Islamo-Fascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the majority of ayatollahs. His demagogic distributing of crumbs to the poor should not deceive us: behind him are not only organs of police repression and a very Westernized PR apparatus, but also a strong new rich class, the result of the regime’s corruption (Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is not a working class militia, but a mega-corporation, the strongest center of wealth in the country).

Second, one should draw a clear difference between the two main candidates opposed to Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi and Mousavi. Karroubi effectively is a reformist, basically proposing the Iranian version of identity politics, promising favors to all particular groups. Mousavi is something entirely different: his name stands for the genuine resuscitation of the popular dream which sustained the Khomeini revolution. Even if this dream was a utopia, one should recognize in it the genuine utopia of the revolution itself. What this means is that the 1979 Khomeini revolution cannot be reduced to a hard line Islamist takeover – it was much more. Now is the time to remember the incredible effervescence of the first year after the revolution, with the breath-taking explosion of political and social creativity, organizational experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. The very fact that this explosion had to be stifled demonstrates that the Khomeini revolution was an authentic political event, a momentary opening that unleashed unheard-of forces of social transformation, a moment in which “everything seemed possible.” What followed was a gradual closing through the take-over of political control by the Islam establishment. To put it in Freudian terms, today’s protest movement is the “return of the repressed” of the Khomeini revolution.

And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front of our eyes.

The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

The Shawshank Redemption--Or Stephen King's Perverse Universe

2009-06-14T20:53:00.000-07:00

I have always been attracted to Stephen King's stories (and some of the films based on them), but why? On one level King is a genius at creating a literary space of the dark sublime--that is, he composes his narratives in such a way so as to heighten the tension in the plot to its most extreme point or zenith. But then, just as the story reaches for its climax everything turns a 180 and the remainder of the story simply falls into place.

It is this logical unfolding of the plot that makes the story worth your time. But if you notice this attribute in King's pen stroke may in fact be his Achilles' Heel. Why? Because, I think, nearly all of his stories unfold in such logical terms--in terms so perfect that it becomes deeply disturbing if only because they are so clean and, well, perfect. It is this perfect distribution of justice that puts King well within the genre of the fantasmic (fantasy). King is a perfect ideological writer on this score because he's creates his narratives in the perfect four-fold fashion. First, we encounter a middle-class "normal" man/woman with whom we (the reader/viewer) are able to easily relate. Then, the twist happens in King's second movement--a tragic event confronts our innocent character. Moreover, this tragic event creates a series of further events which increase and heighten the original tragic moment until finally...the third stage is ripe: enter the dragon, that is, "the 180" (i.e., the reversal). The forth and final stage happens in nearly mathematical form. What you have here is a simple deduction that in one way or another rights the wrongs.

There is a theological doctrine for this logical movement that "rights the wrongs" called Atonement. King's entire plot, at least in the Shawshank Redemption is obsessed with Atoning --setting the record straight. Yet there are many records that need straightened, but King's "record" is nothing short of "cosmic"; King wants to set the entire world back on the straight record--which said differently is called Justice. The mechanism he employs for achieving cosmic "Justice" follows the Biblical injunction: "what you sow you shall reap". In other words the antagonists in King's stories really do get what they deserve--and they get what they deserve in terms that perfectly correspond to the unjust acts committed against the protagonist. It is this exacting manner of atoning the world back together again that makes the novel/film so satisfying to read/view. And it is this "satisfaction" that clues us into why King's works are so ironic and thus ideological. For this rigid view of "Justice" being served in the narrative simply reproduces a blindness to actually existing unjust actions that happen in the world on a deeper and certainly less mathematical level. In this way, King un-trains the reader/viewer to see views of cosmic atonement in ways that fail to conform to easily discernible corresponding actions that will "set the world back on its just and true course." The underlining problem with King’s theology of Atonement is that it comes over as cliché and analytically perfect and thus insulting to the reader/viewer. It is insulting because it underestimates the intelligence of the reader/viewer by assuming that the world does in fact operate in these perfect terms. So the upshot of King's work is that the reader/viewer is satisfied and insulted at the same time. In this way, King delivers his package to us that gives us a great feeling of pleasure and yet totally cuts us down. Thanks you Mr. King for gracing us with such a gift as this.

Burn After Reading

2009-02-20T11:51:00.000-08:00

I just viewed the Coen Brother's film Burn After Reading, and if someone where to hold a .38 to my head and ask me to tell them what this film REALLY means, I would say something like: This film presents America with an ideology without a center-point, which is another way to say that after the unravelling of the Cold War (in which ideology was relatively stable on a basic level) the ideology we are left with is akin to Hitchcock's MacGuffin-Effect but with a twist: A Pure Phallus Signifier that signifies NOTHING at all! The Coen Brother brilliantly weave together two fundamental themes: The first emerges from the unknowability of a women's desires (What does a Women Want?) and the second is the logic of signification grounded in the signifier of the phallus that means nothing at all! But this nothing is that one which all else functions as meaningful signification.

In regards to the first motif viz. the mystery of a women's desire, really does not ever exist (in the Hegelian sense of the intrinsic "In-Itself"). This mysterious drive (of a women's desire) motivates and moves the plot, and it moves in relation to the nothing qua S, that is the subject is the nothing at all. And because the subject (and lets be clear, the subject here is totally male centered) does not exist as a self-referent (or pure signified) it can only be defined in relation to a women's sexual desire.

April Fool's Day!

2008-04-01T05:45:00.000-07:00

No doubt, this is Gmail's attempt to pull the old April Fool's Day Joke on us!

Gmail & Time

2008-04-01T05:35:00.000-07:00

I wanted to attend to something that struck me strange this morning. As I opened my gmail sign-in page, I was confronted with new magical possibilities packaged up by Gmail. It seems that Gmail now has the power to manipulate time and space, LITERALLY! They're calling this "Gmail Custom Time" which is a program that allows you to date your emails hours before they were even composed. This allows you to have a lapse in memory (about a birthday, an crucial special day etc.) and cover it over.

I cannot help but to draw a theological parallal: It was Augustine, while composing his CONFESSIONS that meditates on the nature of time & memory (something that Henri Bergson does in the 20th century cf. MATTER & MEMORY). For the Bishop of Hippo, memory was only possible as a gift from God: God is the condition of possibility for our very memories, which is why the very act of recalling one's life is already placed in the mode of grace and confession. But here, in a stroke of genius, Gmail is marketing it own divine attributes.

Here is the exact quotation from Gmail!

New! Gmail Custom TimeTM

Ever wish you could go back in time and send that crucial email that could have changed everything -- if only it hadn't slipped your mind? Gmail can now help you with those missed deadlines, missed birthdays and missed opportunities.
Pre-date your messages
You tell us what time you would have wanted your email sent, and we'll take care of the rest. Need an email to arrive 6 hours ago? No problem.

Mark as read or unread
Take sending emails to the past one step further. We let you make emails look like they've been read all along.

Make them count
Use your custom time stamped messages wisely -- each Gmail user gets ten per year.

Worry less
Forget your finance reports. Forget your anniversary. We'll make it look like you remembered.

Badiou [Plato] Zizek [Aristotle]?

2007-12-12T12:43:00.000-08:00

It is something of a cliche posed into a question and framed by Raphael's fresco "The Academy" in which you have two figures posed against each other. There is Plato whose figure points skyward that represents the grounding of all things in the Ideal and eternal Truth that grounds beings. Then, there is the other pole figured in Aristotle who points in the opposite direction--toward the Earth: the truth, on these terms, happens in the action of being in the midst of beings.

These two figures at the origins of western philospohy become for us two sides that stress a point--a metaphysical point that grounds all things. There is first the eternal transcendent ideal into which all things exist only by their participation in the Ideal that animates and forms the thing as such. And there is, in the second place, the practical world--the empirical world--a world of existent power animated by different degress of being, and different natures and potiencies.

This dualism posed between the Mind and the Aesthetic becomes the divide that splits western philosophy only to be united by Kant (albeit insufficiently) and finally by Hegel.

Today we have two dominate philosophers thinking for the world today: Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek. Both are indebted to Hegel, but in different and unique ways. For Badiou the challenge that Hegel poses to us is three-fold:

1- The only truth is that of the Whole
2- The Whole is a self-unfolding, and not an absolute-unity external to the subject.
3- The Whole is the immanent arrival of its own concept (Alain Badiou _Theoretical Writings_, page, 222).

In a strange twist, Badiou (while remaining more or less faithful to the over-arching Hegelian structure) actually addresses the challenge that Hegel poses by making an anti-Platonic move. For in the midst of Hegel's unfolding logic of becoming through the other (by, as it were, swallowing up the 'other') and thereby overcoming the limits of being in becoming, Badiou perceives something of a problem. This problem is identified in Hegel opening lines in _Science of Logic_ entitled "The World of Appearance and the World-in-Itself". Here is the exact passage:

The existent world tranquilly raises itself to the realm of laws; the null content of its varied being-there has its subsistence in an OTHER; its subsistence is therefore its dissolution. But in this other the phenomenal alos coincides with itself; thus the phenomenon in its changing is also an enduring, and its positedness is law. (_Theoretical Writings_ page, 231).

What exactly is the problem that Badiou perceives? It is a Platonic problem (or more precisely, a logic). For Hegel (appealing to a Neo-Kantian move) employs the notion of 'the phenomenal world' as a way to 'lift itself up' beyond itself to, and here is Badiou's words "any realm whatsoever" (_Theoretical Writings, page 231). Badiou identifies something of a Platonic (Neo-Kantian) move that allows for a process that unfolds via: 1- dissolution via negating the 'other'; and 2- through the phenomenal world; only to 3- re-appear back as something existing with/against itself. The Platonic move is the USE of the phenomenal world in order to transcend it through itself (i.e. the negation of the other etc.). Against this Badiou re-adjusts Hegel by asserting that "there [is] no separate subsistence that would represent its negative effectuation. Existence only results from the contingent logic of a world that nothing sublates, and in which, in the guise of the reverse, negation appears as pure exteriority" (Badiou, _Theoretical Writings_ page, 231).

It is with this decisive move that Badiou breaks with Hegel's so-called "totalitarian" logic that consumes all otherness via itself as infinite becoming. By contrast, Badiou is not confident in Hegel's belief that there is a realm called the phenomenal through which otherness is sublated and returned again (only to be sublated again). What then is Badiou's contra-Hegel move resting on, or assuming? It is, I think, assuming that the world's Appearing is itself a non-necessary logic of radical contingency. Further, because it is radically contingent and open, the world does not possess within itself an anti-sublational drive. Thus, Badiou's conclusion is that negation is not the kernel core of the world's unfolding toward the Absolute as pure transcendence. What takes place here on Badiou's line, is that the world's truth unfolds through a pure immanent truth (immanent only to itself) and does not rely on the "externalizing" truth of negation via the phenomenal world.

This move does strike us on the face of it as counter-intuitive only insofar as Badiou considers himself to be part of the Platonic heritage.

For Zizek, who is, on the face of it, a thinker devoted to the pure form of the phenomenal world (content really has emptied itself out into a pure form). In this sense, Zizek can clearly be put over with Aristotle. Yet, in a strange reversal Zizek's connections (Soviet Communism & Tom and Jerry Cartoons, between Lacan and Jesus) can only be made by employing a logic of the Platonic 'leap' (ok so it's more like a Kierkegaardian leap).

Thus, and in conclusion, on the surface of it all, Zizek seems to clearly side with Aristotle, whereas Badiou is with Plato. But when you crack open the surface, what we see happening below the surface of thoughts pure form is that Zizek is really with Plato and Badiou is really with Aristotle.

Zizek on Sex and Superego

2007-12-11T19:34:00.000-08:00

Here is a video clip taken of Slavoj Zizek discussing the logic of Superego and its relation to sexuality with Professors Mario D'Amato and Creston Davis. This video was taken in Professor D'Amato's car (that not surprisingly overheated soon after this conversation) while driving through Orlando, Florida in search for an ipod and a Barnes and Ignoble store.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MwmDPimvGU

Christian Love takes out the Ethics of the Neighbor

2007-12-11T09:29:00.001-08:00

Is not Christianity really about the total unreserved break-out through the shock of the external encounter? Christianity posits the radical idea that one cannot surpass the monster "other" that gazes at you with the eye of God himself. It is a logic that must withstand the weight and burden of God's gaze (within which one's subjectivity is constituted) on you through the Neighbor. Thus, to love your neighbor is to love God. But here the notion of Love itself is called into question, because if Christianity surpasses the Jewish Law (without totally sublating it) in Love (via Christ etc.) then, at bottom, one secretly overcodes and tames the "otherness" of God, the Neighbor and even the abyss of oneself (and the Law etc.) such that true encounter of otherness is no longer even necessary. And this returns us back to God's gaze that determines us, because with Love as the center mediating point of all things, then the Gaze can only now appear to one as unthreatening to one's own being. So, and here is the paradox--with Love the neighbor disappears along with God.

To keep love we must therefore have a version of love that is always linked to the law such that the surpassing of the latter via love is only possible once love vanishes from the world forever.

The neighbor only is if love is checked by the law--the law as the external encounter beyond the reach of even love itself.

2007-12-11T07:38:00.000-08:00

Zizek visits Rollins College

2007-12-11T06:32:00.000-08:00

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.