The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Short Circuits)

320 Pages·2009·1.13 MB·english

by  Slavoj Zizek

PARADOX OR DIALECTIC?
Slavoj Žižek John Milbank
EDITED BY CRESTON DAVIS
The Monstrosity of Christ
Short Circuits
Slavoj Žižek, editor
The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, by Slavoj Žižek
The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, by Alenka Zupancˇicˇ
Is Oedipus Online? Siting Freud after Freud, by Jerry Aline Flieger
Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK, by Alexei Monroe
The Parallax View, by Slavoj Žižek
A Voice and Nothing More, by Mladen Dolar
Lacan and Subjectivity: A Philosophical Introduction, by Lorenzo Chiesa
The Odd One In: On Comedy, by Alenka Zupancˇicˇ
The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? by Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank,
edited by Creston Davis
The Monstrosity of Christ
Paradox or Dialectic?
Slavoj Žižek
John Milbank
edited by Creston Davis
The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
© 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic
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Library of Congress C ataloging- in- Publication Data
Žižek, Slavoj.
The monstrosity of Christ : paradox or dialectic? / Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank ; edited
by Creston Davis.
p. cm.—(Short circuits)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-01271-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Philosophical theology. 2. Christianity—Philosophy. 3. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich, 1770–1831. 4. Milbank, John. 5. Žižek, Slavoj. I. Milbank, John. II. Davis,
Creston. III. Title.
BT40.Z59 2009
230—dc22
2008035984
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Series Foreword vii
Introduction: Holy Saturday or Resurrection Sunday?
Staging an Unlikely Debate 2
Creston Davis
The Fear of Four Words: A Modest Plea for the
Hegelian Reading of Christianity 24
Slavoj Žižek
The Double Glory, or Paradox versus Dialectics:
On Not Quite Agreeing with Slavoj Žižek 110
John Milbank
Dialectical Clarity versus the Misty Conceit of
Paradox 234
Slavoj Žižek
Index 307

Series Foreword
A short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network—faulty,
of course, from the standpoint of the network’s smooth functioning. Is not
the shock of s hort-c ircuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for a criti-
cal reading? Is not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires
that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion) and
read it in a short- circuiting way, through the lens of a “minor” author, text, or
conceptual apparatus (“minor” should be understood here in Deleuze’s sense:
not “of lesser quality,” but marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideol-
ogy, or dealing with a “lower,” less dignifi ed topic)? If the minor reference is
well chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shatter
and undermine our common perceptions. This is what Marx, among others,
did with philosophy and religion (short- circuiting philosophical speculation
through the lens of political economy, that is to say, economic speculation);
this is what Freud and Nietzsche did with morality (short-c ircuiting the high-
est ethical notions through the lens of the unconscious libidinal economy).
What such a reading achieves is not a simple “desublimation,” a reduction of
the higher intellectual content to its lower economic or libidinal cause; the
aim of such an approach is, rather, the inherent decentering of the interpreted
text, which brings to light its “unthought,” its disavowed presuppositions and
consequences.
And this is what “Short Circuits” wants to do, again and again. The under-
lying premise of the series is that Lacanian psychoanalysis is a privileged in-
strument of such an approach, whose purpose is to illuminate a standard text
or ideological formation, making it readable in a totally new way—the long
history of Lacanian interventions in philosophy, religion, the arts (from the
visual arts to the cinema, music, and literature), ideology, and politics justifi es
this premise. This, then, is not a new series of books on psychoanalysis, but a
d
r
o
w series of “connections in the Freudian fi eld”—of short Lacanian interventions
e
r in art, philosophy, theology, and ideology.
o
f “Short Circuits” wants to revive a practice of reading which confronts a
s
e classic text, author, or notion with its own hidden presuppositions, and thus
i
r
e reveals its disavowed truth. The basic criterion for the texts that will be pub-
s
lished is that they effectuate such a theoretical short circuit. After reading a
book in this series, the reader should not simply have learned something new:
the point is, rather, to make him or her aware of another—disturbing—side
of something he or she knew all the time.
Slavoj Žižek
The Monstrosity of Christ