The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Religion and Postmodernism Series)

197 Pages·2006·0.64 MB·English

by  Slavoj Zizek

The Neighbor
RELIGION AND POSTMODERNISM
A series edited by Mark C. Taylor and Thomas A. Carlson
The Neighbor
Three Inquiries in Political Theology
SL AVOJ Zˇ IZˇ EK
ERIC L. SANTNER
KENNETH REINHARD
The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London
SLAVOJ ZˇIZˇEK is professor of philosophy at the University of
Ljubljana. His numerous books include Iraq: The Borrowed Kettleand
The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity.
ERIC L. SANTNER is professor in and chair of the Department
of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. His most recent
book is On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud
and Rosenzweig.
KENNETH REINHARD is associate professor of English and
comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles,
where he also directed the Center for Jewish Studies. He is coauthor
of After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2005 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2005
Printed in the United States of America
14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN: 0-226-70738-5 (cloth)
ISBN: 0-226-70739-3 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zˇizˇek, Slavoj.
The neighbor : three inquiries in political theology / Slavoj Zˇizˇek,
Eric L. Santner, Kenneth Reinhard.
p. cm. — (Religion and postmodernism)
ISBN 0-226-70738-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-226-70739-3
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Political theology. 2. Church and social problems. I. Santner,
Eric L., 1955–. II. Reinhard, Kenneth, 1957–. III. Title. IV. Series.
BT83.59 .Z59 2006
177(cid:2).7—dc22
2005016280
(cid:2)(cid:3)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum require-
ments of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Introduction 1
Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor 11
KENNETH REINHARD
Miracles Happen: Benjamin, Rosenzweig,
Freud, and the Matter of the Neighbor 76
ERIC L. SANTNER
Neighbors and Other Monsters:
A Plea for Ethical Violence 134
SLAVOJ ZˇIZˇEK

Introduction
I
In a well-known series of reflections in Civilization and Its
Discontents,Freud made abundantly clear what he thought
about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus
19:18 and then elaborated in the Christian teaching, to
love one’s neighbor as oneself. “Let us adopt a naive atti-
tude towards it,” Freud proposes, “as though we were hear-
ing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress
a feeling of surprise and bewilderment.” Freud condenses
this surprise and bewilderment in a series of questions and
objections that cannot but seem reasonable and common-
sensical:
Why would we do it? What good will it do us? But, above all, how shall
we achieve it? How can it be possible? My love is something valuable
to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection. It imposes
duties on me for whose fulfillment I must be ready to make sacrifices.
If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way.... He deserves it
if he is so like me in important ways that I can love myself in him; and
he deserves it if he is so much more perfect than myself that I can love
my ideal of my own self in him.
Things become even more complex when this neighbor is
a perfect stranger:
1
INTRODUCTION
But if he is a stranger to me and if he cannot attract me by any worth of his own of
any significance that he may already have acquired for my emotional life, it will be
hard for me to love him. Indeed, I should be wrong to do so, for my love is valued by
all my own people as a sign of my preferring them, and it is an injustice to them if I
put a stranger on a par with them. But if I am to love him (with this universal love)
merely because he, too, is an inhabitant of this earth, like an insect, an earth-worm or
a grass-snake, then I fear that only a small modicum of my love will fall to his share.
But things get even worse. “Not merely is this stranger in general un-
worthy of my love,” Freud writes;
I must honestly confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred.
He seems not to have the least trace of love for me and shows me not the slightest
consideration. If it will do him any good he has no hesitation in injuring me, nor does
he ask himself whether the amount of advantage he gains bears any proportion to the
extent of the harm he does to me. Indeed, he need not even obtain an advantage; if
he can satisfy any sort of desire by it, he thinks nothing of jeering at me, insulting me,
slandering me and showing his superior power; and the more secure he feels and the
more helpless I am, the more certainly I can expect him to behave like this to me.
Freud brings his reflections on neighbor-love to a provisional conclusion
by appealing to the persistence, in human beings, of a fundamental in-
clination toward aggression, a primary mutual hostility. As “creatures
among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful
share of aggressiveness, ... their neighbor is for them not only a poten-
tial helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to sat-
isfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without
compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his pos-
sessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him.
Homo homini lupus.”1
Against the background of such remarks, it might well seem to be
a fool’s undertaking to attempt to make psychoanalysis a key resource
in the project of reanimating the ethical urgency and significance of
neighbor-love in contemporary society and culture. But that is just
what the essays in this volume propose to do. This book’s underlying
premise—axiom even—is that the Freudian revolution is stricto sensu
internalto the topic of neighbor and, indeed, provides a crucial point of
1. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents,trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Nor-
ton, 1989), 66–69.
2
INTRODUCTION
reference for the project of rethinking the notion of neighbor in light
of the catastrophic experiences of the twentieth century.
After the slaughters of World War II, the Shoah, the gulag, multiple
ethnic and religious slaughters, the explosive rise of slums in the last de-
cades, and so on, the notion of neighbor has lost its innocence. To take
the extreme case: in what precise sense is the Muselmann, the “living
dead” of the Nazi concentration camps, still our neighbor? Is “human
rights militarism,” as the predominant ideological justification of to-
day’smilitary interventions, really sustained by the love for a neighbor?
And, in our own societies, is not the multiculturalist notion of tolerance,
whose fundamental value is the right not to be harassed, precisely a
strategy to keep the intrusive neighbor at a proper distance? In the mag-
nificent chapter 2.C (“You Shall Love Your Neighbor”) of his Works of
Love,Søren Kierkegaard develops the claim that the ideal neighbor that
we should love is a dead one—the only good neighbor is a dead neigh-
bor. His line of reasoning is surprisingly simple and straightforward: in
contrast to poets and lovers, whose object of love is distinguished by its
particular outstanding qualities, “to love one’s neighbor means equal-
ity”:“Forsake all distinctions so that you can love your neighbor.”2How-
ever, it is only in death that all distinctions disappear: “Death erases all
distinctions, but preference is always related to distinctions.”3
Is this love for the dead neighbor really just Kierkegaard’s theological
idiosyncrasy? In some “radical” circles in the United States, there came
recently a proposal to “rethink” the rights of necrophiliacs (those who
desire to have sex with dead bodies). So the idea was formulated that, in
the same way people give permission for their organs to be used for med-
ical purposes in the case of their sudden death, people should also be al-
lowed to grant permission for their bodies to be given to necrophiliacs
to play with. Is this proposal not the perfect exemplification of how a
particular politically correct stance realizes Kierkegaard’s insight into
how the only good neighbor is a dead neighbor? A dead neighbor—a
corpse—is the ideal sexual partner of a “tolerant” subject trying to avoid
either harassing or being harassed: by definition, a corpse cannot be ha-
rassed; at the same time, a dead body does not enjoy, so the disturbing
threat of the partner’s excessive enjoyment is also eliminated.
To put it in the simplest way possible, the essays collected here share
the basic premise that Freud’s discovery of the unconscious gives us the
2. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love,trans. Howard Hong (New York: Harper, 1994), 75.
3. Ibid., 74.
3