It's been awhile, teaching has been kicking my ass. But here's a quick essay I wrote over the weekend. It's nothing fancy but I hope it's interesting.
"Consequently, is not the “theological” dimension without which, Benjamin, revolution cannot win, the very dimension of the excess of drive, of its “ too muchness”? In other words, is not our task—the properly Christological one—to change the modality of our being-stuck in a mode that allows, solicits even, the activity of sublimation?"
In his discussion of the possibility of a ‘materialist theology’, Žižek enters into a quite lengthy discussion of the importance of sacrifice and its ethical implications. If we assume that by ‘ethics’ Žižek means to suggest a kind of life one commits oneself to, the notion of sacrifice, then, is a way of life. Indeed, the entire chapter, “Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology,” in some way or another revolves around a “theme of a pure, senseless act that restores meaning to our earthy life…”, to which a few lines later he adds, “the idea is that only such a gesture of just ‘doing it’ spontaneously, a gesture not covered by any rational consideration, can restore the immediate faith that will deliver us and heal us of our modern spiritual malaise.” One may wonder what this “modern spiritual malaise” is and how a sacrifice of any kind could be a true cure treating such an insidious malady. One might be tempted to view this sacrifice in a closed economic sphere, such as M-C-M|, that the ‘restoration of meaning’ is a return on an investment of sacrifice; paradoxically however: Meaning as such, reduced to the empty form of Meaning which remains after I have renounced all humanly determined finite Meaning: pure, unconditional Meaning can appear (and it has to appear) only as nonsense. The content of pure Meaning can only be negative: the Void, the absence of Meaning.
In other words, one must “break the vicious cycle of ethics and sacrifice.” To perform a proper sacrifice is to begin the ritual without preconceived notions of return, and more radically still, it is a ritual of sacrifice of the very ritual one is performing. What does all of this mean in plain ‘simple’ language? It is the purpose of this essay to attempt, the best I can without resorting to dense and esoteric terminology, to lay out Žižek’s claims in the plainest simplest terms. The relationship between the quotations above will come into sharper relief if the entire scope of the chapter Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology is at least brought into view and kept within sight. That is to say, we must first ask ourselves the perhaps the obvious, but difficult question, what is a materialist theology? What is its structure? How does such a theology force us to understand the human being and God? And related to these questions, one must ask how can one coherently discuss the transcendent (God, Being, Meaning) within the scope of a materialist philosophy? Far from obscuring the discussion of sacrifice, I hope that introducing Žižek’s apparent need to conceive of a materialist theology will illuminate sacrifice and it’s relation to unconditional Meaning. Žižek distinguishes not only materialism from idealism but two types of materialism: a reductive materialism, on the one hand and on the other, a non-reductive materialism. The reductive materialism regards material reality as “mechanistic materialism,” i.e., matter as inert and passive; also matter is conceived as a collection of entities existing in relation to one another. While an idealist worldview results in a kind of “obscurantism.” Idealism from its beginnings can only appear closed to the subject insofar as it is only from the eternal and omnipotent point of view, from the view of a transcendent God, that reality can rightly be understood—the subject can only understand the world from “the standpoint of finality,” a kind of ‘God’s eye view of history’. A subject found in such a ‘world’ can only understand itself living in a dead, lifeless world; the Messiah, as it were, has come, there is nothing for us to look forward to, the subject asks itself “there is nothing really exceptional about our age; if anything, we live in ordinary and uninteresting times?” Everything is already set in front of the subject, therefore a foreclosure of mysteries and potentialities; the meaning for which the subject searches is not found in this world but in the transcendent world where everything is already decided. On the other hand, non-reductive materialism understands matter “as that which can itself occasion subjectivity and meaning, because it is the site for the emergence of a spontaneous and unpredictable energy” [my emphasis]. Unlike reductive materialism in which matter is inert, non-reductive materialism conceives matter as active and as a result the material world itself becomes question worthy. That is to say that the material world recedes into the background the closer we investigate it, forever eluding our grasp and gaze. It entices us, yet at the same time it is a place of terror insofar as one cannot fully grasp and rationally understand it. The subject is engaged in the chaotic interplay of that which appears and is at the mercy of an irreducible contingency. The contingency is irreducible insofar as, as we will see below, the matter of the material world cannot be placed within a propositional relationship with one another, the relationship is beyond the logic of reason. The project of discovering a non-reductive materialism seems rooted in the call for a subject fulfilling its full expressive potentiality and not explaining the subject in its actuality. Or as John Milbank claims, “What one needs instead are notions of thought and of willing that themselves sustain an excess of reference beyond themselves, that involve unpredictable creativity and the lure of a self-exceeding desire.” We should pay special attention to Milbank’s use of “excess,” since as it plays a prominent role in the philosophy of Žižek. There is an inherent excess found within the human being (the subject) that irrupts from the subject’s relationship with the material world (the background). Materialism, according to Žižek, is grounded in the claim that while one is within the world there is what he calls a reflexive twist by means of which I myself am included in the picture constituted by me—it is this reflexive short circuit, this necessary redoubling of myself as standing both inside and outside my picture, that bears witness to my “material existence.” Materialism means that the reality I see is never “whole”—not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which indicates my inclusion in it.
While there is much that can be unpacked here, what is of interest for us is John Milbank claims that the thought that is included, presumably in the reflexive twist, necessarily gives rise unquestionably to notions of theology and references to the transcendent. While it is not as clear to myself as it is to John Milbank, I will now do must best to flesh out how this reflexive twist as thought works in the construction of materialism and a non-idealistic transcendence. We must first take note that it is the “picture,” the background, the world, being, that is the site for materialism and the reflexive twist. The “picture,” Žižek terms it, does seem to have some objective reality to it, Žižek is clear that some object exists “out there.” For if the object did not exist “out there” it would be difficult to maintain the claim that one can stand both inside and outside of the world: if the world exists as a naïve idealism, my relation to it is simply in my consciousness, I stand outside of the world; however, if the world is something completely independent of me, then I stand within it. Both of these claim are disputed by Žižek. When making ontological claims about the world, then, while the world may exist within my consciousness or use of language, “reality” as Žižek dubs it, the target of my consciousness and language is not, it is beyond them, existing independently, or in excess of them, within the “Real.” What Žižek terms “reality” is on the level of what would be considered doxa, or opinion, as opposed to the ‘Real’, which as alluded to above is not transcendent to reality, but that which escapes the schematization of “reality,” and is the target of investigation of being. Human thought and language refer to something of whose contents are beyond that of human language and thought. They refer to that site which is outside of or beyond my place in the “picture.” However, one must not, on this account, make the claim that because the target of one’s consciousness and language is more than and exceeds the content of the human consciousness that this site must itself therefore be an ‘objective reality’. A correspondence theory (propositional logic) need not be the only way one can make truth claims. Instead, “reality” itself turns into ‘appearance’, and things ‘appear to appear’. In other words, that which is symbolized within “reality” is only an image of that which truly is. The site of materialism exceeds any and all opinions and statements made about it—there is an excessiveness to the site of materialism, i.e., the Real. The excessiveness is un-re-presentable within one’s existing view. Furthermore, the excessiveness resists all propositional re-presentation, i.e., in the form of ‘S is P’. Consequently, the excess cannot be said to correspond to formulations of objects or experiences “out there,” since the excess, by definition, exceeds any relational schemata. As a result, that which appears as objects seems to entail a separation from ‘being’ (the Real) and the appearing. The excess is pointed to by the appearance of objects either in the world or in language/consciousness, and yet, that which is, the Real, is not wholly constituted by either an individual or a community of individuals, it is more than human, beyond human thought. But at the same time it is the excess of human thought and consciousness, suggesting that it is not utterly separate from human thought. Moreover, we should not think of the world, or the “picture” in terms of subject-object relation. In order for us to grasp what I believe to be Žižek’s concern in discussing Materialism, it must be pointed out that the target toward which the human being is aimed (the Real) is neither an objective nor subjective concept. We must rid our minds of the modern conception of the subject/object distinction. The only manner in which this target, the “picture” is experienced or grasped is at it is in the experience of an excess, a beyond, a lack, the Void, that which properly resists penetration. It seems as if a different kind of ontology is being described than the one we ‘moderns’ have in mind. Let us be as careful as we can before we move along in describing the excess of the Real that Žižek describes and the manner in which the Real is ‘independent’ from reality. Being (the Real) is more than or beyond “reality” and as such is not graspable within language or human consciousness, and yet to stress the point again, this does not demand that there be a separation between being and its appearances. Being, the Real, the grounding of existence, the “picture,” and “background,” (whatever one wishes to call it) is “a differential (non-)substance…it involves both univocity—insofar as it is one function or relation: difference—and multiplicity—insofar as difference is a relation between at least two elements.” To put it differently still, being (the “picture”) allows presentation, like a canvas does, but cannot itself be re-presented in the appearances of the painting. Perhaps pointing ahead a bit, Žižek makes a similar reference to the doxa of ethical engagement saying, “to be truly binding and unconditional, it has to rely on an accepted doxa (which, in this case, of course, means: on the doxa impregnated by the tradition of metaphysical ontology).” While in its proper context this quotation has to do with ethical decisions, to which we will return, it does point us to the fact that without doxa, without appearance and opinion about this appearance, we could not act, and yet to be ethical, to investigate why we ought to perform an action, Žižek further argues that we rely on a groundless ground, a “regression to the unethical” (he states that Kierkegaard was well aware of this fact and relied on the ethical suspension of universal ethical doxa). By referring to universally accepted doxai (reality), we reveal that they are in fact established in a never ending regression. The result of this regression ad infinitum results from Žižek’s conception of the Real as a non-neutral ground (it cannot be re-presented in propositional terms) in which the gap occurs, in which it is “not the difference between the element and other elements, but the difference of the element from itself,” which echoes Kordela’s interpretation. The ground is self sundering. The Real is nothing but the “reflexive twist,” leaving an impression upon the subject’s consciousness but because the subject casts a shadow or a smear, there is a gap that cannot be re-presented within the reflexive gaze. Just to lay out the structure of the “groundless ground” that is thought to be transcendent by the subject, let us one more time recapitulate what has been said. The Real, it seems to me, is not at all propositional, but rather is a self-circulation question worthy concept in and of itself. The investigation into the Real reveals what the Real is; it is forever distant from human language and consciousness—but insofar as it is this, it reveals itself as it is, distant, Void, a negative concept. “Through this move, being becomes something incomplete and inconsistent, a sphere penetrated by divisions and ruptures.” These ruptures result in a ground of existence that must appear as outside of material existence precisely because it exceeds itself; our relation to it necessitates that it appear to be transcendent: “‘Transcendence’ is a kind of perspective illusion,” a parallax view to be sure. The preceding discussion was necessary so that the groundwork for an account of the human being (the subject) may be laid sufficiently, while the latter concern will be necessary to explain sacrifice and ethics. The “reflexive twist” by which one is able to both stand outside of the “picture” and inside of it at the same time is what, according to Žižek, marks one’s material existence. Just as the Real must appear to be transcendent given its non re-presentable character in relation to the appearances (doxai, symbolic re-presentation) that irrupts from the Real, so too the human being (the subject) irrupts from out of itself as a split subject—to the same extent that the Real is split, a non-harmonious ‘whole’, so too is the subject. The human being (the subject) understood as active matter, can be understood as a force of self-transcendence, and self-unfolding development of meaning. A subject understood within the framework of non-reductive materialism is itself a reference to an excess, an unpredictable human, all-too-human excess. There is a gap inherent within the human being itself, “a gap between humanity and its own inhuman excess.” Thus there arises a tension within the human being, the human and inhuman excess are not two-sides of the same coin, but rather a tension within the human being itself. The tension arises out of the relationship with the Real as described above. As the subject glances behind the veil of being it finds nothing there (nothing that is rational), so too when the subject looks within and behind itself via the “reflexive twist” it finds nothing but simply a voracious negativity, irreducible and exceeding any and all re-presentation. The human looks upon a terrible hungry abyss within its own core. Although the human may turn away, trembling and the fearing the glimpse of such a creature, i.e., the fact that the human exceeds its own boundaries gives rise to a material existence. Because human thought and language outstrips itself, pointing to a target outside of the ‘human’, indicates that there is some “reality” to the appearance of the material existence of the subject. The appearance may be illusory due to the fear and trembling caused by that which exceeds the ‘properly’ human, there is a material appearance nonetheless. In other words, the “too muchness” of life indicates the rather banal existence of the human. However, peering behind the veil of humanness to find the human, all-too-human excessive core causes guilt and general malaise as was noted above. We should next turn our attention in answering, how and in what way? What is our relation to the excess such that “too much” life would create guilt and malaise? We shall now turn to this topic and finally direct our attention to the ethics of sacrifice. To give a cursory answer as to the character of this malaise, perhaps one should keep in mind that the section entitled “The Difficulty of Being a Kantian” not only comes after the section entitled “The Traps of Pure Sacrifice,” the two sections flow into each other as an organic whole, since the last words of the formerly mentioned section “Therein lies” read into the emboldened title “The Difficulty of Being a Kantian.” Both of these sections emphasize the human being’s relationship with Law: moral, societal, or perhaps even both. The Law as the Master signifier under which all signification of laws (“reality,” doxai) has meaning. The Master signifier is simply an arbitrary beginning point in “reality,” from which all other signifying chains will be derived. The Law/Master signifier attempts to make sense and create a stable world out of the irruption of the discordant flux of being. The Law qua Master signifier is always a referent to the past struggling to lay a propositional foundation for the future (which can in truth only be unknowable in a propositional manner). Consequently, everything that does not fit the strict confines of the Law must be cut. As a result of this cutting, the subject splits itself, sundering itself: the un-re-presentable excessive human, all-too-human is circumcised from that which is definable by Law, i.e., that which can be calculated and made regular. So that one become regular and calculable, the individual makes sacrifices to the Master signifier in terms of sacrificing one’s own excessive desires in return for safety. One makes sacrifices to the Law, sacrifices that the Law can use and with which the Law can repay the individual for its sacrifice. To keep this closed-economy of sacrifice circulating, the subject must be made to feel guilt in front of the excessive drive that is located in the circumcised portion of its ‘body’ so that the individual returns to the Law, in belief that doing so will relieve one of the guilt and malaise. However, the true cure lies in radical autonomy from the Law; yet, this requires an incorporation of the excess. When one subjects oneself to the power of Law, one places oneself in a society, and as such Law expresses itself as a prohibition of our excessive desires. According to the Law, one must become a rational individual, limiting the will through self-imposed laws. And yet it is in this moment that the malaise arises from the self-limiting, self-imposed Law; the Law causes us to forego desires, causing a ubiquitous guilt and humiliation. Freud, in The Future of an Illusion, describes anti-social tendencies within the human being, desires that are destructive (what Žižek is calling the excess), Freud notes it is only through the renunciation of these desires that civilization can be built. The Law, just as being does, appears to be transcendent, existing apart from the community, with the result that frightened by these excessive desires, the individual clings to a ‘transcendent’ notion of civilization and even deifies the transcendence calling it ‘God’, and like a child we cling to the transcendent as a child clings to the parent for protection. That which is natural, the human, all-too-human desire for destruction is subdued through an infantile model; yet that which is meant to protect the human being from itself is that which at the same time causes humiliation at these desires. The spiritual malaise seems to arise, then, from the guilt one feels in the very source from which one attempts to hide from one’s desires, i.e., Law and civilization. Žižek finds a similar thread in his discussion of Kierkegaard’s account of “leap from innocence to sin,” Žižek describes the anxiety the divine prohibition gives rise. The subject renounces the abyss of its excessive freedom and searches instead for a rational support for itself, just as the Freudian individual runs from his or hers nature desire for destruction and clings to civilization to save him or her from himself or herself. The Fall occurs when the subject runs up against its finitude (within society) and again becomes conscious of the desires and freedom one has for destruction, “it is only now that freedom perceives itself as guilty.” The subject must feel guilt or malaise no matter how ‘rationally’ it participates within society: either the subject is guilty by giving way to its desires or by following the Law the subject feels a general malaise for the loss of its desires. The notion of guilt arises only a few times in The Parallax View, but even given its infrequency its arrival within the text announces itself in certain key passages. The concept of guilt not only arises around discussions of Law but also discussions of excess and its relation to the transgression of the Law. Through these passages, Žižek attempts to show that the “dialectical interdependence between the Law and its transgression—‘system is needed and so is excess’,” is not only “premodern,” as he terms it, but also unhealthy for the individual. If the Law itself calls for transgression, one can but only be guilty in front of the Law, engendering a sense of malaise in the individual. Žižek instead wishes to emphasize that “the absolute excess is that of the Law itself.” We can understand this in terms of the earlier discussion of peering behind the veil of being. The Law is excess, there is nothing, nothing of content, just simply excess, that which is distant from the human being as such. But we must remember, “‘Transcendence’ is a kind of perspective illusion.” Our relation to Law is the same as our relation to being (the Real); the terms are one and the same. When one is brave enough to peer behind the Law, one finds that the Law, by its very nature, requires an investigation, it is perforated with inconsistencies and contradictions. There is no foundation for the Law; the Law, like the “Real”, simply allows for particular doxai to appear but is not contained within any doxai. To stress it again but now with regard to the Law, although a particular doxa (law) is schematized within a Master signifier so that each doxa is held within a propositional relation to the next, the Law as the “Real,” or being cannot be rationalized, placed under a propositional relation. Hence, one’s relation with the Law forces one into a non-rational relationship with it. Such as schema will allow the subject to relate to the Law without feeling guilt or a general malaise. To speak of a materialist theology allows one to discuss individuals in a collective entity as existing in the body of Christ. To live as part of the body of Christ (within social practices) the individual itself must have an intimate experience not only of an individualistic nature but must rather have an experience of the body Christ (socially held beliefs) as relatable to the individual itself. The individual cannot feel alienated from the body Christ; that is to say, the subject must relate to the social level as something internal within the individual, something that is not simply imposed from the external. In other words, the subject must understand the ethical call and societal practices as in some sense self-generated, but also, paradoxically, as generated from the excess found within the subject itself. As Žižek writes, “the problem, therefore, is not ‘how to jump from the individual to the social level’; the problem is: how should the external-impersonal socio-symbolic order of institutionalized practices and beliefs be structured, if the subject is to retain his ‘sanity’, his ‘normal’ functioning?” Can the subject reinscribe the excessive neurosis without developing its own debilitating neurosis? These questions become an issue if one recognizes that the subject can never rid itself of the Law, or rather that the Law cannot itself calls for transgression, since there is in truth nothing to transgress. It is here at this point of Žižek’s inquiry that we should return to a discussion of the section entitled The Difficulty of Being a Kantian—the question in this section is how theory and praxis can be incorporated into the life of the individual. If one is to break the cycle of sacrifice and ethics one must think one’s way out of the belief that desire will always find a limit beyond which jouissance is not produced for the sake of something, or rather in relation to another entity. Jouissance must be found outside of the circulation of transgression; otherwise, the subject will be caught up in the spiral of sacrifice of one’s desire and the malaise that follows it. One must be able to make a radical break with the Law, one must realize that there is no “Other of the Other” —to put it differently still, the subject must free itself from the Law as Other, undermining the dominant code of the Law. Kant, according to Žižek, understands the human being to be a hystericized animal, an animal who no longer needs a Master figure of the Other (Law), who will set limits for it, but yet as an animal who does not know what it needs unless prohibitions are given to it. The Kantian mature individual, then, is caught in a bind, on the one hand the individual feels alienated within the Law, consciously feeling its guilt and malaise, and who on the other hand cannot, or does not know how to give itself the weight of limitations and law. Consequently, the subject cannot act as a free subject, a subject who acts outside of the code of the Law. There is no jouissance without transgression, and not transgression without guilt and malaise. In order to escape this sacrificial economy, one must find a rupture to break from the Master figure of the Other, so as to escape the status quo. Politically, this suggests real social change. A change that is more than merely imaginative, for unless one is conscious of an act that provokes real change it may be better not to ‘act’ at all, since such an imaginary act feeds into the already existing social structure. Without being cognizant of a subversive act, one is unable to reconfigure the symbolic order of the Master signifier of the big Other. Such an act does transgress the social order, but does so differently in an important aspect from an ‘imaginative’ transgression, i.e., the act is indeterminate to its very core; there is an irreducible contingency associated with such an act. The act falls outside of the preexisting social code. One must take a ‘leap of faith’ and acknowledge the renunciation of all of one’s ideals, being willing to say No! to the Other but must be willing to say No! to any Other whatsoever. It must be an act that cannot be repaid in the existing order: “sacrificial renunciation cannot be part of an exchange…”. Unless one is willing to take such a leap of faith into an irreducible contingency (the non-propositional nature of the Law qua Real) one will do nothing but repeat the practices of the established Law, forcing one to feel the guilt of transgressing the Law and the malaise of undermining one’s own desire for a new order. Žižek finds a model of leaping into the irreducible contingency in the figure of Christ, Christ himself is the ultimate diabolic figure, insofar as he brings “the sword, not peace,” disturbing the existing harmonious unity: “if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes even his own life—he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). Christ himself is thus the “diabolic” founding gesture of the Holy Spirit as the properly “symbolic” community, the gathering of believers.
Christ disturbs the existing unity, the symbolic Master figure of the Other. Christ speaks in hyperbolic language, even to the point of being misread, because this type of speech may be the only way in which to end the economic sacrifice found in idolatry. In his book Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant critiques idolatry quite strongly. Idolatry, according to Kant, “burdens the conscience” of the individual and casts it as, an illusion which does, indeed, well comport with the cast of mind of a good citizen in a political commonwealth, and with external propriety, yet which not only contributes nothing to the character of such a man, as a citizen of the kingdom of God, but rather debases it, and serves, by means of a deceptive veneer, to conceal the bad moral conduct of his disposition from the eyes of others, and even from his own eyes.
The burden of the conscience, as Kant terms it, could be understood in Žižekian/Lacanian terms of the guilt and malaise. The idol is always physically present, never changing just as the Master signifier is, something to which one can make a sacrifice and never receive anything new in return. Yet the idol, like the society (Master figure of the Other), is a veneer, a false front upon which one believes one’s transgression have been paid and yet, at the same time, forces guilt and malaise upon one’s conscience; and the more one sacrifices to this idol the deeper one internalizes these feelings. Christ attempts through his hyperbolic language to force iconoclastic thought to even greater depths. Not only is the golden calf a veneer, but, for Christ, so is one’s closest familial relations including to oneself. One must not only not make sacrifices to idols that are made from the hands of the human being, but all things that are worldly, even relations to other humans and oneself. One must be willing to discover the rupture that Žižek discusses to find in the Master signifier even within the self. The hyperbolic language of Christ’s declaration calls our attention to the non-relational nature that things in the world, in the “picture,” within being truly have. This non-relational (or perhaps better put, non-rational) relation compels one to view the community not as a whole, an “All” as Žižek would put it in Lacanian terms, where each individual is held in some culturally significant hierarchical relation with the next individual, but rather as a “non-All”. There is a structure that is common to the community, but at the same time it is not fabricated by the community; it is in excess of the community. Idols hold a specific signification, e.g., golden calf, one’s family, oneself, and as such in the face of such signification one can only attempt to find particular meaning for oneself. Selfishness sets in, and as a result the anarchy that Moses found upon returning from the mountain of those engaged in idolatry could not but have occurred. The good that idolaters search for has positive connotations—they are caught is a movement from potentiality to actuality; however, Žižek is clear that this is characterization of evil itself “the very principle of the actualization of a Ground.” Through their sacrifice, the idolaters believe they are becoming more moral, more like a god that they have preordained with certain principles. Now, presumably because one believes that one is becoming more God-like in the very practices of sacrifice, one begins to believe that the idol repays their sacrifices; consequently, one’s moral conduct is hidden even from oneself, as Kant reminds us. However, “God is ultimately the name for the purely negative gesture of meaningless sacrifice.” God, in other words, is the un-re-presentable signifier—the true concept of God cannot be formalized into a schema; God is beyond re-presentation. Any meaning found within God is pure Meaning, “reduced to the empty form of Meaning which remains after I have renounced all humanly defined finite Meaning: pure, unconditional Meaning can appear (and it has to appear) only as nonsense.” Thus, just as the Law and being are, the content of Meaning is negative; it is the Void and absent of ‘human’, rational Meaning. Where we look for meaning, all we are left with is the inconsistent and paradoxical character of God. As a consequence of Judaism’s prohibition against idolatry one is freed from sacrificing to something in the concrete and allows for abstract thought to arise. One’s thought can become abstract to the extent that one can posit a ‘transcendent’ realm. This transcendent realm, again interpreted in Žižekian/Lacanian terms, may be the birth of the unconscious, that part of the psyche which is hidden from the conscious and rational part of the mind. As a result one might say that God is the content of the unconscious. The notion of God creates a gap in our religious experience. Escaping discourse and conscious speech (and action in sacrifice), if one is to engage in theology one must engage in negative theology. Even if this is the case, although one does not consciously feel the “burden” of sacrificing to the idolatry of the golden calf, of one’s spouse, children, or of oneself, the “burden” is now more insidious; it festers within the unconscious “making us guilty without knowing what we are guilty of; the wound that won’t heal itself and does not let us die.” It seems that Žižek believes that there is something in the logic of Christianity that either allows the wound to heal, or at least we no longer sustain future injuries. God as found through negative theology seems to bring to light what Žižek means by ‘materialist theology’. God, like the Real itself, is inconsistent and divided unto itself, rupturing itself. Since there is a rupture in God’s being, an inconsistency, a division saying to Adam and Eve, do not eat the apple and yet “between the lines” giving another command, the ground of being is “a self-sundering material Grund internally producing what transcends it.” “Perhaps ‘God’ is the name for this supreme split between the Absolute as the noumenal Thing and the Absolute as the appearance of itself, for the fact that the two are the same, that the difference between the two is purely formal. In this precise sense, ‘God’ names the supreme contradiction: God—the absolute unrepresentable Beyond—has to appear as such.” We have seen, in the case of being, the logic of why God has to appear as such. It is in passages such as these that Žižek is attempting to narrate the lively and active trait of the immanent beginnings of the transcendent. The concept of God is itself a “Grund as Ungrund” and as undermining itself, God cannot help but reveal God-self as that which is not transcendent but that which is immanent. In other words, as Žižek would say, God reveals God’s self as there is no Other of the Other. The master signifier reveals itself to be nothing other the subject’s own reflection upon the signifier; Žižek says as much in the passages just quoted from The Parallax View, “instead of a hidden terrifying secret, we encounter the same thing behind the veil as in front, this very lack of difference between the two elements confronts us with the ‘pure’ difference that separates an element from itself.” God is not wholly external to the subject but rather is the subject’s reflection of subjectivity itself. The subject is inscribed within God as part of God’s ontological structure. The subject is not separate from substance: the “subject is substance staring back at itself; the eye of the observing individual.” God is partially, if not wholly, the gaze of the subject upon substance, which seems to be nothing other than the subject gazing upon its “picture” and the gap the subject creates through its being in the “picture” is God. For Žižek, God, then, is not an illusion, as it is for Freud, but rather a ground that cannot sustain itself as a ground of being. God is that which appears as distant and mysterious to us as such. Thus, God must appear, but how, in what form, and how is this appearance going to help with our sanity? As we have seen the transcendent/unconscious also gives rise to symptoms of guilt and malaise. The question, then, remains how does God’s appearance, perhaps as the unconscious, help ease the malaise? Since the ‘transcendence’ of God is contradictory, it must appear, at least according to Žižek, as its opposite as well, that is in a materialistic manner. God must become human incarnate. Let us return to the purpose of this essay, the relationship between sacrifice and ethics. There is nothing that transcends the human, as such; the ‘transcendent’ is rather that excessive core resides in all of us. Moreover still, it is this excessive core that makes the human, without the excess one would be something other than human, more beast than man perhaps. It is through the excess that we are allowed access into our most human selves: although this human self, due to the split subject entail its own excess, the inhuman or the “undead,” as Žižek is fond of saying. As stated above, when one is subjected to the preordained constellation of value of the master signifier one is forced to make ethical decisions based on this constellation of value. Those who are ‘good’ and those who are ‘evil’ wear the preverbal white and black hats. However, if one takes into account the excess of the split subject “Christ’s love” can take effect. Unless one takes into account the excessive inhuman element in the human, “what he misses is the paradox that every normative determination of the ‘human’ is possible only against an impenetrable ground of ‘inhuman.’ Moreover, Žižek is clear that “the Christian comedy of love can occur only against the background of a radical loss of human dignity, of a degradation which, precisely, undermines the tragic experience.” Christian love as comedic is a love that allows one to break free from the circulation and economics of sacrifice and ethics. As comedic, the ‘tragic’ situation of a disaster “outgrows the confines of the tragic.” The ‘tragic’ being the horizon of finitude, the horizon upon which one judges what it is to be human and what is not. This horizon, through Christian love, explodes revealing in its aftermath the excess of the human what is left when ‘dignity’ has been striped from the individual. ‘Dignity’ seems to be used in the Žižekian context as a rational construct placed upon someone on account of cultural beliefs. Such as the dignity a king has, not because he is a king but only because people treat him as a king. ‘Dignity’ is a way of hiding the monstrous excess in an individual. Christ not only comes out of the tradition of iconoclastic thought but also from the notion of the Incarnation. Through the Incarnation, God (now Jesus) has become God-man; God (the master signifier that is the Other of no Other) has now be transubstantiated into the human. The noumenal has been collapsed into the phenomenal, the conscious and the unconscious. We should not be too hasty in our conclusions however. Žižek, it would seem, does not want to say that God is the unconscious, as Jung would have it: the conscious and the unconscious are separate—albeit separate in a parallax manner. Such a conflation would be nothing other than a return to religion and its malaise and guilt. Rather, perhaps, one could say that God is a part of the unconscious or a consequent of the unconscious the shadow, the smear just as the Real is. What this means to suggest, it seems to me, is that God is not an object of faith; God exists just as much as the unconscious and the Real are existent. Žižek insists that we take the Incarnation comically, rather than tragically—the Incarnation is not the limit of our finitude it is the opening of the infinite investigation of human. Comedy “short circuits” the power of the mask of dignity to reveal that the pathetic and that which is humanly weak exist too in the dignified mask of the king. In other words, the power that is believed to reside in the mask is revealed not to be excessive at all, but rather the veiling of the human all-too-human aspect. If we view the world tragically, we run up against the wall of finitude. The human being can only be truly understood over and against the infinite, the beyond. To be properly human, a subject must recognize this excessive core of inhumanity within the human itself and strive to reinscribe it, albeit fool heartedly of course, within the human subject. Since the subject can only emerge as a result of its own excess, returning its gaze back upon itself from the ‘background’ of that which objects to its gaze—the excess of its own existence—seeing another as a product of the excess, just as oneself is, one can finally show love to the other. What bars us from loving another is the belief that the other must return our love, that our sacrifice may be in vain; and yet at the same time, we feel guilt and malaise in the sacrificial love to another, since one first sees another as suffering and there is nothing one can do to have stopped it, and one feels malaise because there is an inhibition of instinct. However, one can begin to treat other ethically through a universality that only Christ taught, according to Žižek’s argument. To love another, or rather to treat one ethical, is usually thought of in relation to another, “I love you!” implies that “I am in such a relation to love and care for you.” Yet, due to the split subject what one in fact loves is a representation of the other, the veil behind which the excess lies. Consequently, the love is not faithful to the real other (or the Real of the other). What one has in mind is an imaginary other. The self is not a particular subject found within a community of others to be found in relation to others, this would not allow us to transgress the economy of sacrifice, but rather each of us is an unconscious self: the excess resides in each of our unconscious mind. As was stated above, God is part of the unconscious, Christ dying on the cross affirms the singularity of all subjects because the Incarnation is the basis for this singularity, “the gap that separates God from man is transposed into God himself, as the gap that separates Christ from God-Father; the properly dialectical trick here is that the very feature which appeared to separate me from God turns out to unite me with God.” Further Žižek states, “the universals undermined by Christ are ‘abstract’ substantial universals (presented in the guise of the Jewish Law), while ‘concrete’ universality is the very negativity of undermining abstract universals.” What is so scandalous about Christ’s love is that is breaks the community of relational otherness, so that the true excessive self may be seen. Law of the community is replaced by the realization that all subjects are united not due their particularities (one might be a cobbler, another house builder, and other banker making a ‘community’) but rather the excess that is common to us all. Christ’s love corrects the singular particularity. Without such a love each individual can only understand their desires with regard to their own particularity, which can only result in a Hobbesian war of all against all (worse yet perhaps a war within each individual’s conscious). By embracing the excess of Christian love, it is one’s conscious mind that can be understood as the cause of one’s desires and drives. One can no longer posit unto the unconscious world the cause of our being, our longing for love or even destruction. We are forced to confront these desires that lead to guilt and malaise head on. 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