DEBATES

Religion and the Bifurcation of the Left

Slavoj Žižek and the

Imperial/Colonial Model of Religion

William David Hart

Hegelian Prelude

T

his earliest form of religion—

although one may well refuse to call it religion—is that for

which we have the name “magic.” (Hegel 1998a, 226)

The religion of magic is still found today among wholly crude

and barbarous peoples such as the Eskimos. (229)

The Negroes have an endless multitude of “divine images”

which they make into their gods or their “fetishes.” (234–35)

[Africa] is no historical part of the World; it has no movement

or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it—that is

in its northern part—belong to the Asiatic or European World.

(Hegel 1988b, 92)

World history goes from East to West: as Asia is the begin-

ning of world history, so Europe is simply its end. In world

history there is an absolute East, par excellence (whereas the

N e p a n t l a : V i e w s f r o m S o u t h

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Copyright 2002 by Duke University Press

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geographical term “East” is in itself entirely relative); for al-

though the earth is a sphere, history makes no circle around

that sphere. On the contrary, it has a definite East which is

Asia. It is here that the external physical sun comes up, to sink

in the West: and for that same reason it is in the West that

the inner Sun of self-consciousness rises, shedding a higher

brilliance. (ibid.)

This inner dialectic of civil society thus drives it—or at any

rate drives a specific civil society—to push beyond its own lim-

its [colonial expansion] and seek markets, and so its necessary

means of subsistence, in other lands which are either deficient

in the goods it has overproduced, or else generally backward in

industry, &c. (Hegel 1967, 151)

The same consideration justifies civilized nations in regarding

and treating as barbarians those who lag behind them in in-

stitutions which are the essential moments of the state. Thus

a pastoral people may treat hunters as barbarians, and both of

these are barbarians from the point of view of agriculturists,

&c. The civilized nation is conscious that the rights of barbar-

ians are unequal to its own and treats their autonomy as only a

formality. (219)

Introduction

In their efforts to develop a general theory of religion, scholars often employ
an evolutionary/hierarchical model. These models became evident at least
as early as the eighteenth century and reached their zenith in the nineteenth
century. Almost invariably, they exhibit the following schemata: from sim-
ple to complex religion, from primitive to civilized, from religions of the
South to those of the North, from religions of the East to those of the
West, from the religions of Africa, aboriginal Australia, and native Amer-
ica to the religions of Europe. This evolutionary and hierarchical model
of religion is more properly called the imperial/colonial model of religion.

1

I

shall argue that Slavoj Žižek’s recent book The Fragile Absolute, or, Why Is
the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?

(2000a) is a legacy of this model

of religion, the most systematic version of which is found in the work
of Hegel. I shall argue, further, that Žižek’s and Hegel’s models share

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Eurocentric presuppositions—historical, cultural, political, and econom-
ic—that are troubling. What I will not argue is that Žižek intends to recapit-
ulate the imperial/colonial model of religion. On the contrary, he stumbles
into this model. He does so, precisely, because he does not intend to. He does
not think about the ethics and politics of religion and representation at all.
Instead, he speaks the “common sense” of his culture, which distinguishes
invidiously between Christianity and other religions, viewing Christianity
alternately, if not simultaneously, as the height of religious evolution and
as a revelation whose very “absurdity” confounds and throws into utter
disarray preexisting notions of religion, ethics, and politics. Žižek holds
this common sense constant and beyond question—it does not even reach
the threshold of critique—as he queries “our” culture’s common sense on
other matters. What he holds constant, I put into “play.”

The appellation imperial/colonial model of religion is apropos. For

colonial modernity began with Portuguese and Spanish voyages of conquest
consecrated by the Pope in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. T hus conquest
provides the historical context for the emergence of a theory of religion
that models the hierarchical, sociopolitical relations with native peoples
in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the islands of the Atlantic,
Pacific, and Indian Oceans (the bitter fruit of conquest) that were already
beginning to develop. This development was fed by the classification of
national characters, the transatlantic slave trade, and the emergence of
racial theory, developments that in turn fed into and were conditioned by
Christian Europe’s lingering anxieties toward its Jewish inhabitants and by
competition and conflict between Christian and Islamic civilizations. When
I refer to the imperial/colonial model of religion, it is this large tableau—
with its temporal, geographical, racial, and gendered hierarchies—that I
have in mind.

That is not all that I have in mind. The imperial/colonial model of

religion has antecedents in the medieval notion of the “four faiths”: Chris-
tianity, Judaism, Islam, and Idolatry (King 1999, 99). Idolatry (or paganism)
referred to non-Abrahamic religion. The singular religion rather than the
plural religions was appropriate since, for the proponents of the Abrahamic
religions, the similarities were more important than the differences. As
polytheists and demon worshipers, the adherents of non-Abrahamic reli-
gion were ignorant of father Abraham and certainly ignorant of Jesus the
Christ. Idolatry was the dominant category under which the Portuguese
and Spanish perceived Africans and American Indians during the fifteenth
century. But we know that this was not the only way they (Africans at

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least) were perceived. When the Portuguese raided West African villages
in 1441, they shouted “‘St. George’ and ‘Santiago’ (St. James), the saints they
always appealed to when raiding the outposts of Islam” (Raboteau 2001, 4).
At a time when the crusading spirit of Christendom was experiencing its
last revival, the Portuguese clearly saw Africans (at least some of them) as
their Muslim enemies. Ironically, their African adventures were partially
inspired by “a legendary Christian king called Prester John,” who resided
somewhere in Africa and whom they hoped to persuade “to join them in
their crusade against the followers of Islam” (ibid.).

By the time of the European Enlightenment, and certainly by the

nineteenth century, the medieval quartet of Christianity, Judaism, Islam,
and Idolatry had developed into the precursor of the “world religions”
model. On one side of an epistemic and normative dividing line were the
world religions, on the other side were “nature religions.” World religions
were defined in large part by the presence of literacy, if not a high textual
tradition. Nature religions were nonliterate. World religions were Euro-
pean and Asian. Nature religions were African, Native American, and
Aboriginal. Thus the category of Idolatry as an all-purpose description of
non-Abrahamic religion had all but disappeared as Asian religions were
distinguished from African, Native American, and Aboriginal religions
and became constitutive members of the world religions club, while the
religions of the “people without history,” as Hegel would put it, were rele-
gated to the category of nature, tribal, primitive, or primal religion. By the
mid-nineteenth century, the imperial/colonial model of religion was firmly
in place, constituting the “common sense” through which religion was un-
derstood. Indeed, the imperial/colonial “model with its Christian center,
‘oriental’ periphery, and ‘primitive’ outer-periphery is still the dominant
way of organizing religious studies departments” (Hart 2002, 9).

In this essay, I trace the reemergence of the imperial/colonial

model of religion in the work of Žižek. To show that his recent work
presupposes this model—despite his status as a progressive Marxist—is my
task. To show that this model is constitutive of his politics, that his politics
are Eurocentric, and that Eurocentrism colors his view of Christianity and
Marxism is also my burden. Before I attempt to shoulder so heavy a load,
allow me to make a remark about the pleasures and the perils of reading
Žižek.

Reading Žižek is a stimulating experience. One is simultaneously

informed, edified, and entertained. His courage, his willingness to criticize
leftist conventions and common sense, is attractive, even when he is wrong,

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even when his political judgment is questionable, even when his taste is
“bad.” My analysis is often little more than a writing between his lines,
an effort to understand Žižek’s deficiencies in light of his own critique. If
Stuart Hall’s “Religious Ideology and Social Movements in Jamaica” (1985)
has greater depth than Marx’s account of religion, then Žižek swims even
deeper, in the middle regions between a superficial analysis and the kind of
depth analysis that one finds, for example, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The
Time of History and the Times of the Gods” (1997). Žižek’s most explicit
effort to theorize religion in relation to Marxism is The Fragile Absolute. As
usual, one is stunned by Žižek’s sheer intelligence, by his endless creativity
in reading both the philosophical tradition and popular culture through
Lacanian lenses. His appropriation of Jacques Lacan allows him to capture
something important about religion that Hall misses, that is, the powerful,
contradictory, and paradoxical ways in which religion works ideologically
on the level of fantasy and affect, on the level of the viscera, the stomach,
and the amygdala. Thus he gives a better account of subject formation in
religious ideology, of the sensible and infrasensible “domains in which we
think, within which intensities of cultural appraisal are stored, and through
which we value and disvalue” (Connolly 1999, 177).

Take the case, which Žižek recounts, of a woman who needs a

lifesaving blood transfusion. Her religious beliefs (let’s assume that she is a
Christian Scientist) hold that transfusions are sinful. A liberal judge has a
difficult decision to make: How does he get the woman to consent to a blood
transfusion without forcing her to violate her religious beliefs? The judge
attempts to resolve this problem by forcing the woman to have a blood
transfusion against her will. Since sin is an act of will and the transfusion
violated her will, then she could not be held responsible for the act, and
would not be condemned to hell and damnation. Her life could be saved
without violating her religious conviction that transfusions are sinful or the
liberal belief that coercing confessions is wrong.

Despite its noble intentions, which might lead him behave simi-

larly were he facing a similar case, Žižek despises this solution as a lie. It
does not force the woman, psychoanalytically speaking, to confront her de-
sire. For in regard to the judge’s question (of whether she would be guilty
of sin were the court to forcibly transfuse her), the woman in question
“knew perfectly well that if she answered ‘No,’ the judge would order enforced
transfusion

” (Žižek 2000a, 138). Thus she was in the enviable position of

saying yes by saying no. Answering no would allow her to satisfy her true
as opposed to her lying desire. Here is a formal coincidence between telling

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the truth and telling a lie, that is, a formal truth provides cover for a sub-
stantive lie. This solution does not force the woman to face the truth of her
desire, that is, the Lacanian difference between her stated desire (as “sub-
ject of statement”) and her unstated desire (as “subject of enunciation”).
Statements are propositional. They are public relations announcements for
an ego that always dissembles, deceives, and lies. Enunciations are about
affects, instincts, and ideological fantasy. They are the pronouncements of
our unconscious desire. The woman in question speaks to the letter of the
law, its propositional truth, when acknowledging the sinfulness of blood
transfusion (she truly believes that transfusion is sinful). But she lies about
her true desire and thus does not speak to the spirit of the law, to what we
might call the “truth effects of affect.” For “on the level of her subjective
position of enunciation,” she endorses the very blood transfusion that as a
proposition she rejects (ibid.).

Through analyses such as this, Žižek provides a powerful set of

conceptual tools—most notably, the idea of “ideological fantasy”—that
help us to better understand the power of religious ideologies and the tena-
cious hold that they have on their subjects. But if we are stunned by Žižek’s
intelligence, by his ability to illuminate the ideological power of religion,
then equally as stunning is his thorough captivity to the imperial/colonial
model of religion. This enthrallment is only underscored by his often sub-
tle and insightful analysis of ideology. If Žižek has identified the “sublime
object of ideology” as a traumatic void, constitutive lack, or ontological
absence at the center of the subject, ethnos, and nation—at the center of
any notion of wholeness, completion, or plenitude—then he remains blind
to that object in his narrative of religion. In this essay, I use the conceptual
resources that Žižek provides to illustrate this blindness.

As one of my colleagues has said, The Fragile Absolute, like all of

Žižek’s texts, is something of a “grab bag.” One is never sure of how to
read Žižek, never sure of his mood. Is his account serious? Is it parody? Is
it analysis by way of perversion? Or analysis by way of hysteria? (Penney
2000, 3). It is hard to know as he meanders, digresses, and lurches from
ostensible Lacanian insight (often illustrated by reference to a movie) to a
stimulating reading of Marx. In this analysis, I will grab what I find useful
in Žižek’s “bag” and leave the rest behind. That I leave a great deal behind
has as much to do with limitations of space as with my desire, specifically,
to explicate his concept of religion. So I have nothing to say about a lot of
things (for instance, his brilliant analysis of Coke as an example of Lacan’s
objet petit a

) that I otherwise find interesting and noteworthy.

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Žižek (2000a, 1) begins his analysis, rather portentously, with the

following statement: “One of the most deplorable aspects of the postmodern
era and its so-called ‘thought’ is the return of the religious dimension in all
its different guises; from Christian and other fundamentalisms, through the
multitude of New Age spiritualisms, up to the emerging religious sensitiv-
ity within deconstructionism itself (so-called ‘post-secular’ thought). How
is a Marxist, by definition a ‘fighting materialist’ (Lenin), to counter this
massive onslaught of obscurantism?” Against the obvious answer of fero-
ciously attacking these tendencies and mercilessly denouncing the residual
religiosity within Marxism, Žižek advocates “fully endorsing what one is ac-
cused of

: yes, there is a direct lineage from Christianity to Marxism; yes,

Christianity and Marxism should fight on the same side of the barricade
against the onslaught of new spiritualisms—the authentic Christian legacy
is much too precious to be left to the fundamentalist freaks” (2).

What one notices immediately is that Žižek puts Christianity and

Marxism on the same side and against the multicultural multitude, which
he construes in summary fashion as “fundamentalist freaks.” Before pro-
ceeding, a disclaimer: I share Žižek’s disdain for liberal multiculturalism.
I think that he is right, furthermore, to criticize much of the academic-
cultural Left for fetishizing difference and underplaying the virtues of
universality, not as an antecedent, transcendental a priori but as a conse-
quent, as a result of agonistic struggle. Žižek is a provocative writer whose
very style invites counterprovocation. I am being intentionally provocative,
maybe perverse, in using the term multicultural multitude, which I refuse to
concede to liberalism or to Žižek’s critique. Under the cover of a legitimate
and necessary critique of difference, Žižek smuggles illegitimate claims for
Europe. He seeks to universalize European difference to the detriment, I
fear, of the multicultural multitude, whose legitimate interests, fears, and
desires cannot be reduced to the language of liberal pluralism and the
politics of political correctness, even if that kind of language and politics
is multiculturalism’s dominant mode of articulation. Can Žižek imagine
the agonistic universalization of non-European difference? Or is the non-
European markered, by definition, as nonuniversal, as nonuniversalizable?
I wonder. To answer these questions now would be premature. T hus I will
only mark the chain of equivalence between fundamentalism, freakishness,
inauthentic Christianity, New Age spirituality, and paganism, that is, the
ensemble of peoples, perspectives, and forms of religiosity, spirituality, and
piety that I call the multicultural multitude. I will return to these questions
later.

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By putting Christianity and Marxism on the same side, but more

important, by linking them uniquely, irremediably, and even essentially to
Europe, and thus placing them against the others, Žižek reaffirms the im-
perial/colonial model in the theory of religion. This model, which Žižek
appears to have appropriated without reservation, is given its most thorough
philosophical exposition by Hegel in four series of Lectures on the Philos-
ophy of Religion

(1821, 1824, 1827, 1831). In these lectures Hegel develops

an evolutionary schema in which Geist, Spirit, God moves spatiotempo-
rally from South to North, from East to West, from the dark continent
to the continent of enlightenment, from black to white, from Oriental to
Occidental, from primitive to civilized, from fetish to Christ. Christianity
sits at the top of religious development. And while it too must be sublated
(preserved, cancelled, transformed, and lifted higher) by philosophy, phi-
losophy would not be possible without it. But do not Žižek’s accounts of
Marxism and Christianity make similar moves? Are not Christianity and
Marxism—at least in his account—two sides of a Eurocentric narrative of
colonial modernity? I attempt to answer these questions in the remainder
of this essay.

Judeo-Christian Logic

According to Žižek, there is a “Judeo-Christian logic.” He urges “us” to
stick to this logic against the “onslaught of New Age neo-paganism.” The
virtues of this logic are as profound as the vices of neopagans, who are
fundamentalist freaks under a different description. Judeo-Christian logic
provides the theoretical and political weapons that “we” need in the fight
against Capital, and against its neopagan, fundamentalist, and multicul-
tural proxies. To this point, Žižek has not said clearly what that logic is,
but one gets the sneaking suspicion that it is a Lacanian logic avant la let-
tre

. In any event, what interests him most are the correlations that he can

make been this logic and Lacan. He explicates this logic, if you can call
it explication, in a set of reflections that have a serial but not a narrative
relation. On my gloss of Žižek’s (2000a, 83) account, Judeo-Christian logic
allows us to apprehend the “ontological paradox—scandal, even—of the
notion of fantasy.” Pagans, whether “paleo” or “neo,” simply get fantasy
wrong. They think that fantasy is subjective when, in fact, it belongs to
the anomalous category of the “objectively-subjective” (Dennett 1991, 132;
quoted in Žižek 2000a, 83). They think of fantasy as an idiosyncratic de-
rangement of cosmic order, rather than “the violent singular excess that
sustains

every notion of such an order”; that is, they construe fantasy as

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external and abnormal rather than constitutive of the norm (Žižek 2000a,
86). Thus they deny that error, distortion, and lying are metaphysical con-
stituents of truth. Further, they are oblivious to Friedrich Shelling’s mood,
his account of an infinite melancholy in nature, a muteness before an infi-
nite pain, a deadlock, an “unresolved absolute tension” that only the logos
in “man” can redeem. Žižek stops short of dismissing Shelling’s account as
“crazy teleological speculation” insofar as it has an analogue in historical
experience. By historical experience he means a movie! Federico Fellini’s
Satyricon

is his evidence. On Žižek’s reading, the “Ancient Roman hedonis-

tic figures” depicted in this movie are “permeated by an infinite sadness”
(87). This observation sets up a claim about the soteriological complexity
and superiority of Christianity that he has been working toward all along:

Fellini himself claimed that, precisely as a Christian, he wanted

to make a film about a universe in which Christianity is yet to

come, from which the notion of Christian redemption is yet

to come, from which the notion of Christian redemption is

totally absent. Does the strange sadness, a kind of fundamental

melancholy, of these pagan figures not, then, bear witness to

the fact that they somehow already have the premonition that

the true God will soon reveal Himself, and that they were born

just a little bit too early, so that they cannot be redeemed?

And is this not also the fundamental lesson of the Hegelian

dialectics of alienation: we are not dealing with the Paradise

which is then lost due to some fatal intrusion—there is already

in paradisiacal satisfaction (in the satisfaction of the “naïve”

organic community) something suffocating, a longing for fresh

air, for an opening that would break the unbearable constraint;

and this longing introduces into Paradise an unbearable infinite

Pain, a desire to break out—life in Paradise is always pervaded

by an infinite melancholy. (88)

According to Žižek, there is nothing speculative, teleological, or

nonsensical about this account. On the contrary, it is the only way of avoid-
ing the naiveté of an evolutionary narrative. Now, this is quite astonishing
in light of the naiveté of his evolutionary narrative of religion, of the im-
perial/colonial matrix from which it emerged, whose history makes his
Hegelian account of religion suspect. Even the wise and dusky wings

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of Minerva (that is, a retrospective assessment) are not enough to save
this account from the ridicule that it deserves. But on this matter, Žižek
seems oddly indifferent, even blind. And what he has to say about Walter
Benjamin’s idiosyncratic notions of messianism and other antievolution-
ary gestures does not save his account. They only expose more sharply its
inadequacy.

If Judeo-Christian logic is antievolutionary, as Žižek contends,

then it alone can give a proper account of eternity. This logic stands against
a pagan logic that denies the founding power of trauma, which is an eter-
nal, irremediable wound or infinite sadness that we cannot speak or put
into historical context because it resists the symbolizing and historicizing
work of language. Judeo-Christian logic comprehends the negativity of
eternity, the ontological difference between time and eternity, eternity as
that which time excludes, eternity as the negative condition for the emer-
gence of time. In effect, Žižek baptizes Martin Heidegger’s ontological
difference as Judeo-Christian.

2

Ignorance of this difference distinguishes

“pre-Christian religions.” Notice: he doesn’t say other religions or non-
Christian religions but pre-Christian. He calls such religions pre-Christian
because he is employing an evolutionary model, probably Hegel’s model,
in which Judaism is the Sublime Religion and Christianity is the Consum-
mate Religion. Before and behind these religions, to the south and to the
east, are the pre-Christian religions: (1) “Immediate or Natural Religion,”
where Spirit has yet to extricate itself from nature—Spirit being the proper
measure of “man”; (2) Mediated Religion, where the spiritual is elevated
above the natural; and (3) Consummate Religion, “religion that is for itself,”
which is self-conscious, which can take itself as an object of inquiry. If one
does an ethnography of this schema, one discovers the following “ascent
of ‘Religion Man’”: from Eskimos, Africans, Mongols, Chinese, Indians,
Burmese, Jews, ancient Greeks, and ancient Romans,

3

to modern Euro-

peans. In ascending rank order, the list of religions are: magic (fetishism,
animism, primitivism), Buddhism, Lamaism, the “State Religion of the
Chinese Empire,” Taoism, Hinduism, Persian Religion, Egyptian Religion,
Greek Religion, Jewish Religion, Roman Religion, and Christianity (Hegel
1988, 205–15, 229–30, 235, 391). These lists are a little misleading; not only
do the two orders of ascent fail to map up perfectly, they also obscure the
categorical difference between Christianity as Consummate (superhistori-
cal) Religion and all the others as Determinate (historical) Religion. The
differences between the others are matters of degree; the one between them
and Christianity is a difference in kind. And this is true despite the fact that

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there is no place in Hegel’s philosophy for the kind of gaps and conceptual
leaps that one finds, for example, in the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard,
his dissident follower. Hegel’s account reflects the confidence of a Christian
Europe that was well on its way (in 1827) to reducing most of the globe to
a colony.

If Žižek explicates the antievolutionary character of Judeo-Chris-

tian logic in relation to eternity, then he ignores the context of colo-
nial modernity and, thus, the evolutionary and hierarchical episteme of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century comparative religion, which is consti-
tutive of the very notion of Judeo-Christianity. If I am correct in assuming
Žižek’s reliance on Hegel—and even if I am not, since this episteme is bigger
than Hegel—then Žižek bears a certain burden of proof. He must explain
why his Hegelianism does not commit him to Hegel’s account of religion,
history, and politics. As the quotations with which I opened this essay show,
there is a constitutive relation between pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory,
the distinction between lower and higher races, between “primitive” reli-
gions and “world historical” religions, and claims for the preeminence of
European Man. In the absence of an account that distinguishes his views
from this tradition, it would be foolish not to raise the question of Žižek’s
complicity. Here an inversion of the ethical-juridical mood is appropriate.
Žižek must be considered guilty until proven innocent.

Tsenay Serequeberhan and Jorge Larrain provide the kind of

accounts that Žižek needs to confront if he is to exonerate himself. Sereque-
berhan shows why Hegel’s political philosophy—which is integrally con-
nected to his philosophies of history and religion by the evolutionary/hierar-
chical motif—requires colonialism. Hegel is driven by the dialectics of
his own logic—with its failure to adequately address the political econ-
omy of civil society, which inexorably produces poverty, which places the
poor/nonproductive/superfluous classes outside the modern system of jus-
tice that is based on property ownership—to advocate colonialism as a
solution. According to Serequeberhan (1989, 311), colonialism is the only
solution to the market imperfections of civil society, and to the surplus popu-
lations it inevitably produces, “that is compatible with the basic terms of his
[Hegel’s] perspective and the European reality upon which and out of which
he reflected.” The structural imperfections (contradictions) inherent in civil
society made colonialism attractive, even necessary. “Thus, non-European
territories which do not share the peculiar European idea of property and
society and thus do not have the strange problem of ‘overproduction’ are

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labeled ‘generally backward in industry’ and thereby become the legitimate
prey of colonialist expansion” (ibid.).

Larrain provides an account of what we might call the impe-

rial/colonial episteme of nineteenth-century Europe, allowing us to place
Serequeberhan’s account in a larger context. On this view, Hegel’s distinc-
tion between “world historical peoples” and “peoples without history” pre-
supposes classical political economy (Smith, Malthus, Say, Ricardo), which
regards the British bourgeoisie as the privileged representative of capitalist
emancipation and progress, and presages Marx and Engels’s notion that the
most important proletariat, that is, the universal and messianic class, “is the
proletariat of the most advanced European capitalist nations.” What these
perspectives hold in common is “a kind of Eurocentrism: the belief that the
progress brought about by these historical actors in capitalist Western Eu-
rope is inherently superior and has a historical mission which must finally
prevail in the world” (Larrain 1991, 239). The concepts and images that
Serequeberhan and Larrain identify in the work of the classical political
economists, and in the work of Hegel and Marx—including the notion of
“peoples without history,” the concept of the white man’s burden, and the
imagery of darkest Africa—are examples of what David Spurr (1993) calls
“the rhetoric of empire.”

Are the Jews Stealing Žižek’s Jouissance?

Žižek’s account of religion is an artifact of the ethno-philosophical discourse
of colonial modernity, of the imperial/colonial “machine.” The ethno-
graphic material on which Hegel relies and that Žižek presupposes became
available, primarily, through imperial encounters between an emerging
West and the “rest”—from the conquest of the Americas to the coloniza-
tion of India to the “scramble for Africa,” the latter of which occurred in the
century of Hegel’s death. It was during that same century, the nineteenth,
that Europeans fell in love with ancient Greece and struggled with anxieties
about the relative importance of “Athens and Jerusalem” in the formation
of European identity. Was Europe fundamentally Hebraic or Hellenistic?
Jewish or Greek? And what was the relation between these traditions and
Christianity? Jews were a troubling presence, an immovable foreign body
within the imagined community of the European body politic, which for
centuries had been defined externally by its Islamic other. The recovery of
ancient Greek learning, whose mediation/transformation by Arab-Islamic
culture was increasingly disavowed (on this view, Arab-Islamic culture was
merely the caretaker or valet of Western culture) often went hand-in-hand

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with an effort to establish the superiority of Christianity to Judaism. In his
1793 text, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant (1960, 116) says
that “Judaism is really not a religion at all but merely a union of a number
of people who, since they belonged to a particular stock, formed themselves
into a commonwealth under purely political laws, and not into a church.”
Kant is not being complimentary. On the contrary, this is an account in
which Judaism comes up short in the game of comparative religion, since
true religion is a by-product of strict adherence to the moral law, and no
religion is stricter in this regard than Christianity. As with Kant, religion
for Hegel is a term of praise. I read Kant’s position on Judaism, his skep-
ticism about its religiousness, in relation to Hegel’s expressed doubt about
whether the religion of magic is even worthy of the name religion at all. For
Hegel religion is a mark of humanity; it distinguishes absolutely between
humanity and animality, and differentially between higher and lower races.

It would be incorrect to say that Hegel questioned the humanity

of Jews, but he certainly doubted the equality of Judaism. Žižek has no
such doubts: he is positively certain of Christianity’s superiority. The Spirit,
as God, as History, moves from East to West and leaves Judaism behind.
In his account, Žižek seeks a gentle way of leaving Judaism behind while
simultaneously bringing it along. He accomplishes this sublation through
his notion of Judeo-Christian logic. Again, this logic—and here we return
to the question of time and eternity—is opposed to pagan or pre-Christian
religions. They remain merely at the level of wisdom because they sto-
ically “emphasize the insufficiency of every temporal finite object . . . in
favor of the True Divine Object which alone can provide Infinite Bliss”
(Žižek 2000a, 96). The genius of Christianity—and here one suspects that
Žižek is following without attribution that great anti-Hegelian Hegelian,
Kierkegaard—is to insist on the invasion of the temporal by the eternal.
Christianity confounds pagan wisdom by offering “Christ as a mortal-
temporal individual, and insists that belief in the temporal Event of Incar-
nation is the only path to eternal truth and salvation. In this precise sense,
Christianity is a ‘religion of Love’: in love, one singles out, focuses on, a
finite temporal object which ‘means more than anything else’” (ibid; see
also Žižek 2000b, 663).

Žižek also appropriates Kierkegaard’s notion of infinite passion.

And he poses what he calls “the delicate question of the relationship be-
tween Judaism and Christianity” (Žižek 2000a, 97). He never says why
this question is delicate. One has to read between the lines. Perhaps Žižek
is reticent because to speak about the anti-Semitic obscene and monstrous

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underside of Christianity (ibid.), as he might put it were he referring to fun-
damentalist freaks, would force him to deal with imperialism/colonialism
and its relation to his account of religion. In evading this question, he makes
explicit that conquest, expulsion, and/or subordination of the Jews (the ob-
scene underside), which always already entails the subordination of pagans,
is prerequisite to the universal and hierarchical claims that he makes for
the Christian legacy. Before Christianity can rise to the top, before Žižek’s
notions of Europe and universality can be consolidated, Judaism must be
cast down.

Judaism proves deficient because of its dogmatism, because of

Jews’ “‘stubborn attachment’” (Žižek borrows Judith Butler’s term) to the
ghost that haunts them, “to their secret disavowed tradition,” which brings
them up short (Žižek 2000a, 97). Judaism, to personify, refuses to confess, to
acknowledge the extralegal event (the founding “crime” and, thus, obscene
underside) that undergirds every law and every order and that “haunts
the public legal order as its spectral supplement” (ibid.). Judaism, to put it
colloquially, “is in denial.” It is split between its public and secret aspects,
between the symbolic Law (language) and secret crime. This inner split
is simultaneously the split between Christianity, which confesses, which
acknowledges its dirty secret, its obscene underside, and Judaism, which
refuses to confess.

4

But even this account, Žižek argues, is inadequate. It

presents a distorted picture of Christianity as tied, through what Foucault
calls the confessional mode of discourse, to an “entanglement of Law and
its spectral double” (100), that is, the “originary” crime, transgression, and
obscenity on which the Law is founded. Isn’t the point of Paul’s message
of agape, Žižek asks rhetorically, that we should leave this vicious cycle be-
hind? Doesn’t Pauline agape cut the Gordian knot of “Law and its founding
Transgression?”

5

If the answer to these questions is yes—Žižek’s confi-

dence that it is and my doubt notwithstanding—then isn’t Christianity’s
superiority even greater than we imagined? Moreover, what if the standard
argument “that pagan (pre-Jewish) gods were ‘anthropomorphic’” and that
“the Jewish religion . . . was the first thoroughly to ‘de-anthropomorphize’
Divinity” is false (103)? Doesn’t the very prohibition of worship of other
gods suggest that Jews had a propensity to do so?

This is the train of Žižek’s reasoning. He disputes the claim that

Christianity stands intermediate between the thoroughgoing anthropo-
morphism of paganism and the radical iconoclasm of Judaism. On the
contrary, he argues “that it is the Jewish religion which remains an ‘ab-
stract/immediate’ negation of anthropomorphism, and as such attached to

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it, determined by it in its very direct negation, whereas it is only Chris-
tianity that actually ‘sublates’ paganism” (Žižek 2000a, 97–100; quota-
tion on 104). Christianity goes further than Judaism. Its iconoclasm is
stricter. It is “the negation of the negation.” It negates, that is, Judaism’s
“‘abstract/immediate’ negation of anthropomorphism.” To translate this
from Hegelese into English, Christians no longer need prohibitions against
graven images. Such prohibitions (negations) have done their pedagogical
work. Thus in using icons (the negation of the negation), Christians, who
are neither confused nor idolatrous, acknowledge the supersensible and
nonrepresentational nature of God. Christianity has attained a critically
mediated universality that Judaism has not.

This is the payoff that Žižek has been seeking, the conclusion

toward which he has been working. Finally, Judaism has been put in its
proper place. In Žižek’s Hegelian narrative of Christian triumphalism, Ju-
daism stands above the other religions that Hegel called “determinant”
(excepting Roman religion) but below Christianity—indeed, in a different
category altogether. This is the universalizing logic found only in Chris-
tianity and its Marxist legacy that Žižek suggests “we” hold on to in the
face of New Age neopaganism. Žižek names his enemies. He calls them
neopagans and fundamentalist freaks. Also on his enemies list are “PC”
(politically correct) racial minorities, proponents of “deviant” sexualities,
and liberal advocates of human rights. All attempt to rewrite the past so
as to abolish “the Real of a traumatic encounter whose structuring role in
the subject’s psychic economy forever resists its symbolic rewriting” (Žižek
2000a, 108–9; quotation on 109; see also Žižek 2000b, 676). This multicul-
tural multitude (horde) reduces the Judeo-Christian injunction “to love and
respect your neighbor” to an imaginary doubling or mirroring of the self.
The irreducibly traumatic character of the neighbor and, thus, of neigh-
borly love is denied. The PC horde imagines love and respect without
trauma, which is to say that it imagines a Law and Order that doesn’t
wound.

6

Thus, for the politically correct, human rights is little more than

the right to violate the Ten Commandments, to worship false gods, to steal,
lie, kill, and so on. In violating the Decalogue they violate Lacan who
“directly inscribes psychoanalysis into the Judaic tradition” (Žižek 2000a,
110). But even here Žižek is anxious to distinguish the Jewish and Christian
components of Judeo-Christian logic, and to establish the superiority of the
latter. Thus Judaism is salutary in refusing “to assert love for the neighbor
outside the confines of the Law” (112). This refusal prevents neighborly love
“from degrading into a narcissistic (mis)recognition of my mirror-image”

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(ibid.). But Christianity is better. Christian love goes beyond Jewish law by
breaking the vicious cycle of law and sin.

Žižek develops this argument in relation to the views of Donald

Davidson. While he spends some time comparing and contrasting Lacan’s
“Big Other” (language, the Symbolic order, Law) and Davidson’s princi-
ple of charity, according to which “‘disagreement and agreement alike are
intelligible only against a background of massive agreement’” (Davidson
1984, 187; quoted in Žižek 2000a, 114), that discussion can be dispensed
with for my purposes. What I will focus on instead is yet another argu-
ment that Žižek makes for the comparative superiority of Christianity to
Judaism, on the one hand, and to paganism, on the other. In this regard,
Žižek contrasts the global character of pagan religions and the universal
character of Christianity. The pagan cosmos is one of hierarchy, harmony,
and balance. Evil is defined as disharmony, derangement, and disruption.
The superiority (universality) of one principle is never asserted over others.
In contrast, Christianity, by its very nature, is subversive of “this global bal-
anced cosmic Order” (Žižek 2000a, 120). It scandalizes pagan wisdom by
speaking of the individual’s “immediate access to universality (of nirvana, of
the Holy Spirit, or, today, of human Rights and freedoms)” (ibid.). “Chris-
tianity is the miraculous Event that disturbs the balance of the One-All
[pagan cosmology]; it is the violent intrusion of Difference that precisely
throws the balanced circuit of the universe off the rails

” (121). That Žižek in-

cludes nirvana on his list of the vectors of universality does not change its
Orientalist color. On the contrary, he recapitulates the standard Orientalist
notion that the West (he marks Christianity as Western) is dynamic, his-
torical, revolutionary, and universal while the East is not. The South and
other geographies, of course, do not figure in his account, as they do not in
Hegel’s infamous claim that Africa is static and ahistorical and that history
moves from East to West.

The closest, so far as I can tell, that Žižek comes to addressing the

imperial/colonial implications of Hegel’s philosophy of religion is The Sub-
lime Object of Ideology

(1989). There he mentions Yirmiahu Yovel’s critique

of Hegel’s inconsistency and anti-Semitism. Indeed, Hegel’s inconsistency is
driven by his anti-Semitism. Thus Judaism (the religion of sublimity) pre-
ceeds Greek religion (the religion of beauty) even though this violates the
Kantian order—first the beautiful, then the sublime—on which Hegel’s
account depends. Rather than pursuing this point,

7

much less the evolu-

tionary/hierarchical character of Hegel’s overall philosophy, Žižek retreats
into a discussion of the philosophical sublime. Thus he turns away from the

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torn flesh and red blood of the historical sublime, from the bodily practices,
disciplines, and tortures of anti-Semitism and colonial modernity to the
discourse of a philosophy seminar (Žižek 1989, 201–2).

If the Jews did not steal Žižek’s love object, if they are not respon-

sible for his jouissance, his pain-filled satisfaction, then it seems a sure bet
that the motley crew of “village idiots” (pagans), and those that he skewers
as “fundamentalist freaks,” are. While Doug Akoi’s (1996, 413–14) point, in
the following passage, is to show how Žižek’s analysis helps to illuminate
“the fascistic moment of every culture,” there is no better description of the
operation that Žižek performs on the multicultural multitude:

Žižek argues that there is an irreducible gap between the fan-

tasy of culture as a Gemeinschaft/ethnos/Nation-Cause/shared

thing, that is, as a community sustained by organic bonds, and

the agonism of cultural difference, where meanings are mis-

read and signs are misappropriated. This gap, opened up by

the imaginariness of culture, motivates the displacement of its

immanent impossibility onto an ideological fantasy of a patho-

logical Other who threatens the wholesome body politic. This

is the formal conversion of the negativity of cultural lack into

the despised positivity of the alien Thing—the new old nation-

alism translated into Hegelese.

In reading Žižek against himself, we have seen and will see how he con-
structs the non-Western, non-European, non-Christian other as lacking
true politics, true ethics, true universality. This other threatens the whole-
some Western/European/Christian body politic. The European/Christian
ethnos—its possession of the love object, the object treasure—is being
threatened by “pagans at the gate.”

The Plague of Eurocentric Fantasies

I will pursue the final part of this analysis by way of a digression on Euro-
centrism, which as it turns out is not a digression at all but a constitutive
part of Žižek’s argument for the universality of Christianity and its superi-
ority to paganism. This will allow me to tie in the final thread of Žižek’s
account of religion in The Fragile Absolute.

Žižek has a rather odd notion of Eurocentrism. Or perhaps it isn’t

so odd. He claims that politics proper is of ancient Greek derivation; as

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such, it is “something specifically ‘European’” (Žižek 1998, 991).

8

Politics

proper always entails a paradoxical “short circuit between the universal
and the particular” (988). It is the universalization of the particular. The
history of European political thought, however, is “nothing but a series
of disavowals” (ibid.) of democratic antagonism, that is, the competitive
(and salutary) struggle for universality, which is the proper logic of politics.
Politics is not the globalization of difference but the universalization of
particularity, not a globalizing politics of difference but a universalizing
politics that everyone can identify with. Politics proper accents democratic
antagonism, while archepolitics (communitarianism), parapolitics (Jürgen
Habermas and John Rawls), metapolitics (Marxism), and ultrapolitics (Carl
Schmitt) subvert democratic antagonism in a variety of ways. They “de-
antagonize” politics proper by (1) construing it as a closed, homogeneous,
and plenitudinous social space that is organically structured, (2) establishing
clear rules and procedures, (3) reducing politics to the status of a “shadow
theater” whose real act is always economic and always offstage, or (4)
transforming antagonism (through a false radicalism) into war (990–92).

Žižek believes that there is no politics without an agonistic strug-

gle for universality, without the paradox of particularity occupying the
space of universality. Thus archepolitics, parapolitics, metapolitics, and ul-
trapolitics are, in fact, postpolitical. Postpolitics is rule by market forces,
multiculturalism, tolerant humanism, consensus, and the police, with the
Leviathan of the sovereign state as their sum total. This postpolitical turn
succeeds in pushing real antagonism, which needs to be democratically and
agonistically mediated, out of the Symbolic realm and into the Real. As
the Real is the impossible to say, this antagonism is not spoken, but oper-
ates, in Freudian terms, below the level of the ego, on the level of the id.
It feeds the growth of what Žižek calls “id-evil,” including new forms of
racism, and the explosion “of excessive ethnic or religious fundamentalist
violence.” The motive of such evil, Žižek contends, is neither ego-selfishness
nor superego-fanaticism, that is, an excessive “devotion to some ideological
ideal.” Rather, it is jouissance (Zizek 1998, 998–99), which is the enjoyment
not pleasure that we derive from our pain. It is “the paradoxical satisfac-
tion,” according to Dylan Evans (1996, 92), “that the subject derives from
his symptom, or, to put it another way, the suffering that he derives from
his own satisfaction.” Id-evil, as Žižek notes, “stages the most elementary
short-circuit in the relationship of the subject to the primordially miss-
ing object-cause of his desire. What bothers us in the Other (the Jew, the
Japanese, the African, the Turk, and so forth) is that he appears to entertain

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a privileged relationship to the object” (Žižek 1998, 999). This privileged
Other “possesses the object-treasure,” having stolen it from us “(which is
why we don’t have it),” or threatens “our possession of the object” (Žižek
2000a, 8).

This id-logic or logic of the Real is the consequence of the postpo-

litical turn (on the Symbolic level) from democratic antagonism to tolerant
humanism and multicultural consensus. What is hard to understand, how-
ever, is why Žižek thinks that proper politics, a politics of democratic
antagonism and universality, is essentially European. He stops just short of
this explicit claim, but it is difficult to draw any other conclusion. What is
at stake? I ask this question because Žižek’s argument is in excess of his
theoretical needs. That he is in the grips of ideological fantasy is evident
by the fact that the very argument against Eurocentrism—the notion that
it can fill the constitutive emptiness at the center of things—starts to func-
tion as an argument in its favor (Žižek 1989, 49). Thus Žižek blames what
Europe lacks on the multicultural multitude, on fundamentalist freaks and
New Age neopagans. This is odd. Žižek need not argue for Eurocentrism
to justify selectively retrieving various aspects of the European legacy that
he, like many others, values. The value of such retrievals itself is sufficient
justification. That being the case, I cannot help but ask why he overstates
his case. What does Žižek fear? His fear as far as I can tell is tied to the
privileged role that the notion of universality plays in his thinking, in par-
ticular his view that there are only three competing and/or complimentary
forms of universalism: Christianity, Capitalism, and Marxism.

If Christian universalism has been put in jeopardy if not dis-

placed by capitalist universalism, then only Marxist universalism—which
is a Christian legacy, filtered and augmented by Lacan, of course—can
displace capitalism. Given what he regards as the European provenance
of Christianity and Marxism, Žižek fears that the decline of Eurocen-
trism may mean the loss of universality. This should give pause to any
reader who is tempted to separate Žižek’s Hegelian, Eurocentric, evolu-
tionary/hierarchical model of religion from his politics. One is no more
likely to find a culturally and socially autonomous and atomistic notion of
politics in Žižek’s work than in Hegel’s work. The temptation, for those
who otherwise find his insights compelling, to quarantine Žižek’s politics
from his other views is understandable but wrong. For Žižek Christianity,
Marxism, universality, and Europe are a uniquely precious if fragile ensem-
ble. This is why he argues so strongly for the comparative superiority of
Christianity to paganism and Judaism. Interestingly enough, Žižek never

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mentions Islam.

9

Islam, which poses so many problems for the narrative

that Žižek constructs, is also absent from Hegel’s account! Is this merely an
interesting coincidence? Perhaps.

A reprise of Žižek’s argument in The Fragile Absolute, as I have

developed it, goes something like this: Marxism and Christianity share a
common ancestry. Marxism should embrace its Christian heritage. As the
only bearers of messianic universalism, Marxism and Christianity should
join forces against the competing universalism of capitalism. If Marxism
is indebted to Christianity, then Christianity is indebted to Judaism, thus
the concept of Judeo-Christianity. But it is important to maintain their
difference while acknowledging their unity. For Christianity is superior to
Judaism, goes beyond Judaism, embodies the greatest strengths of Judaism
while avoiding its greatest weaknesses. Thus Christian love—to return to
one of the threads of Žižek’s argument that I want to pull a little further—
succeeds in decoupling law and transgression, thus pulling the plug on
a vicious cycle. In describing this process, Žižek is clearly in a generous
mood. One is not sure whether this is a mark of genius or perversity,
perhaps perverse genius. For only a perverse genius could make Saint
Paul speak Lacanian; moreover, Paul is as rigorous an antihumanist as
Louis Althusser. One is almost forced to read this account as parody so
as not to laugh. But I suspect that this is no laughing matter for Žižek.
He is serious. Thus, through Pauline agape, we unplug from the law,
from “theoretical humanism,” from “an idealized Romantic universe in
which all concrete social differences magically disappear” (Žižek 2000a,
127). Christianity uncouples the law and its spectral obscene supplement. It
suspends this monstrous supplement, which haunts the law like an angry
ghost, while preserving the law. This is the Hegelian logic of Aufhebung,
of sublation, of simultaneously preserving, negating, transforming, and
lifting higher. According to Žižek, only Christianity can do this work. For
Christianity, however fragile and fleeting, is the absolute (126–28).

If the ultimate outcome, the superiority of Christianity, is a fore-

gone conclusion, Žižek still manages to surprise us along the way. Thus he
partially rehabilitates Judaism vis-à-vis Christianity. On this revised view,
Judaism is properly pre– the vicious cycle of law and sin, of desire and guilt,
while Christianity is properly post–vicious cycle. True, in its cruder forms,
Christianity seems to be a case of the superego gone amok, where transgres-
sions of the spirit of the law are judged as severely as transgressions of the
letter of the law. Indeed, in its cruder, improper forms, Christianity “ma-
nipulates guilt much more effectively” (Žižek 2000a, 142) than Judaism,

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for which truth and not one’s pathological, desiring, emotional investment
in that truth is what matters. Here, it seems, Nietzsche had it right. Thus
crude, improper, inauthentic Christianity simply misses the point when it
accuses Jews of being hypocritical, of trying to cheat God “by seeking ways
of obeying God’s commandments and prohibitions literally, while nonethe-
less retaining what they desire” (140). In making this judgment, Christians
are ignorant of a paradox: “that the vicious dialectic of Law and its trans-
gression elaborated by Saint Paul is the invisible third term, the ‘vanishing
mediator’ between the Jewish religion and Christianity” (145). Neither oc-
cupies the middle ground of the vicious cycle: Jews do not because they do
not experience guilt, they have not broken into the vicious cycle; Christians
do not because they have broken out of the vicious cycle. If neither Judaism
nor Christianity is guilty of what it is commonly accused, then Christianity
is still superior because it has sublated, that is, broken out of a vicious cycle
that Judaism has never broken into. Again, Žižek uses Paul as read by Hegel
and Hegel as read by Lacan to put Judaism in its proper place.

The task of distinguishing Christianity from Judaism, with all the

anxieties of influence that entails, and from the more subterranean anxieties
of influence that characterize Christianity’s relations with paganism, has
long vexed Christian intellectuals. They waged a two-front war against
Jews and pagans, plus an internal war against Christian deviants; thus Islam
was initially seen as a Christian heresy. Whether Žižek can “properly”
be called a Christian intellectual or not, he takes on the task. I take the
following passage, which may be good Christian theology but is bad history,
social theory, and phenomenology, as his basic claim:

As every true Christian knows, love is the work of love—the

hard and arduous work of repeated “uncoupling” in which,

again and again, we have to disengage ourselves from the in-

ertia that constrains us to identify with the particular order we

were born into. Through the Christian work of compassion-

ate love, we discern in what was hitherto a disturbing foreign

body, tolerated and even modestly supported by us so that we

were not too bothered by it, a subject, with its crushed dreams

and desires—it is this Christian heritage of “uncoupling” that

is threatened by today’s fundamentalisms, especially when they

proclaim themselves Christian. Does not Fascism ultimately

involve the return of the pagan mores which, rejecting the love

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of one’s enemy, cultivate full identification with one’s own eth-

nic community? (Žižek 2000a, 128–29)

On Žižek’s account, authentic Christianity breaks out of the vicious cycle
of law and sin that characterizes the human condition by renouncing “the
transgressive fantasmatic supplement that attaches us to it” (149). Christian-
ity attacks itself, what it desires most—just as Medea and Sethe attack and
kill their children, Kierkegaard binds Isaac for sacrifice, and God gives his
only son to be crucified—and this is the ultimate meaning of uncoupling,
the ultimate antifascist gesture. Thus Christian love creates a new subjec-
tivity, where “we catch a glimpse of Another Space which can no longer be
dismissed as a fantasmatic supplement to social reality” (158). Christianity
is the fragile absolute.

Marxism is a legacy of Christian Europe, which is the abode of

agonistic universality or true politics.

10

But what about the constitutive

void at the center of Europe, the ontological lack underwriting the very
notion of Eurocentrism? To put a finer point on an observation that I made
earlier, doesn’t Žižek blame this lack on pagans and fundamentalist freaks,
on those whom I call the multicultural multitude? Isn’t he accusing them
of stealing his jouissance? To paraphrase Žižek, the question that he must
confront is how he invests the ideological figures of the pagan and the
fundamentalist with his unconscious desire, with how he has constructed
these figures to escape a certain deadlock of his desire. Isn’t his antipa-
ganism and antifundamentalism a “pathological, paranoid construction”
(Žižek 1989, 48)? Perhaps this accounts for the severity of Žižek’s critique
of the non-Christian other. Could it be that the multicultural multitude of
fundamentalist freaks, New Age spiritualists, neopagans, and inauthentic
Christians represent the “return of the repressed” (a case of the Empire
striking back) in Žižek’s neo-Hegelian account of religion? If Christianity
is the fragile absolute, then colonial modernity is the absolute trauma. Colo-
nial modernity is that of which Žižek cannot speak; it is the “impossible
Real” in his account of religion.

Coda

In The Ticklish Subject (1999) and in other works, Žižek deplores the global
reflexivity or “ticklish” character of contemporary Western life. And yet, his
own lack of reflectivity allows him, without reservation, to deploy Oriental-
ist discourse, which Edward Said and others have shown is one of the most

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tenacious and productive discourses of imperial/colonial modernity. Thus
in his essay “Melancholy and the Act” (Žižek 2000b, 676–77), in a section
titled “The Pope versus the Dalai Lama,” he offers this bit of Orientalist
profundity: “One can now understand why the Dalai Lama is much more
appropriate for our postmodern, permissive times. He presents us with
a vague, feel-good spiritualism without any specific obligations; anyone,
even the most decadent Hollywood star, can follow him while continuing
a money-grubbing, promiscuous lifestyle. In contrast, the pope reminds us
that there is a price to pay for a proper ethical attitude.” Now the point
here isn’t merely that Lacanians can be Orientalist, too. Nor am I merely
saying that Žižek knows as little about Buddhist scholarship as he does
about biblical scholarship. For as Mark Twain once observed, everyone is
ignorant about something. The point, rather, is that Žižek is ignorant of his
ignorance. Or maybe this is a case of ideological fantasy, in which case, Žižek
(1989, 32–33) “know[s] very well how things really are,”

11

but is still acting

as if he did not. If this is correct, then Žižek’s is an ideological ignorance,
the refusal of knowledge, the refusal to be self-reflexive, to be tickled. He
is not ticklish/reflexive where being ticklish is a good thing. In any event,
his observation about the Pope and the Dalai Lama—which is a compar-
ative theory of religion in microcosm that recapitulates the Orientalist and
primitivist history of comparative religion, which is an important modal-
ity of knowledge production in imperial/colonial modernity—dovetails
nicely with his Eurocentic fantasy in which the universality/absolutism of
Christianity (and its Marxist legacy) is the only viable obstacle to global
capitalism.

Notes

[The next issue of Nepantla, 4.1, will include a short rejoinder by Hart to the reply by

Žižek that follows here. Eds.]

1. I am aware that evolutionary and hierarchical can be construed in a variety of ways,

both negative and positive. Unless otherwise specified, I use these words as

deprecations. In employing them (or the term colonial modernity), I intend to

move the reader toward a similar assessment.

2. “Ontological difference” refers, in Heidegger’s language, to the difference between

being and the Being of being, that is, the void, emptiness, nothingness from

which being emerges. In Spinoza’s language, this is the distinction between

natura naturans

(nature naturing) and natura naturata (nature natured).

3. In the 1827 lectures, Hegel places ancient Roman religion higher than Judaism.

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4. Žižek cites Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1983 [1939]) to illustrate this logic. Thus

the murder of Moses and his true identity as an Egyptian are the (repressed)

obscene and monstrous underside of the Mosaic Law, which it haunts.

5. Žižek is no biblical scholar and neither am I. I assume that his commentary should be

understood as that of the intelligent, nonbibilical scholar. It is metacommen-

tary on the ordinary discourse of the religious community and not an effort

to engage biblical scholars on their terrain of expertise. In his effort to put

Paul to work, Žižek relies heavily on Alain Badiou’s interpretation in Saint

Paul ou la naissance de l’universalisme

(1998).

6. I have already suggested that Žižek’s critique of multiculturalism, while insightful, is

inadequate. If Michel Foucault moves toward liberal notions of the self in his

later work, if Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994) concludes with a set

of liberal proposals, if, as Žižek himself argues in a 2001 Süddeutsche Zeitung

review of Empire, the even more radical, Marxist-communist discourse of

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) succumbs to the siren songs of

human rights liberalism in its constructive proposals, then why should we

expect more from multiculturalists? Given the discursive constraints of a

deeply ingrained culture of liberalism, perhaps multiculturalists express rad-

ical, subversive, and revolutionary desires within the constraints of the only

language they know.

7. In fairness, Žižek’s account strengthens Yovel’s by pointing out this very inconsistency.

While there is no absolute distinction between metaphysics and politics, Ži-

žek, at least in this case, is more interested in the former than in the latter.

8. On this point, many questions could be asked, not the least of which would be why

ancient Greece was necessarily European as opposed to, say, Mediterranean,

and why we should assume that Europe’s others are eccentric and nonconsti-

tutive of European identity. I can barely resist pursuing these matters, but I

will.

9. Should we take “fundamentalism” as an oblique reference to Islam? If so, why would

Žižek be so coy?

10. This includes Europe’s American and Australian diaspora.

11. It isn’t reality that people misrecognize, according to Žižek 1989, 32–33), “but the

illusion that is structuring their reality, their real social activity. They know

very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did

not know. The illusion is therefore double: it consists in overlooking the

illusion which is structuring our real, effective relationship to reality. And

this overlooked, unconscious illusion is what may be called the ideological

fantasy

.”

577

Hart . Imperial/Colonial Model of Religion

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