Žižek, Slavoj. “A Plea for a Return to Différance (with a Minor Pro Domo Sua)” Critical Inquiry. 32.2 (2006): 226-249. PDF download
This is how one should answer the standard critique of Christian universalism:what this all-inclusive attitude
(recall St.Paul’s famous statement, “Where there is neither Greek nor Jew” [Col. 3:11])
involves is a thorough exclusion of thosewho do not accept Christianity. In other “particularistic” religions (and even in Islam, in spite of its global expansionism), there is a place for others, they are tolerated, even if they are condescendingly looked upon.
The Christian motto, All Men Are Brothers, however, means also that those who are not my brothers are not (even) men. Christians usually praise themselves for overcoming the Jewish exclusivist notion of the ChosenPeople and encompassing the entirety of humanity—the catch here is that, in their very insistence that they are the Chosen People with the privileged direct link to God, Jews accept the humanity of the other people who celebrate their false gods, while Christian universalism tendentiously excludes nonbelievers from the very universality of humankind.
Thus Christian universality is not the all-encompassing global medium where there is a place for all and everyone. It is rather the struggling universality, the site of a constant battle.
Which battle, which division? To follow Paul: not the division between Law and sin, but between, on the one side, the totality of Law and sin as its supplement and, on the other side, the way of Love.
Christian universality emerges at the symptomal point of those who are “part of no-part” of the global order. This is where the reproach of exclusion gets it wrong: Christian universality, far from excluding some subjects, is formulated from the position of those excluded, of those for whom there is no specific place within the existing order, although they belong to it; universality is strictly codependent with this lack of specific place/determination.
Or, to put it in a different way, the reproach to Paul’s universalism misses the true site of universality. The universal dimension he opened up is not the “neither Greeks nor Jews but all Christians,” which implicitly excludes non-Christians; it is rather the difference Christians/non-Christians itself which, as a difference, is universal; that is, it cuts across the entire social body, splitting, dividing from within every kind of ethnic identity: Greeks are cut into Christians and non-Christians, as well as Jews.
The standard reproach thus in a way knocks on an open door. The whole point of the Paulinian notion of struggling universality is that true universality and partiality do not exclude each other and also that universal Truth is only accessible from a partial, engaged, subjective position. 242