Žižek, S. Why Only an Atheist Can Be A True Christian Wilson College, Princeton University. 12 Dec. 2010.
Here is the talk on YouTube
Eppur Si Muove: Although someone possesses true knowledge is forced to renounce it, this does not stop it from being true. It can also be used in the opposite sense, assert the deeper symbolic truth, make a statement its obviously false but nonetheless, even if its not true, in a deeper sense, the message has metaphorical truth.
Although he knows that there is no God, the idea of a god still moves him. This is nothing mystical, how does it evoke emotion? The well known conservative idea: IF THERE IS NO GOD THEN EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED.
Lacan inverts this: If there is no god then everything is prohibited, everything is regulated.
I visited Belgrade, there I encountered Nationalists engaged in ethnic cleansing: for them modern hedonist liberal society was not too much freedom, but too regulated, I can’t beat my wife I can’t rape, for them being a nationalist, I can steal, rape, kill. Hitler is false permissivity, pretend to sacrifice yourself and beneath this surface we can have lots of fun.
Sound of Music: Sister Maria, Julie Andrews, goes to Mother Superior in the monastery, I’m still in love, repent? Mother Superior sings Climb every mountain, go back and screw
Pretend to be one of us, Catholic priest and you can have all the boys you want. It isn’t superfically follow the ritual and then do secret stuff, no you are obliged to particpate in obscene transgressions, take the KKK in Alabama 1950. If you were against the church you would be teased, but if you spoke against the KKK, to be a real member of the white community you had to participate in these rituals. When I was young in the Yugoslav army, you had to do fragging, it is there solidarity is asserted.
Stalinist commies were NOT atheists, commies had their own GODS which is why everything was permitted, commies did not perceive themselves as hedonists, but instruments of a historical necessity, perceiving yourself as instrument of historical necessity which permitted them to do whatever they wanted. In 1956 when Kruschev denounced Stalin’s crimes, they had psychiatrists, delegated had heart attacks, hospitalized, Why? They didn’t find out anything new, no, they all knew it, the point is that what in Lacanian theory we call the big Other, the public space, there it was admitted.
The big Other, I claim we believe more than ever.
CHICKEN JOKE
crazy as this sounds, this is how ideology functions today
Neils Borg joke: We don’t have to believe in it, it works objectively. we don’t believe in democracy, justice
Commodity Fetishism
Of course we know that there is nothing magical about money, in our everyday ideology we are rational utilitarians, fetishism is not in what we think but WHAT WE DO. They don’t know what they are doing but they are doing it. They don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know the illusions they follow in their real social actions. My father is a jerk. If you observe the same teen interacting with his father, you see a different attitude. It is not simply what you think and how things really are, OBJECTIVE BELIEF even if you don’t you believe, you believe without believing subjectively, you believe in your ACTS.
This is how RELIGION functions, we believe much more, even if we say we don’t, we believe through our acts.
INTERPASSIVITY: Weepers, Tibetan Prayer Wheel: objectively you are praying, think about sex whatever. Canned Laughter The TV set laughs. At the end of the show I feel relaxed as if I had laughed. The tv literally laughs for you.
Religion: we don’t need to, we need an other one Subject Supposed to Believe, exist as a presupposition, Xmas time, why did you buy present for kid, I don’t believe in Santa Claus, but the child pretend to believe in it to get presents and not disappoint parents. A belief can be objective without anyone believing in it.
Age of Innocence, movie: Winona Ryder, hero has a love affair with Michelle Pfeiffer. The young wife dies, he thinks he is free to marry Pfeiffer, but his son says that mother knew it all the time, she just pretended, everything is ruing for Daniel Day Lewis. Nothing changed, he just learned that the OTHER was not ignorant. We need another agent/group/subject that through their/his/her belief COVERS US. Have orgies, but there should be someone who does not know. MOLESTATION OF small children, children’s sexuality disappeared, to be transgressive, do what you want but there needs to be an appearance, a big Other who doesn’t know.
Everyone knows it but everyone pretends not to know it, and it works.
Life is Beautiful: holocaust was so brutal and violent it was too strong for a tragedy, a minimal of dignity of victim should be maintained. To imagine such a confrontation in Auschwitz is to presupposes a level of dignity which was not given to them. Comedy, not where you laugh, but a total ridicule of a scene. Primo Levi. In the movie Life is Beautiful, the son should know all along that father was lying, but was just playing the game so not to hurt his father. This would make the situation tragic.
Capitalism is a religion: Usually we say capitalism is brutal egotism, utilitarian, profiteering. NO. It is clear a capitalist works as a monk, what matters to him is to totally sacrifice himself to capital, so that just capital should circulate.
Christianity: A religion functions without people really believing in it. It can function objectively.
Nobody believed, not taking it seriously was a condition for taking part in nomenklatura, if you take the ruling ideology seriously you are close to being a dissident. The chicken should know that you are not corn, not you. It is not enough for us that there is no god, the illusion must be broken from within. This whole history of Christianity is dealing with this, Napoleon forced the Pope to crown him, Pope told him, you want to destroy Christianity, but we the church have been trying for 2000 yrs and have not succeeded.
Judaism God is dead. Woody Aloni, God is speaking to his people, you have made me a single entity in the world through your prayers. Marshal Mcluhan, the other rabbi says God go away, god runs away. The structure of illusion, what you still have here, we know its an illusion but it still fully functions as an illusion.
On that moment on the Cross for Christianity, Father why did you abandon me, God himself becomes for a moment an atheist, what dies on the Cross is not the terrestial rep of Divinity, but God dies himself and Holy spirit is the community of believers.
Book of Job. And then 3 theological friends come. Your suffering has a deeper meaning. He rejects the idea that his calamity has deeper meaning. God comes everything that Job says is true, Chesterton says it is supreme moment of blasphemy, God becomes for an instant an atheist, the maker is astonished at the things he made, I don’t control anything, all is a mess.
What dies on the CROSS? God as the big Other, God as such.
Death of Christ: radical renunciation, God is saying NO YOU SHOULD NOT TRUST ME, there is no meaning guaranteed, don’t trust me, I trust you, where there is love between two of you I will be there. We are condemned to our freedom. RUINING THE STRUCTURE OF ILLUSION FROM WITHIN, this atheist message is the Christian message, God dies on the cross we are condemned to freedom.
Levinasian Ethics: Experience of the Other as vulnerable, the wounded perplexed suffering face. We are still in a position of Masters, it is the other who is fragile not ourselves, when the other addresses us, I don’t accept it, the problem of animals, as Derrida demonstrated, the Animal that I am, how Levinas with all his celebration of otherness, the face, EXPLICITLY excludes animals. If there is a paradigm case of confronting wounded other, it is the animal, all philosophy disavows this, rationally you accept it, but nonetheless you ignore it. A photo of a cat submitted to a lab experiment, broken bones, without fur, helplessly looking into camera. Jeremy Bentham, instead of asking can animals talk/reason/think, denying things to animals, half blind pigs fattened and slaughtered, philosophical way to deny this is Cartesian notion of animals as machines, cries of pain should not disturb us, just imagine malfunction of machine there is nothing behind it. What do we see in the perplexed gaze of tortured animal, I claim that instead of just asking the standard philosophical questions what are animals for us, but what are WE for animals, what does the tortured animal see when the see us, inhuman dimension of human being, Freud said it was DEATH DRIVE. This excessive monstrosity of being HUMAN, some philosophers got it, Kant, in his unknown text on education, human is an animal who needs a master. Human nature is explosive radical crazy freedom, it is to control this excess that humans need education not animals. I see in the animals gaze is my MONSTROSITY.
I claim that some things, ordinary things we do, could be read against this background, how to cope/control this other as neighbour. A kiss is clumsy but tender answer to a question that eludes the power of language. A kiss is by the mouth, it is as if the message of a kiss is, I know that there is a monstrosity in you beyond language, an abyssal potential evil, but with my kiss in you, I accept you in this dimension, and by kissing we can reach a momentary peace.
I don’t care about your ethnic dances, I want to hear your dirty jokes.