Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010
As Žižek (PV 61) emphasizes elsewhere, the difference between desire and drive is precisely that “[…] desire is grounded in its constitutive lack, while drive circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being.” note 275 page 204
It is however, as Žižek (OB 92-98; PV 60-63) emphasizes, paramount to distinguish between the gap of the drive and the gap of desire, if we want to avoid a highly misleading confusion between drive and desire. The gap that characterizes desire is, as I have already hinted, the external gap between the substitutable object (that I want) and the forbidden/lost Thing (that I desire). In contrast, the gap that characterises the drive is, according to Žižek (OB 92; PV 61), the inherent gap between its ‘goal’ and its ‘aim’. That is, the gap between the object around which the drive circulates endlessly (goal) and this very endless circulation around the object itself (aim).
This finally brings us back to the issue of theology. In On Belief, Žižek explicitly relates this discussion of the difference between desire and drive to Christianity. In the section entitled ‘God Resides in Detail’, Žižek applies the contrast between Judaism and Christianity to illustrate this difference (and vice-versa).
Following Hegel, Žižek (OB 89; cf. SOI 201-207; FTKN xxx-xxxi) suggests that Judaism is the religion of the Sublime, insofar that it perceives God as the transcendent irreprehensible wholly Other, or in Lacanian terms, as the impossible God-Thing. In other words, Judaism follows the logic of desire.
In contrast, Christianity renounces this transcendent God-Thing of the Beyond with its fundamental
message that Christ (this miserable human-being) is God (the Sublime).
By claiming the absolute identity between God and man, Christianity acknowledges that there is really nothing (no Thing) beyond appearance, or more correctly, as Žižek (OB 89) puts it “[…] Nothing BUT the imperceptible X that changes Christ, this ordinary man, into God.”
That is to say, although Christianity ‘inverses the Jewish sublimation into a radical desublimation’, this inversion is not merely a (Feuerbachian) reduction of God to man, but rather the manifestation of the divine dimension in man (OB 90).
So, in what does this X, this divine dimension in man, consist? Žižek’s (OB 90) answer is that:
[…] far from being the Highest in man, the purely spiritual dimension towards which all humans strive, the ‘divinity’ is rather a kind of obstacle, of a ‘bone in the throat’ – it is something, that unfathomable X, on account of which man cannot ever fully become MAN, self-identical. The point is not that, due to the limitation of his mortal sinful nature, man cannot ever become fully divine, but that, due to the divine spark in him, man cannot ever fully become MAN.
As we know by now this ‘imperceptible X’ (the inherent ‘minimal difference’) that Christ manifests, which according to Žižek is what prevents man from becoming fully man, is of course that which also goes under the name of the subject, the Cartesian Cogito, the self-relating negativity of German idealism, the Lacanian $ or the Freudian death drive.
In Žižek‘s words, Christ “[…] stands for the excess of life, for the ‘undead’ surplus which persists over the cycle of generation and corruption […].” In terms of the issue of the difference between desire and drive and God into God himself, conforms to the transposition of the external gap between the substitutable object (that I want) and the forbidden/lost Thing (that I desire) into an inherent gap in the object itself around which the drive circulates.
Thus, the Christian ‘inversion of Jewish sublimation into a radical desublimation’ is not merely the demythologization of desire; it is the manifestation of the dimension of drive in man. Or, to put it in other words: by manifesting the divine dimension in man through its message of Christ on the cross as the death the God, Christianity makes it possible to (re)enter the domain of drives.
By making manifest through his sacrifice on the Cross of the absolute identity between the sublime Thing and miserable human-being (the everyday object) Christ suspends the gap of desire and (re)closes the loop of drive.
At the end the same section in On Belief, Žižek (OB 105) indicates that the fundamental narrative of Christianity, the story of the Fall, could be read as a parallel to the psychoanalytical conception of the emergence of the death drive:
“The story of the (Adam’s) Fall is evidently the story of how the human animal contracted the excess of Life which makes him/her human – ‘Paradise’ is the name for the life delivered of the burden of this disturbing excess.”
So, perhaps we should reverse – in an admittedly completely anachronistic manner – the suggestion made by the German philosopher, Jakob Taubes (1957, 137), that Freud was the last great advocate of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. Is not the Christian doctrine of Original Sin the first great advocacy of the Freudian notion of death drive? Is this not what Žižek hints at? 205
Christianity also releases or ‘redeems’ man from the excessiveness of the death drive: “Out of love for humanity, Christ then freely assumes, contracts onto himself, the excess (‘Sin’) which burdened the human race.” Yet, this redemption (rescue, deliverance from sin, salvation) does certainly not consist in the obliteration of this excess.
The ‘redemption’ from the excess of death drive offered by Christianity is not a ‘healing of the wound’, but rather the possibility of accepting it. In short, in Žižek’s Hegelian reading, the redemption is the wound, the Fall, itself.
“God does not first push us into sin in order to create the need for Salvation, and then offer himself as the Redeemer from the trouble into which he got us in the first place; it is not that the Fall is followed by redemption: the Fall is identical to Redemption, it is “in itself” already Redemption.”
So, what exactly is this redemption, this possibility that Christ opens up with his death, which is already the Fall itself? Žižek’s (MC 273) answer is:
“The explosion of freedom, the breaking out of the natural enchainment — and this, precisely, is what happens in the Fall.”
Or, as he (PD 86) puts it elsewhere:
“[…] for Christianity, the Fall is really not a Fall at all, but ‘in itself’ its very opposite, the emergence of freedom. There is no place from which we have fallen; what came before was just stupid natural existence.”
What does the freedom that the death drive enables look like?