Kotsko, Adam. \u201c\u017di\u017eek and the Excremental Body of Christ\u201d Presentation at the American Academy of Religion 2009 Conference<\/p>\n
The basic structure of \u017di\u017eek\u2019s interpretation of Christianity is provided by Hegel, who elaborates a theology of the \u201cdeath of God\u201d (which was later taken up by American theologians such as Thomas Altizer, whom \u017di\u017eek discovered after developing his own Hegelian reading of Christianity). Hegel contends that the three persons of the Trinity do not represent three coeternal realities, but rather three decisive and irreversible turning points in the life of God:<\/p>\n
the Father empties out the entirety of his divinity into the Son, and by dying the Son then empties out that divinity into the Holy Spirit, which is understood as a new form of social bond.<\/p>\n
Coming at this basic structure from a Lacanian perspective and specifically from his use of Lacan to found a contemporary form of ideology critique, \u017di\u017eek argues that Christ represents a unique form of \u201cmaster signifier.\u201d Normally \u201cmaster signifiers\u201d are tautologous authorities whose self-assertion allows some form of symbolic order or ideological structure to crystallize \u2014 for instance, in modern society money serves as the foundation of our entire system of values, but when you ask what money is worth, you can only answer that it\u2019s worth\u2026 money.<\/p>\n
Money is valuable because it\u2019s valuable. The model of this kind of \u201cmaster signifier\u201d is of course God, whose authority ultimately stems from the fact that he is God. \u017di\u017eek claims, however, that the founding myth of Christianity provides us with a weird kind of self-effacing or<\/strong> self-denying master signifier \u2014 a God who not only dies (many gods have died throughout history, only to be replaced), but who himself becomes an atheist<\/span>.<\/p>\n In \u017di\u017eek\u2019s reading, Christ\u2019s cry of dereliction on the cross\u2014\u201cMy God, my God, why have you forsaken me?\u201d \u2014 presents us with an image of a God who doesn\u2019t believe in himself.<\/span><\/p>\n Elevating Christ to the level of a \u201cmaster signifier\u201d<\/span> thus means effectively giving up on \u201cmaster signifiers,\u201d producing a whole new form of social bond \u2014 one that is outside of ideology<\/strong>.<\/p>\n As I argue in \u017di\u017eek and Theology, this elaboration of a \u201cdeath of God\u201d theology as a path to a non-ideological social bond is the end result of a long and difficult development in \u017di\u017eek\u2019s political thought, because\u2014to put it bluntly \u2014 getting rid of master signifiers is difficult.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy enough to overthrow any given master signifier, but the human tendency to reestablish them seems irresistible<\/strong> \u2014 and before his foray into theology, \u017di\u017eek seemed to be essentially advocating revolution for its own sake, as a kind of moment of pure authenticity and truth, despite the fact that every revolution will necessarily be a matter of \u201cmeet the new boss, same as the old boss.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The reason for this is that \u201cmaster signifiers\u201d<\/span> are a way of organizing our enjoyment<\/span>, keeping the suffocating force of jouissance<\/span> sufficiently at bay to give us breathing room, while nonetheless giving us access to occasional moments of indulgence.<\/p>\n A key aspect of this is \u017di\u017eek\u2019s view that every form of law founded in a \u201cmaster signifier\u201d includes its own \u201cinherent transgression\u201d\u2014 that is, it depends on people occasionally feeling like they not only have permission to break the rules but are actively exhorted to do so, so that they have a way to let off steam.<\/span><\/p>\n A familiar example of this is the Jim Crow<\/span> order in the US \u2014 in addition to the official laws segregating blacks and whites, the order was characterized by extra-legal attacks such as lynch mobs.<\/p>\n \u017di\u017eek would argue that these weren\u2019t unfortunate outbursts but were an integral part of the Jim Crow order, allowing whites to \u201clet off steam\u201d by forcibly asserting their dominance while maintaining the public fiction that segregation was a harmonious system with everyone in their natural place.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Inspired by Alain Badiou\u2019s work on St. Paul, \u017di\u017eek turns to the origins of Christianity as a way of thinking through what it might mean to have a revolution that would be a durable achievement rather than a flash of inspiration between two ideological regimes. His main critique of Badiou is that Badiou one-sidedly emphasizes the resurrection over the cross \u2014 in Lutheran terms, Badiou is a theologian of glory rather than a theologian of the cross.<\/p>\n \u017di\u017eek believes that any new order (represented by the resurrection) must be preceded by a break with the old (represented by the cross) \u2014 some act of negation, some negative gesture separating oneself from the reigning master signifier<\/strong>. But again, this is very difficult to achieve.<\/span><\/p>\n Not only does the ideological order actively rely on its own violation through the \u201cinherent transgression,\u201d but \u017di\u017eek had also argued extensively that \u201ccynical distance\u201d from ideology\u2014the sense that \u201cno one really believes this stuff\u201d\u2014is actually a built-in feature of all ideologies. Just \u201cgoing through the motions\u201d without really believing it isn\u2019t a way of escaping ideology, but rather the most powerful form of submitting to ideology.<\/p>\n If the seemingly most obvious ways to negate ideology are built-in features of ideology already, then where can one turn? In The Puppet and the Dwarf<\/em>, which represents his most fully realized account of Christian origins, \u017di\u017eek makes what is, in my view, one of his most interesting moves\u2014he claims that Judaism<\/strong> represents a kind of inherently negative space, a culture that is \u201cunplugged\u201d from the enjoyment provided by the surrounding pagan ideology<\/span>, so that the logic of the \u201cinherent transgression\u201d and of \u201ccynical distance\u201d alike don\u2019t apply.<\/p>\n Contradicting both Badiou and centuries of Christian interpreters, \u017di\u017eek thus argues that the point of Pauline Christianity wasn\u2019t to escape from the Jewish law, but to find some way to induct Gentiles into this \u201cunplugged\u201d Jewish stance<\/span>.<\/p>\n Historically, of course, Christianity wound up betraying its Jewish roots and became an ideological order like any other, so that perhaps \u017di\u017eek\u2019s attempt to find a durable model that would be something other than the space between two ideologies has failed \u2014 yet he believes that the Pauline communities built on engrafting Gentiles into the promises of Judaism provide at least a way of thinking through what a durable non-ideological social bond might look like<\/span>.<\/p>\n II.<\/p>\n So where does the Body of Christ fit into all this? As I\u2019ve said, he is uninterested in the idea of the Christian community or church as the \u201cBody of Christ,\u201d and this is not only because he has opted to refer to that social bond as the \u201cHoly Spirit\u201d\u2014in addition to his general distaste for anything as \u201charmonious\u201d or \u201corganic\u201d as a body metaphor would imply, \u017di\u017eek also has no interest whatsoever in ecclesiology or in the institutional church as such, believing it to be a betrayal of Christianity\u2019s original revolutionary core. Furthermore, \u017di\u017eek has never, to my knowledge, addressed the sacraments in any serious way, and so the sacramental Body of Christ in the Eucharist is not on his radar.<\/p>\n What remains, though, is the literal, physical body of Jesus, which \u017di\u017eek basically only discusses in the context of the crucifixion. Like a medieval mystic, \u017di\u017eek is fixated on Christ\u2019s weakness and suffering, his pathetic and pitiable appearance\u2014the absolute disjuncture between this disgraced and repulsive dying body and the divine nature he embodies. More than that, he claims, in something like an orthodox fashion, that Christ embodies the truth of humanity, the truth that, in Luther\u2019s words, \u201cwe are the shit that fell out of God\u2019s anus.\u201d<\/span> Drawing on this Lutheran inheritance, \u017di\u017eek defines Christianity as providing a vision of a God who \u201cfreely identified himself with his own shit\u201d<\/em><\/span> (Parallax View, 187).<\/p>\n Now this focus on excrement<\/span> is not entirely new for \u017di\u017eek, who has always had a fixation of sorts on whatever is disgusting, repulsive, or otherwise off-putting. In fact, one of the key concepts he takes from Lacan, objet petit a<\/span>, which represents the ever-elusive object and cause of desire, frequently bears the name of the \u201cexcremental remainder,\u201d<\/span> referring to that little \u201csomething\u201d that one has to give up in order to join the social order<\/strong>. What \u017di\u017eek calls Luther\u2019s \u201cexcremental anti-humanism,\u201d<\/span> then, does not simply lead to humanity wallowing in its own self-disgust.<\/p>\n Rather, it leads to humanity wallowing in its own enjoyment, or as \u017di\u017eek says, to the emergence of enjoyment as a direct political factor. For \u017di\u017eek all ideological orders represent a way of organizing enjoyment or jouissance, of keeping it at a distance while allowing periodic indulgence<\/span>, but what Luther\u2019s position opens up is the possibility of a kind of short-circuit, where jouissance is not just a silently presupposed basis of the political order but instead a conscious emphasis and goal<\/span>.<\/p>\n The end result is what \u017di\u017eek characterizes as the contemporary \u201csuperego injunction to enjoy\u201d<\/span> \u2014 the perverse situation where authorities are directly exhorting people to enjoy. The most obvious manifestation of this tendency was perhaps George W. Bush\u2019s injunction that people go shopping in response to 9\/11, but \u017di\u017eek believes this basic attitude is absolutely pervasive.<\/p>\n Increasingly, \u017di\u017eek claims, one feels guilty not for having sex, but for not having enough sex \u2014 and even the asceticism of dieting and exercise is geared toward the hedonistic ends of attractiveness and longer lifespan<\/span>.<\/p>\n Increasingly, contemporary Western subjects, or at least contemporary middle and upper class Western subjects, directly identify with their excremental remainder, with objet petit a<\/span> \u2014 with the end result of a kind of autistic compulsion to enjoy, an obligatory enjoyment that one begins to suspect is not finally all that enjoyable<\/span>.<\/p>\n The answer to this situation, for cultural conservatives and particularly for conservative Catholics such as \u017di\u017eek\u2019s dialogue partners G. K. Chesterton and John Milbank, is to reimpose some version of traditional values in order to save enjoyment from itself<\/strong>. For \u017di\u017eek, however, such a solution is both dishonest and self-undermining, or in other words, perverse \u2014 hence the subtitle of The Puppet and the Dwarf:The Perverse Core of Christianity<\/em>, which refers to Actual Existing Christianity and not to its original, supposedly revolutionary form.<\/p>\n His solution is not to disavow enjoyment, but rather to focus on the enjoyment<\/span> of the other<\/span>, to form a community centered on the care for the concrete suffering and enjoying others one happens to encounter. This, in his view, is Christian love<\/strong>, a love he characterizes as \u201cviolent\u201d in that it cuts beneath the ideological identity markers of the other and attends directly to the excremental remainder underneath it all<\/span>.<\/p>\n Though this notion of an authentically Christian community is based in an adaptation of one of the later Lacan\u2019s more opaque concepts, the \u201cdiscourse of the analyst,\u201d<\/span> I believe that the clearest example of what he\u2019s talking about can be found in his final contribution to The Monstrosity of Christ<\/em>. There he discusses Agota Kristof\u2019s novel The Notebook<\/em><\/span>, which for him is \u201cthe best literary expression\u201d of an ethical stance that goes beyond the sentimentality of moralism and instead installs \u201ca cold, cruel distance toward what one is doing.\u201d<\/p>\n The novel follows two twin brothers who are \u201cutterly immoral\u2026 yet they stand for authentic ethical naivety at its purest.\u201d \u017di\u017eek gives two examples. In one, they meet a starving man who asks for help and get him everything he asks for, while claiming that they helped him solely because he needed help, not out of any desire to be kind. In another, they urinate on a German officer with whom they find themselves sharing a bed, at his request.<\/p>\n \u017di\u017eek remarks, \u201cIf ever there was a Christian ethical stance, this is it: no matter how weird their neighbor\u2019s demands, the twins naively try to meet them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n (Interestingly, this ethical stance of giving people what they ask for in the most literal way corresponds with one of \u017di\u017eek\u2019s earliest political prescriptions for dealing with the cynical distance that is inherent to ideology\u2014instead of resisting the demands of ideology, one should take them as literally as possible, because that\u2019s the one response ideology isn\u2019t prepared for.) \u017di\u017eek commends the twins\u2019 amoral ethics as follows:<\/p>\n This is where I stand\u2014how I would love to be: an ethical monster without empathy<\/span>, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others while avoiding their disgusting proximity. With more people like this, the world would be a pleasant place in which sentimentality would be replaced by a cold and cruel passion.<\/span> Monstrosity of Christ 303<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Such is \u017di\u017eek\u2019s understanding of Christian ethics, a position I am sure will not be included in any Christian ethics courses any time soon.<\/strong><\/p>\n III.<\/p>\n I would like to conclude this presentation by connecting \u017di\u017eek\u2019s work to liberation theology\u2014not through the more obvious path of the reliance of both on the Marxist tradition, but rather precisely through \u017di\u017eek\u2019s notion of the Body of Christ as a kind of \u201cexcremental remainder.\u201d My initial point of contact here might seem superficial initially, but I believe it will prove surprisingly revealing. In his essay \u201cExtra pauperes nulla salus,\u201d or \u201cNo salvation outside the poor,\u201d Jon Sobrino begins with a quotation from his fallen comrade Ignacio Ellacur\u00eda, who was among the members of Sobrino\u2019s Jesuit community who were massacred by a Salvadoran death squad in 1989 while Sobrino happened to be out of the country:<\/p>\n What on another occasion I called copro-historical analysis, that is, the study of the feces of our civilization, seems to reveal that this civilization is gravely ill and that, in order to avoid a dreadful and fatal outcome, it is necessary to change it from within itself.<\/span><\/p>\n Sobrino agrees, claiming that the \u201cexcrement\u201d or waste product of capitalist civilization, in the form of massive impoverishment in the Third World, demonstrates that it is profoundly sick. Reciting the massive imbalances in global priorities, for instance the inconceivable sums spent on arms at the same time as people are starving daily, Sobrino concludes that \u201cwe are dealing with a metaphysical obscenity\u201d and that \u201cGod is furious\u201d (39). That is of course because for Sobrino and for all liberation theologians, God has identified decisively with this excremental remainder of the poor<\/span>. The parallel here with \u017di\u017eek\u2019s \u201cGod who freely identifies with his own shit\u201d<\/span> is inexact\u2014most notably because liberation theologians do not believe God is the author of the process that produces the poor as an excremental remainder<\/span> \u2014 but also compelling, insofar as \u017di\u017eek has written a great deal recently on the obscene inequalities that characterize the contemporary world and has even put forth urban slum dwellers in the Third World as a contemporary parallel to the \u201cunplugged\u201d stance he detects in first-century Judaism.<\/p>\n In addition, \u017di\u017eek\u2019s account of \u201cChristian love\u201d as naively meeting people\u2019s needs simply because they ask resonates profoundly with the implied premise of Sobrino\u2019s harsh and furious text: people need to eat!<\/strong><\/p>\n Regardless of whether they\u2019re deserving, whether giving them food would produce bad economic incentives, etc., etc., people need to eat. The same could obviously be said for all basic needs\u2014for example, regardless of whether it undermines someone\u2019s ability to put big numbers in quarterly reports, people who have AIDS need medicine!<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n A little more literalism and na\u00efvet\u00e9 would certainly help in our present situation. In addition, simply listening to what people are asking for would be a huge improvement over the patronizing tutelage of NGOs and foreign aid, which Sobrino characterizes as actively contributing to the dehumanization of the already dehumanized people they serve, insofar as it deprives them of agency.<\/p>\n The principle here is basically Jesus\u2019s: sell all you have and give to the poor. The focus here isn\u2019t on liquidating your holdings so that you can enjoy the moral righteousness of poverty, but of putting your goods at the disposal of the poor\u2014or, as Jesus says in another setting, of using your dishonest wealth to make friends.<\/p>\n The really difficult question between \u017di\u017eek and liberation theology, however, is what the end state looks like. For Sobrino as for most liberation theologians, the basic stance seems to be humanist in the broad sense\u2014a society that respects human dignity, that looks to the intrinsic worth of every individual. Yet \u017di\u017eek remains resolutely anti-humanist and suspicious of the language of human rights. And while Sobrino can look forward to a correction of civilization\u2019s digestive system such that it will stop producing the poor as excrement<\/strong>, \u017di\u017eek revels in the disgusting and repellant aspect of the \u201cexcremental remainder.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n When the case is stated in this way, it seems difficult to favor \u017di\u017eek over Sobrino, yet I wonder if \u017di\u017eek is getting at an important truth here\u2014namely that the end state is something that we, blinkered as we are by the ideology of our present sick civilization, simply cannot recognize as beautiful or desirable, that the change we need is so profound that it will change our very concept of what it means to be human<\/span>.<\/p>\n In any case, both \u017di\u017eek and Sobrino agree that what it means to be human now entails the production of a massive and appalling waste product\u2014and that what it means to be faithful to the message of Christ is to freely identify with that waste product.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kotsko, Adam. \u201c\u017di\u017eek and the Excremental Body of Christ\u201d Presentation at the American Academy of Religion 2009 Conference The basic structure of \u017di\u017eek\u2019s interpretation of Christianity is provided by Hegel, who elaborates a theology of the \u201cdeath of God\u201d (which was later taken up by American theologians such as Thomas Altizer, whom \u017di\u017eek discovered after … Continue reading “excremental remainder ethical monster”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,39,21,24,72,15,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-ideology","category-jouissance","category-lacan","category-objet-a","category-subjectivity","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7106"}],"version-history":[{"count":54,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11218,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7106\/revisions\/11218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}