Zizek And The Colonial Model of Religion

DEBATES

Religion and the Bifurcation of the Left

Slavoj Žižek and the Imperial/Colonial Model of Religion

William David Hart

Hegelian Prelude

This 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 beginning of world history, so Europe is simply its end. In world history there is an absolute East, par excellence (whereas the

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geographical term “East” is in itself entirely relative); for although 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 limits [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 institutions 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 barbarians 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 simple 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 America 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 economic—that are troubling. What I will not argue is that Žižek intends to recapitulate 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. Thus 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”: Christianity, 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 religion 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 European 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 relegated 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 understood. 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 similarly were he facing a similar case, Žižek despises this solution as a lie. It does not force the woman, psychoanalytically speaking, to confront her desire. 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 substantive 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 “subject 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 tenacious 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 subtle 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 sensitivity 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 ferociously attacking these tendencies and mercilessly denouncing the residual religiosity within Marxism, Žižek advocates “fully endorsing what one is accused 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 proceeding, a disclaimer: I share Žižek’s disdain for liberal multiculturalism. I think that he is right, furthermore, to criticize much of the academiccultural Left for fetishizing difference and underplaying the virtues of universality, not as an antecedent, transcendental a priori but as a consequent, 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 nonEuropean markered, by definition, as nonuniversal, as nonuniversalizable? I wonder. To answer these questions now would be premature. Thus 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 imperial/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 Philosophy of Religion (1821, 1824, 1827, 1831). In these lectures Hegel develops an evolutionary schema in which Geist, Spirit, God moves spatiotemporally 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, philosophy 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 multicultural 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 lettre. 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 derangement 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 constituents of truth. Further, they are oblivious to Friedrich Shelling’s mood, his account of an infinite melancholy in nature, a muteness before an infinite 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 hedonistic 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 avoiding the naiveté of an evolutionary narrative. Now, this is quite astonishing in light of the naiveté of his evolutionary narrative of religion, of the imperial/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 antievolutionary 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 eternal, 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 emergence 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 nonChristian 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 Consummate 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 Europeans. 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 (superhistorical) 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-Christian logic in relation to eternity, then he ignores the context of colonial modernity and, thus, the evolutionary and hierarchical episteme of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century comparative religion, which is constitutive 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” religions 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. Serequeberhan shows why Hegel’s political philosophy—which is integrally connected to his philosophies of history and religion by the evolutionary/hierarchical motif—requires colonialism. Hegel is driven by the dialectics of his own logic—with its failure to adequately address the political economy of civil society, which inexorably produces poverty, which places the poor/nonproductive/superfluous classes outside the modern system of justice 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 populations 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 imperial/colonial episteme of nineteenth-century Europe, allowing us to place Serequeberhan’s account in a larger context. On this view, Hegel’s distinction between “world historical peoples” and “peoples without history” presupposes 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 Europe 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 ethnographic 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 colonization 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 skepticism 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 stoically “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 mortaltemporal individual, and insists that belief in the temporal Event of Incarnation 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 between 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 fundamentalist 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 obscene 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 behind? 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 confidence 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 anthropomorphism of paganism and the radical iconoclasm of Judaism. On the contrary, he argues “that it is the Jewish religion which remains an ‘abstract/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 Christianity that actually ‘sublates’ paganism” (Žižek 2000a, 97–100; quotation 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, Judaism 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 Christianity 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 multicultural 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 neighborly 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 principle 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 argument 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 balanced 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.). “Christianity 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 includes 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, historical, 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 Sublime 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) preceeds 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 evolutionary/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 responsible 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 fantasy 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 misread 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 pathological 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 nationalism translated into Hegelese.

In reading Žižek against himself, we have seen and will see how he constructs the non-Western, non-European, non-Christian other as lacking true politics, true ethics, true universality. This other threatens the wholesome 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 Eurocentrism, 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 superiority 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 “deantagonize” 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 struggle for universality, without the paradox of particularity occupying the space of universality. Thus archepolitics, parapolitics, metapolitics, and ultrapolitics 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 operates, 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 satisfaction,” 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 missing 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 postpolitical turn (on the Symbolic level) from democratic antagonism to tolerant humanism and multicultural consensus. What is hard to understand, however, 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 function 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 particular 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 displaced 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 Eurocentrism may mean the loss of universality. This should give pause to any reader who is tempted to separate Žižek’s Hegelian, Eurocentric, evolutionary/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 ensemble. 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 foregone 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 transgressions 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 “manipulates 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 nonetheless retaining what they desire” (140). In making this judgment, Christians are ignorant of a paradox: “that the vicious dialectic of Law and its transgression elaborated by Saint Paul is the invisible third term, the ‘vanishing mediator’ between the Jewish religion and Christianity” (145). Neither occupies 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 inertia that constrains us to identify with the particular order we were born into. Through the Christian work of compassionate 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 ethnic 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). Christianity 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 subjectivity, 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 antipaganism 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. Colonial 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 Orientalist 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 comparative theory of religion in microcosm that recapitulates the Orientalist and primitivist history of comparative religion, which is an important modality 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 metacommentary 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 radical, 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, Žižek, 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 nonconstitutive 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.”

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References Akoi, Doug. 1996. “The Thing of Culture.” University of Toronto Quarterly 65: 404–18. Badiou, Alain. 1998. Saint Paul ou la naissance de l’universalisme. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1997. “The Time of History and the Times of the Gods.” In The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, edited by Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Connolly, William E. 1999. Why I Am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Davidson, Donald. 1984. Inquiries into Truth and Representation. Oxford: Clarendon. Dennett, Daniel C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. New York: Little, Brown. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. London: Routledge. Evans, Dylan. 1996. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 1983 [1939]. Moses and Monotheism. In The Origins of Religion. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Hall, Stuart. 1985. “Religious Ideology and Social Movements in Jamaica.” In Religion and Ideology, edited by Robert Bocock and Kenneth Thompson. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hart, William David. 2002. “From Theology to theology: The Place of God-Talk in Religious Studies.” In Shifting Paradigms: Religious Studies and the University, edited by Delwin Brown and Linell Cady. Albany, NY: SUNY. Hegel, G. W. F. 1967. Philosophy of Right. Translated by T. M. Knox. New York: Oxford University Press. . 1988a. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Translated by R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 1988b. Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Translated by Leo Rauch. Indianapolis: Hackett. Kant, Immanuel. 1960 [1793]. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. New York: Harper and Row. King, Richard. 1999. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and “The Mystic East.” London: Routledge. Larrain, Jorge. 1991. “Classical Political Economists and Marx on Colonialism and ‘Backward’ Nations.” World Development 19: 225–43.

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Penney, James. 2000. Review of The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, by Slavoj Žižek. Journal of the Psychoanalysis of Culture 5.i1: 166. Raboteau, Albert J. 2001. Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans. New York: Oxford University Press. Spurr, David. 1993. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Serequeberhan, Tsenay. 1989. “The Idea of Colonialism in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” International Philosophical Quarterly 39: 301–18. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. . 1998. “A Leftist Plea for Eurocentrism.” Critical Inquiry 24: 988–1009. . 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso. . 2000a. The Fragile Absolute, or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London: Verso. . 2000b. “Melancholy and the Act.” Critical Inquiry 26: 657–81.