Zizek, religion and ideology

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Volumn 24, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 125-139

  Moriarty, Michael ^a  

^a QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 31344475552     PISSN: 02648334     EISSN: 17500176     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3366/jsp.2001.24.2.125     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. The following works of Žižek s are discussed here: The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, Verso, 1989: hereafter SOI); For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London, Verso, 1991: hereafter FTKN); The Ticklish Subject: the Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London, Verso, 1999: hereafter TS); The Fragile Absolute: or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?. (London, Verso, 2000: hereafter FA).
2. Etienne Balibar, Spinoza et la politique (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1985); Pierre Macherey, Hegel ou Spinoza (Paris, Maspéro, 1979).
3. Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation, in Essays on Ideology (London, Verso, 1984), pp. 1-60: on Pascal, see p. 42, and cf. Louis Althusser Sur la philosophie (Paris, Gallimard, 1994), pp. 52-3. Pascal was a figure of interest to French Marxists in the 1950s, with Henri Lefebvre and Lucien Goldmann both writing substantial books on him.
4. The reference is to the wager fragment: Pascal, Pensées, ed. by Louis Lafuma (Paris: Seuil, 1962), fragment 418.
5. Penseés, fragment 821, quoted by Žižek, SOI, 36. Žižek quotes in the Penguin translation (Pensées (Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 274).
6. See, e.g., Jean Mesnard, Les Pensées de Pascal, second edition (Paris, SEDES, 1993), pp. 86-87, 174.
7. Pascal, Pensées, ed. by Philippe Sellier, Classiques Garnier (Paris, Bordas, 1991), p. 166.
8. Žižek (ed.), Mapping Ideology (London, Verso, 1994), Introduction, pp. 12-13.
9. Pensées, fragment 60 (Penguin translation, p. 46).
10. The question is, though, whether we can expect these reasons to convince anybody else. The statement that the reasons why we should believe are persuasive only to those who already believe (SOI, 38) implies the answer no .
11. Compare the later analysis of the stain or residue of enjoyment, the presence within the subject of the obscene call to enjoyment that is at stake in the submission to totalitarianism (FTKN, 231-41). The enjoyment of the renunciation of enjoyment is in fact a constant theme of seventeenth-century Augustinian writing
12. Here Žižek s gloss is undoubtedly valid: it is borne out not simply by the fragment on custom (see above n. 9) which he quotes at length again here, but by other passages, such as fragment 828.
13. St Paul, as Žižek reminds us (TS, 152-3) is also invoked by Lacan; and it would be instructive to compare Žižek s use of religious vocabulary with Lacan s own.
14. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: la Fondation de l universalisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), pp. 7, 11-12. Žižek suggests that Badiou can be read as the last great author in the French tradition of Catholic dogmatists from Pascal and Malebranche on (p. 142). It is, though, important to point out that Badiou owes no allegiance to this tradition as such. His own background, he states, is irreligious and anti-clerical (Saint Paul, p. 1). This situation is quite unlike, say, Althusser s.
15. Žižek s exposition also draws on Badiou s L Être et l événement (Paris, Seuil, 1988). It is worth noting that he parts company with Badiou s conception of subjectivity (see TS, 153-67): but as to the points discussed here I take them to be in agreement.
16. Compare FTKN, pp. 29, 78. 17 Any location of the Truth-Event at the level of supernatural miracles necessarily entails regression into obscurantism, since the event of Science is irreducible and cannot be undone (The Ticklish Subject, p. 142). A believer might reply that a miracle is precisely that which undoes or transcends the order of nature revealed by science.
17. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 6. 19 This is not solely a Protestant notion. The Roman Catholic tradition accepts the contribution of human effort to the process of salvation, but holds that grace is none the less a gratuitous gift.
18. The point being that there is no Hegelian Absolute Subject, in the sense of a unitary entity encompassing human subjectivity (cf. TS, 88-9). But if the Malebranchian model is adopted, one would need to investigate the general laws, the particular laws, and the occasional causes that regulate the flow of grace (that is, put us in possession of our beliefs-that expression to be understood both as an objective and a subjective genitive). The work of Pierre Bourdieu could be read in terms of such a project.
19. He elsewhere rejects the reading of Hegel as endorsing a similar model of society (TS, 94).
20. Žižek has stated that what I find theoretically and politically engaging in the religious legacy is not the abstract messianic promise of some redemptive Otherness, but, on the contrary, religion in its properly dogmatic and institutional aspect (The Žižek Reader, ed. by Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (Oxford, Blackwell, 1999), Preface, p. ix). But he says little in The Fragile Absolute about dogma and institutions.
21. The subjective stance recommended by Žižek involves a reaffirmation of the traditional Marxist thesis of the primacy of the economy (pp. 225-6, 356).
22. Derrida observes that for Marx religion is not one ideology among others: it holds a privileged place in the analysis of ideology in general (Les Spectres de Marx: l Etat de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris, Galilée, 1993), p. 236).