Читать книгу A New Reading of Jacques Ellul - Jacob Marques Rollison - Страница 10

It is an open question whether this theology/philosophy interaction might be a one-sided dialogue (as I have suggested regarding Le Dœuff), with theologians appropriating philosophers who ignore or even despise them and Christian faith. Slavoj Žižek provides a good case for study. When interviewed for Bad Subjects magazine, Žižek described himself as “a fighting atheist”:

Bad Subjects: You’ve also left some of your readers scratching their heads over the positive things you’ve been writing about Christianity lately. What is it in Christianity you find worthy?

Žižek: I’m tempted to say, “The Leninist part.” I am a fighting atheist. My leanings are almost Maoist ones. Churches should be turned into grain silos or palaces of culture.^[13]

His books clarify his strategic engagement with Christianity. He begins The Fragile Absolute thus:

One of the most deplorable aspects of the postmodern era . . . is the return of the religious dimension in all its different guises . . . How is a Marxist, by definition a ‘fighting materialist’ (Lenin), to counter this massive onslaught of obscurantism? . . . instead of adopting such a defensive stance, allowing the enemy to define the terrain of the struggle, what one should do is to reverse the strategy by 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.^[14]

This trend continues in his introduction to The Puppet and the Dwarf, which explicitly suggests that shunned historical materialist thought ought to speak in theological language to receive a new hearing.^[15]

Taking Žižek at his word, it is unsurprising to see him pursuing theological themes or engaging with theologians. But this engagement is explicitly and avowedly ironic (i.e., not intended to be taken at face value) as concerns his own relation to belief, and subversive towards those who claim to believe in a non-ironic sense.^[16] In The Monstrosity of Christ, co-authored with theologian John Milbank, Žižek sees in Christ’s cry “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Christianity’s admission that there is no God, its own ironic self-undermining. Reviewing Monstrosity, John D. Caputo summarizes:

Just as in psychoanalysis, Žižek says elsewhere, the treatment is over when the patient realizes there is no “Big Other” (God or Man, Nation or Party, Father or Big Brother, Lacan’s symbolic order or what Derrida called the “transcendental signifier”). For Milbank . . . Christ represents a magnificent monstration of God’s love for the world, which takes the form of the excessive “paradox” of God-made-man. For Žižek . . . Christ is the monstrous moment of the death on the cross in which God himself loses faith and confesses the death of God, which is the theological result demanded by the “dialectic.” So the whole book unfolds as a theological and Christological bidding war aimed at deciding whether paradox or dialectic holds the most chips when it comes to making matter matter more. In this corner Milbank’s radically orthodox theology with a straight face, in that corner Žižek’s radically ironic, heterodox and subversive theology.^[17]

Caputo describes this as more of a fight, a “bidding war,” than a dialogue. The fight is not unproductive: the book is a “first rate exchange” with substantial agreement, with both authors’ eccentric readings of Hegel constituting the book’s core. He notes that Milbank seems to perceive that Žižek is up to a certain mimicry, “offering us an atheism that takes every opportunity to mime theology.” According to Caputo, Žižek thinks “Milbank’s ontology of peace is so much fantasy . . . Žižek is a realist in the sense that he is encouraging us to realize that help is not on the way, that no one is going to save us, save ourselves.”

Overall, Caputo finds the dialogue frustratingly ironic for both authors:

What strikes me first about the debate is the irony by which both positions are sustained, both the ironic materialism of Milbank and the ironic religion of Žižek. Milbank makes no bones about the fact that the goal of his argument is to lie down in green pastures with his friends on the other side . . . [Žižek’s] whole point, as he says elsewhere, is subversive: to build a Trojan-horse theology, to slip the nose of a more radical materialism under the Pauline tent of theology in order to announce the death of God . . . For truth to tell, Žižek doesn't think there is a God himself who dies. Never was. The treatment is over when we realize that . . . He discusses Christian doctrines like the Trinity, the Incarnation and the Crucifixion the way an analyst talks with a patient who thinks there is a snake under his bed, trying patiently to heal the patient by going along with the patient’s illusions until the patient is led to see the illusion . . .^[18]

Caputo returns to the fight metaphor, noting the debate’s violence.

I move finally from irony and incredulity to alarm—about the violence of this book. Žižek has not the slightest compunction about invoking violence . . . Milbank . . . batters our ears with a barrage of rhetorical violence, with the vintage violence of theological imperialism . . . a disturbing and dogmatic theological dismissiveness of anyone who disagrees with him . . . Milbank and the authors who swim around him in the “school” of “Radical Orthodoxy” flatter themselves with the insufferable conceit that the entire world may be divided into either medieval Thomistic metaphysicians—or nihilists! They remind us, in case we might have forgotten, why no one trusts theology.

While perhaps Caputo’s polemic unhelpfully represents other Radical Orthodoxy writers, he seems to read Žižek in line with the above citations. Caputo’s commentary nicely encapsulates my question: is this, or can this really be, a dialogue at all? And if theological speech is violent, has there not been a wrong turn somewhere?

Žižek seems to think it was not a dialogue, or that it stopped being one. God in Pain, written with theologian Boris Gunjević, starts with Gunjević citing an e-mail exchange between Milbank and Žižek:

Time to conclude. When, at the beginning of his reply to my reply, Milbank claims that, in my previous reply, I merely reiterated my main points, without properly engaging with his specific arguments, my reaction is that this, exactly, is what he is doing in his second reply—a clear sign that our exchange exhausted its potentials. So, since we are both reduced to reiterating our positions, the only appropriate way for me is to conclude the exchange.^[19]

As in the US impeachment trial, the dialogue seems to have failed. Far from suggesting that there is no fruit to glean from theological engagement with Žižek or post-structuralism—on the contrary, I think that I have generously reaped benefits of such engagement—I am questioning if, at the moment, dialogue with structuralism might be precisely what theology should not desire.

In this inquiry, I seek a response to structuralism that upsets a binary laid out by James K.A. Smith. In a popular work, Smith provocatively analyzes what theology must be after taking postmodernism seriously (perhaps justifying Caputo’s wider critique above): “a ‘radical orthodoxy’ is the only proper outcome of the postmodern critique . . . ”^[20] In a more academic register, he allows two options: “there are two ways to be postfundamentalist: emergent or catholic.”^[21] On the following page, he recounts beginning with the “emergent,” “anti-institutional trajectory,” then gravitating towards the “catholic” side. He cites “a criticism often levelled at my work by a certain stream of theologians, often emerging from Scotland . . . from the Barthian tradition that does not entertain the possibility of a Christian philosophy . . . ”^[22] Without commenting on the possibility of Christian philosophy, this book (in tandem with structuralist thought) interrogates the role philosophy plays in ethics, language and community. In other words, Smith might be right, but only if one accepts the terms laid out in the “postmodern critique”; the binary emergent/catholic response already assumes that speech operates within a philosophical framework.

In some ways, this book is prefigured by Smith’s comment: it emerges from research undertaken in Scotland, from a more or less Barthian tradition, and if decidedly not anti-institutional, does stem from a specific approach to institutions that will come out in due course. However, I believe my treatment is original—it is expressed in a register more Kierkegaardian than Barthian, and my entire interest is in how these seemingly philosophical questions bear on our time. In this book, I describe elements of what I see as a distinctly protestant response. It is protestant in the true sense of protest. To borrow from Žižek as cited above, it will refuse to allow the enemy to define the terrain of the struggle. Or more precisely, leaving the fight metaphor, it refuses to fight, but perhaps also to speak. I propose to accomplish this through an original reading of Jacques Ellul.