360 Reviews

Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox

In their new co-authored volume, The Monstrosity of Christ, Slavoj Žižek and John
Milbank seek in diverse ways to recover the properly interruptive effect of the
claim that God became human in Christ. Since the publication of Theology
and Social Theory (1990), Milbank has consistently advocated a reading of
Protestantism as the chief carrier of a widespread perversion of this essential
Christian affirmation. The characteristically Protestant sense of Christ’s
righteousness as unattainable by human sociality as it is actualized in history might
sound radically serious about the incarnation, but for Milbank it really amounts
to a fearful evasion of the implication that God might positively determine our
material and historical lives in ways that conform with Jesus’ own body. Readers
familiar with Slavoj Žižek’s work will know that he agrees with Milbank that the
incarnation accomplishes a crucial though often overlooked ‘parallax shift’, which
prohibits ideological evasions of actuality. Yet this agreement masks a fundamental
difference between Milbank’s and Žižek’s efforts to recover an anti-gnostic
or anti-ideological Christianity, which is that Žižek’s Christian materialism is
decidedly Protestant. This difference is engagingly pursued in The Monstrosity
of Christ, which turns the book into an unlikely but profound reinvigoration of
Catholic–Protestant debates, one that I think readers of this Journal will find
worthwhile, if not entirely satisfying.
Žižek’s first essay argues, with Chesterton, that conventional religion and
metaphysics function to distract us from the ‘senseless’ contingency of material
experience by proposing a ‘big Other’ in which all of reality’s loose ends are
supposedly tied up. In doing so, religion and metaphysics express a fear of genuine
Christianity, which offers above all ‘ “four words: He was made Man” ’ (p. 25). As
this citation of Chesterton indicates, for Žižek Christianity is incompatible with the
recourse to ideology, since the incarnation declares that God himself became derelict
of any ‘big Other’. Yet the Christian experience of dereliction moves the subject
beyond the paralysis of fear precisely because the terrifying gap between humans and
God, between incompletion and completion, is affirmed as internal to God himself,
which makes this gap not a prison but the locus of freedom.
Žižek argues that Hegel’s philosophy alone has been able to think ‘the
implications of the four words through to the end’, which is what determines Hegel’s
placement at the ‘end’ of metaphysics (p. 26). Most importantly, for Žižek, Hegel
does not imagine that the ‘self-alienation’ of Spirit through the subjective power of
‘differentiation’ implies alienation from a substantial ‘thing’. Instead, as Žižek points
out, ‘the very process of alienation creates/generates the “Self” from which the Spirit
is alienated and to which it then returns’ (p. 71). What this means is that when one
thinks of reconciliation in Hegelian terms, one should not imagine a return to an
actual ‘given-immediate substantial unity’, but instead a shift in perspective through
which the Spirit’s shattering experience of disunity is itself the healing of the wound
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of disunity. As Žižek helpfully puts it, ‘the Spirit heals its wound not by directly
healing it, but by getting rid of the very full and sane body into which the wound was
cut’ (p. 72). Yet one can only do this, get rid of the ‘substantial status of that which
was lost’, through a monstrous affirmation of the identity of this illusory substance
(‘God’) with the very ‘loose end’ which is putatively alienated from it. For Žižek, this
affirmation is a specifically Christian possibility, which Hegel only interprets, since
Christ uniquely does not ‘represent’ an essential idea, which would render his
‘accidental’ features irrelevant; but instead he ‘directly is God, which is why he no
longer has to resemble God’ (p. 81). It is only through such an experience of the
divine as identical with the monstrous singularity of Christ that one may recognize,
in proper materialist fashion, ‘the ontological incompleteness of reality itself’ (p. 90).
Ultimately this is also, for Žižek, to arrive at a fully orthodox theology of creation,
since in Chesterton’s words, ‘Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free’
(p. 39).
Milbank’s ambitious essay offers a ‘Catholic’ rejoinder to Žižek’s implication
that Christianity’s openness to ontological equivocity is forsaken by theological
appeals to a measure of harmony prevailing among differences. Thus it becomes
Milbank’s task to argue that the Christian understanding of creation as a joyous and
mysterious movement of differentiation (‘a sword which separates and sets free’)
does not preclude, and perhaps even requires, the hopeful wager that such
differentiation is deployed in a trinitarian mode. Here Milbank makes his familiar
argument that those who are, like Žižek, ‘historicists’ to the point of atheism are
ironically not historicist enough. That is, Milbank emphasizes that the experience of
ontological equivocity, of the incompleteness of reality relative to a univocal idea,
does not actually necessitate the conclusion that singularities bear a ‘negative’ or
‘dialectical’ (for Hegel) relation to one another (p. 139). In fact, as Milbank shows,
this supposition is only the conclusion of a certain ‘mediating preference’ (p. 113),
to which one can oppose a different preference. As far as competing wagers go, of
course, it might appear that Milbank’s ‘Catholic’ preference is overly determined
by the ‘fear of four words’ that needs to see equivocity reduced via its incorporation
in a big Other (the actual, ‘infinite’ differentiation of the Trinity). Milbank argues
persuasively, however, that it is really Žižek’s ‘nihilistic’ wager that differences are
dialectically determined which expresses a refusal to experience actual difference.
That is, the approach to difference which rules out the possibility of harmony a
priori, ironically reduces all singular differences to the same measure of agonism.
Thus Milbank’s rebuttal really comes down to the claim that Christian orthodoxy
demands what Žižek says it does – a relentless openness to the traumatically
different without recourse to an objective univocity – but also that this demand can
only be met when one does not foreclose a priori the possibility of a harmonious
proportionality among differences. It is on this basis that one may begin to imagine
what Milbank calls a more ‘Catholic’ conception of a ‘transfigured natural desire
for peace and harmony’ (p. 121), which holds together ontological equivocity
with a positive sociality arising from and supporting this very desire. Milbank
then concludes his essay with a general phenomenological analysis of perception
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362 Reviews

that aims to support his ‘Catholic’ view that our experience of ontological
differentiation is not obviously one of ‘negation’, but possibly of coincidental
paradox (pp. 160ff.).
In the book’s final essay, Žižek argues that Milbank’s efforts in the direction of
a Radical Orthodox natural theology only confirm the central problem with his
trinitarian ontology – it refuses to wrestle with the singularity of Christ. That is, for
Žižek, Milbank’s vision ‘of a substantial immediate harmony of Being’ (p. 249)
necessarily turns the incarnation into a mere ‘index of the “coincidence of finite and
infinite” ’ (p. 253). Jesus becomes far too much the representation of an a priori idea
of coincidental paradox to operate a shift beyond the paralysis of subjection to an
ideological ‘big Other’. For Žižek, the true scandal of the Christ event, which is also
the scandal of true freedom, is that there is no longer an ‘idea’ that can tie up the
loose ends of experience. Ultimately this leads him to endorse what he takes to be the
Protestant sensibility that the Christian experience negates any relation between
the believing individual and an ideologically guaranteed social vision – even
Milbank’s beautiful but ultimately ‘soft-Fascist vision’ (p. 250). Yet this is least of all
a privatization of the Christian ethic, Žižek continues, for ‘when St. Paul says that,
from a Christian standpoint, “there are no men and women, no Jews and Greeks” ’,
he thereby claims that ‘when we reflect on our ethnic roots, we engage in a private
use of reason’ (p. 293). For Žižek this implies that it is only when a subject is free
from the need to safeguard the immediately intimated harmony and positive legality
of what Milbank calls ‘a sphere for the operation of charity’ that she can be, in a
Pauline sense, liberated by agape.
Žižek unfortunately concludes what is mostly a forceful and clear response to
Milbank’s advocated ‘natural desire for peace and harmony’ with a seriously
misguided sketch of his own ‘Christian’ ethic. By directly applauding characters
who act according to a ‘cold and cruel passion’ (p. 303), Žižek naively confirms
Milbank’s sense that for all his talk of an open ontology, Žižek really is all too certain
that freedom from ideological paralysis must take the form of ‘cold and cruel
passion’. This unfortunate ending also confirms the deeper disappointment of the
volume as a whole, which is that both Milbank and Žižek seem much more
concerned to defend their common claim that ‘my abstraction is the “true” one’
(p. 247) than they are ready to imagine, as Kierkegaard does, that the irreducible
subjectivity of Christian truth means it will find all such contests more soporific than
helpful. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard argues that Christian love’s distance from any
erotically intimated completion means that it does not have time to draw a picture of
itself as the fulfillment of social harmony or as the appropriately cold and cruel
passion, because it is secured in duty and thus is too busy ‘hoping all things’. For all
the sense The Monstrosity of Christ gives of the apocalyptic urgency of the present
moment for theology, it is this truly interruptive Christian urgency, the urgency of
hope, which is ultimately missing.

Justin D. Klassen
Austin College, Sherman, Texas
© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd