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Kotsko 2010

The book review discusses 'The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?' by Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, highlighting the significant philosophical engagement between the two prominent thinkers in contemporary theology. The review notes that while Žižek advocates for a Hegelian reading of Christianity, Milbank counters with an ontology based on paradox, ultimately revealing their differing perspectives on history and ideology. Despite the lack of direct dialogue, the review emphasizes the book's contribution to theological discourse by clarifying and contrasting the views of Žižek and Milbank.

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Ilja Aradski
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13 views5 pages

Kotsko 2010

The book review discusses 'The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?' by Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, highlighting the significant philosophical engagement between the two prominent thinkers in contemporary theology. The review notes that while Žižek advocates for a Hegelian reading of Christianity, Milbank counters with an ontology based on paradox, ultimately revealing their differing perspectives on history and ideology. Despite the lack of direct dialogue, the review emphasizes the book's contribution to theological discourse by clarifying and contrasting the views of Žižek and Milbank.

Uploaded by

Ilja Aradski
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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[PT 11.

1 (2010) 141-144] Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317X


doi:10.1558/poth.v11i1.141 Political Theology (online) ISSN 1473-1719

Book Review

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


Dialectic?, ed. Creston Davis. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. 312 pp.
ISBN 0262012715 (hbk), $27.95.

Reviewed by: Adam Kotsko, Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, MI,


USA [email protected]

The last decade has witnessed a steadily increasing interest in the Chris-
tian theological tradition among European philosophers. While these
philosophical investigations have generated considerable enthusiasm
and discussion among theologians, thus far the philosophers in question
have shown little inclination to engage with contemporary theology. This
book marks the most high-profile departure from that pattern to date.
Indeed, on the philosophical side it is difficult to imagine a higher-profile
response: Slavoj Žižek is arguably the most famous living philosopher,
with few rivals in terms of reaching non-academic audiences. Of course no
theologian—leaving aside those who are also heads of worldwide church
communions—enjoys comparable notoriety today. Yet within certain
academic theological circles, John Milbank and his highly disciplined
Radical Orthodoxy school have managed to gain a certain hegemony in
the discussion, serving as a key point of reference both for conservatives
who wish to see theological apologetics go on the offensive and for liberals
seeking someone they can “love to hate.”
There are deeper reasons to be glad for this encounter than a simple
squaring off of two giants in their respective fields. From the standpoint
of academic theology, it is highly appropriate for Žižek to respond to
Milbank insofar as many of the contemporary theologians who are sym-
pathetic toward Milbank tend to be favorably disposed toward Žižek as
well, due to what they perceive as significant parallels between the two
thinkers. Clarifying that relationship through a direct encounter is thus
all for the good. From the standpoint of Žižek’s project, on the other
hand, Milbank is a suitable interlocutor because so much of Žižek’s
work on theology has focused on Catholic thinkers, most notably G.
K. Chesterton, and because of Milbank’s own considerable philosophi-
cal sophistication. When asked to deal with Žižek’s peculiar blend of
Hegelianism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Marxism, many theologians

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010, 1 Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, London SW3 5SR.
142 Political Theology

would understandably hesitate, whereas for Milbank, Žižek’s thought is


part of a conversation with which he has, in his own idiosyncratic way,
been engaged all along.
The book begins with an introduction from the book’s editor, Creston
Davis, who also collaborated with Žižek and Milbank on the edited volume
Theology and the Political: The New Debate. Davis is primarily concerned to
demonstrate that the debate represented in this book is much more intel-
lectually serious than the current debates surrounding the so-called “new
atheists,” which he argues are bound up in outdated concepts inherited
from the Enlightenment, concepts that Žižek and Milbank move beyond.
The rest of the volume is given over to the dialogue: an initial statement
by Žižek, a response from Milbank, and a final response from Žižek.
All three sections are very long—in Milbank’s case over 120 pages—and
although Žižek is perhaps correct to claim that “every philosophical dia-
logue is an interaction of two monologues” (235), one wishes that the
book had been divided into several shorter sections, in order to allow for
at least the appearance of greater dialogue. First of all, there is the simple
matter of fairness: why should Žižek get to talk back to Milbank but not
vice versa? More importantly, however, a more thorough-going back
and forth has the potential to be more revealing than competing lengthy
monologues, or at least revealing in a different way—a potential that, as
I will discuss below, Žižek’s own final response already actualizes to a
significant degree.
To the actual content, then: Žižek’s opening piece is presented as
“a modest plea for the Hegelian reading of Christianity.” This reading,
whose most prominent defender in the twentieth century has been
Thomas Altizer, is one in which the Father’s self-emptying into Christ
is complete and irreversible and is followed by Christ’s complete and
irreversible self-emptying into the Holy Spirit, conceived as the bond of
the religious community. In previous works, Žižek has given this reading
his own Lacanian twist: Christ’s death represents the death of the “big
Other,” understood as the grounding of the ideological order, and the
“Holy Spirit” points toward the possibility of a non-ideological social
bond, one in which we attend to the neighbor directly, in an encounter
unmediated by law, culture, or other ideological categories.
What is new here is not so much a development of his position as a
more directly “theological” statement of it. For example, Žižek advances a
reading of church history in terms of the doctrine of the Trinity. Heavily
reliant on the work of Vladimir Lossky, this account is likely to strike
many academic theologians as unsatisfying and even sloppy, but it does
a good job of indicating the ways in which trinitarian doctrine has often
served to domesticate or “contain” the scandal of the cross. A much more

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.


Reviews 143

significant development here is an extended engagement with Meister


Eckhart, whom Žižek sees as pointing toward Hegel. As in The Puppet and
the Dwarf, the key foil throughout is the Catholic version of Christianity,
particularly as represented by Chesterton. Despite his obvious admiration
for Chesterton’s often quite Hegelian mode of thought, the Catholicism
he champions finally positions God as a “big Other” or “master signifier,”
an irrational “constitutive exception” that grounds the smooth function-
ing of reason—as in the classical Marxist tradition, actual existing Christi-
anity is still the key example of ideology. The true insight of the Hegelian
reading of Christianity, however, is that the world really isn’t structured
by the smooth functioning of reason, as Žižek’s closing reflections on
contemporary science show.
Žižek’s brand of theology, then, is not simply about a reading of a
particular religious tradition, but about the very structure of reality. That
is precisely the ground where Milbank challenges him most fundamen-
tally. The centerpiece of Milbank’s essay is an elaboration of an ontology
grounded in “paradox,” drawn from William Desmond and explained in
terms of a vivid description of driving on a misty day. Here he appears to
be using “paradox” as a synonym for his more usual appeal to “analogy,”
deploying it in an opportunistic manner to evoke a Kierkegaardian cri-
tique of Žižek’s Hegelianism—though the only real point of contact with
Kierkegaard that I can discern is that Milbank is putting forward what he
takes to be a “Christian” critique of Hegel. Milbank also challenges Žižek
on his philosophy of history, claiming that Žižek’s use of dialectic limits
him to a nihilistic determinism. It is in this discussion of history that we
see one of the most interesting parallels between Žižek and Milbank:
their advocacy of historical “lost causes.” For Žižek, these “lost causes”
are most often located in the history of left-wing revolutions, while for
Milbank, they tend to be indications that a more capacious and humane
medieval worldview could have developed, heading off the most destruc-
tive aspects of modernity. Yet in this very parallel, an even more important
difference is evident: Žižek is mining history for moments of rupture, in
the hopes of actualizing their revolutionary force again, while Milbank is
looking for moments of balance that point toward a stable ontology. To
put it differently: Milbank wishes somehow to undo a break (in his case,
of modernity), while Žižek believes the break is irreversible and can be
“undone” only by a further break.
Though Milbank claims in a footnote that his piece is a response to
Žižek’s contribution to this same volume (219), in reality it is more like
a summary of Milbank’s own position, developed in an often very loose
dialogue with the broad outlines of what he takes to be Žižek’s position.
Most telling in this regard is the almost total absence of direct citations

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.


144 Political Theology

of Žižek’s own words. Though footnotes are abundant, the ones that
support his reading of Žižek often refer to huge chunks of Žižek, Lacan
or Hegel in one broad sweep, imparting a vague flavor to his arguments
that is matched in the main text by his breezy name-dropping (Žižek is
here quite Schellingian, there almost Kierkegaardian, etc.—nowhere is it
clarified what these various points of proximity concretely mean). Thus
Žižek’s response is arguably the only proper response in this volume,
and as readers of his previous responses to critics might expect, he comes
out swinging. Quoting Milbank repeatedly and at length, he claims that
Milbank consistently misrepresents Žižek’s own position and harshly
critiques Milbank, at one point going so far as to claim that Milbank has
“a soft-Fascist vision” (250). The performance is certainly satisfying for
those, like me, who are sympathetic to Žižek and critical of Milbank—but
more importantly, it is likely to be frustrating and even disturbing to those
who thought they could be faithful to both. The differences between the
two come out in sharp relief, forcing a choice.
As usual, though, even in what is primarily a response, Žižek is hard at
work developing his own philosophy. A crucial theological development
is the reference to the “death of God” theology of the 1960s, represented
by many pages worth of lengthy block quotes from Altizer. But perhaps
the most important contribution of this volume to the understanding
of Žižek is the final few pages, where Žižek attempts to give some kind
of positive account of his ethical position—a move that he positions as
a response to Milbank’s deepest and most probing questions (297).
Drawing on a trilogy of novels by Agota Kristof, he outlines an ethics
“without empathy,” characterized by “doing what is to be done in a weird
coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others
while avoiding their disgusting proximity” (303). As in the case of Žižek’s
harsh criticism of Milbank, this clear ethical account forces a choice: some
will find it invigorating, while others will find it appalling; it is difficult to
imagine a middle ground.
In sum, then, though more dialogue would have been desirable, The
Monstrosity of Christ represents a significant contribution to the theological
conversation, clarifying and extending the views of two key figures and,
more importantly, sharpening the differences between them.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.


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