A Merry Marxy Christmas
By Eugene McCarraher | 12.23.03
A specter has been haunting Marxism— the specter of Christianity. Routed politically by capitalist globalism, and hard-pressed to identify any really existing hope, some prominent Marxists have turned to Christianity for inspiration and revision. Terry Eagleton has reclaimed his Catholic past, and now exhorts his comrades to read theology. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have invoked St. Francis as a model of “the future life of communist militancy.” And Alain Badiou, arguably France’s foremost Marxist, has upheld St. Paul as the pre-secular augur of revolutionary universalism.
Now comes (or rather, returns) Slavoj Zizek, seeking to unite the existential and political import of Christian faith—extracted from its “religious” trappings—with a revitalized revolutionary Marxism. Zizek has been racing back and forth on the road to Damascus for some time now, and his new book retraces some of that journey, with all the nervy erudition and promiscuous allusion that are his intellectual signature. Coming as close as an atheist probably can to a bold assertion of faith, Zizek becomes the godless theologian of our time, exhibiting all the sacred foolishness of that hopeful and futile vocation.
Zizek isn’t the first Marxist to write theologically. His title refers to philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin’s story of a “puppet called ‘historical materialism’” whose actions were guided by a little dwarf—theology—which, while “wizened and out of sight,” made the puppet “a match for anyone.” But Zizek is the first Marxist to write theology in a post-Marxist, post-secular age. Historical materialism, he writes, now must operate “under cover,” at the same time that religion and theology have been granted “a new lease on life” in a deconstructed world where the sacred and the secular are no longer in opposition. So Zizek reverses Benjamin’s thesis: The puppet called theology must now enlist a dwarf named Marxism, who animates and guides believers while concealed.
Orthodox Christians might reject this kind of compliment, but Zizek’s theological turn is neither cynical nor shallow. For Zizek, the “perverse core of Christianity”—its abolition of the opposition between humanity and divinity as embodied by Jesus as God’s human son—is identical to the kernel of Marxist materialism. Indeed, Zizek advises every Marxist to “go through the Christian experience.” ...
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Carl
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