Theology and the Political

Duke University Press has just come out with a collection of essays edited by Creston Davis, John Milbank and Slavoj Zizek on political theology. As one might expect from the list of contributors (Milbank, Pickstock, Ward, Conor Cunningham, Kenneth Surin, Terry Eagleton and others) it’s a dense collection. It was a surprise to discover how little this volume intersects with other recent work in political theology. There are no index entries for William Cavanagh, only a single entry for Oliver O’Donovan (though I’ve discovered more than one reference to Desire of Nations in the text), no index entries for Hauerwas, and it appears that the neocons are beneath notice.

Zizek’s essay on the romance of orthodoxy spends a good bit of space interacting with Chesterton – often quite favorably. He expounds on Chesterton’s notion that Christianity provides the outer frame for pagan joy, and adds: This “is why the conservative Christian critics who recently expressed their concern at how books and movies like The Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter series undermine Christianity through their message of pagan magic miss the point, the perverse conclusion which is unavoidable here: You want to enjoy the pagan dream of the pleasurable life without paying the price of melancholic sadness for it? Choose Christianity!” In short, “far from being the religion of sacrifice, or renunciation of earthly pleasures (in contrast to the pagan affirmation of the life of passions), Christianity offers a devious stratagem to indulge in our desires without having to pay the price for them, to enjoy life without the fear of decay and debilitating pain awaiting us at the end of the day. If we go to the end in this direction, it would even be possible to sustain that therein resides the ultimate function of Christ’s sacrifice: you can indulge in your desires and enjoy, I took the price for it upon myself! There is thus an element of truth in a joke about what is the ideal prayer of a young Christian girl to the Virgin Mary: ‘O thou who conceived without having sinned, let me sin without having to conceive!’” In the middle of this paragraph, Zizek spends some time analyzing (apparently without irony) the role of “Climb Every Mountain” in the Sound of Music : “The uncanny power of this scene resides in its unexpected display of the spectacle of desire, which renders the scene literally embarrassing: the very person whom one would expect to preach abstinence and renunciation turns out to be the agent of the fidelity to one’s desire.” While acknowledging the truth here, Zizek recognizes that this is a ultimately a perverse function of Christianity, but he ends the essay recognizing that the anxiety of our age is due to the “elevation of transgression into the norm, the lack of the prohibition that would sustain desire.” Tell the guilt-ridden promiscuous woman that she has no reason to feel guilty because there is no standard to transgress, and she will perhaps lose her guilt but also almost certainly lose interest in sexual promiscuity – what thrill is there if there’s no boundary to cross?

This is a travesty rather than a summary of Zizek’s piece, but I was struck both by his evident admiration for Chesterton and his often trenchant cultural analysis. Elsewhere in this volume, Milbank attempts to account for the invocation of theology in “recent French or French-influenced Marxisant thinkers” – Derrida’s use of the via negativa, Alain Badiou’s appeal to Paul, and Zizek’s attempt to sustain “revolutionary love beyond desire by reference to the historical emergence of the ultimate sublime object, which reconciles us to the void constituted only through a rift in the voice. This sublime object [for Zizek] is Christ.” Yet, these thinkers are, at this point, grasping the necessity of theology “in a thoroughly fragmentary and partial fashion.” Perhaps this book will fill in the picture for many.