Fake Your Own Death: Mock-Suicide and the End of Identity in Jean Paul and Žižek

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At the end of the film Žižek!, the theorist pretends to throw himself down the center of a spiral staircase. Žižek’s mock-suicide foregrounds the dialectical relationship between seriousness and play in his work. Though he pretends to sacrifice his clown persona in order to rescue the serious core of his thought, the comedy of this gesture indicates that core and semblance are inseparable. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Žižek’s engagement with the crucifixion, which he sometimes tempts us to consider the greatest mock-death of all. Though he rejects the claim that God’s death on the cross was a case of deceptive play-acting, could we not make the same claim about the Christian commitment of a professed atheist who sees “the Christian experience” as the only conduit to dialectical materialism? This paper contends that the place of performativity in Žižek’s dialectical theology is most visible from the standpoint of a neglected precursor: German Romantic-era novelist Jean Paul (1759-1826). Author of a sprawling oeuvre permeated with tropes of mock-death and resurrection, Jean Paul articulates, in both theory and practice, the dialectic of seriousness and play that frames his and Žižek’s engagement with Christ. For both writers, the contradictory unity of the divine and the human in Christ models a transcendence paradoxically immanent in human subjectivity, and which playful performances of doubling, masking and framing make accessible to thought. Reading Jean Paul in the light of Žižek’s thought can help explicate what remains implicit, or even unthought, in Žižek’s own method.