Mystical Theology and the Four Discourses

Abstract

In this chapter I suggest that a rereading of Dionysius’s Mystical Theology through Jacques Lacan’s four discourses illustrates how a Žižekian ontology makes possible a materialist reading of apophatic theology and Christian identity. Slavoj Žižek’s work offers the possibility of repeating Dionysius differently, under the aegis of a Žižekian materialism within which apophatic theology is the condition of both the possibility and the impossibility of cataphatic theology. In such a materialist theology, Christian identity can be understood according to the logic of drive: that is, not as a commitment to a particular set of answers or a particular vision of harmony, but precisely as the commitment to a particular problem, the problem of what it means to be faithful to Christ.