Reactualizing Hegel: Žižek, the Universality of Islam, and Its Political Potentiality (Revisiting “the Archives of Islam”)

Abstract

This article revisits the controversy over the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s sympathetic, yet critical and provocative, views on Islam and fundamentalist terrorism as developed in his ‘A Glance on the Archives of Islam.’ Žižek, I argue, offers an original reading of the universality of Islam and its political potentiality, by reactualizing the originary impulse in Hegel’s dialectical analysis of Islam as endogenous to the series of monotheistic religions, without falling into the trap of either Hegel’s racist Orientalist, Eurocentric, and Islamophobic views about Islam or their antithetical Islamocentric views. First, I show that Žižek rejects Hegel’s emphasis on both Islam’s temporal incongruity and the Islamic unique conception of an abstract and transcendent God. Instead, Žižek reloads Hegel’s dialectical views and manages to resolve the deadlock in Hegel’s approach to Islam that could not account for the universality of Islam. Second, I draw out the political aspect of Žižek’s philosophical analysis of Islam, by examining his claim that Islam is the most politicized religion today. Grounding the emergence of political Islam in the encroachment of modernization project on the Islamicate world, he notes the ambiguity about sacrifice (martyrdom and terrorism) in Islam and attributes the rise of Islamic extremism (violence) to the contradictions and impasses of the global capitalist system.