The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? by Slavoj Žižek , John Milbank , Creston Davis (review)

Abstract

[MWS 10.1 (2010) 121-137] ISSN 1470-8078 Book Reviews Slavoj liiek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Girist: Paradox or Dialectic? (ed. Creston Davis; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 312 pp. ISBN 978-0-262-01271-3. $27.95 and £19.95 (hbk). In The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? the Slovenian Marxist author Slavoj iiZek and the British Anglo-Catholic theologian John Milbank team up in an exchange on the meaning of Christian theological heritage for contemporary radical social and political causes. Èiiek kicks off with a chapter titled 'The Fear of Four Words: A Modest Plea for the Hegelian Reading of Christianity', to which Milbank replies with "The Double Glory, or Paradox versus Dialectics: On Not Quite Agree ing with Slavoj tiZek'. 2iZek gives a shorter concluding statement and the volume is helpfully introduced by a North American commentator, Creston Davis. Although the book has nothing to say about Max Weber, or even about sociology in any ordi nary sense (Weber is never mentioned in the volume, and neither is any other canon ical sociological figure, other than Comte), it deserves consideration in these pages, if only for how strikingly it testifies to Weber's ever recurring importance as a caution ary break on the free flights of fancy of contemporary 'neo-metaphysical' writing in current 'radical' religious social thought. Enfant terrible of the European left intelligentsia and doyen of an idiosyncratic blend of Marxist-Lacanian psychoanalytic cultural theory, 2iZek turns his hand here to an appraisal of the dialectically coded revolutionary message of Christian teaching—an interest also visible in some of iiiek's earlier books such as The Fragile Absolute (2000) or Tlw Ticklish Subject (1999). Close antecedents to 2izek's in some ways rather familiar line of argument in this text are perhaps Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope—theorizing the dialectical persistence of the Gospel in its a-theist sublation in revolutionary praxis—along with numerous other twentieth century heterodox Marxist sources, from the thought of figures such as Kautsky, Lukâcs, Horkheimer, Adorno and the young Kracauer to Latin American liberation theology of the 1970s. The difference in 2iZek's case is that at just the moment when one might have thought that all of this had been quietly laid to rest, dissipated by postmodern irony, cultural difference and the demise of Marxism as an integral worldview, it all seems to come back—with a twist. For 2iiek, the mendacity of contemporary liberal pluralist discourse in Western democracies and its refraction in contemporary bien-pensant academic postmodernism is reason enough for an adventure of return to the thought of a politico-metaphysical 'absolute' of some kind. Like the French left philosopher Alain Badiou, liiek is impatient with multiculturalist and value pluralist positions in contemporary commentary that invoke moral universals— such as human rights—while simultaneously abjuring any commitment to structural social transformation capable of realising such universals and instead retreating into various evasive epistemological disclaimers.© Max Weber Studies 2010, Global Policy Institute, London Metropolitan University, 31 Jewry Street, London, EC3N 2EY. 122 Max Weber Studies Pivotal for 2iZek's argument in his contribution to this book is Hegel's reference to the 'monstrosity' of God's appearance in the finite flesh of a human individual, Jesus Christ. "This is the monstrous [das Ungeheuere] whose necessity we have seen', wrote Hegel in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (quoted by iiiek, p. 74). Ziiek reasons here that the historical 'death of God' along with everything evoked by this dictum—Nietzsche, secularization, atheism and the natural sciences, de transcendentalization, Weber's 'disenchantment', modernity — itself occu rs in the Crucifixion, in the dying of God on the Cross. Combining Meister Eckhart's and other medieval mystic visions of God's absolute self-sacrifice and self-extinction in the soul of man with Hegel's dialectical elaboration of God's sublation into Christ and Christ into the Holy Ghost qua 'World-Spirit', Ziiek holds that the revolution ary self-education of the collective human subject of world history is itself the working out of the process of divine self-negation in historical material division and multiplicity—in the 'non-All'. 'In the...