The pseudo-pious path to secular salvation

The increasingly trendy Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek is no stranger to controversy, championing two ideological and intellectual traditions, each loaded with enough anti-individualist implications to upset the most tolerant of liberal sensibilities. That is of course, Marxism albeit in a somewhat provocative and unconventional approach and the Lacanian tradition to which he adheres to much more seriously. With two films now under his belt, numerous appearances on News programmes discussing everything from the Egyptian revolution in Al-Jazeera to Julian Assange on Russia Today, Zizek has accumulated a large following among the intellectual left (something he claims to despise) and spawned many imitators with amateur Freudians haphazardly coupling psycho-sexual analysis with the crisis of capitalism, suddenly becoming a prominent phenomena among the left. It is no wonder then that Hamid Dabashi's accusation of Orientalist clichés appearing throughout Zizek's work was met with such distain among intellectual leftists. The issue that caused such controversy was Zizek's position on the Tiger economies appropriation of Capitalism, spelling the effective ideological end of any inherent democratic character contained within it.

Zizek is without doubt a profound thinker, and perhaps the only leftist ideologue worth listening to today if for the simple fact alone that he completely disturbs the ideological entrenchment and uncreatively of the current left by arguing primarily from a non-Marxist perspective and one alien to the antiquated Trotskyist-anti-revisionist rivalry. That being said the limitations to it's usefulness become embarrassingly clear when he steps outside his comfort zone and lays out his often reductionist accounts to a theological or cultural phenomena beyond the scope of his anti-metaphysical mission to arrange the world comfortably within framework of his progressive-Lacanian worldview where any local peculiarities, sacred traditions or historical ambiguities are parodied, used as a sort of intellectual canon fodder to further Zizek's own conclusions by perversely arguing that the numerous traditions of the worlds not only serve to prove the supremacy of Zizek's progressive atheistic socialist worldview, but render themselves useless in the process.

Such is the case in Zizek's "A perverts guide to ideology", where in critiquing Scorsese's The last temptation of the Christ he provokes faithful and faithless alike with the statement that in order to become a true Atheist, one must first become Christian. Whether this is to be seen as part of an already existing tradition among outwardly atheist intellectuals warming up to Christian theology  as Habermas did with the Pope, fascinated by the cognitive substance of religion is unclear. Zizek's position is unfortunately more reminiscent of Geert Wilders in his atheistic appropriation of the Christian legacy of Europe. It's no secret that Zizek is pro-European and yet it seems with the lack of any substantial secular unifying force to call upon, Zizek has opted for a Theo-nationalist reading of Europe as the predecessor to a progressive atheist community.

Zizek's position of the ontology of the crucifixion is in contradiction to both a traditional Christian perspective as well as Freud's position on the primordial patricide and the guilt-obedience complex that lingers on in Christian teaching. So while the crucifixion in Zizek's philosophy is an ultimately liberating moment, heralding the death of God as the proof of his love (resolving the problematic old-testament divinity) and imbuing the believer with the holy spirit, it is in psychoanalysis a mere solidification of the primal obedience brought about by the guilt in having murdered ones archetypal father. Zizek is clearly departing from Freud, following Kautsky in his assessment that the crucifixion was not only atheistic in nature but revolutionary. In fact it reminded me of Ahmad Shamlou's poem where he describes Christ forced to carry the cross as an exemplar of revolutionary responsibility and the crucifixion as the archetypal commitment to a revolutionary cause.

He was relieved
By the mercy he found in his soul
And like a proud swan
He looked into his own purity

The problem lies in reading the crucifixion as a resolution to a problematic theology. And here Zizek's orientalism is somewhat more evident as he laments the morbidity of the distant and harsh Semitic monotheistic divinity as somehow harmonious with the irresponsible, emotional faculty within the believer. "If God exists then everything is permitted". Perhaps it is useful that Zizek is in fact disregarding the dubious "Judeo-Christian" character of Europe by regulating the former to it's actual anti-idealised position in pre-modern Europe as a Semitic morbidity but instead of transcending both Euro-centrist and Orientalist discourses of Semitic monotheism, he lapses into both. This premise rests entirely on God's role as the Big-Other, the non-existent father who is oblivious to his own death.

That is he makes no distinction between the genuinely transcendental and the worldly ideological justification for social change. Zizek explains the monstrosity of 20th century Communism by arguing as many have that the whole affair was more or less religious, in a strict literal eschatological sense and the believer had merely been redeemed as an agent of historical progress. Of course, dialectical materialism is just that, materialism worlds apart from an orientation towards an intersectionary sacred dimension. The aims of the first are undoubtedly worldly with the eventual horizon set on the end of totalizing historical narrative. It is a sort of secular millenarianism which even in it's religious variety is utter heresy given the fact that it transposes divine knowledge to a non-messianic or non-prophetic personality. That is, theology only becomes a morbidity when it's ultimate vision is in commanding a change in the earthly dimension.

As far as Zizek is concerned, what Sufis call Fana fillah, extinction in the sacred or the apophatic Theoria of the Eastern orthodox tradition cannot exist and it is a shame that a former Heideggerian cannot recognise the ontological separateness between the two. Unlike Zizek's position whereby God's death is known but unacknowledged, placing a revolutionary responsibility on the believers shoulders "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace but a sword", the metaphysicists responsibility arises from the death of his Ego, the meditation of the thaumatological moments of his tradition (the resurrection, scripture etc.)  and the acknowledgement of the real which is ironically reminiscent of Lacan's own hatred towards Ego psychology and the need to painfully have the patient acknowledge his own helplessness, however damaging it may be.      

 

"In fear of death, in fear of rot"

It is said that the Prophet told his followers to die before they die. Are we in need of an existential euthanasia? In demanding this the act of Islam, the spiritual submission as understood in the worldly horizon evades the totality of it's temporal revelation. Sharia, the transmitted conditions of transcendental return is mortal after all, it's rulings are constrained by the metaphysical composition of Dunya (what need would we have for return if the oppositions between departure and arrival no longer convey any ontological resonance), but as we consciously die as the Prophet suggested, we project onto a certain possibility which is of course paradoxically avoided in the condition of intentional undeath. Life in death, "حي فل موت". To die intentionally then, is it not a suicide or do the inter-sensory components of the imaginal hierarchy, the shadowy presencing of which we merely mirror as fickled ambivalence assume the determinant of our own martyrdom? And thus, do we avoid the ultimate hubris in appropriating the original function in commanding for ourselves the collapsing of the infinite horizon, through nothing but our own will? 

Is there nothing then, more terrifying in death? The rejuvenation towards the unveiling of the sub-conceit of an established revelation? Surely as Bram Stoker's Dracula would have it, there are far worse things in this world than death? Indeed how can fear what is not only the only certain possibility, but a desired archetypal condition. We have already inverted the projected fatal occurrence into the very condition of our fixation towards it. To fear this condition would only indicate a certain ethereal homelessness, having being hurled into the world and picked up oneself in horrified awareness of recycled time echoing behind him, and urging him onwards off a quickly approaching precipice. Treatment would require a determined yet effortless reorientation towards the finite, or the sacred life that lies on it's threshold. Is it this unknowable condition in the post-Dunya that resolutely defies the subjugation of human reasoning that deserves fearing?         

How can fear, however the ultimate reconciliatory process between initiation and releasement, aesthetic degeneration and horrific rejuvenation, word as idolic injunction and unhindered desire in a violently sanctioned commitment to the nobility of the un-self. The last principle, perhaps. The horizontal blade of the impetuous feminine royalty, refinement in the wilful erasing of boundaries, into sanctified butchery, imposing momentary inter-sensory clarity in gleeful blinding's. The blade raised vertical and inherited among the purified self-obliterated. The vigilant slave, their kohled eyes mirroring their mastery over the inter-perceptuary, the splendid symmetry of their physical form complementing the blade inherited. Unquestionably masculine in virtue though bound and worshiped through the royal birth-giver. This is the nature of the double tipped sword. It is perhaps truly impossible to rationalise the outwardly destination but not entirely in vain to glimpse in the duality of the sacred form. 

We are of course referring here to beauty. Beauty as the symbolic register of the articulation of truth, it's presence in the sensory realm. It is, not however an imitation by whose very nature is incapable of authentic admiration but a bridge unto which we gaze onto the other side and acknowledge the projected possibilities that lay beyond. Beauty is rarely a given though, but a mutilatory ideal. It's conditions must be carved through our moral and sensible boundaries. The void of the sacred light which saturates from within our exclusionary edifices are not, however fear inducing in the sense that we wish to consider here but more momentarily displacing.       

The only condition worthy of fear then should be rot. A Thrownness but not in this world but the after. In the jaded torment, the infinite tearing onto all of ones possibilities there is simply no connection to the past, nor is there a present in which to feel frustrated. One is frantically holding against the shattered threshold. Grounding Is and the conditions unto which one orients his existence in an unfathomable vacuum of anti-Is. Terrifyingly perform useless tricks to pass into an opening, only to be left dejected, confronted by ghosts of performers to which art he may recognise but that he may never see as anything other than an unrepentant elimination.