Tag: death drive

The Interlocking Necessity of Universalism and Nonviolence

The nature of violence is division within and without. Warfare is by definition divided, antagonistic, and set for one side to be destroyed. Peace through war is the contradiction that lies behind all warfare. The reign of death is the violent, fearful, grasping, utilizing death to gain life (as in the story of Cain and Abel, the first use of the term sin, Gen. 4:7). Paul’s picture in both Corinthians and Romans is that sin reigns in and through death, with death giving rise to sin. His point is not merely that sin results in death, as in the sin of Adam, but that the spread of death has meant the spread of sin (as witnessed in the sin of Cain, then Lamech, then the generation of Noah, and the ongoing history of a world at war), as sin is what people would do to save themselves from and through death (the death of the other). Sin’s struggle, in Paul’s explanation (Rom. 4, 6, 7) is a violent struggle for existence in the face of the reality of death. There is a hostility toward others and God which is connected to every form of evil (Col 1:21; Rom. 8:7-8). The violent division between people utilizing murder, war, borders, walls, antagonism, punishment, delimitation, exclusion, is the human attempt to violently utilize and control death. Paul refers to it as the “wall of hostility”: the division between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, which are characteristic forms of the infectious violence (Eph. 2:14; Gal. 3:28). Evil, violence, murder, war, suicide, genocide, and deicide describe the hostility definitive of the world. Universal salvation must entail the universal deliverance from death and violence.

Universal or complete peace, at the cosmic and individual level, is the predominant picture of salvation in the New Testament (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:22; Rom. 5:18; 2 Thess. 3:16; Isaiah 26:3; Eph. 2:14; Col. 1:19-20, 3:15). There is an interlocking logic and necessity between the all-inclusive nature of the gospel of peace (its universal import – for all), and the universal realization of the peace of Christ (in and through all, Col. 1:19-20). The universality of the one entails the all-inclusive aspect of the other. All creation must be brought into the peace of Christ and everything within or about the individual and existence must be incorporated into this peace. The “all in all” (I Cor. 15:28; Rom 11:36) of Christian peace is necessarily universal in this double sense. Partial peace, with a remainder of violence, death, or division is not the absolute peace of Christ. It cannot be as Aquinas and others imagined, that those in heaven could delight in watching their loved ones burn in hell. For the individual to find peace, there must be an all-inclusive cosmic peace for there to be an all-inclusive inner peace. Thus, salvation as universal peace means a total abolishment of violence between and within people and powers. Salvation from death and violence cannot be partial, only for some, or parts of some (e.g., their soul) or only for some things. If some part of the cosmic or individual is not included there is division that disrupts at every level. For peace to reign, there cannot be the continuation of either mega or micro violence as the universal is tied to the particular and the particular is tied to the universal.

Universal however, also applies in the negative sense throughout. There is a universal problem, inclusive of all people and extending to the cosmos.  “For as in Adam all die” and “death reigns in the world” (1 Cor. 15:22; Rom. 8:20-21). Again, the negative universal is inclusive of the cosmic and particular. The universality of death extends to all people and to everything about each. To be dead in sin (Eph. 2:1) is an action (“the law of sin and death,” Rom. 8:2) instituted in a misorientation to life, death, and the law. Death is both a practice and orientation, which is not so much about mortality as an active dying. The “law of sin and death” is not primarily about either law or death, but an orientation to the law that is deadly. A way of characterizing this law is in its divisive violence.

In a catena of quotes (from the law) which apply in their original context to Jews and sometimes to their enemies, Paul weaves together a picture of sin in which the organs of speech, due to taking up a deadly lie, function as a grave and entrap and poison, leading to bloodshed and violence (Rom. 3:10-18). Nothing or emptiness seem to have been taken up into the organs of speech, to become there a grave or a sarcophagus. Throughout the list the organs of speech deal in death: “Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit” (3:13 quoting Ps. 5.9). David, in this Psalm, compares two kinds of speech, as they orient one, either to God’s presence or his absence. The lie of sin deals in death even among those who have been entrusted with the oracles of God (3:2). Violence and death reign, having taken root in the inner man.

The divide among people applies as well to the warring divide within the individual. The war of the mind would also destroy itself to gain peace: “for sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. . . I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7:11, 14,15). Paul characterizes the self-antagonism of sin as “the law of sin and death and “the body of death” crying out at the end of the chapter: “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?” (Rom. 7:24). The recognition that death accounts for the universal human sickness at its root in the inward self (death drive, Thanatos, masochism, etc.) locates this universal sickness within the individual, so that the cosmic cure must begin here. In its universality the peace of Christ is the resolution to psychological violence that is the seed of every form of violence.

If sin and death are a violent struggle for life, resulting in death, then the gift of life, as in Paul’s depiction, is the universal resolution to the problem: “For since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive” (I Cor. 15:21-22). The universal problem is universally resolved, and this resolution pertains not only to all people but to the cosmos: “For God was pleased to have all his fulness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Col. 1:19-20). Peace is the breaking down of the universal wall of hostility (Eph. 2:14). The wall of separation between Jews and Gentiles is the characteristic form of hostility undone in the peace of Christ: “there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman, but Christ is all, and in all” (Col. 3:11). “For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall” (Eph. 2:14). Christ’s peace, resolves the enmity, in and through himself, extended to all people and then to the cosmos: He abolished “in His flesh the enmity . . . so that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity. And He came and preached peace to you who were far away, and peace to those who were near; for through Him we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father” (Eph. 2:15–18). Universal salvation through defeat of violent antagonism and putting on the peace of Christ are a singular move. The warring factions between Jews and Gentiles, slave and free, male and female, or any other antagonistic dualism in heaven and earth (Col. 1:19-20) are finished in the peace of Christ, inclusive of the inner depths of the individual.

The resolution to the deadly struggle is found in Christ: “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (Rom. 8:1–2). The holistic peace of Christ is universal in its penetration of the mind and body of the individual: “For those who are according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom. 8:5-8). The inward hostility, in which the mind and body seem to be obeying separate laws, is overcome through the unifying work of the Spirit.

Once again, Paul connects the inner depth of peace within, with cosmic peace: “the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now” (Rom. 8:21–22). The new birth of the individual, involves the same suffering futility and corruption imposed on the universe, and so too the new birth is inclusive of cosmic peace and reconciliation. The creation and all that is within it is being set free from violent, alienating, futility, and this universal release from death and violence is the “all in all” peace of Christ. Universal salvation is by definition the telos of a peace that dispenses with all violence.

Two of the most neglected and perhaps reviled doctrines stand at the very center of the gospel: salvation for all in the peaceable nonviolence of Christ.

Rereading Žižek’s Hegel in Light of the Spirit and Truth of Kenotic Love

Though Slavoj Žižek, reading Hegel as if he were an atheist must ultimately misread him, there is a great deal in Žižek’s atheistic reading which commends itself and acts as a guide, not only to Hegel, but to New Testament Christianity as understood by Hegel. The particular point where there is both convergence and divergence between an atheistic and theistic reading of Hegel concerns the meaning of Spirit and the death of God. As Žižek describes it, the Hegelian notion of the “death of God” in Christ amounts to the death of the “transcendent Beyond” as definitive of the experience of God, and this brings about the opening of reality from within (Metastases of Enjoyment, 39). Indeed, this suspension of God as other, and the immediate experience of God as immanent is key to Hegel. But Hegel’s point of departure is not simply negation, but he is focused on the Pauline concept of kenotic self-sacrifice in which one arrives at the Spirit of Christ. The kenotic sacrifice simultaneously marks the death of something “beyond” humanity and this is realized in the Spirit through imitation of Christ’s self-giving love.[1] But it is not simply the negation of God as Other, but the bringing together of the infinite and the finite in Absolute Spirit as Concept [Begriff] or a new form of speculative understanding and Truth.

In Hegel there is a double movement as the infinite negates itself and so arises in the finite and the finite negates itself and this is realization of the infinite.[2] But this is no mere feeling, but is the way of the Spirit, the way of love and of reason. As Hegel states it, “Thus the life of God and divine cognition may well be spoken of as a disporting of Love with itself; but this idea sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative.”[3] In Kenotic love God incorporates the finite. As Hegel puts it, “If God has the finite over against himself, then he himself is finite and limited. Finitude must be posited in God himself, not as something insurmountable, absolute, independent, but above all as this process of distinguishing that we have seen in spirit and in consciousness—a distinguishing that, because it is a transitory moment and because finitude is no truth, is also eternally self-sublating.”[4] God is not limited by the finite or infinite, as this would be something less than God.

Žižek gets this understanding half right, in that he misses the movement of Spirit as arising from both God as infinite Father, and the immanent Son. As he describes it, the Hegelian “reconciliation” is the “redoubling of the gap or antagonism” as the gap that separates opposites “is posited as inherent to one of the terms” (Parallax View, 106). “The gap that separates God from man is transposed into God himself” through the death of Christ, so “the properly dialectical trick here is that the very feature which appeared to separate me from God turns out to unite me with God” (Parallax View, 106). There is relief from the oppressive otherness of God as Christ makes God immanent, but in Hegel’s understanding there is not simply the relinquishing of the infinite for the finite, but a realization of the infinite in the finite. In “externalization” (Entäußerung), Luther’s rendering of “kenosis,” Hegel depicts the break from “immediacy” through self-sacrifice, which is the work of the Spirit experienced in the Eucharist, and in the Christian’s taking up the life and death of Christ. In Pauline terms, self-sacrifice or being crucified with Christ is to arrive at the self, and in Hegelian terms self-negation is at the heart of self-actualization.

In Žižek’s understanding, the focus is on the negative moment. The move from the legal, symbolic, totalizing religion of Judaism to Christianity, is due to the death of Christ which suspends the perverse relation to the law. In Žižek’s Hegelian/Lacanian notion of dialectic, Judaism and Christianity posit the gap either as a gap between man and God or as within God, respectively. Judaism posits the gap between God and man, as God stands outside the Law in that he cannot be properly represented within it. The holy of holies, the empty room, is isolated and separated from everyone by a series of walls emphasizing God’s absolute transcendence to the Law. God is the Other, outside of the symbolic, and yet the one who holds the symbolic together (Parallax View, 106). The death of Christ exposes the orbit of the oppressive symbolic in God as Other. In Žižek’s Hegel the death of Christ, the fulness of the work of the Trinity comes into effect as thesis/antithesis/synthesis. There is the suspension of the Other (thesis) in the death of God (antithesis). The Holy Spirit is “then posited as a symbolic, de-substantialized fiction” which exists in and through the “work of each and all” (synthesis) (Metastases of Enjoyment, 42).

Of course, the primary contention between a Christian and atheistic reading of Hegel, revolves around Spirit. In Žižek’s reading the Spirit is a fiction, which is not a dismissal of its importance, as the Spirit is an open fiction, where the movement of the Subject, in all of its phases prior to the gift of the Spirit is a necessary lie, but one that remains hidden. The hidden force of negation or death drive animates the Subject – giving life through death, but in therapy exposure of the lie, the death drive and its attendant categories, can be tapped as a source to unplug from perversion and to come to an understanding of Being as sustained in and through negation. The encounter with the death drive is a “limit-experience” which “is the irreducible/constitutive condition of the (im)possibility of the creative act of embracing a Truth-Event: it opens up and sustains the space for the Truth-Event, yet its excess always threatens to undermine it” (Ticklish Subject, 161). Behind the good, the true and the beautiful is the constitutive background of the death drive – “the Void that sustains the place in which one can formulate symbolic fictions that we call ‘truths’” (Ticklish Subject, 161). The means of manipulating the truth is through tapping into the underlying ground of the death drive and approaching the void of deception in which the symbolic truth is grounded. The death of Christ and dying with Christ provides access to this deception undergirding the truth. The truth inheres in a lie, so to refer to the Spirit as a fiction, is a new form of truth.

For Hegel, the Spirit is not a fiction but the absolute truth: “it is here maintained that this content, which the knowledge of absolute Spirit has of itself, is the absolute truth, is all truth, so that this Idea comprehends the entire wealth of the natural and spiritual world in itself, is the only substance and truth of all that constitutes this world, while it is in the Idea alone that everything has its truth, as being a moment of its essential existence.”[5] This truth, in the Spirit is a realized truth. Kenotic love unites the infinite and finite in the Concept (Absolute Spirit), which is the realization of presence (God’s and the self) and identity. Hegel slowly recognizes the inadequacies of other forms of sacrifice, which fall short of fostering the social relation, inherent to kenosis. Mere self-negation, apart from the establishment of a community of the Spirit, simply ends in self-defeat.[6] To be a living sacrifice or to “live” sacrifice is not simply a negation, but the arrival at one’s true essence.

A way to get at the divergence in regard to Spirit, is in Žižek’s focus on the death of Christ, which more or less sums up what he has to say about the gift of the Spirit and resurrection (unlike Hegel). Where for Hegel the death of Christ results in the immanence of God in the Spirit, Žižek has more to say about death, which he equates with resurrection and spirit. He repeatedly refers to Christ’s cry of dereliction: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mk. 15.34; Mt. 27.46)., “In Lacanian terms, we are dealing with the suspension of the big Other, which guarantees the subject’s access to reality: in the experience of the death of God, we stumble upon the fact that ‘the big Other doesn’t exist’” (Metastases of Enjoyment, 42). This negation or death opens up the possibility of life in the spirit.

In describing the death of Christ, Žižek equates life and death: “Life and death here are not polar opposites, contrasts, within the same global Whole (field of reality), but the same thing viewed from a global perspective” (The Monstrosity of Christ, 292). He concludes, “The (temporal) death of Christ is his very (eternal) life ‘in becoming’” (The Monstrosity of Christ, 292). Death and life are not in some sort of “pseudo-dialectic relation as utter loss/negation (death) and its reversal into absolute life” (The Monstrosity of Christ, 292). The death of Christ is the founding of the community of the Spirit and this community is his resurrection. According to Žižek, “That is to say that Christ’s death, in the Hegelian reading, is the disappearance of disappearance. It is in itself already what becomes for itself the new community.”[7]

Christ’s death reveals the psychoanalytic ground; the Freudian moment of madness which Schelling anticipates and which Žižek comes to understand Paul to describe in Romans 7. Radical negativity, the death of Christ or death drive, is the constitutive moment of the event which serves as the ground of a Subject no longer constrained by law or ideology (the significance of the resurrection Event). Resurrection can be identified with death as they both amount to the destruction of one’s symbolic supports and the emergence of a new form of subjectivity. This new form of subjectivity is the hysteric, which Lacan and Žižek equate with Hegel – “that most sublime of hysterics.” Where the masculine orientation identifies unquestioningly with the symbolic order of the law, the hysteric questions the status of the law. So, for example, Žižek identifies hysteria with the Paul of Romans 7. The feminine, hysteric position from which Paul writes describes the necessary passage through negativity and death drive as this is the road trod by Christ himself.

In my original reading of Hegel, through Žižek and Lacan, the role of negation was key to understanding the rise of the Subject in the dynamic interplay of the three registers of symbolic, imaginary, and real. The real is the engine of negation and death which explains the negative energetics dominating fallen personhood. I think this reading is a partially true reading of Hegel, in its diagnosis of the disease, much as Žižek’s is an insightful reading of Paul’s depiction of the problem in Romans 7. But both Paul and Hegel pass beyond this negative moment. But for Žižek, nothingness and death drive precede the Subject and are the primary “substance” constituting the Subject. In Žižek’s atheistic creation ex nihilo (a creation from nothing) God and truth, subject and object, are preceded by death drive and nothingness, which he does not hesitate to call evil (Reader, 273). Lacan also describes the death drive as the attempt to go beyond the pleasure principle to the realm of excess jouissance, the pure substance of the death drive, which he also does not hesitate to call evil: “We cannot avoid the formula that jouissance is evil” (Seminar VII, 184–5). This evil is subject to manipulation but, inasmuch as it is prime reality, it is not something that can be finally and completely overcome; nor would one want to overcome it, as this nothingness is the only possible ground for the absolute freedom of the Subject. Absolute freedom and autonomy cannot, by definition, be constrained by a prior Good (in Žižek’s reading). The absolutely free, autonomous Subject can be preceded by nothing, and this is the Nothing and negation Žižek links to death drive.

But of course, if one understands Hegel is working with negation, not in an atheistic sense as a point of origin, but in the Pauline sense of kenotic self-giving love, this will account for the illness of the Subject diagnosed as more or less incurable by Lacan and Žižek, and go beyond this privileging of the negative, to kenotic self-giving love, truth and unity in the Spirit.

[1] This is the argument of William Goggin, Hegel’s Sacrificial Imagination, (University of Chicago, PhD. Thesis, 2019).

[2] Goggin, 12.

[3] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 10.

[4] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: One-Volume Edition – The Lectures of 1827. Edited by Peter Hodgson. One-Volume Ed edition. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1988, 190. Quoted in Goggin, 273.

 [5] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures On the Philosophy of Religion: Together With a Work on the Proofs of the Existence of God vol. 1, Trans. By E. B. Speirs, and J. Burdon Sanderson, (London:  Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co. Ltd., 1895) 206.

[6] Goggin, 11.

[7] See On Belief, 106 – 51; The Puppet and the Dwarf, 171; The Parallax View, 106; For They Know Not What They Do, liii.