Slavoj Žižek – Forging Ploughshares

Redefining Luther’s “Justification” Through Žižek’s Extension of Girard’s Anti-Sacrificial Reading of Paul

Much of the theology and career of Martin Luther was driven by his obsession with notions of law and justice. He describes a “burning desire” to understand what Paul meant by the term “justice” in the book of Romans, not out of an idle curiosity, but because he was plagued and obsessed: “‘The justice of God is revealed in it.’ I hated that word, ‘justice of God,’ which, by the use and custom of all my teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically as referring to formal or active justice, as they call it, i.e., that justice by which God is just and by which he punishes sinners and the unjust.” He describes, “that before God I was a sinner with an extremely troubled conscience.” There was no assurance, no peace, no satisfaction. “I did not love, no, rather I hated the just God who punishes sinners. In silence, if I did not blaspheme, then certainly I grumbled vehemently and got angry at God. I said, ‘Isn’t it enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of original sin, are oppressed by every kind of calamity through the Ten Commandments?’”[1]

The Gospel did not relieve his obsession with justice, but aggravated it: “Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow through the Gospel and through the Gospel threaten us with his justice and his wrath? This was how I was raging with wild and disturbed conscience. I constantly badgered St. Paul about that spot in Romans 1 and anxiously wanted to know what he meant.” The “righteousness revealed” in the Gospel did not help, until Luther discovers his understanding that Christ freely grants this righteousness through grace. He discovers that “faith” displaces works in achieving righteousness. In this new understanding, the justice of God is a “passive justice” in that faith accomplishes what works could not. He discovers, the just person lives by faith, and not by works. “All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates.” [2] He begins to read all of Scripture in a new light, recognizing that justice is God’s work throughout.

“Justification” as an Aggravation of Luther’s Struggle with the Law

Now this would make for a happy story, if on the other side of Luther’s discovery, he found peace, but though there may have been improvement, he cannot be said to have stilled his troubled conscience. His psychological and spiritual battles shifted from earning salvation to fighting depression, feelings of divine abandonment, and intense spiritual warfare against perceived demonic attacks. In his 95 Theses, he writes that self-hatred is something to be cultivated until entry into heaven: “The penalty of sin remains as long as the hatred of self (that is, true inner repentance), namely till our entrance into the kingdom of heaven” (Thesis 4). This self-hatred is posed from the perspective of the God of the law, that demands righteousness, and seems to have not changed in his attitude to sinners, in spite of grace. Even the cross is a sign of God’s hatred, but luckily Christ has born the penalty. However, God, in his hidden transcendence (Deus absconditus) continues to cause suffering and terror, and therefore it is refuge from God that is sought in God (Deus revelatus). “Thus, according to Luther, God reveals himself to sinners wearing a Janus face of both wrathful law and loving mercy. Consequently, believers should be ‘seeking refuge in God against God.’”[3] Luther needs to get rid of one half of God, but this angry transcendent God, the one behind the law, is primary in his thought.

At the same time, his struggle with the devil increased, as he felt the battle with evil was ongoing, within himself. “Christ and Satan wage a cosmic war for mastery over church and world. No one can evade involvement in this struggle. Even for the believer there is no refuge – neither monastery nor the seclusion of the wilderness offer him a chance for escape.”[4] Luther describes an ongoing campaign in which the victory is not yet secured, and he feels this in his mental and spiritual struggle. He describes still waiting on God’s righteousness, as he has yet to receive what is promised.[5] The irony of the shift from the early church’s belief in Christus Victor (defeat of sin, death, and the devil), to a legal righteousness, is that Luther may have solved one problem only to have it multiplied elsewhere. He continues to be tormented, concluding that it is not righteousness per se that is received in Christ, but the qualification for righteousness. We are made worthy to receive the gift, if not the fulness of the gift itself.

The weakness in Luther’s understanding of justification is that in pitting law against grace, he still pictures grace in terms of the foundation set forth in the law. Grace gives what the law demands, but the presumption is that grace still works according to the retributive justice and sacrifice of the law. Under grace, works of the law are accomplished by Christ, and his righteousness is legally imputed to believers. It did not occur to the reformers or to many of their Catholic forebears, that Christ sets aside sacrifice and retributive justice. He exposes and ends the working of sacrifice and the judicial system of righteousness built upon payment and retribution, and in fact the defeat of Satan is involved with, and can be equated with this overcoming of sacrifice. The absolutely transcendent God demands sacrifice under the law (God as a legislative authority), but Christ embodies the law of love and closes the gap between God and the world, posed by the law. According to Paul, “Christ is the end of the law” (Rom 10:4) as “He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross” (Col 2:14).

Paul’s Justification in Žižek and Girard as the End of Sacrifice

In Paul’s understanding, justification is making the world right, not through the law, but through Christ. Christ suspends the punishing work of the law, and brings an end to sacrifice. It is not a top-down legislation, but a bottom-up reformation of understanding of God and humanity. If one insists on the terminology of payment, Christ did not pay the price demanded by the law, Christ paid off the entire system, and defeated sin, death, and the devil in the process. Christ would end violence, including the violence of retribution and sacrifice, but also the violence of a masochistic conscience. As René Girard puts it, “The real meaning and function of the Passion” is “one of subverting sacrifice and barring it from working ever again by forcing the founding mechanism out into the open, writing it down in the text of all the Gospels.”[6] For Slavoj Žižek, Anselm’s doctrine of “divine satisfaction,” the legal basis of the atonement for much of Catholicism and the basis of Luther’s doctrine, serves this false economy of sacrifice and fails to penetrate the delusion of the fundamental fantasy (the lie) which grips the human subject. With the end of sacrificial religion (the end of the God of sacrifice and law), Luther’s Deus absconditus is exposed as a lie. The God behind the law of sacrifice, behind onto-theology, behind a metaphysical transcendent/immanent dualism is exposed as an idol, and so too the God presumed to be behind the plague of conscience is dethroned. The punishing, transcendent God of the law, is undone by the full revelation of God in the flesh. Paul addresses the anthropological, religious, and psychological nature of this displacement, but it may be that only the combination of Girard with psychoanalysis, can fully appreciate the apocalyptic nature of Paul’s theology.

Žižek’s Extension of Girardian Sacrifice into Psychoanalysis

Girard traces this work of exposure primarily in the realms of religion and religious sacrifice, and though he depends upon a psychoanalytic account of mimetic desire, he sees his work as demythologizing Freud and Lacan or psychoanalysis (in its focus on sex), along with religion. For Girard, the “other” is another person who acts first as model, then as rival, in the obstacle cause of desire, which is desire for life itself. The other person mediates desire and may be Other or divine-like, depending upon the “distance” between self and Other. He speaks of the passage from “external mediation” to “internal mediation” but he is referring to the felt proximity of the other. The external mediator remains distant and undisturbed by the desire he invokes, but in internal mediation the model is brought into the radius of the one following him, and is thus subject to mimetic desire and rivalry.[7] In Girard’s reading, by focusing on biology and sex, Freud missed the primary role of mimetic theory. Freud was too focused on the object of desire, the mother, and missed that primal desire was for being or life. Girard revises and rejects Freud, but as a result, his theory of mimetic desire seems to miss that sacrifice is not simply historically behind the rise of language and signs, but language continues, in the Lacanian portrayal, to exact a sacrifice. According to Marcus Pound, Girard “leaves little room” for “the practice of psychoanalysis, having eliminated “the conscious patricide-incest desire,” he does away with “the cumbersome necessity of the desire’s subsequent repression,” and along with it, “does away with the unconscious.”[8]

As Pound points out, it is Žižek, who “establishes the link between Girard’s thesis and Lacan precisely at the level of sacrifice.”[9] Žižek, building on Freud and Lacan, demonstrates how the sacrificial relation to language is not simply historical, religious, or cultural, but is the abiding reality in the human psyche. What Girard may not have appreciated about Lacanian psychoanalysis, especially as developed by Žižek, is that the Lacanian registers explain the psychoanalytic role of sacrifice. Freud laid out the basic parameters of this self-punishing system, which Luther gives every indication of being subject to all of his life, and Lacan explains the dynamic between the ego and the superego (or the law of the mind and the law of the flesh in Paul) as a relation within language (and not in biology or sex).

According to Lacan, following Freud, the other is not simply an outward model, but in Freud’s language, the image of the father is “cathected” or subsumed into one’s own image. As Freud describes, the “masochism in him creates a temptation to ‘sinful acts’ which must be expiated by the reproaches of the sadistic conscience” (The Economic Problem in Masochism, 266). Lacan pictures this punishing conscience as arising in the mirror stage, in which both the image in the mirror (the imaginary ego) and apprehension of this image through the language of the father (the symbolic or the law) constitute these others (the symbolic and the imaginary registers) as two sides of the self. That is, the external mediator, which is nearly identical for Girard and Lacan, becomes a constituent part of what is internal to the Subject, in the psychoanalytic understanding. The original sacrificial relation is established within the Subject (with passage through the mirror stage) between the imaginary (the ego or “I”) and the symbolic (the superego) which establishes the alienated distance from the real of the body.

For psychoanalysis, sacrifice not only controls external violence but it creates “control” over the inward threat of violence. In Freud’s depiction, the ego/superego split, evolves to channel the death instinct, or the energetics arising around the fear of death. Freud refers to the “id” as the origin of the death drive, which is then concentrated in the punishing superego (synonymous in Lacan with the acquisition of language). Passage through the castration complex is the resolution to what, in Girardian terms, would be the result of mimetic rivalry with the model. “The ritual background provides a stable imaginary/symbolic framework by which to answer the question of the desires of the real.”[10] The inner child (the ego) relinquishes the power of the father (the phallus) to the superego, or in Pauline terms takes up servitude to the law. According to Pound, the castration complex describes the inner dimension of Mosaic circumcision, ceding a part for the whole. “For example, in The Book of Exodus, God is about to kill Moses but is only dissuaded through his abrupt circumcision by his wife (Ex 4:24). His sacrificial act of circumcision, ceding his foreskin, serves to ensure the persistence of his being whilst at the same time giving presence to the terrifying God.”[11] Likewise, the sign of circumcision is the original mark of the sign in Abraham by which life is preserved in the face of death. “The cut of Abraham’s knife amounts to the cut induced by the signifier, which determines the subject and brings the differential system of signification into play.”[12] In the castration complex this passage is universal.

The imaginary stage, prior to differentiation, resolves into the ego/superego split, which can be directly laid over the Girardian picture of the sign arising over the body of the scapegoat. The Subject bears the mark of the original sign perhaps literally in their body, which reflects submission to the letter of the law in the castration complex. Prior to the slain victim in Girard, or passage through the mirror stage in Lacan, there is a lack of social order or order in the Subject, respectively. In Girard, hominization and civilization arise around the body of the slain victim, and in Lacan the biological body plays the same role. [13]

In the explanation of Žižek, the passage is from being a body to establishing a symbolic distance from the body (and having a body): “The body exists in the order of having – I am not my body, I have it” (Organs without Bodies, 121). Self-consciousness arises simultaneously with the realization and refusal of the body and its mortal contingencies (sexuality/castration) so that the Subject arises over and against the real of the body. The symbolic or the soul “has to be paid for by the death, murder even, of its empirical bearer” (The Žižek Reader, vii). Where Paul speaks of being split, Žižek describes two bodies, the physical body and the body under the sign (or the soul). That body which one might think can be reduced to the biological dimension is refused: the “subject turns away from her biological body in disgust, unable to accept that she ‘is’ her body” (Organs without Bodies, 93).[14] The price for entry into language, separation from the mother (passage beyond the mirror stage), is an ongoing alienation. The Subject arises from the self-negating activity of sacrifice (castration) and sacrifice guarantees that “the Other exists: that there is an Other who can be appeased by means of the sacrifice” (Enjoy Your Symptom, 56). This is felt as an all-pervasive inadequacy or guilt. From within the economy of the law (the law of sin and death), the excessive superego injunctions (giving rise to perverse questions such as, “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound” (Rom. 6:1)) “no longer imposes specific, determinate, prohibitions and/or injunctions . . . but just reverberates as an empty tautological Prohibition: don’t” (The Puppet and the Dwarf, 104).[15] There is no satisfying this all desiring and all-consuming law.

The Sacrifice of Christ as Confirmation of the Obscene Law

In Paul’s description of his first encounter with the law, in Romans 7, the law gives rise to what it forbids, and creates a life filled with death. This absolute law requires infinite payment, in Anselm’s estimate, and even this infinite payment does not satisfy the continual pressure of the law’s demands. There is the sense, as attested by Luther’s digression into depression, that Christ’s payment simply confirms the omnipotence of the big Other behind the law. “Christ’s death cannot but appear as the ultimate assertion of the Law, as the elevation of the Law into an unconditional superego agency which burdens us, its subjects, and with a debt we will never be able to repay’ (The Puppet and the Dwarf, 103).

Giving in to the obscene superego demand of the law gives rise to an interior sacrificial economy continually aimed at meeting the all-consuming desire of the law, which is taken up within the self in the split between the ego and superego. It is this perverse superego pressure, equated with the law, which Žižek describes as connected to the reversal of the law’s commands into acts of disobedience (equating the law with sin and sinning that grace may abound).[16] To read the sacrifice of Christ within this economy, with Luther and much of the Christian tradition (reaching back to Anselm), is to reinforce the punishing law in the sinful Subject rather than relieve from subjection the punishing law.

The Faith Of Christ as an Overcoming of a Law-like Faith In Christ

Perhaps the contrast is succinctly captured in the notion of faith in Christ’s propitiating sacrifice or the faith of Christ in which disciples participate. Faith in Christ is supposed to replace works of the law, but then the problem for Luther and for his Calvinist heirs, is if their faith is adequate, or an authentic faith. Faith in Christ has to do with faith in the propitiating power of Christ’s payment for sin (we can trust in Christ who has paid the penalty), but how much faith is required and how much can we muster? Faith initially seems to relieve the suffering of works, but then there is the same agonizing over the degrees of faith that might be necessary. Luther sees faith as simultaneously positing wrath and love, and he sees suffering very much like the friends of Job, as caused by God’s wrath. Job, and the widow of Nain, in his sermons, are examples of God causing suffering, and faith acknowledges this and is saving, only if it does not give in to despair.[17] Given these requirements, faith seems to induce a doubtful suffering, picturing God as randomly causing suffering and demanding a steady un-despairing faith.

In contrast, the faith of Christ calls for participating in Christ’s faith (walking as he walked and living as he lived) and this constitutes a deliverance, as people are freed from sin, not by Christ’s death as such (as a sacrifice), but by sharing in Christ’s death, by dying to sin, to the way of the flesh (and sacrifice). There is the faith that claims, Christ died and we do not have to, or the faith that would take up the cross and follow Christ. Propitiating the works of the law through dying is only something Christ can accomplish, and the believer is reduced to a spectral witness and belief, very much as on the order of the spectral relation to the law (being outside the law and being outside of Christ).

The alternative is to take up the subject position of Christ and “die to” the identity found in Adam (the subject of the superego) – having the faith of Christ (ridding one’s self of the superego supplement to the Law and sacrifice) or one can have faith in Christ’s propitiating sacrifice. It is a choice of understanding the death of Christ as a sacrifice, under the law, with Luther, or recognizing that the law is not the basis for understanding Christ.[18] In this second, apocalyptic understanding, the Subject is so drastically reoriented through identifying with the death of Christ that this constitutes a new form of the Subject. “Here enters the ‘good news’ of Christianity: the miracle of faith is that it IS possible to traverse the fantasy, to undo the founding decision, to start one’s life all over again, from the zero point – in short to change eternity itself” (On Belief,148). This making right is not by the scale imposed by the law, but it is a new cosmic order (as in Girard’s ending of sacrificial religion) and a new sort of Subject (as in Žižek’s non-sacrificial Subject).

[1] Martin Luther, Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther’s Latin Works (1545) Translated by Andrew Thornton (https://www.bluffton.edu/courses/humanities/2/ml-1545.htm).

[2] Preface to Luther’s Works.

[3] Sasja Emilie Mathiasen Stopa, “Seeking Refuge in God against God”: The Hidden God in Lutheran Theology and the Postmodern Weakening of God (Open Theology 2018; 4: 658–674) 659. Citing Luther, “Operationes”, WA 5, 204, 26-27: “… ad deum contra deum confugere.”

[4] Heiko A. Oberman, “Luther Against the Devil,” Christian Century 107 no. 3 (1990): 75-76 Cited in Tenzan Eaghll, Martin Luther and the God Who Acts: Finding Common Ground in the Current Debates on Justification, (University of Calgary, MA, 2010) 23.

[5] “The world is a house… but I am outside the house, on the roof, not yet in heaven, but also not in the world. I have the world beneath me, and the heavens above me, and so I am suspended in faith, alone, between life in the world and eternal life” (WA 1. 199, 3.) Gordon Rupp, The Righteousness of God (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1953), 223. Cited in Eaghll, 42.

[6] René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005) 181.

[7] Benoît Chantre, The Time Has Grown Short: René Girard, or the Last Law (p. 64). Michigan State University Press. Kindle Edition.

[8] Marcus Pound, Lacan and Girard: Sex and Non-violence (Psychoanalytische Perspectieven, 2003, 21, 1:///), 6.

[9] Pound, 6.

[10] Pound, 7.

[11] Pound, 7.

[12] Pound, 8.

[13] Pound fuses the Girardian and Lacanian passage: The mirror image is the monstrous double, the surrogate victim who promises to bring wholeness by standing in for the community as a whole. It is thus synonymous with the imaginary phallus, which is nothing but the imaginary “I” whose sacrifice gives birth to the ego ideal.”Pound, 8.

[14] See my book, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation: An Analysis of the Meaning of the Death of Christ in Light of the Psychoanalytical Reading of Paul (London: T&T Clark, 2015), 119.

[15] Psychotheology Sin, 118.

[16] Psychotheology, 118.

[17] Stopa, “Seeking Refuge in God against God.”

[18] Psychothelogy, 122-123.

Benoît Chantre’s Girardian Reading of Paul

Among the several recoveries of Paul found in Girard and spelled out by one of his premiere French interpreters, Benoît Chantre, is recognition that Paul is picturing salvation in anthropological terms. That is, Paul is describing the human predicament, whether religious, psychological, or social, as a manmade and human problem. In Girardian terms, people are mad with religion, with sacrifice, with violence, and the compulsion to repeat, portrayed in sacrificial religion is the human sickness Christ addresses. They may have contracted the disease, in any of its infinite manifestations (religious, social, or psychological, all of which are mixed and merge), but it consists of the desire to obtain the being of the Other (to be God). The admired model becomes the envied obstacle-cause of desire, but for both Paul and Girard, going to the end of the sickness is on a continuum with the cure.

Paul’s personal/religious break(down) on the Road to Damascus is contiguous with his recognition of the Messiah, as failure of a false transcendence, a false God, a false sense of law, is on a continuum with the truth. When his world falls apart, the significance of the Messiah stands out in full relief. It is not that “original sin” is moral, but as Paul shows (in Romans 7:7), it pertains to covetousness, or in Girardian terms it is mimetic rivalry (the same thing). The law is not impotent because its maxims are inadequate but the law is impotent because it creates covetous rivalry, as in the biblical story of the fall. Adam and Eve are jealous of God, their model, and as with any model, rivalry ensues. They would imitate him, in his containing and dispensing laws, and they would be him (knowing good and evil). Given the opportunity, adamah (human kind) would kill God. Their problem pertains to misoriented desire, misrecognition and deception. They would be like God, knowing good and evil, and they imagine this is the mode to life and the means to avoid death.

Paul concentrates his explanation of the human predicament, as it pertains to the law, but this law is not just the the Jewish law, but the universal “law of the flesh,” which Paul explains in regard to both the Jewish Law and the law given to the first couple. As Chantre puts it, “the essential function of the law necessitated a decisive confirmation and a decisive transformation.”[1] The confirmation traces the pattern of the universal fall, in which the object cause of desire becomes the obstacle. “For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness” (Rom 7:7–8). The prohibition or obstacle gives rise to what it forbids, murder and sacrificial religion. Cain’s sacrifice is reproduced in sacrificial religion, culminating in the sacrifice of Christ.

Christ exposes the nature of this scapegoating sacrifice in his passion and death but this is not simply exposure of false religion but, according to Chantre, it is the revelation of a new sort of “immanent transcendence.” “It causes the advent of a completely different type of transcendence—the transcendence of parousia, the growing ‘presence’ of another transcendence, which this time is at the heart of human history.”[2] The gap or distance in the law prompts an escalated desire to possess the law or to be interpolated into the law (to be possessed or a possessor of the law). Paul’s questioning of the law in Romans 7 describes a failed interpellation from which the law is enacted as an outside force. The woman consorting with her lover, in Romans 7:1-3, only understands herself over and against the law, while she may imagine her relationship to her lover in some way pre-exists her relationship to the law. As Slavoj Žižek asks, “Is not this hysterical distance towards interpellation . . . the very form of ideological misrecognition? Is not this apparent failure of interpellation . . . the ultimate proof of its success . . . that is to say, of the fact that the ‘effect-of-subject’ really took place” (The Indivisible Remainder, 166). For Žižek, there is only the failed subject in regard to the law, and this failure constitutes the subject. The distance between the subject and the law is the enactment of the only possibility of the law and the failure is the power of the law to create subjects.

According to Chantre, “The subject, raised in the Law and guided by it, suddenly enters into rivalry with the commandment.”[3] Transgression is the attempt to obtain what stands behind the prohibition. There must be life in the law, according to the serpent, and God is holding out. The reification of the law (the tree of the knowledge of good and evil), or the law of the flesh, keeps one eating the deadly fruit to obtain life by taking and grasping the law. “Veneration of the Law has become an obsession with the Law and the benevolent God has become a jealous God who opposes my own will, blocking my way. We are no longer dealing with a transcendent God but with a God made from human hands, an idol.”[4] This idol demands death as the means to life.

In Pauline and Girardian terms, this failure is the beginning, and not the end of subjectivity as it prompts the turn to authentic subjectivity. The move is from an external desire and rivalry, an external mediation to an intimate mediation, which brings with it an ultimate collapse. One begins to act, possessed by desire: “So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me” (Ro 7:17–18). This demon that inhabits me, is a “deviated transcendence” that “pushes me to do what I don’t want to do, that ‘disorients’ my desire, which was originally a desire for God, by offering mirages of a jealous divinity.”[5] This “deviated transcendence” is the counterfeit image of the Law, in which God is a jealous rival in the pursuit of self-divinization.

This “ontological sickness” brings on “all manner of covetousness” and ultimately experience of the law of sin and death. “When the external mediator becomes internal and when admiration is transformed into rivalry, when the model become too close is suddenly fetishized, the subject, obeying the law of desire, enters into a mimetic crisis that is one and the same as sin.”[6] The desire for God’s law becomes the desire to become God’s law, which brings on the split and collapse of the subject. “I do what I do not want to do” . . . “for sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me” (Rom 7:15,11).

Paul is split between the law of his mind (reason) and the law of the flesh. He is caught up in the movement described by Girard, between “games of external and internal mediation, admiration and rivalry, ‘mimetic models’ and ‘rational models.’”[7] The back and forth speaks of a compulsion to repeat, in which the self is at stake. “I would gain myself through repetition.” “For we know that the Law is spiritual, but 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 7:14–15). The practice repeats itself as “the sinner always believes he can extricate himself from sin through a reiterated veneration of the Law: ‘So the law is holy and the commandment is holy and just and good.’”[8] More veneration repeats and tightens the circle as the grab for God’s transcendence grounds one in the flesh.

The law gives rise to sin, and sin is the failure of the subject, but this failure precedes the remedy. Mimetic desire, or covetousness of the law, takes a particular course, pointing to Christ. It might be described as a process of maturing, in which the father as model becomes obstacle and rival giving rise to murderous desire. There is a collapse of an outward structure that constitutes an inward desire and structure, in which one becomes both father and child, law and subject, so that the social structure becomes a deadly psychological structure. “The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me” (Ro 7:10–11). The law, meant to be a barrier to mimetic rivalry, provokes it, mediating what it forbids.

This external mediation is taken up within, the law of the flesh, in which the model is a rival, producing the war within and without. “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Ro 7:24–25). The law is a dead end that leads to Christ, but this dead end must somehow be pursued to appreciate the alternative. It poses the choice between a renunciation of the violent attempt to obtain the law, or a complete renunciation of violence and entry into an alternative Kingdom. It is not attachment to the law, but to Christ, through faith, that enacts true subjectivity.

Those who “were made dead to the law through the body of Christ” no longer serve the letter of the law as they have dispelled the fantasy of this failed interpellation. Imitating Christ closes the gap. There is no distance, no failure of interpellation, as the law of Christ incorporates into his body. “Only an intimate mediation, the return to faith in a unique Mediator—the one whose Incarnation, for better or worse, has put divinity within reach—can save the religious structure and with it the long process of hominization.”[9] There is a turn from the external models, mimetic rivalry to a different order of transcendence – an immanent transcendence in which we identify directly with 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 passage is from being captive to a deadly law which has been at work throughout history in religion and society and in the human psyche, to freedom in Christ. “Thus faith does not suppress the Law; it ‘frees us from it,’ says Saint Paul, ‘delivers’ us by suppressing a proximity that too often risks degenerating into promiscuity, which is to say into ritualism and into transgression.”[10] The point at which man failed, in the flesh, Christ enters in. Christ fulfills, completes, and takes the place of the Law. The misorientation to the Law seemed to promise the Father through the Law, but Christ delivers God where the Law could not.

The passage is from out of violent sacrificial religion into imitating Christ, the model with whom we have a direct identity. The Law mediates, not the Father, but sin, and the emptiness of sin points to the fulness of Christ. Law will lose its “alienated” character of an external force brutally imposing itself on the Subject the moment the Subject renounces its desire for completeness within the self (the law of the flesh). There is passage through destitution, death, and rebirth: “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:3–4). Christ has destroyed the cycle of punishment and veneration of the law, as the law of the flesh is set aside for the law of the Spirit. Paul, due to the law, was persecuting and killing Christians, but now the law has been nailed to the cross. God has reconciled us to Himself through Christ, accomplishing what the law could not (2 Co 5:18–19).

There is now a new law at work, which still involves imitation and repetition, but repetition is no longer the deadly spiral of oscillation. The law of the flesh has been replaced by the law of the Spirit of Christ: “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. However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you” (Rom 8:6–9). The law creates hostility and jealousy, as it creates the impossible pursuit of God through the law. This fleshly law distances and alienates, and this is its work, while the Spirit is God dwelling in the flesh. The intimate transcendence displaces the distancing hostility. “If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness” (Rom 8:10). Mimetic desire, rivalry, and murder, are exposed and resolved: “the Resurrection resolves the enigma of the founding murder; the Passion, the event of the death and resurrection of the victim, is the ultimate variation on the religious structure.”[11] The work of Christ does not ignore this religious structure but intervenes and delivers from it, and this is resurrection power. Life in the resurrected body of Christ directly answers the deception of life in the Law.

Religion, society, the self, fall apart but this failure is on a continuum with the coming of the Kingdom. The crucifixion or collapse of everything is followed by resurrection of the victim. The innocent victim, Christ, brings an end to scapegoating and sacred violence: “the Passion is a dynamic repetition of the religious structure, which is itself defined as a first repetition, the sacrificial victim repeating the scapegoat victim and reactivating the first trauma for cathartic ends (or as a vaccine against violence). This third form of repetition deepens awareness of the origin, working back to violent foundations.”[12] The violent foundations of culture and religion are exposed, bringing the human kingdom to a close with the coming the Kingdom of Christ.

[1] Benoît Chantre, The Time Has Grown Short: René Girard, or the Last Law (p. 55). Michigan State University Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Chantre, 47-48.

[3] Chantre, 59.

[4] Chantre, 59-60.

[5] Chantre, 60-61.

[6] Chantre, 61.

[7] Chantre, 63.

[8] Chantre, 64.

[9] Chantre, 52.

[10] Chantre.66.

[11] Chantre, 53.

[12] Chantre, 53.

There is a Crack in Everything: Reading William Desmond and Slavoj Žižek with Flannery O’Connor

Achilles is not quite invulnerable; the sacred waters did not wash the heel by which Thetis held him. Siegfried, in the Nibelungen, is not quite immortal, for a leaf fell on his back whilst he was bathing in the dragon’s blood, and that spot which it covered is mortal. There is a crack in everything God has made. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Compensation”[1]

We may imagine we are invulnerable, but then a wound opens. A world that seemed complete, cracks open so that both darkness and light flood in through the gaps. Flannery O’Connor, in various forms and characters, describes how the gaps can open, revealing the dark suturing point holding our world together, and this inevitably is conjoined with enlightenment. In her story Revelation, Ruby Turpin’s visit to the doctor has her reflecting on her good fortune relative to those she surveys in the waiting room.[2] There is the rude child who will not make room for her to sit down, the leathery old woman in a cotton print dress with the same print as sacks of chicken feed, the woman in wine colored gritty-looking slacks with a yellow sweatshirt, the ugly girl with a skin problem. She judges their shoes, their socks, and besides the pleasant looking lady and the common girl, she concludes they are mostly white trash “worse even then n….” “Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them—not above, just away from—were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the home and land owners, to which she and Claud belonged.”

While she surveys the various low-grade humans by which she is surrounded, a gospel hymn was playing and Mrs. Turpin mentally supplied the final line, “And wona these days I know I’ll we-eara crown.” The ugly girl, Mary Grace, seems to read Ruby’s thoughts (and clearly picks up her demeaning racist conversation), and at a moment in which Ruby is thanking Jesus for her own good disposition and circumstance, Mary Grace heaves her book and hits Ruby over her left eye. “The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with Mrs. Turpin’s. ‘Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,’ she whispered.” Ruby Turpin’s world cracks apart as she comes to terms with the opening of this fissure, which she takes as a revelation.

Both Slavoj Žižek, the atheistic philosopher, and William Desmond, the Irish Catholic philosopher, speak of a “crack in everything.” Both are engaging the Hegelian reflection on the Kantian antinomies and coming to different conclusions about the significance that our world does not hold together but is somehow out of joint. The One does not correspond with itself; the subject can be its own object; thought does not arrive at the thinking thing; I and me do not entirely align. This discord may be taken as an indicator either that reality is incomplete or that it opens onto something beyond. With Žižek, we might focus on the dis-ease of the discord and assume it points to a final lack, or with Desmond, we might see the gap as a “godsend” which points to the overflow of reality. O’Connor reaches a depth of darkness on the order of Žižek, but she combines this realization as only being exposed in the light of revelation. The discord between atheistic materialism and philosophical theism points to the “between” we all occupy. The disease of being stuck, of desire which gives rise to drive, may be the predominant force in our lives, but this force, which seems to be for evil, is the gap through which the light potentially shines.

Žižek calls this the “parallax gap” and he defines it as “the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible.”[3] He notes, Kant referred to this as the “transcendental illusion,” in which one can describe the same phenomena from two different perspectives between which no synthesis or mediation is possible. This gap exists all around us, though our tendency is to “balance” or “harmonize” binary opposites, imagining the out-of-jointness is temporary, and it is best if we are not over-focused on the problem. We are surrounded by binary opposites such as masculine and feminine, liberal and conservative, wave and particle, nature or nurture, freedom and determinism, mortality and immortality, the individual or the group, or in Kant’s summary of the problem “phenomena and the noumena.” Everything from the colors of the rainbow (wave length and the appearance of color) to mind and brain are disjointed, posing a gap. “Thus there is no rapport between the two levels, no shared space—although they are closely connected, even identical in a way, they are, as it were, on the opposed sides of a Moebius strip.”[4] There is a minimal difference within a singular thing in which it is divided against itself. Reality cannot be completely synthesized, so it might seem that Kant has named the problem for which there is no solution; that is, it may seem as if Kant has the final word over Hegel.

In Žižek’s reading of Hegel, antinomy is not the problem of reality but its basis. Where Kant exposes the structuring principle of the world in antinomies, Hegel presumes this is not a problem to be solved, but the very nature of reality and this is Žižek’s point of departure. “And does not Hegel, instead of overcoming this crack, radicalize it? Hegel’s reproach to Kant is that he is too gentle with things: he locates antinomies in the limitation of our reason, instead of locating them in things themselves, that is, instead of conceiving reality-in-itself as cracked and antinomic.”[5] Psychoanalytically the divided self (the split within Paul’s I) may seem to be the primary problem but this problem for Žižek is also the cure. There is no escape from the conflict of drives or the antagonism between the registers of the self (symbolic, imaginary, and real), but recognition of this reality is the first step to controlling it. The perceived gap or difference is constitutive of “reality” and closure of the gap or dissolution of dissonance, the exposure of the primordial lie, would amount to a dissolving of this perceived reality. The goal is not to overcome the gap but to conceive it in its “becoming” and thus manipulate it.[6] So, one should learn to enjoy their symptom rather than cure it, as sickness is the reality of the Subject.

Žižek, unlike Desmond, argues that Hegel’s was not a closed synthesis, while Desmond develops his metaxological understanding presuming he is moving beyond Hegel, though both are developing the significance of the gap, which Desmond dubs the “metaxological.” According to Desmond, “The metaxological can be thought of as a different way to relate the same and the different, in contrast to the Hegelian way of ‘dialectical’ mediation, which unites them in a higher unity.”[7] As he explains, “The same does not return to itself through the different; rather the space of play between the same and the different is sustained, allowing for relations of otherness, difference, and plurality to obtain along several orders—between mind and being, immanence and transcendence, finite and infinite, and singular and universal.”[8] While Žižek presumes this tension is inherent to Hegel, Desmond thinks Hegel’s synthesis goes beyond the tension, which he sees as a continual resource. The “mystery” of the middle draws us toward it. “The strangeness is not that of a hostile stranger, but rather of an intimate from which one has been estranged, which estrangement now begins to be slowly overcome.”[9] Desmond describes an awakening on the order of O’Connor’s: “Our ears, long caked with misunderstanding, hear sporadically only a faint echo of song. We have been deaf for too long. This deafness can last centuries, as with Western modernity that has systematically closed its hearing to ‘It is good.’”[10]

In a passage that sounds very much like Hegel, Desmond describes truth both as the enabling reality and the impetus toward a deepening of reason: “Self-determining thinking is released into its own freedom to think for itself by an enabling resource that is not self, a source not captured in terms of this or that determinate thought, or by thought’s own determination by and for itself. There is more that allows thinking to be itself more than itself.”[11] In the “crack” there is a mystery which does not speak of absence or lack but an excess which the theologian recognizes as Logos. Desmond does not explicitly identify the Logos but this is implicit. He speaks of “a call” more primal than self-assertion in which through the process of conversion (metanoia) we feel an indebtedness which endows us to move beyond the self and self-glorification to a sense of gratitude. “There is reverence for what has been given rather than arrogance for what is claimed as one’s own.”[12]

The wakening up of this reverence occurs in the “godsend” which frees from obsession with the self, working through the gap: “there are graced communications when self-transcending is freed from self-circling and an energy of generosity is released towards the otherness of the between, into the givenness of creation as good, into the neighborhood of others as good. A godsend of generosity visits us in the between.”[13] The between of self and other, work toward a realization or enlightenment opening up to reality: “We start in the midst of things, and we are open to things. We are open because we are already opened. Before we come to ourselves as more reflectively thoughtful, we already are in a porosity of being, and are ourselves as this porosity of being become mindful of itself.”[14] This mindfulness is a personal realization of what Hegel might call “spirit” becoming aware of itself in the individual. For Desmond, the godsend opens up the crack in reality, exposing the darkness and letting in the light.

Desmond appeals to O’Connor’s Revelation, as an example; the exposure of the racism by which Ruby Turpin orders her world, and then her godsend literally strikes her in the face in the form of the book and the girl’s harsh words. Her dark reality is exposed. She looks at the girl who had thrown the book, “‘What you got to say to me?’ she asked hoarsely and held her breath waiting, as for a revelation.” Long past the events, after the girl is gone and Ruby and Claud have returned home, she silently carries on the conversation. “Occasionally she raised her fist and made a small stabbing motion over her chest as if she was defending her innocence to invisible guests who were like the comforters of Job, reasonable-seeming but wrong.” She answers the girl’s accusation: “’I am not,’ she said tearfully, ‘a wart hog. From hell.’ But the denial had no force. The girl’s eyes and her words, even the tone of her voice, low but clear, directed only to her, brooked no repudiation. She had been singled out for the message, though there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have been applied. The full force of this fact struck her only now.” She recognizes from whence this godsend has come and complains directly to God: “‘What do you send me a message like that for?’ she said in a low fierce voice, barely above a whisper but with the force of a shout in its concentrated fury. ‘How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?’” She rages at God, “‘Why me?’ she rumbled. ‘It’s no trash around here, black or white, that I haven’t given to. And break my back to the bone every day working. And do for the church.’”

As the sun is setting and the light is fading, “A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, ‘Who do you think you are?’” The question reverberates back, putting everything she knew into question. Then she catches a vision: “Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge.” She sees a vast swinging bridge stretched toward heaven, and on it were companies of white-trash, black folk, “battalions of freaks and lunatics” “clapping and leaping like frogs.” And then she sees her own kind at the back, marching with all the dignity they could muster. “Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”

This seemingly random act of violence, for Ruby is a revelation about herself and her world. Her sense of self, her invulnerability, her station in life, which she thought free of illusion turns out to be a lie. Like the prodigal son who comes to his senses among the pigs, like Peter caught in the midst of denying Christ and suddenly broken, like the two on the Road to Emmaus who encounter a stranger who turns their world upside down, the godsend, Christ, may come in any number of forms, through which one world is undone in opening another. Could it be that something like Žižek’s dark hopelessness necessarily accompanies Desmond’s godsend? As Ryan Duns writes, “The ‘crack’ in everything renders philosophy and theology, or at least a metaxological philosophy and theology, porous to one another. The theological layer is not imposed but exposed and revealed by the godsend and our response, in faith, is to live according to the logic of these depths.”[15] There is a speculative darkness eclipsed by joy in the theological turn to philosophy; a path opened by Žižek’s Hegel which comes alive in Desmond.

Ruby’s vision fades but the realization it brought remained. “At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”

(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace”: This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. We will examine various forms of false peace and ask what peace is positively, its metaphysical and religious status as a concept and as a lived reality. Is peace possible? How is it characterized? How does Jesus make peace? Can difference be understood, lived, and resolved, not in violence and victory but in cooperation and mutuality? We will be guided into such questions by voices past and present, including Augustine, Thomas Merton, Raimon Panikkar, William Desmond, Rowan Williams, and more. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)

[1] Ryan Duns deploys Emersons quote for his opening epigraph. Ryan Gerard Duns, Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age? William Desmond’s Theological Achievement (Boston College PhD, 2018) 76.

[2] Flannery O’Connor, Revelation, included in her collection titled “Everything That Rises Must Converge” but also available online https://andrewmbailey.com/oconnor_revelation.pdf.

[3] Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006) 4.

[4] Parallax View, 4.

[5] Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (p. 8). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.

[6] Parallax View, 6-7.

[7] William Desmond, The William Desmond Reader (State University of New York Press. Kindle Edition) Location 66.

[8] Reader, 199.

[9] William Desmond, Being and the Between (Albany: SUNY, 1995) 205.

[10] Being and the Between, 205.

[11] William Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics After Dialectic (Washington DC:CUA Press, 2012), 217. Cited in Duns, 349.

[12] William Desmond, “Consecrated Thought: Between the Priest and the Philosopher,” (Louvain Studies, 30, no. 1-2 (2005): 92—106), 97. Cited in Duns, 350.

[13] William Desmond, The William Desmond Reader (State University of New York Press. Kindle Edition), loc. 4207.

[14] Desmond Reader, “Wording the Between,” loc. 3730.

[15] Duns, 351.

The Letter Versus the Logoi

Derrida, Freud, and Lacan make the philosophical and psychological case for Paul’s argument that the letter kills (2 Cor 3:6), while also leaving open the implication that the Spirit gives life. What they demonstrate, and what is implicit in Paul’s point, is not simply that there is a distinction to be made between speech and writing but that speech contains the problems of graphic communication in that it too is reducible to the material, the finite, the repetitive, and that there is an enslaving aspect to language. There is an orientation to language and law, identifying it with access to God or the fulness of reality, in which the material, cultural, and finite form of language shuts off from the freedom and fulness of the Spirit. Paul is not making some Platonic argument, privileging speech over writing, but he is making a broader point about two ways in which language can order reality. The letter or Scripture, or the law engraved on stones, is inherently deadly, not because it falls short of the spoken word (after-all it was spoken by God’s messengers and then written), but because, by its very nature, it obstructs and hides the Spirit. In Paul’s depiction the letter obscures, as it creates duplicity, hiding, and shame, due to its fading reality (2 Cor 3:4-18; Php 3:19) and those put to shame by this circumstance would equate the letter with access to God. The letter made absolute is not simply the Jewish problem, but is universal and attached to the organs of speech and to language (Rom 3:10-20), which gives rise to division and violence, and Freud, Derrida, and Lacan show why this is the case.

Jacques Lacan develops Freuds picture of the working of the unconscious as following the system of signs, claiming “the unconscious is structured like a language.”[1] He argues that the psyche develops along the material or concrete structures of language, necessarily working through difference in sounds and meaning, and always driven to an end it cannot achieve. Just as language naturally divides and gains meaning through different phonemes, letters, or words (over and against others), so too the structure of consciousness (largely in the unconscious) takes on this material function. One meaning is against another, just as one letter and sound gains its meaning over-and-against another, so there is no origin to be found in language, but only an ever-receding meaning.

The parallel argument of Jacques Derrida is that there really is no difference between speech and writing, inasmuch as both share the characteristics of language in marking differentiation.[2] The drive to privilege speech over writing is due to the notion that speech or the phonic sign has no structure of difference (which demonstrates the drive to synthesis); and then the presumption that in this perfect accord there is immediate access to the signified. This desired access is first an access to myself, or my self-presence, as I would have myself in my thought life. The presumption is that I am in or behind the silent speaking, and this inner voice not only provides access to myself but access to the world and to God. The obvious characteristics of writing (its material form, its exterior and conventional nature, its rule based iterability), in this argument, are absent in speech. Writing is presumed to be a parasite on speech, with speech not being completely reducible to marks in stone or ink but is a future possibility or outworking derived from speech.

The linguistic counter-point is that the phonic sign employs the same conventions as the graphic sign, and writing is not imposed upon speech but oral language “already belongs to this writing.”[3] “Original” or “natural” language shows signs of always having been touched and shaped by writing, and the notion that there is a living speech as opposed to a dead letter, misses that breath, the clicking of the tongue, aspiration, etc., are as material as ink and stone. “Living speech,” due to its existence in human interiority may more successfully hide the objective, material, and chain-like necessity, of language made explicit in writing. There is only the continual unfolding of signs which endlessly refer to other signs to gain meaning. Whether the medium is ink or a stream of air, the substance is built upon a chain of differences. No one, however, has thought to examine the chemical content of ink to get at the substance of language, though a certain deceptive magical quality is sometimes assigned to air, but in both, what Derrida calls arche-writing, is at work.[4] Both create meaning through the play of differences, or what Derrida calls “différance,” in that meaning is never fully present. Movement, temporality, and iterability, may give the appearance of some stable substance, a presence or ego, behind the movement producing difference.

The psychological point is that the letter shapes the psyche in its pursuit of presence through this illusive absence. This is evident in Freud’s focus on symbols and signs in dreams, fantasies, and everyday discourse, and it is stated in the title of one of Lacan’s articles “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.”[5] This is a “literal” or material work which can be traced in the structure of the psyche: “By ‘letter’ we designate that material support which concrete speech borrows from language.”[6] The “unconscious structured like a language” posits the meaning of the conscious and unconscious as following the structure of contrasting binary pairs. The unconscious is not a deep structure obscured from view but is simply the obverse side of the signs of language or the place of the signifiers. Lacan links this directly to what Freud calls the “death instinct” as the pursuit of self, or the insistence to be through language is bent on obtaining being through non-being, or on obtaining presence through absence. In Paul’s explanation, the letter kills because it does not contain life, and yet it is presumed to be the source of life. One who is coming to identity in and through language is subject to the fate of language. There is the dynamic of language in the chain of signifiers, but meaning (the self) is not found in any singular signifier or any moment in time.

In the description of both Paul and Slavoj Žižek, the realization of the impossibility of law or language to produce life, creates a feeling of alienation or of being “out of joint.” According to Žižek, “Modern subjectivity has nothing to do with the notion of man as the highest creature in the ‘great chain of being,’ as the final point of the evolution of the universe: modern subjectivity emerges when the subject perceives himself as ‘out of joint,’ as excluded from the ‘order of the things,’ from the positive order of entities.”[7] Paul describes his realization that all he counted as most important is now so much excrement (Php 3:8). Locating the self in language or the law is a frustrating impossibility which points to a further need and realization. No longer does Paul find comfort in his identity as a Jew, though he at one time had total “confidence in the flesh.” The fleshly sign of circumcision, the national sign of Israel, the genetic sign of being of the tribe of Benjamin, and the legal sign of being a Pharisee, he now counts as loss. But for Paul, this loss is embraced as part of an alternative identity: “But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ” (Php 3:7).

Paul relinquishes his striving to find identity and life in his Jewishness in his turn to Christ, though he makes it clear that this is not something to be grasped, in the way he grasped after being a Jew. “Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus” (Php 3:12). Desire and its attainment, the role of the logos or language, and the understanding of the self, undergo a shift in this new understanding. Paul refers to it as the freedom of the Spirit, which is the alternative to the deadly letter. “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Co 3:17). It is not that Paul has lost confidence in speech or language, but he now recognizes the working of the Spirit, which gives him a new confidence in speech (2 Cor 3:12) and in which he can identify Christians as “the letters of Christ” (3:3). This letter is not material, it is not formed in opposition, it is not fading, it is not mortal, it is not finite. This is the sort of letter that provides adequacy.

Maximus the Confessor’s picture of this realization, which ironically gets confused with Platonism (and thus falls back into reification of language), focuses on the absolute difference between God and world, bridged by the Logos. That is, there is no natural speech, natural origin, or human logos that can attain the divine Logos. There is no supposed natural synthesis between sign and signified or of God and the world. The theological and philosophical tendency is to follow the human sickness (identity through difference), by either identifying God with the world (e.g., in various forms of pantheism) or by making God absolutely transcendent and unattainable (e.g., nominalism). The tendency is to erase difference or to accentuate it, or in biblical terms, to keep the law or attempt to be the law. Maximus point is that in Christ, God is both absolutely different from creation while identified with creation as incarnate Word: “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[8] Creation does not account for itself “naturally” but calls for the supernatural as both its logic and end.

The way in which this Christo-logic or the Logos is deployed in the world is through what Maximus calls logoi. In creation as incarnation, the Logos is spread out in the logoi, the particulars of creation which are part of Christ’s becoming “all in all” (Col 3:11; Eph 1:22-23). In Jordan Woods description, Maximus’s logoi are the “One Logos’s hypostatic, kenotic procession into becoming the natural power of every individual creature to be, and that such a procession secures the metaphysical ground of an inevitable, identical, unnecessary creation.”[9] There is simultaneously no confusion between Creator and creation, and yet direct identity in the Logos and logoi. The hypostatic identity of Christ grounds the world in a deeper identity than a Spinoza-line pantheism (which leaves out subjectivity) and a wider difference and logic than the actual non-difference embraced in linguistic and psychological difference. “Only this sort of “both-and” – both similarity-dissimilarity and identity – can claim rights to a truly Christo-logical God-world relation.”[10] According to Maximus, “if we wish to have a complete knowledge of things, it is not enough to enumerate the multitude of characteristics,” that is, “whatever is around the subject,” but it is “absolutely necessary that we also indicate what is the subject of these characteristics, which is the foundation, as it were, upon which they stand.”[11] The foundation or subject which Paul says, “fills all things” (Eph 1:23)

Identity and difference are not naturally resolved, language is not its own end, and according to Maximus no creature simply “coincides in its essence with what is and is called the assemblage of characteristics that are recognized and predicated of it.” The grounding identity of the individual creature “is something different from these characteristics, which holds them all together, but is in no way held together by them” and so “is not derived from” or “identical with them.”[12] This Word found in creation is not structured like the letter, the law, or the order of language. Things do not otherwise hold together, and this psychological, linguistic, and theological reality, is directly addressed in the God/man who is the beginning and end of creation. In the language of Paul, “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Col 1:17). According to Maximus, from the viewpoint of God taken up by the virtuous person “by conforming to this beginning,” a beginning in which “he received being and participation in what is naturally good,” “he hastens to the end, diligently.”[13] This end is deification of all things: “In this way, the grace that divinizes all things will manifestly appear to have been realized.”[14] There is an overcoming of the law, of the human sickness bound to the letter that kills, through the freedom of Christ’s Spirit, filling all things.

[1] Jacques Lacan, “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious” (Yale French Studies, 1966, No. 36/37, Structuralism (1966), pp. 112-147) 113.

[2] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) xvi-xvii; 54, 74.

[3] Derrida, 55.

[4] Derrida,60

[5] Lacan, Ibid.

[6] Lacan, 114.

[7] Slavoj Žižek, cogtto and the unconscious, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998) 4.

[8] Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) Ambigua 7:22.

[9] Jordan Wood, “Creation is Incarnation: The Metaphysical Peculiarity of the Logoi in Maximus Confessor” (Modern Theology 00:00 Month 2017 ISSN 0266-7177 (Print) ISSN 1468-0025 (Online) 4.

[10] Ibid, Wood.

[11] Amb 17.5, cited in Wood, 6.

[12] Amb 17.6, cited in Wood, 6.

[13]Amb. 7.21.

[14] QThal. 2.2.

Understanding McGilchrist Through Paul, Hegel, and Lacan

Iain McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary, in his approach to left brain/right brain theory, presumes “each hemisphere is involved in everything” but nonetheless he argues there is a predominant form of thought attached to the different spheres of the brain.[1] It is not that there are absolute differences or that the two spheres of the brain are not continually interdependent, but this does not mean that there are not necessary differences. Afterall, as he points out, “every known creature with a neuronal system, however far down the evolutionary tree one goes, and however far back in time, has a system that is asymmetrical.” This raises the question of his research, “Why on earth would that be, given that the world they are interacting with is not asymmetrical?”[2] This asymmetrical world shows up continually in “subject versus object, alienation versus engagement, abstraction versus incarnation, the categorical versus the unique, the general versus the particular, the part versus the whole,” with either the objective and impersonal or the subjective and personal, tending to win out.[3] What I demonstrate throughout is that the categories in which McGilchrist sets his dichotomies (between the two hemispheres) easily convert to the Pauline differentiation between law and Christ with the “incarnation” overcoming “alienation” in the “particular life” of a “singular” man in which the antinomies posed by the two hemispheres, or simply by life, are overcome. I also make the case that the completion of McGilchrist’s theory, the ultimate right-brain synthesis, lies in a particular theological understanding toward which his theory points. Throughout the second half of the book he describes two forms of thought or two ways of “being” reflected in the brain and the mind, one of which I argue, culminates in Hegel’s notion of “absolute knowledge” in and through Christ.

The “master” is supposed to be the brain’s right hemisphere, which is the side most connected with the holism of personhood, as it relates vitally, and humanly to the world, taking in what is “new” without concern for objective closure. The left hemisphere is focused on detail and analysis, and rather than connecting to living things, tends to focus on the static and lifeless, on machines, numbers, and abstractions, and while both sides of the brain are involved in language, the left brain tends to reify the word. Rather than recognizing the metaphorical, emotional, and integrating role of language (connected to the right hemisphere), in the left hemisphere there is rejection of the metaphorical for the literal, and a rejection of the personal for the impersonal. The left brain is the organizing bureaucrat which is all about procedure, organization, predictability, abstraction (decontextualization), and which has no room for uniqueness. Justice, in this realm, is not a sense of making things right so much as making everything equal. In this realm, “Increasingly the living would be modelled on the mechanical.”[4] Production, speed, scale, and quantity are the focus, and not quality. Those “with schizoid or schizotypal traits will be attracted to, and be deemed especially suitable for, employment in the areas of science, technology, and administration” which have become the shaping forces of our time.[5]

Ideally the master or the right side of the brain is served by the left side of the brain, but there is a tendency in history and in the individual to cut short this integrating holism and to become focused on dissecting the details as an end in itself. Modernity, with its focus on scientism, industrialization, mechanics, materialism, information processing, or perhaps a neuro link in which the machinery is inserted directly in the brain, demonstrates how the servant can usurp the role assigned by the master.

As with illness or brain damage, there is a general trend for the left brain to close in on itself and to shut out the world beyond its own projections:

But what if the left hemisphere were able to externalise and make concrete its own workings—so that the realm of the actually existing things apart from the mind consisted to a large extent of its own projections? Then the ontological primacy of right-hemisphere experience would be outflanked, since it would be delivering, not ‘the Other’, but what was already the world as processed by the left hemisphere. It would make it hard, and perhaps in time impossible, for the right hemisphere to escape from the hall of mirrors, to reach out to something that truly was ‘Other’ than, beyond, the human mind. In essence this was the achievement of the Industrial Revolution.[6]

The mirror stage in Lacanian psychoanalysis can become terminal, in its focus on the self, to the exclusion of all else. Rene Descartes is a key example of one who turns to focus on his own thought, attempting to get at the “thinking thing” behind the thought, dissecting, isolating, refusing the body, and focused completely on interior thought. His philosophical focus follows the pattern of modernity, and betrays the same characteristics of (new) forms of mental illness which would arise in this period. In Pauline terms one is enclosed and isolated in the sinful orientation to the law.

One might extend McGilchrist’s theory to suggest a left-brain theology and atonement as well, in which Christ is made to serve the law and his death makes up for any lack or failure in regard to the law, with the law defining and determining Christ. The sickness of the left brain, the bureaucratic disease that would achieve perfection and power seem perfectly illustrated by Pharisaical Paul: one can be a perfect Jew and keep the law blamelessly (Philippians 3:6), which Christian Paul explains, was what made him the chief of sinners (I Tim. 1:15). Power through language or law presents the possibility of a limited whole which can be manipulated, but to maintain this realm it is necessary that it be complete in itself. The tendency is to see all of reality, even God and Christ, as constituted in a closed space, so that there must be an obstacle, warding off the right brain or warding off the limited nature of language and law. In McGilchrist’s description this gives rise to violence and in the case of Paul it accounts for his arresting and killing Christians. The letter, or primary attachment to Scripture and law, functions as an obstacle, killing off the unlimited vagaries of the spirit, in the Pauline sense (2 Cor. 3:6).

Rather than an embodied and social language (as in Wittgenstein) the tendency is toward a disembodied Platonism, Cartesianism, or legalism. In a Lacanian sense the symbolic order becomes a realm unto itself, with language taking the predominant role over the imagination, reducing the ego to an object. The symbolic register is the organizing center – the possibility of a subject. The “obstacle cause of desire” is the impossible desire of a desiring self. That is, one is blocked from achieving the desired object and this creates the frustrated agon, that for Lacan is the very definition of the human subject. In Paul’s picture, one serves the law, and imagines law is an end in itself, and there is a basic confusion between God and the law, which is inherently alienating. Paul describes an irresolvable split within himself (Rom. 7:15). This Pauline bilateralism within the ego is reflected in McGilchrist’s picture of how it is that we become an obstacle to ourselves. The left brain cuts off the integrating powers of the right brain in the same way the law cuts off from the person of God or the absolute personal reality of Christ.

The work of Christ, is to suspend the law, sublating or suspending while also preserving and fulfilling. Through Christ Paul escaped the delimited world of the law as in Christ the law is delimited (pointing beyond itself), and human brokenness is not a failure in regard to the law, but the failure, and incompleteness of the law as a guide. Christ does not complete human obligations in regard to the law, but suspends the punishing effects of a defective orientation to the law.

The fact that McGilchrist uses the Pauline word describing the suspension of the law in Christ (aufgehoben) indicates that imposing a Christian or Pauline understanding is not foreign to his project. He uses the word in the context of the Hegelian synthesis, in which Hegel deploys Luther’s translation of Paul’s καταργηθῇ, which is a suspension of the punishing effects of the law and its simultaneous preservation. The right brain cannot function apart from the left brain but at the same time it tends to pose an obstacle to its integrating powers. Christ is recognized through the law, through Judaism, through the Scriptures, but taken as their own end these are an obstacle to Christ. The ill effects of sin are when the emissary is thought to be the master. The sin condition, which is a misorientation to the law or a reification of the law, amounts to something like the obstacle the left brain often poses to the right brain. One cannot get rid of the law, any more than function with half a brain, but the ill effects of the law can be suspended in Christ (while the law and Judaism are preserved).

By the same token, it is not that a more holistic (right brain) Romanticism abolishes the Enlightenment or that any particular age is a complete departure from the one that preceded. McGilchrist specifically sights the Hegelian synthesis to express the full integrating power of the right brain. “The movement from Enlightenment to Romanticism therefore is not from A to not-A, but from a world where ‘A and not-A cannot both be true’ is necessarily true to one where ‘A and not-A can both hold’ hold (in philosophical terms this becomes Hegel’s thesis, antithesis – synthesis).”[7] Elements of the Enlightenment are found in Romanticism, just as elements of the Hebrew Scriptures frame understanding of Christ. This synthesis found in Christ is precisely not supersessionist or anti-nominalist, though in the thought world of the left brain and the law this must necessarily be the case.

As Jordan Wood notes, Hegel distinguishes two kinds of thinking: there is finite thinking in which antinomies such as subject/object (along with all of the Kantian antinomies) hold as the one always implies and depends upon its opposite and this “permanent opposition” is definitive of the terms.[8] In Lacan and Žižek’s Hegel, this antagonism and ultimate negativity (death drive) is what gives the appearance of truth and a human Subject. Truth inheres in a lie and the subject arises as a result of this power of negation. In McGilchrist’s definition, this would be the ultimate left-brain materialism and sickness (which Žižek would acknowledge in his notion that the best we can do is “enjoy our symptom”).

Jordan provides a more orthodox reading of Hegel: “Infinite or “rational” thinking is thinking in itself—or better, thinking thinking itself—since here the thinking subject and the object thought are one, and are directed to an inward identity that brooks no definite term.”[9] Hegel has in mind the divine Subject and his thought, shared in Christ, in which there is a move from finite to infinite thinking. As Jordan describes, the theological picture of Hegel’s “knowing” is not the finite but an infinite ground, both subjective and objective. In the subjective, “human reason ‘from below’ is in truth God’s self-knowing “from above” as the Spirit in us.” The objective ground is “God’s Incarnation as a single human individual establishes the conditions for intuitive certainty that the divine nature is such that it can communicate its entire identity as the concrete oneness of abstract opposites, of the infinite and the finite, subject and object, etc.—and this communication is also the form of speculative logic.”[10] This integrating unity of the knower and the known is Hegel’s “absolute knowing,” the goal and means of his “speculative thinking.” That is, this absolute is not closed but open to continual speculation, incorporation, and synthesis.

McGilchrist describes a left-brain failure in theology – reification of the word, focus on the book or the letter as opposed to the integrating factors of the right brain. He argues, the Reformation is a refusal of the metaphorical, and in this the Reformation preserves the Enlightenment rejection of the mysterious and a turning of the imagination to the word. “In their search for the one truth, both movements attempted to do away with the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere, particularly in its mythical and metaphoric function, in favour of the word, the stronghold of the left hemisphere, in pursuit of unambiguous certainty.”[11] There is a loss of a sense of the “real presence” of Christ in “an endlessly repeated and deferred” symbolism, devoid of its signified. Though he does not explicitly connect the fulness of the right brain with the person of Christ, he does note the “real presence is displaced by a sign, “re-presentations not presentations.”[12]

Where the Greek and Hebrew logos or the law is an entity apart from God, the incarnation enfleshes the Word – which seems unthinkable in the left-brain world. The incarnation of the Word is the ultimate synthesis which personalizes all things and which demands an infinite openness to the new, the unique, and the different. The Word is not that which reduces to sameness but it preserves difference. As long as the left brain, the law, or the symbolic order is predominant, subject-object opposition, bilateralism, dichotomy, dualism, or what Hegel refers to as finite knowing, are clearly in place. Synthesis, integration, or participation in the Word does not obliterate difference but it passes beyond, not through sameness or obliteration of difference, but through recognition that God has made himself available to thought. This Hegelian picture of the role of Christ seems to be the natural implication toward which McGilchrist’s theory points.

For McGilchrist, perhaps in the spirit of Maximus or Origen, we are cocreators, in many senses, of the world we inhabit, as our understanding or perception is shaped by our perspective, our theory, our hypothesis, or even the apparatus of the brain through which we apprehend but this this means of apprehending is not neutral but is itself shaped by our thought. That is there is continual feedback between the mind and brain, and it may be impossible to separate the interplay between the two. McGilchrist recognizes that his theory may serve only as a metaphor, which floats free of cerebral hemispheres, and point to two ways of being in the world. As he puts it,

If it could eventually be shown…that the two major ways, not just of thinking, but of being in the world, are not related to the two cerebral hemispheres, I would be surprised, but not unhappy. Ultimately what I have tried to point to is that the apparently separate ‘functions’ in each hemisphere fit together intelligently to form in each case a single coherent entity; that there are, not just currents here and there in the history of ideas, but consistent ways of being that persist across the history of the Western world, that are fundamentally opposed, though complementary, in what they reveal to us; and that the hemispheres of the brain can be seen as, at the very least, a metaphor for these.[13]

His work is pointing to the primacy of metaphor, connectedness, and synthesis, so he is content if his work serves this purpose. The Christological conclusion, which he does not name but which seems a natural extension of his work, is the Personalism of Hegelian Christology.

Afterall, it is the refusal of the primacy of the personal, of narrative, of metaphor, of openness, that describes the human disease. Only in brain damaged patients, or those who suffer mental illness, can it be said the physical brain is controlling thought but what can be seen in these instances (such as autism or schizophrenia) is the trend which McGilchrist sees as characteristic trends of modernity; narrow focus, reification of language, and depersonalization, but these are precisely the symptoms Paul describes as entrapment to the law. In Christian terms, the disease is addressed and cured in the Person of Christ, as the personal depth of creation, and participation in personhood open up the left-brain to infinite knowledge and synthesis of the right-brain.

[1] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) Thank you to Jim for acquiring this book for me.

[2] Ibid, 2.

[3] Ibid, 462.

[4] Ibid, 430.

[5] Ibid, 408.

[6] Ibid, 386.

[7] Ibid, 353.

[8] Jordan Wood, “Hegel as Alexandrian Christian: Or, Against False Piety,” from his Substack: Words in Flesh, Sep. 3^rd,2025. This wonderful piece just appeared as I was writing.

[9] Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline [Enc hereafter], Part I: Science of Logic. Translated and Edited by Klaus Brinkmann and Dnaiel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1817]), 28. Cited in Wood.

[10] Ibid, Wood.

[11] McGilchrist, 315.

[12] Ibid, 317.

[13] Ibid, 461.

A Conversation on Why I Am a Christian

Jessica: What’s ur biggest reason for believing Jesus is the way. The most compelling reason for believing jesus is the best.[1]

Paul: Meaning!

Jessica: Can you Elaborate!

Paul: You ask for the “biggest reason” and so I use the word “meaning” in the broadest sense. Personal meaning is either partial, absent, or wrongheaded apart from the depth of meaning in Christ. We can find all kinds of meaning apart from Christ, and that may be good or bad or indifferent. Meaning in work, family, or even a variety of religions may give us personal satisfaction. Perhaps our skill at sports, or art, or some other area provides levels of meaning. But these will remain partial apart from a broader ground of meaning. For many, there is no meaning, and Christ is the entry point into meaning. For others, they may find meaning in the military or the mafia or a false religion, but this is the wrongheaded sort of meaning.

Beyond personal meaning but tied to this is just the possibility of meaning in the areas of philosophy, linguistics, and semiotics. Meaning systems derive from a meaningful ground and these various explorations of meaning systems ultimately find their possibility in Christ. Philosophical nihilism, pragmatism, phenomenology, etc. have the same issue as personal meaning. They may be good but incomplete, or wrong and dangerous, or they may simply conclude there is no meaning. So, the term can be applied in every area. No area of human endeavor is complete in itself, though every area may be good or bad, but will always remain partial. Of course, this is not a coercive meaning to be foisted onto us personally, scientifically, or philosophically, but it is like the word itself. It is there to be grasped and to lead us on a journey, but it is not insistent or fear inducing. Like meaning, Christ is healing, completing, and fulfilling. This is my humble attempt at the “biggest” reason.

Jessica: So, the fact that there is meaning at all convinces you of Gods existence?

Paul: I prefer meaning. This is not to say that meaninglessness is not also convincing. Most days I ward off the nihilism, the evil, the cruelty, or the seeming meaninglessness of everything. On these days or these small snippets of time, you might say I am “convinced” of God’s existence. But that does not sound exactly right. I am committed to meaning, to living a meaningful life, to being loving, and to the beauty and goodness of the universe which entails God, but my personal capacity for belief or being convinced is not very great. I feel I can make the moral commitment to the Truth (just the possibility of truth in the Truth) without being personally inclined toward a strong sense of conviction. I am well acquainted with a lack of personal spiritual devotion, with doubts and disbelief, but my own proclivities are not the point. I have never considered either my capacity for belief nor my tendency toward doubt as primary. Belief is no great accomplishment, and to think it is, is the problem in imagining doubt is determinative of salvation or moral engagement. The focus on individual belief misses the New Testament meaning of faith, which does not refer to my faith but to Christ’s faithfulness, of which I can partake. I have no faith in my faith or in faith in general, but the faithfulness of Christ is salvific. Saving, not in the sense of going to heaven and missing hell, but in the sense of delivering from bondage: bondage to my capacity, my thought, myself and the values of my culture.

This is a form of belief and of being convinced, but it is not the form in which we usually discuss these things. Most are thinking of historical and scientific proofs, but this will only lead to the endless need for more and stronger proof. Belief and faith are largely moral commitments that engage us more holistically than typical proofs. I am full of doubt, but this doubt is not the kind that many may find so disturbing, as my faith embraces doubt as part of the reality in which I believe.

The doubt that many have, is grounded in an ultimate trust in reason, in which there is no room for doubt. Thus, apologetics must be airtight. The Bible must be inerrant. Tradition cannot contain fallacy. Doubt is not part of the possibility of this form of faith. Undeniable philosophical arguments and the absolute historical trustworthiness of the texts is required. This foundationalism and Biblicism is focused on rationalism or Scripture rather than Christ. It trusts the authority of history and reason more than Christ. This sort of foundationalism has displaced Christ with reason, Scripture, history, or some other authority as foundation.

Jessica: I think I understand, but you are saying too much too quickly. I have been reading Sam Harris and he has many convincing proofs that Jesus never existed and that God does not exist.

Paul: Sorry, my wife tells me I overcomplicate things.

The issue is not between different sorts of meaning or levels of meaning, but whether there is meaning or no meaning. The new atheists, such as Sam Harris, like fundamentalists, liberals, and modernists of every stripe presume a foundation of meaning and this is their starting point. One can use this foundation to argue for the inerrancy of the Bible, the truth of secular humanism, the self-contained truth of science, or basic principles (“I Think”, there is cause and effect”) or whatever, but all share the modernist foundation. The way in which they build upon this presumed philosophical rationalism varies, but they all share the modern rationalist presumption of a given meaning. This presumed foundation is a parasite on the meaning set forth in Christianity, but it is incorrect (in its atheistic, fundamentalist, and liberal manifestation) in that its imagined meaning floats free of the person of Christ.

Jessica: I have started reading David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions.

Paul: Excellent! Hart quickly and accurately debunks the New Atheists.

I prefer a more hard-core atheism, such as that of Slavoj Žižek, who recognizes the construct of meaning (and self) are easily deconstructed. As a true atheist, he does not argue on the basis of meaning, but he makes the case that beneath the structure of “self” is the reification of language which fabricates the self (and meaning) through the interplay of language – on the order of the Cartesian cogito (“I think therefore I am”). Žižek is Cartesian, not because he believes Descartes is correct in his foundationalism, but because he considers the Cartesian error or lie, the basis for “truth.” That is, there is no Truth, but only the lie which gives rise to truth. This is a better understanding of the choice with which we are faced. True nihilism and atheism do not hold to meaning of any sort, other than that which can be fabricated.

So, I prefer meaning as opposed to no meaning. I prefer love, beauty, and goodness as opposed to hatred and evil, and this entails the world revealed by Christ.

Jessica: But what about the contradictions in the Bible?

Paul: The focus of the Bible is not on itself or its own authority, but it is a witness to the authority of Christ.The founding premise of Scripture is set forth by John: “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has exegeted Him” (John 1:18). The revelation of Christ precedes and makes possible the writing of the New Testament and the formation of the canon of Scripture. There would be no Scripture apart from its formation around the work of Christ. It is not just that Christ precedes Scripture, but faith in Christ (the “rule of faith”) precedes and is the means of exegeting Scripture (and in particular was the early church’s means of incorporating the Hebrew Scriptures into the Christian canon of Scripture). This means that the reality of Christ not only precedes Scripture, but precedes the unfolding political and cultural realities of our day.

The primacy of Christ implies an exegetical method which is not primarily historical, literal, or attached to a book. That is, if we take this passage (John 1:18) literally, this means the rest of Scripture must fit this fact. The primacy of Christ is the means of Scripture and its interpretation, and apart from this primacy the letter is bent in every direction (e.g., Jesus the warrior, the upholder of national and cultural interests). The Old Testament is filled with conflicting images, which if given equal weight (and literality), displace the literal fact of Christ as exegete. Christ brings together the sign and signified, enfleshing meaning, such that to make Scripture the foundation of meaning is to set the sign afloat, separating it from it from its signified. A biblicism or sola scriptura which does not recognize Scripture as derived from Christ has taken images of violence and warfare, images of sacrifice and law, or simply interpretations of history, and imagined that Christ must be made to accommodate this order. The images of God in the Bible (Old and New Testaments), require the Gospel, require that all of the Bible be read in the light of faith in Christ.

As Origen put it, “If you want to understand, you can only do so through the Gospel.” The Gospel (Jesus Christ) makes the Bible the Word of God for each of its contemporary readers. The analogy of faith, or the rule of faith or, to say the same thing, the Gospel, is a hermeneutic or interpretive lens which unveils the meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures (among many other things). As Paul explains to the Corinthians, “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (I Cor. 15:3-4). Paul is referencing the only Scriptures he knew, the Hebrew Bible. Apart from these events in the life of Christ, it would be hard to locate such things in the Scriptures, but given the reality of the life of Christ, the Scriptures become a means of understanding these events and these events unveil the meaning of Scripture. Christ is a revelation which inspires Scripture, and this revelation constitutes the center of Christian thought. Apart from this center, it is not clear Christian thought survives. Apart from Christ there is no Bible, there is no authority, there is no meaning, but only a bundle of contradictions. In light of Christ, the contradictions do not completely disappear but they are relatively unimportant in light of the fulness of meaning revealed in Christ.

Jessica: I think I am beginning to grasp some of what you are saying, but have you written anything that might help?

Paul: I will recommend a few of my blogs, which I have referenced above and which expand on the topic.[2]

(Sign up for the class Human Language, Signs of God: using Anthony Bartlett’s two books, Theology Beyond Metaphysics and Signs of Change, as one continuous argument. The course will run from 2025/9/16 to 2025/11/4. Register here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/)

[1] This question arose through messenger and continued on the phone, and I have taken liberties with how it unfolded and have changed the name of the inquirer, but it is based in reality.

[2] Here is a piece on reading Scripture through Christ and the Gospel https://forgingploughshares.org/2025/02/06/the-scriptures-gospel-and-the-exegesis-of-jesus/ I have done several on Hermeneutics. This one is on Origen’s approach: https://forgingploughshares.org/2022/09/22/the-peaceful-hermeneutic-of-origin-the-end-of-deicide/ As is this one: https://forgingploughshares.org/2024/11/07/finding-the-center-in-the-midst-of-despair/

Deliverance From the Cloud Economy

In Paul’s depiction of the law, we are bound to serve some form of the Law (e.g., the Master, the superego, the conscience, the father) but this authority, even in Paul’s description is amorphous. We mistake the law for God, or we imagine that the symbolic order holds out life, while it offers only death and a futile servitude. The ultimate master, the force behind all fear and striving, is fear of death, but as in the Garden, the symbolic order, the knowledge of good and evil, the manipulation of the law, seems to hold out the possibility of life through the law. We would inscribe ourselves into the law, so as to attain life, but as Paul notes, “the law deceived and killed me” (Rom. 7:8). As Slavoj Žižek describes, “we are condemned to domination—the Master is the constitutive ingredient of the very symbolic order, so the attempts to overcome domination only generate new figures of the Master.”[1] With the internet and information technology dominating the economy, the symbolic order (the desire of the law) threatens to shape desire in a more controlling and explosive manner. The techno-oligarchs presume to have access to the mind and soul of the masses, such that they can manipulate desire through controlling the algorithms of consumption and want. No longer is it a straightforward master/slave sort of exploitation, or exploitation of workers by owners, but the enslavement is more insidious. It is a psychological enslavement and exploitation based on personal choices and production of data. It is no longer the body of the slave as commodity, but the mind and identity of the individual that is exploited.

Among the key theorists who have recognized this process is Yanis Varoufakis, who argues that capitalism is morphing into techno-feudalism.[2] We are toiling away in the fields staked out by Google, Microsoft, Meta or Amazon, but what is ultimately being mined from our toil, along with our identity, is our wants and desires. We are data-producing subjects confined to an infinitely reflexive world of personal choices. Our desire is the commodity that is being mined and shaped. “Not capital as we have known it since the dawn of the industrial era, but a new form of capital, a mutation of it that has arisen in the last two decades, so much more powerful than its predecessor that like a stupid, overzealous virus it has killed off its host.”[3]

Capitalism depended upon profit and markets, which the techno-fiefdoms have replaced with digital platforms; all who enter pay a form of rent, what Varoufakis calls “cloud rent.” The owners in traditional capitalism, owned the land, the machinery, the buildings, and the means of transport, but the owners of cloud capital own and control digital information. Just as modern physics, after Einstein, recognized that the physical universe is mostly a dynamic of information, so too in the modern economy, information is capital. Whoever owns or controls the code is the final arbiter of power.

Capitalism is already a departure from traditional economies tied to materiality, in that capital is not just another commodity, but its exchange value is intrinsic to human desire and activity. Capitalism decoupled power from land or various material goods. As is evident with Bitcoin and its offspring in the digital age, capital “is, above all else, a reflection of our relation to one another and to our technologies; i.e. the means and the ways in which we transform matter.”[4] The step from capitalism to techno-feudalism is that as in the feudal age, the techno-barons own information just as the landed gentry once owned and controlled the land but the difference is that there is no end to the capital to be generated. There is no end to the depth of exploitation and control.

Varoufakis illustrates the difference with the common household tool Alexa:

It means that what begins with us training Alexa to do things on our behalf soon spins out of our control into something that we can neither fathom nor regulate. For once we have trained its algorithm, and fed it data on our habits and desires, Alexa starts training us. How does it do this? It begins with soft nudges to provide it with more information about our whims, which it then tailors into access to videos, texts and music that we appreciate. Once it has won us over in this manner, we become more suggestible to its guidance. In other words, Alexa trains us to train it better. The next step is spookier: having impressed us with its Capacity to appeal to our tastes, it proceeds to curate them. This it does by exposing us to images, texts and video experiences that it selects in order subtly to condition our whims. Before long, it is training us to train it to train us to train it to train us … ad infinitum.[5]

This infinite loop in the algorithmic network, an unseen force in the cloud, guides our behavior and choices, such that owners, manufacturing and curating our desires, directly profit through this manipulation.[6] Our identity is literally relinquished, through ID codes, purchasing records, familiarity (on Facebook and X) with whom and what we like. Every thought, every thing you have paid attention to, every opinion, is tracked, such that Apple, Google, Facebook, and X, know you and remember you better than you do.

The constant surveillance, the presumption of ownership over one’s life, the daily indignity of giving up something of oneself, and ultimately the fact of being rendered servile and brainwashed, describes a form of impoverished enslavement. It is as if the techno-oligarchs have claimed ownership of the law, and benefit according to how many cycle through the sequence of desire, sin, and death, Paul describes in Romans 7. The biblical picture of the loss of identity is not dissimilar though more exhaustive, in that pursuit of life through the law not only renders one a subject of the law but it identifies the deadly emptiness. The more one attempts to gain control the tighter the bind to the symbolic order, which contains only death in spite of or due to the effort expended. This also means that the salvation which Paul describes, perhaps more than at any other time, is a literal suspension of the economy which binds us in this modern age.

(Register now for the course Colossians and Christology which will run from June 3rd to July 29th https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (p. 20). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.

[2] Yanis Varoufakis, Techno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism? (New York: Vintage, 2023). Thanks to Matt Welch for pointing me to Varoufakis.

[3] Varoufakis, x.

[4] Ibid, 17.

[5] Ibid, 54-55.

[6] Ibid, 55.

Recapitulation (with a difference) as Opposed to Repetition (of the same)

The summing up, bringing together, recapitulation, or synthesizing of all things (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι) in Christ (Ephesians 1:10), in the earliest development of atonement theory by Irenaeus (A.D. 120-203) and several of the early church fathers, captures the New Testament picture and the early church’s understanding of the work of Christ. As in the context of Ephesians, this recapitulation is at once cosmic and directly concerned with personal salvation: “We have redemption” in Christ (Eph 1:7), but so too do “all things in the heavens and things on the earth” (Eph 1:10). The all-inclusive nature of recapitulation, includes elements such as the life of Christ, which will come to be neglected (Irenaeus is focused on Christ’s life of obedience as opposed to Adam’s disobedience). Later traditional theories of the atonement, and even early confessions (the Apostle’s creed) skip over the life of Jesus, to say nothing of the cosmic and the historical. The focus on the legal aspects of the death of Jesus tend to center on his birth and death, and the practical, experiential, and psychological, even in the nature of his death, are not addressed. In the developments of Anselm and Calvin, death is reduced to a payment, while in Paul, the obedience of the Son to death on the cross (Phil. 2:8) is not simply a legal condemnation nor a single historical fact, but it takes in the totality of what God has done in Christ through the whole movement from the incarnation of the gift of the Spirit.[1] Recapitulation plays out in the texture and details of the life of Christ, tying together the life of Christ with the manner of his death. Likewise, the believer in imitating and being joined to the life of Christ, is taking up the quality of eternal life (a lived reality and not simply a legal abstraction).

Being joined to Christ, the head of a new humanity, is not a consequence but the substance of salvation. Where legal theories separate the life of Christ, ethics, and the lived reality of the Christian life from salvation (focused as they are on divine satisfaction), recapitulation is a practical salvation, in that being in Christ, being joined to Christ, living the Christian life, putting on the mind of Christ, is the content of salvation. In turn, the problem or condemnation of sin, is not simply a future punishment but a present form of humanity, as in the first Adam (Romans 5, a focus of Irenaeus). Thus, the difference between the first and second Adam is one way of depicting the content of what it means to be saved, and what exactly one is saved from.

Repetition in the trinity of Self Versus Recapitulation in the Trinity

Though being in the first (Adam) or the second (Christ) type of humanity, entails a form of imitation and repetition, recapitulation describes a repetition with a difference rather than a repetition of sameness. In the simplest terms, Jesus did not repeat the failures of the race of Adam. He identified with sinful humanity, with suffering, pain, and death. He traversed birth, childhood, adulthood, Jewishness, maleness, and death, but he took this to a new place and experience, and did not repeat the failures of the former race, but summed it up, so as to become the head of a new race. The difference between these two is the difference between the trinity of ego, law, and the body of death, and entry into participation in the Father, through the Son by the Spirit.

Repetition captures the relationship to the law or the symbolic order, which Paul describes as an antagonism between the ego, the law, and death. Where the law is made primary, as in forbidden desire or in the notion that life is in the letter of the law, the relationship is to an object and the image it holds out (the ego or “I”) is one of lack. Not just that one cannot keep the law, but life or the self is lacking. Deceptive, death-dealing desire overtakes the will in compulsive repetition, attempting to obtain the object of desire. The trinity of law, absence or loss (“I”), and desire define the Subject of sin.

A key difference between living death and life in the Spirit, is that the death of the “I” divides and alienates, while life in the Spirit is a communion founded by the Father who has sent his Son (Ro 8.3) who leads by his Spirit (Ro 8.14). The Father is the primary agent who subjected creation in hope (Ro 8.20), who makes all things work to the good for those who love him (Ro 8.28), who has foreknown and predestined those he called (Ro 8.29) and these he has justified and glorified (Ro 8.31). This communion is “in Christ Jesus” who was sent to free from the law of sin and death (Ro 8.2,3) by condemning sin in the flesh (Ro 8.3), who gives his Spirit of life (Ro 8.9) so that those who suffer with him will be glorified together with him (Ro 8.17) and who died and was raised and intercedes so that nothing can separate from the love of God (Ro 8.34-35). Recapitulation founds the new race in life in the Trinity.

In the recapitulated form of this relation, the child of God relates directly to Abba, through the Spirit, with the image of the Son before him. The Trinity, fills in the trinitarian absence. Through the work of the Trinity, relation with the Father is no longer mediated through the law but through the Son, and the Spirit is the enabling power of righteousness (Ro. 8.10). The law marked a covenantal relationship fulfilled in Christ who makes it possible to keep the covenant relationship with God through participation in the Trinity.

The Power of Death in the word and Life in the Word

The stark difference in the two Adam’s of Romans 5, is that one introduced death, and the other introduces life. “For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ” (Ro 5:17).

The power of death to produce sin, has been largely obscured due to the Augustinian misreading of the problem, but the power of death is identifiable in multiple ways. The power to kill, to sacrifice, and to oppress is the obvious form of death’s power. But the law of sin and death can also be described psychologically, as mistaking the human word for the Word of life.

The power of death in the law, is death denied, obscured, or covered over. The law poses the possibility of an eternalizing repetition of the same, in which the inanimate letter, the law, language, does not suffer or die. Interpolating oneself into the law, being a law keeper or even identifying with the letter, poses an escape from death through extracting the self from life. This orientation to the law (or to death), is the drive behind destructive compulsions, addictions, or repetitions, which rely upon the letter, or the word, to repeat the self.

The lie which the serpent tells in Genesis, and Paul’s explanation of that lie (Ro 7), pictures absence (of God) and presence (of the symbolic order or the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) as its own kind of false power (attaining divinity). The negative (death, absence) does not take an obvious or conscious part in the binary of language (or the knowledge of good and evil), but symbolic features are dependent on presence and absence. To imagine the symbolic contains a real presence is to miss the absence upon which it depends.

Freud illustrates this with his grandson, who learned to talk while playing with a spool. In Freuds estimate the spool was functioning in place of relationship to mother. The boy could make it appear and disappear, accompanied by the German equivalent of “Here/Gone.” He was in control of the spool, but his mother continually left him. According to Jacques Lacan, words are always “a presence made of absence.”[2] The law, the knowledge of good and evil, or perhaps every child’s entry into language would produce life and being through absence.

Recapitulation entails at its heart, the recapitulation in and through the Word, which brings about life and presence through the Spirit. The Spirit can be equated with life (Ro 8:2,10-11), and with the introduction of the Spirit, Paul’s question of 7:24 is definitively answered: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.”

The Law of the Father Versus Abba, Father

Rather than a relationship with a person, the impersonal law poses as father (in the role of God). The insistence to be through the law, is the repetition of death or the letter that kills. That is, the compulsion to repeat is a product of the attempt to establish the self like an object, to repeat the self, in and through a medium (the Scriptures, the letter, the symbolic) that is inherently impossible. There is no life in the law.[3]

The ego or I in the mirror of the law, is a false construct, and the father in this relation is the superego or the law taken up into the self. “The father, the name-of-the-father, sustains the structure of the law.”[4] In Freudian theory, the Subject arises from the self-negating activity of sacrifice (castration or passage through the Oedipus complex). “Sacrifice is a guarantee that ‘the Other exists’: that there is an Other who can be appeased by means of the sacrifice.”[5] In other words, there is an inherent hostility towards the Other of the law (the symbolic or superego or father) as this Other demands continual service and sacrifice.

The inheritance of life in the Spirit, is indicative of the ontological shift from being one’s own father to being a child of God. The former inherits alienation and death while the latter will be glorified with Christ (Ro 8:17). The former is a slave serving the law of sin while the latter is enabled to please God (Ro 8:8). This status of being the sons of God means that “you put to death the deeds of the body” (Ro 8.13). Pleasing God, and not simply serving the demands of the law, is the goal, but this entails true righteousness (and not simply the imputed kind).

Righteousness is not individual, but it is to be made right in relationship. God’s covenant faithfulness to his people is the fulfilment of his righteousness, and in turn the faithfulness of his children to this relationship is their righteousness. Righteousness is being brought into a right relationship with God and overcoming the alienation and hostility towards God, and this resolves the alienating conflict with the self and others. God is fulfilling and has fulfilled this righteousness in those he has called in Christ (Ro 8.30).

Paul’s cry at the end of Romans 7, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (7:24), is followed by a cry of joy, “And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father’” (8:15). The God who was known through the law previously (Ro 7) is “Abba” in the recapitulated relationship. This difference is wrought through “The Spirit himself” who “testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children” (8:15). Christ, as the firstborn son of this new family (8:29), provides the perspective of the successful outcome of a justification or righteousness already received. There is a recapitulation of relationship.

Recapitulation as Salvation

In recapitulation there is a positive repetition with a difference, and this allows for “following Christ”, or putting on Christ or being imitators of Christ. Repetition and imitation (as in Girard), may describe the seat of neurosis and violence, but in Christ imitation does not give rise to mimetic rivalry, and repetition is not focused on an object but on a person. The root cause of sin is addressed in the very term of salvation (recapitulation displaces repetition).

Recapitulation (anakephalaiōsasthai) is to change the head (kephalé), to sum up, synthesize, so as not simply to repeat but repeat with a different outcome.[6] The root word occurs in describing the summing up of the law in love (Mark 12:31), and those united under his headship are united with him in this loving recapitulation. Resolution to the alienation of the Subject of the law is to become a child of God. Where the sinful mind is “hostile to God” and cannot even recognize God, the one adopted as a child by the Spirit has overcome this hostility enacted against the law (Ro 8:7). As in Ezekiel’s prophecy, the heart of stone will be replaced with a heart of flesh and God’s Spirit will indwell his people and enable them to keep the law (Ezek. 36:26-27). Those who miss the summing up of love in Christ, get stuck on the letter, pitted against love.

Though fully human, Christ is obedient unto death, without sin, and with this comes peaceableness, love, non-violence, and a new ordering of the human psyche. To say he died for your sins, may miss that he lived and died to defeat evil, recapitulating human life so as to break the bondage of the law of sin and death. Christ incarnates a new form of human experience, and in being adopted into his family or joined to him, Christians enter into this alternative human experience.

[1] Theological dictionary of the New Testament Vol. 3, 1964- (G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley and G. Friedrich, ed.), 951 – 2.

[2] Ecrits: Selection, 65.

[3] Where Freud grounded the compulsion to repeat in a biological need to return to the stable material realm, Lacan explains the compulsion as arising from dissonance between the two registers (the imaginary and the symbolic). The image or ego is a visual static image, and the symbolic (the repeated “I”) is the means of establishing it.

[4] Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI , 34.

[5] Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom , 56.

[6] David T. Williams describes the various word studies of recapitulation in “Another look at recapitulation,” Pharos Journal of Theology (ISSN 2414-3324 online Volume 101 – (2020) Copyright: ©2020 Open Access/Author/s – Online @ http//: www.pharosjot.com) 3.

Paul with Kant, Sade and Lacan, on the Source of Evil

Paul warns in 2 Corinthians that “scripture slays” (2 Cor. 3:6) in that it is not grounded in Spirit. This could be stated as the law, the symbolic order, principle, letter, or language, slays if it is taken as an end in itself. The problem Paul is addressing is the relationship between the written word, whether in the form of letters of recommendation, the Scriptures, or Torah, and the reality of embodied humans. Paul does not need letters written with ink, as he has the Corinthian believers as living letters bearing the living Word in their heart. Words or laws inscribed on stone, even if put there by the finger of God, by angels, or by the highest law giver, cannot possibly compare to the Spirit of the living God written on the heart. The former is a “ministry of death” in that it does not pertain to flesh and blood and spiritual reality. Paul refers to it as a “ministry of condemnation” or a “ministry of death” which is “from death to death” in that it is a fading reality which “veils” its own transitory nature. This ministry of death obscures or veils its own reality but it also veils the truth or the true glory which comes from the Spirit.

The thinker who unwittingly stumbled over Paul’s equation of death, emptiness and deception, with the law, was Immanuel Kant. Kant arrives at what he calls “the supreme principle of morality”[1] which he captures in his categorical imperative: “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”[2] The beauty of the Kantian maxim, in his own estimate, is that it does not depend upon anything residing outside of the maxim or outside of the rational will of the one following the maxim. Kant equates the will, not with “a presupposed condition” or “any inclination” but he connects this maxim directly and only with the power of the will.[3] The problem Kant stumbles upon, is that if his maxim is completely enclosed in the will, then there is no determinate content to it, and it may give rise, not to the supreme principle of morality, but to what Kant calls radical evil. This radical evil, like its counterpart in the good, is completely enclosed in human will. “So we can call this a natural propensity to evil, and because we must always accept the guilt for it we can call it a radical innate evil in human nature, though one we have brought upon ourselves.”[4]

This radical evil is a necessary possible result of Kant’s anthropology as reason and freedom are not dependent upon anything outside of the self: “Now the human being actually finds in himself a faculty through which he distinguishes himself from all other things, and even from himself insofar as he is affected by objects, and this is reason.”[5] The faculty of reason provides simultaneous access to absolute freedom and to the choice of evil, for no reason (outside of the will). As Alenka Zupančič explains: “Evil, radical evil, is something that can be defined only in paradoxical terms as the ‘free choice of unfreedom’. In other words, here, too, a genuine negation of freedom proves impossible. The subject is free whether she wants to be or not; she is free in both freedom and unfreedom; she is free in good and in evil; she is free even where she follows nothing but the trajectory of natural necessity.”[6] Reason, the law, the categorical imperative, all arrive at a pure form or pure idea, which does not depend upon anything but itself.

Paul exposes the inherent fault or evil in this orientation to the law, locating it in the drive or desire which stands behind it. As he describes in Romans 7:7, the law gives rise to desire or covetousness: for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, ‘YOU SHALL NOT COVET’” (Rom. 7:7). In Paul’s description, the law generates the desire it forbids.

The Freudian explanation or the ‘Freudian blow’ to philosophical ethics, which accords with Paul’s description, is that “what philosophy calls the moral law – and, more precisely, what Kant calls the categorical imperative – is in fact nothing other than the superego.”[7] The superego is not God, the will, or a rational moral imperative, but is the individual’s attempt to be a law unto themself. Rather than the law being inscribed on the heart, the transgressor of the law, would inscribe themselves into the position of the law, thus obtaining what the law obstructs or forbids. In his drive to freedom (from the law of the father) he enslaves himself to this law (the law of the father or superego taken up into his own identity). The moral imperative, as Freud recognized, is a “moral masochism” in which the individual subjects himself to his own “cathected” father image – which gives rise to the worst forms of evil.

The superego serves in place of the law, and proves itself in relation to the ego. Thus, Freud pictures the superego as the seat or medium of the death drive; the law or the letter kills in giving rise to a dynamic of death. As Zupančič describes, “In so far as it has its origins in the constitution of the superego, ethics becomes nothing more than a convenient tool for any ideology which may try to pass off its own commandments as the truly authentic, spontaneous and ‘honourable’ inclinations of the subject.”[8] The superego is, in Freudian terms, the attempt to be one’s own father. In Pauline terms, this orientation to the law is a displacement of the true Father.

Interestingly, Kant’s critique of the biblical notion of evil aligns with Paul’s universalizing of the problem of the law. This is not simply a historical problem which humanity inherited from its progenitors, but is the problem which every individual faces. The problem of evil is not a historical but a logical problem, though Genesis seems to present the problem as one residing at the beginning of history. For Kant, evil presents itself as part of his understanding of freedom. “The propensity to birth evil is not only the formal ground of all unlawful action, but is also itself an act (of freedom).”[9] Kant posits an original freedom at the heart of every human, but if the original innocent pair were irresistibly seduced or tricked, then this is not true freedom. For God to punish what they could not and did not have the power to resist means God is unfair.

According to Kant, humans are not subject to determinations beyond their control, yet they do evil, which demands an explanation. “Kant’s solution to this problem is that one has to recognize the propensity to evil in the very subjective ground of freedom. This ground itself has to be considered as an act of freedom [Aktus der Freiheit]. In this inaugural act, I can choose myself as evil.”[10] There is the possibility, in Kant’s own estimate, that the categorical imperative may be grounded in a perverse will, in which the service of the seeming good is actually pure evil: “It may also be called the perversity [perversitas] of the human heart, for it reverses the ethical order [of priority] among the incentives of a free will; and although conduct which is lawfully good (i.e. legal) may be found with it, yet the cast of mind is thereby corrupted at its root (so far as the moral disposition is concerned), and the man is hence designated as evil.”[11] But by Kant’s own criteria, it is not clear how the individual might sort out radical evil and the good.

Jacques Lacan adds a problematic layer onto this Kantian/Freudian dilemma, with his own categorical imperative: “Don’t compromise, don’t give way on your desire as it is fidelity to one’s desire itself that is elevated to the level of ethical duty.”[12] As Dylan Evan’s notes, “The very centre of Lacan’s thought … is the concept of desire.” Lacan argues that “desire is the essence of man” (Seminar XI, 275), and the goal of therapy is to articulate and recognize the nature of desire (Seminar I,183). Lacan’s three registers (the real, the symbolic and the imaginary) intersect with and emerge from his symbol for desire – objet petit a (Seminar XX, 87) and the conscious and unconscious dialectic occurs in and around the medium of desire (Seminar II, 228).[13] Lacan links desire with the life force and “the moral law, looked at more closely, is simply desire in its pure state.”[14] To give way on desire is to give up on life and subjectivity as the structure and dynamic which gives rise to the desire for the self is precisely the dynamic necessary for subjectivity to occur. The impossibility of desire is the necessary structuring principle against which desire (jouissance) forms.

Likewise, in Žižek’s understanding, apart from desire for self or the compulsion to obtain the self there is no self. He uses Paul’s terms for sin to describe the rise of the Subject. The “hermeneutical” procedure of isolating the letter of the law creates a frontier or “coast-like” condition between the real (with the obscene superego) and the symbolic and out of this tension jouissance or forbidden desire arises. The letter and jouissance describe the form and substance of life under the compulsion to repeat – the letter being that which “returns and repeats itself” in the life force of desire.[15] The problem is now double layered, in that the moral law, the will, duty, or reason, taken as an end in and of themselves, are without any recourse to circumstance – the world. In turn, Lacan’s jouissance (or evil desire) is indistinguishable from that desire necessary for life.

We are surrounded by examples of those who perform the most evil deeds, due to their form of the categorical imperative. Paul counts himself blameless in regard to the law as a Pharisee, and for the same reason he persecuted and killed Christians, and thus considers himself the chief of sinners. Adolph Eichmann appeals to the Kantian categorical imperative (doing his duty, obeying the law) while on trial in Jerusalem, as reason enough for killing Jews. The Marquis de Sade appeals to the categorical imperative as a call to universal sadism – each one is duty bound to pleasure himself through his neighbor. He has one of his novelistic characters propose as his maxim to murder anyone who gets in his way: “With regard to the crime of destroying one’s fellow, be persuaded it is purely hallucinatory; man has not been accorded the power to destroy; he has at best the capacity to alter forms . . . what difference does it make to her creative hand if this mass of flesh today is reproduced tomorrow in the guise of a handful of centipedes.” This is the law of universal metamorphosis, and murder is simply part of this universal principle.

Both Kant and Sade need an eternity to pose the possibility that the highest good (the holy will, or the diabolical will), though not now attainable, might be attained in an eternal future. In Sade, this clearly translates into the worst form of evil (eternal sado-masochistic torture chambers), but the point is Kant is aligned with Sade in putting into place the machine of compulsive repetition. Desire, the good will, the categorical imperative must be pursued and it must be pursued endlessly into eternity. “This then necessarily leads to the exclusion of (the possibility of) this object (the highest good or ‘diabolical evil’), an exclusion which, in turn, supports the fantasy of its realization (the immortality of the soul).”[16] The categorical imperative requires a bad infinity (no longer simply desire but drive), giving rise to the depth of the human sickness, the compulsion to repeat. Here we no longer have to do with life, but the pure form of the death drive. Kant cannot imagine that someone would want their own destruction, but Lacan pictures this, not as an extreme, but the human situation; “on a certain level every subject, average as he may be, wants his destruction, whether he wants it or not.”[17]

My point is not to refute either Sade or Kant, but to indicate how the worst forms of evil might be associated with the law. To call this “radical evil” is obviously as mistaken as to imagine that there is a highest moral principle obtainable through the will. Both are mistaken, but the lie of this mistake is the universal deception which Paul equates with the sinful orientation to law.

[1] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Edited and translated by Allen W. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 8 (Ak 4:392).

[2] Ibid, 38 (Ak 4:421).

[3] Ibid, 38 (Ak 4:420).

[4] Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (Jonathan Bennett, 2017 )15. https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/kant1793.pdf

[5] Metaphysics of Morals, 68 (Ak 4:452).

[6] Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (New York: Verso, 2000) 39.

[7] Ibid, 1.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, 88.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, 25. Cited in Zupančič, 89.

[12] Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999) 153.

[13] Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996) 36.

[14] Zupančič, 2.

[15] Evans, 100.

[16] Zupančič, 100.

[17] Ibid.

The Uses of Language: Julia Kristeva and Kenotic Love

Language is the medium in which we live and move, and what we make of or do with language, is determinative of the reality in which we live. In this post-theological age, it may not occur to us to consider that we have an orientation toward or within language. Psychoanalysis, or the talking cure (as Freud described it) is nearly the last realm in which what we do with words, linguistic exchange (even in dreams), how we linguistically constitute ourselves towards others and ourselves (transference and countertransference), is an object of study.

Psychologists have noted that young children pass through a fundamental depression just prior to acquisition of language. Julia Kristeva describes the passage into language as an abandonment by the mother or the narcissistic paradise in which all needs are met, and entry into the symbolic world of the father. “The child must abandon its mother and be abandoned by her in order to be accepted by the father and begin talking … [L]anguage begins in mourning …”[1] Both death and abandonment and the establishment of the self are implicated in language acquisition.

In the description of G. W. F. Hegel, language brings simultaneous awareness of death and its refusal. As he describes, inasmuch as he is speaking and mortal, man is, the negative being who “is that which he is not and not that which he is.”[2] The “faculty” for language and the “faculty” for death arise together, but of course the peculiar faculty for life, at least in the Christian understanding is interwoven with this “faculty” of death and language. Which is to say, this focus and enquiry into language is first and properly the domain of theology.

As Kristeva describes, the work of the cross is to address us at this most basic and deep psychological level: “The ‘scandal of the cross’, the logos or language of the cross … is embodied, I think not only in the psychic and physical suffering which irrigates our lives … but even more profoundly in the essential alienation that conditions our access to language, in the mourning that accompanies the dawn of psychic life. By the quirks of biology and family life we are all of us melancholy mourners, witnesses to the death that marks our psychic inception.”[3] Yet it is through this passage, from out of blissful narcissism, that we discover the other. We form connections, not simply warm support in an extension of the life in the womb, but the possibility of love and hate, life and death, self and other, through entry into language. Kristeva depicts this slightly hellish condition as precisely the place in which Christ meets us: “Christ abandoned, Christ in hell, is of course the sign that God shares the condition of the sinner. But He also tells the story of that necessary melancholy beyond which we humans may just possibly discover the other, now in the symbolic interlocutor rather than the nutritive breast.”[4] Language is for finding the other, for recognizing and negotiating mortality, and yet it can also be deployed as a refusal of this reality.

The matrix of language can be made to constitute its own reality, and can act as an obstacle rather than a bridge. In this understanding, attaching ourselves to the law, the immovable symbolic order, is simultaneously a means of inscribing ourselves into stone (becoming immortal) but the stone is an epitaph. Meaning attached to language per se, to the occurring of the sign, mistakes the letter of the law for its meaning. Kristeva raises the example of Chinese reification of the word: “In classical Chinese (for example, the I Ching), ‘to believe’ and ‘to be worthy of faith’ are expressed by the word xin, where the ideogram contains the signs for man and speech. Does ‘to believe’ therefore mean ‘to let speech act?’”[5] In the case of Japanese, being a speaker of the language conveys the spirit of Japanese identity. Much like the Jew, marked by Hebrew speaking and law-keeping, attachment to the sign conveys an immovable essence, which Paul characterizes as deadly. The reification of the word seems to be the universal tendency.

The philosopher often uses words much like the mathematician employs numbers, as a coherent symbol system which is or produces truth. In this understanding, language works within a closed system, in which words and symbols constitute their own reality. Thinking is being, as the thought contains the essence of reality. Rather than language leading from death to resurrection, we can be haunted by negativity, rejection, castration, death drive. In the language of the Apostle Paul, we can be caught between wanting and doing, between the law of the mind and the law of the body, and we can find ourselves overwhelmed with the ego, that ungraspable “I” in the mirror. The ego cogito is ever allusive, and yet pursuit of the ego poses as salvation.

To pass from death to resurrection requires a relinquishing of the ego. What Paul describes as kenotic self-giving love, is a relinquishment of stasis, being, and position, so as to reach out to and exist with and in the other. This kenotic lover does not insist upon his status or position in the symbolic order. This deadly attachment to law, is a futile attempt to have existence within the self – to establish the self-image as distinct from and not subject to the other. The ego is preserved at the cost of love. In the description of Graham Ward:

To be redemptive, to participate in the economy of redemption opened and perfected by Christ the form of God’s glory, our making cannot be in our name. Our making cannot, like the builders of the Tower of Babel, make a name for ourselves. Our making cannot reify our own autonomy. Such making is only death and idolatry. Our making must be in and through an abandonment to an operation that will instigate the crisis of our representations. Our making has to experience its Passion, its descent into the silent hiatus.[6]

The recognition of mortality, forsakenness, alienation, is the first step toward life. According to Kristeva, “It is because I am separate, forsaken, alone vis-àvis the other that I can psychologically cross the divide that is the condition of my existence and achieve not only ecstasy in completion (complétude: reunion with the father, himself a symbolic substitute for the mother) but also eternal life (resurrection) in the imagination.”[7] She is specifically thinking of life in Christ as completing the journey to love. ”For the Christian believer the completion of faith is real completion, and Christ, with whom the believer is exhorted to identify, expiates in human form the sin of all mankind before achieving glory in resurrection.”[8] The passage through death with Christ enables, through tarrying with the negative, kenotic love.

As Slavoj Žižek explains I Corinthians 13, this love necessitates self-emptying:

the point of the claim that even if I were to possess all knowledge, without love I would be nothing, is not simply that with love I am ‘something’ – in love, I am also nothing but, as it were, a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing paradoxically made rich through the very awareness of its lack. Only a lacking, vulnerable being is capable of love: the ultimate mystery of love is therefore that incompleteness is in a way higher than completion. On the one hand, only an imperfect, lacking being loves: we love because we do not know all. On the other hand, even if we were to know everything, love would inexplicably still be higher than completed knowledge.[9]

Žižek’s negation rests upon an atheistic reading of Hegel, but the Christian Hegel sees negation, not as an end in itself, but as the merging of the infinite and finite. The infinite negates itself and so arises in the finite and the finite negates itself and this is realization of the infinite.[10] 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.”[11] In Kenotic love God incorporates the finite. God in Christ emptied himself, not of deity, but of the presumption of infinity. “He existed in the form of God, [but] did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men” (Php. 2:5–7). Paul is recommending Christ as the model for the Christian, who obviously cannot empty themselves of deity, but they can “have this attitude” of self-sacrificial giving. They can “hold fast to the word of life” (Php. 2:16) in taking up this self-emptying Word.

Language is made for love, for connection to the other, such that all true dialogue is an act of love. Speaking as a reaching for the other is a relinquishment of the isolated ego. All true discourse is an act of love. According to Kristeva, “The speaking subject is a loving subject.”[12] But at the same time, “Love is a death sentence which causes me to be.”[13] As Ward explains, “All representation is a kenotic act of love towards the other; all representation involves transference – being caught up in the economy of giving signs.”[14] We gain access to both God and the neighbor through transferential (mutually indwelling) discourse of the kenotic Word. The task of theology, the work of the Christian, is to recognize how it is that the language of Christianity shapes us according to a different order of desire – (as Hans Frei describes) the unique “cultural linguistics of the Christian religion.”[15] In the vivid explanation of Ward:

As such, Christian theology is not secondary but participatory, a sacramental operation. It is a body of work at play within the language of the Christian community. Our physical bodies are mediated to us through our relation to other physical bodies and the mediation of those relationships through the body of the signs. Thus we are mapped onto a social and political body. The meaning of these signs is mediated to us through the body of Christ, eucharistic and ecclesial, so that we are incorporated into that spiritual body. Transcorporality is the hallmark of a theological anthropology. [16]

The deep grammar of the body of Christ inducts into an alternative linguistic community, in which lack and negation become the opening to love and entry into the corporate body of Christ, sharing a body, indwelling one another, through the “transcorporality” of Christ.

[1] Julia Kristeva, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Colum[1]bia University Press, 1988) pp. 40. Cited in Graham Ward, Christ and Culture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 207.

[2] According to Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, Translated by Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) xii.

[3] Kristeva, 41.

[4] Kristeva, 41.

[5] Kristeva, 35

[6] Ward, 215.

[7] Kristeve, 35.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute — Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London/New York, Verso 2000) 147. Cited in Ward, 264.

[10] This is the argument of William Goggin, Hegel’s Sacrificial Imagination, (University of Chicago, PhD. Thesis, 2019), 12.

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

[12] Kristeva, 170.

[13] Kristeva, 36, Cited in Ward, 212.

[14] Ward, 212.

[15] Types of Christian Theology (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 20. Cited in Ward, 217.

[16] Ward, 217-218.