Nathan Schneider has an excellent review of Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Religion, and David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies over at The American Prospect. For the record, I certainly wouldn’t deny that the Christian tradition has a lot of emancipatory potential within it. I don’t think Zizek and Badiou have been misguided in their appropriations of Paul, though I do think they are wrong in their dismissals of Jesus. One question here might be how we are to account for the curious dialectical inversion whereby something that does have so much potential somehow so often gets converted into its opposite, becoming a force of hate and an apology for some of the most repressive forces in our society. As I’ve often joked, Christianity is the greatest of conspiracies against Christ.
In this connection, many religious formations often strike me as being similar to psychodynamic processes Freud describes in his analysis of screen-memories. Freud theorized that screen-memories were a defense formation against some sort of trauma. For example, upon seeing a vagina for the first time the child might be filled with dread at the prospect of castration. Rather than remember what he saw, the child instead potently remembers, say, the flower print of his mother’s dress or develops a fetish for shoes. A recent book by Zizek and John Milbank is entitled The Monstrosity of Christ, and there does indeed seem to be something “monstrous” or sublime about Christ in the positive sense of the term. When I look at the tradition of Christianity, much of it often looks to me like a screen-memory designed to defend against this sublime monstrosity. For example, you get the fetishization of Christ’s death— so well illustrated in Gibson’s Passion of the Christ –such that his life and teaching is effectively erased or rendered invisible. Here we might also reference Joyce’s boyhood experience of the Catholic church as chronicled in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. What is it that is so sublime and monstrous about the figure of Christ? Certainly, like Socrates, part of this sublimity lies in his death. However, I think that Christ’s teaching is even more traumatic or Real in the proper Lacanian sense.
read on!
Were we to make like Thomas Jefferson and cut out all of Scripture and simply reduce Christianity to Christ’s life, death, parables, and teaching, such a teaching would require a total transformation of both ourselves and our entire social structure. It would require a form of social organization that was beyond any tribal identifications or names such as “Christian”, “Jew”, “Muslim”, “American”, “European”, etc., a form of social organization beyond the Law or the systems of mores and customs (sittlichkeit) that function as the condition for tribal membership, a form of social organization that would require a devaluation of kinship relations, and a form of social organization premised on the aleatory nature of encounters and what that encounter calls for in the contingency of that encounter (a sort of kairotic ethos) rather than abstract and universal moral laws. All of those activities through which we try to achieve prestige and superiority over others, such as praying in public or pride in our nation, would have to be thrown by the wayside as we would have to live in a way that is perpetually other oriented. Like the Lacanian analyst that “plays dead”, setting his own singular desire to the side so that the analysand’s desire might come to the fore and be discovered for that analysand, the *#*#*#-ian would have to “play dead”, setting aside his singular desire so as to have a desire, not unlike that described by the Buddhists, for absolute difference. As Lacan puts it at the end of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis,
The analyst’s desire is not a pure desire. It is a desire to obtain absolute difference, a desire which intervenes when, confronted with the primary signifier, the subject is, for the first time, in a position to subject himself to it. There only may the signification of a limitless love emerge, because it is outside the limits of the law, where alone it may live. (276)
In short, the social and political vision Christ seemed to envision was that of a form of social life beyond the Lacanian dimension of the Imaginary. The “Imaginary” here does not signify the “illusory” or “imagination”, but rather is the domain of “…wholeness, synthesis, autonomy, duality, and above all, similarity” (Dylan Evans 1996, 82). The Imaginary is the domain of self-identity, of being identical to oneself, and of social relations based on similarity. Moreover, it is the domain where we take ourselves to be masters of what we say, where we think of meaning as being defined by our intentions (psychoanalytic practice being premised on the thesis that our words and actions always say more than we intend and that meaning is bestowed by the Other, not our intentions). Lacan associates the domain of the Imaginary with that of narcissism insofar as the Ego or self-identity is produced through narcissistic identification. Most importantly, it is a realm characterized by rivalry and aggression, insofar as we see our mirror counter-parts as contesting our own identity and therefore threatening or sense of wholeness and completeness or our belief that we are master’s of ourselves and of meaning. Whenever you protest to another “but that’s not what I meant, you’re twisting my words!” you are thoroughly immersed in the domain of the imaginary.
Throughout all of his teaching and more importantly his practice, Christ can be seen as challenging this dimension of the Imaginary. He contests the domain of imaginary identification with the Other in proclaiming that “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). As Levi-Strauss demonstrated, the incest prohibition and the structure of kinship relations is a matter of the symbolic and symbolic identifications, not a matter of the danger of producing five headed children. In contesting kinship relations the point isn’t that we should follow Jesus and God above all others, but that in the name of this new community we should undergo a subjective destitution where we refuse our Imaginary tribal identifications in the symbolic order. Kinship structures are organized around the dialectic of sameness and difference, the same and the other, such that they are designed to maintain the identity of the One or the Same against the other. This new community would therefore be a strange sort of community that was not an identity or a community at all, that did not name itself or differentiate itself against an other, and that did not require obedience to a particular set of customs or beliefs in order to belong. It would be a set-theoretical community rather than a class-theoretical community. We can also see traces of the vision of this sort of community in the people with whom Jesus congregated (disrespected Samaritans, thieves, beggars, tax collectors, lepers, and prostitutes… the lowest of the low and the marginalized) and those whom he denounced like the highly respected and self-righteous Pharisees. It can be seen in how he throws the law to the side, reducing it to the love of God and of one’s neighbor, but also in all the practices he proposed to minimize conflict and antagonism: not praying in public, not judging others, turning the other cheek, etc.
There is something monstrous and sublime in such a set of ethical and political proposals, and it thus comes as no surprise that all of this tends to get screened out, defended against, through a focus on his death, superstition, and Old Testament law. Nor does it come as a surprise that the proposal of a set-theoretical community without a name or identity has become inverted into its opposite: a community hyper-vigilant about maintaining the boundaries of its identity and defending against the Other.
Larval Subjects . 
May 6, 2009 at 1:20 am
That passage out of Seminar X stuck out for me when I first read it a few years ago. Interesting connection to “the buddhists” too.
May 6, 2009 at 2:12 am
Glad you appreciated my review. What troubled me most about Eagleton’s approach (though initially I was highly receptive to it) was the sense in which he hoped to mobilize Christ for a political aim. Certainly the politics of Christianity cannot be evaded, but what I would hate to see eviscerated is the anti-political element of it all—precisely related to the monstrosity that you focus on here. Going back to Augustine at least, the Christian “imaginary”—and I do suspect there is one, in the “Kingdom” Jesus spoke of—is one never to be realized in politics, or at least never yet. It is something else, it yearns for something else.
As a result, Eagleton’s effort to offer Christianity as a political regime, while it may have some benefits like honor for the poor and brotherly love, is missing something quite central.
The text that drives a lot of my thinking on this issue is Philip Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Against those who would wish to marshal religious legacies in the service of therapy, he insists that the transcendent is not to be possessed, it possesses us.
May 6, 2009 at 1:45 pm
dr sinthome, this post is going somewhere. i think the fall of the Father or the ”dekline of simbolik efikasy” did not cause problems because having his authority is necessarily the best social solution for us, or something natural. Rather, I think what caused the damage was the fear and terror people experienced at the realization that their therapeutic support had been removed, as if one tried to perform subjective destitution prematurely. This enormous rightist fundamentalist reaction does seem sort of hysteric that way. I find Western feminism endlessly stupid because it doesn’t recognize the importance of this illusion in patriarchal societies: not the ”real” power of the father, which nobody even believes is real, and women clearly run the show, but the illusion of his omnipotence, and his protection. I think it is very traumatic for this illusion to be removed in a certain age period when one is not ready to hear the truth that the father doesn’t really exist.
May 6, 2009 at 2:15 pm
and Zizolina wrote about this already – in the Puppet and the Dwarf – but I’m not buying her dialectic explanation (like, Christianity’s prohibitions are a subversive ”wink” whose flip side is actually endless tolerance, like the plot of some cheap porno movie from the 1950s, et cetera; I think he used the sentimental Italian movie LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL to illustrate) Rather, I think this illusion of the father’s omnipotence operates simultaneously and parallel to a cognizance or at least suspicion of his impotence, and is better explained using one of your modern object-oriented networking models, dr. Sinthome. I was recently meditating on why, despite the obvious fact that linear narratives have long ago collapsed, we keep watching them, in Hollywood movies for example, and that’s a very similar situation: the linear narrative is still there, right in front of your nose, and you KNOW that it’s fake and bullshit and all, but you keep watching. There’s no ”flip side” to it.
May 6, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Levi, what a beautiful description!
Re: Nathan-
Another sense in which Jesus was a-political is that the Kingdom of Heaven is already at hand. There are of course contradictory strands about this in the scripture, but there is a strand which supports the view that being in heaven is just a state of grace that exists here and now (Saint Paul actually says some among us are in that state now). This too is a monstrous thought.
For Nietzsche, organized Christianity is nihilistic because it sees the meaning of this life in the next. And life is so terrible that people will always need the illusion that an individual ego could be preserved for eternity and somehow set right as a part of that. But then you get the idea that some people will not get this. And that is very seductive. Again, Nietzsche is good here in his citation of Tertullian saying that there will be windows in Heaven so that the pleasure of the saved will be enhanced by watching the tortures of the damned.
The historical Christ I think combined Cynicism (he grew up within one day’s walk of an important center of Cynic philosophy, and he lived near twenty Greek communities) with the Jewish idea that the universe gives a crap about you and also the (more Stoic) concept of a universal family. It’s really a fantastic synthesis. It is the latter idea of a universal family that made organized Christianity necessary for a new Roman cosmopolitan ethos. The city state and priest state had been crushed and people needed something new to tie together a cultural identity. Rome just would not have worked if members of different ethnicities refused to eat with one another. But a big part of early Christian practice was just doing so.
But the cynic individual ethical revolt is always still a part of it, I think the core of how it manages to resist anti-Christian political appropriation.
Interestingly, the gospels themselves were Ur texts of various “Jesus communities” who withdrew like the cynics, but did so in communal ways (which was unprecedented). It really is quite remarkable how that spread.
This is all really difficult though, because Levi is also correct that the monstrous ethical vision is political in a way. Assuming basic rationality, informedness, and goodwill, you can’t really hold that all humans are brothers and sisters and support Apartheid. Martin Luther King I think made a bet on this (and people’s goodwill) and won.
May 7, 2009 at 12:59 am
[…] between fish’s review of terry eagleton’s ‘Reason, Faith and Revolution’ , larval subject’s discussion thereof yesterday and today, not to mention The Politics of Love, (with Hardt, Zizek, Westphal, […]
May 7, 2009 at 3:00 am
Levi: “Throughout all of his teaching and more importantly his practice, Christ can be seen as challenging this dimension of the Imaginary. He contests the domain of imaginary identification with the Other in proclaiming that “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).”
Kvond: I wonder if this is so, or if this is selective quotation (a favorite of users of the Bible). When Jesus crystalizes the Law:
“One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” (NIV, Mark 12:28-31).
are these not primarily an imaginary identifications? Two great projections? Hating your mother and father really is not essential to Jesus’s message. Perhaps you can clarify. If anything his message and practice seem to be focused on maximizing imaginary identification.
May 7, 2009 at 3:03 am
That’s a good question, Kevin. I don’t profess to be a Biblical scholar or a scholar of the Gospels and I certainly admit that I have my own version of “radical Jesus” or how this particular figure speaks to and evokes me.
May 7, 2009 at 3:04 am
Personally I think Scripture is a bit of a rorschach, why not make alternatives available?
May 7, 2009 at 3:15 am
If its rorschach I would have to ask do you withdraw your thought: “Throughout all of his teaching and more importantly his practice, Christ can be seen as challenging this dimension of the Imaginary”. I mean, you are making a specific claim about a teaching and a practice, and you are citing words to support your view.
If we are going to provide alternatives, don’t we have to examine the evidence? Or is it, “I see a butterfly” and “I see five people playing cards”?
I’m not being flippant about this, for how we characterize “all of his teachings and his practice” gives strong critical positioning against how others do.
If Jesus was not about challenging the dimension of imaginary identification that you characterize in Lacanian fashion:
“Lacan associates the domain of the Imaginary with that of narcissism insofar as the Ego or self-identity is produced through narcissistic identification. Most importantly, it is a realm characterized by rivalry and aggression, insofar as we see our mirror counter-parts as contesting our own identity and therefore threatening or sense of wholeness and completeness or our belief that we are master’s of ourselves and of meaning.
Would not the parable of Good Samaritan engage directly, but imaginatively, with these notions of identity? Is not his dissolution of “the law” into two vast identifications (God/neighbor) the imaginary resolution of the challenge to the “wholeness and completeness of our belief that we are master’s of ourselves and meaning”?
May 7, 2009 at 3:56 am
Why is that interpretation any less valid than an interpretation that privileges one particular line in Leviticus or Revelation?
May 7, 2009 at 4:00 am
Or to put it bluntly, you’re not going to get me to give up my reading so let it go.
May 7, 2009 at 4:01 am
When you reduce “all teaching…and practice” to a single quoted line, perhaps this should have some correspondence to the kinds of reductions that Jesus himself made, when making reductions.
To put it to the extreme, if Jesus says, “I reduce all law to x” quoting some other passage and saying “Jesus reduces everything to y” is in need of strong textual support.
If you are saying that you are simply making up your interpretation, I would perhaps agree (barring further support), but you seem to be claiming something more. You are attempting to characterize a very important conceptual and historical time in history.
May 7, 2009 at 4:02 am
Oh geez. Don’t even start.
May 7, 2009 at 4:03 am
Don’t start questioning you as to whether your interpretation of the core of Jesus’s teaching and practice is correct or not?
Hmmmm.
May 7, 2009 at 4:04 am
Levi: “Or to put it bluntly, you’re not going to get me to give up my reading so let it go.”
Kvond: Sorry, I did not see this. I leave you with your expertise on Jesus. Cheers.
May 7, 2009 at 4:07 am
Given that there are a million and n + 1 interpretations of scripture, I’m not even sure where we’d begin with such a discussion. What even establishes that the passage you give is his real word? Therein lies the problem with revelation.
May 7, 2009 at 4:21 am
Hmmm. There are a million and n + 1 interpretations of Spinoza, but that doesn’t keep me from arguing about which is the corrrect or most productive one. There are countless interpretations of Plato, but….
well you get the point. If you want to make up interpretations go ahead. What is at stake is not the “revelation” of his words and actions (whether they are divine), but what they meant, or were intended to mean.
Best of luck.
May 7, 2009 at 4:25 am
I think the difference is that Spinoza is about reason and can be evaluated in those terms.
May 7, 2009 at 4:32 am
Obviously your claim about the core of Jesus’s teachings appealed to “reason” and cited evidence. In fact, Spinoza himself seemed to be quite fond of Jesus’s teachings, as they were. Again, if you want to just make things up, I’m not sure on what level you have authentic claims against those you attempt to disagree with.
May 7, 2009 at 4:35 am
What’s the bug up your ass? My interpretation is based on how he lived his life, various quoted claims, the Sermon on the Mount, etc. No interpretation is perfect, but that’s the one I advocate. You’re premising your counter-argument on a single reference to Israel. That’s fairly weak.
May 7, 2009 at 10:15 am
I’m with larvalsubjects on this one.
It’s a lot easier to know about the historical Spinoza or Caesar or Socrates than about the historical Jesus, just because that whole part of the world was set on fire in the AD 60s. None of the extant Gospels date before the Judean revolt, and some people (a minority, though it could be the case that religious belief has blinded the scholarship of the majority) argue that they are actually hundreds of years older, given the lack of early secondary discussions of the gospels.
The oldest manuscript of Jesus’ words is probably one that doesn’t now exist, the Q gospel which scholars have pieced together as a source by looking at the material that is word-for-word identical in Mathew and Luke. And something like Q (and unlike the Gospel of Mark) is discussed by Pappias and attributed to Mark in 150 AD, which is one of the earliest mentions of such texts.
Weirdly, Q makes no mention of anything relating to Jesus’ life. No virgin birth, no crucifixion, and none of the Greek resurrection mythology. It’s just a set of really striking sayings, many of the ones larvalsubjects indicated in his post.
Wikipedia has a nice set of links to the main things contained in Q:
* The Beatitudes (The Sermon on the Mount)
* Love your enemies
* The Golden Rule
* Judge not, lest ye be judged
* The Test of a Good Person
* The Parable of the Wise and the Foolish Builders
* The Parable of the Lost Sheep
* The Parable of the Wedding Feast
* The Parable of the Talents
* The Parable of the Leaven
* The Parable of the blind leading the blind
* The Lord’s Prayer
* Expounding of the Law
* The Birds of Heaven and The Lilies in the Field
You can follow the links to all these in the Wikipedia article. As far as books on Q, Burton Mack’s is excellent. Some Christian scholars don’t like Mack because he a makes a very plausible thematic connection between Q and the Cynic philosophy discussed in Galilee during Jesus’ life.
Anyhow, given this content and the fact that Q is arguably the closest we are going to get to the historical Jesus, I think that larvalsubjects’ account of the monstrous content of Christian thinking does get to a heart of the matter.
May 7, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Hmmmmm. Nice.
I have not seen reference to various quoted claims, or the Sermon on the mount in your claim that Jesus’s teachings are against the “Imaginary” identification. In fact I saw only one quote.
I did not refer to Israel, I referred to Jesus’s answering of the challenge what was the most important commandment.
When asked what support you had for your interpretation, you brought up ridiculous argumentative points referring to how people see all kinds of things in ink blots (apparently a cue to how you think text should be interpreted), and how fundamentalists interpret Revelations. In this you are engaging in the very worst kinds of explanation. What I was after was your reasoning, why you claimed that the teachings were such and such. And all I got was some kind of weird dogma of personal freedom, “I can see Jesus anyway I want”. Well, of course you can see Jesus anyway you want, but if you want to post the opinion in a public domain and have others respond to it, expect questions.
May 7, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Kevin,
I did not base my interpretation on a “single quote”. I referred to that quotation, Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan and his constant references to the Pharisees, the commandment to love your neighbor (which I would translate as “stranger”), his relationship to the marginalized, the bits about not praying in public, turning the other cheek, etc. The reference to the Samaritans and the Pharisees are especially important in this connection as the former were largely excluded from the Jewish power structure and despised much like immigrants in the United States while the latter were at the heart of this power structure. In addition to this, one could add the release of the “holy spirit” and people speaking in tongues, where the latter phenomenon should, in my view, be read in terms of the collapse of the tower of Babel and the dispersion of groups into different languages (tribal differences) and where “speaking in tongues” should be understood metaphorically as an overcoming of these differences and the formation of a universal community not based on tribal identifications through custom and law. This reading is especially supported by Paul’s Romans. Taken together I think these things provide a strong case for a non-tribalistic ethical and political vision beyond a politics premised on the Imaginary as Lacan understands it. I was dismissive of your question because of the combative way in which you posed it and the selectiveness of your reading of my post.
May 7, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Additionally, given what we’ve come to know through ethnography about the role that kinship relations play in organizing social structures it becomes possible to read the Gospels through very different eyes and arrive at very different conclusions than those put forward by more traditional Biblical interpretation. This strange remark by Jesus becomes incredibly significant when read through this lens and functions, I think, as a master-key for organizing his other claims and their meaning. Additionally, the parable of the female adultress becomes significant in this connection as well. If adultery was such a significant sin in this socio-historical content, then this is because it related to blood ties, kinship relations, lineages, etc., upon which the power structure of this civilization was based (note the importance of the various Jewish tribes for the Jews). In turning the ethical issue away from the adultress to those that would judge and condemn her, Jesus is making a tremendously radical claim about the nature of the moral law or customs that underlie this community. So too in the case of the parable of the good Samaritan insofar as this group was excluded from the Jewish power structure (I linked to articles on both the Samaritans and Pharisees to provide the historical context here).
May 7, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Jon, I can’t quite tell if you’re “with LS on this one” because you think, contrary to kvond, that he did indeed make a well reasoned interpretation sufficiently cited, or because you happen to agree with his interpretation.
also, I’m not sure you can privilege and interpretation simply because it’s based only or mostly on the oldest known text. Of course there’s tremendous value in the earliest possible account of whatever, but, and forgive me for perhaps being “Eagletonian” about it, but isn’t it a bit like saying the first reviews of a book are more authoritative than later ones?. We’re not, after all, talking about eyewitness accounts of a battle (and even then, earliest isn’t always “most accurate”)
Q (the individual or group) was recording what they/he/she thought was most important. ie. already interpreting.
May 7, 2009 at 4:17 pm
ok, scratch that, the analogy of first book reviews vs. later ones . . . I was trying to get at some idea about an evolving EVENT not perhaps “showing itself” in all it’s complexity to the earliest “experiencers” of the event.
So not a great analogy since a book remains pretty much the same and later reviewers refer to the same text as earlier ones.
my bad.
May 7, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Exeter,
I think the issue here is that of how we evaluate the authenticity of the Gospels. The Gospels circulated about– almost like political pamphlets –for many years and were copied again and again, allowing for all sorts of deviations and modifications. And, of course, I’m sure you know that a number of Gospels were excluded when the Bible was finally put together by the Council of Nicaea. This entails that there was both politics and interpretive decisions made in what would be included and what would be excluded. The “Q” text would be the most accurate chronicle of what Jesus actually said, not unlike the Gospel of Thomas.
May 7, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Levi: While you may think that the Good Samarian is a “reference” to the Pharisees (and Israel), this certainly was NOT my reference. My reference was to the commandment reduction, (and this is specifically what JESUS was referring to, as he uses this parable to exemplify the reduction).
Additionally, to use Paul (and Badiou’s Paul at that) in support of a “let’s just look at the core of Jesus’s teaching and practice” is a bit off-center, as it is well-known that there is great conceptual disparity between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Paul. Paul is usually credited with inventing Christianity, but we were not speaking of Paul’s invention.
As to your “translation” of neighbor as stranger, very original of you. (Is this more of your inkblot knowledge of Biblical texuality?) The word used in the Greek of Mark is “plesion”. Very inventive of you to “translate” this as “stranger” but it literally means “the one close to you”. This has almost nothing to do with, and in many cases is almost antithetical to, the concept of “stranger”. You now are translating from languages you do not even check. Greek has words for “stranger”.
As to your notion that Jesus was fighting against Levi-Strauss. I find this quite interesting, but composed of some highly selective citation, perhaps as inventive as Creationist Bibical interpretation (which is not to say that they are un-valuable. As you translate and select from the Gospels with great imagination, perhaps I should just read this an imaginary rumination on the figure of Jesus. As such, it takes its place beside paintings of Caucasian Jesus, a Jesus for “us”, a testament to the imaginative powers of the figure.
Jon, actually in terms of time and variety of report, there is probably more known about Jesus than is known about Socrates, in particular the “teachings” of Socrates. This discussion as to whether Jesus taught and whether we should read his message the way that we read inkblots also would pertain to reading the “message” of Socrates, as filtered through Plato or Xenophon. If one is going to make claims about the core of Socratic teachings and life, I would hope that one would not use the hermetic practices of reading apocalyptic clues from Revelations as a guide.
May 7, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Kevin,
I really don’t understand why you have adopted such a bellicose and scornful tone with me, nor am I at all clear as to the point you’re trying to make with the “commandment reduction”. As I see it, Jesus’s reduction of the Law to loving your neighbor as you love yourself and loving God above everything else is thoroughly consistent with the reading of the Gospels I am proposing. Your portrayal of my thesis as “Jesus fighting against Levi-Strauss” is just bizarre. What I claimed is that Jesus proposes a form of social relations that is no longer based on tribal identification or kinship relations, but where anyone can belong and participate. When I “translate” the term “neighbor” as “stranger” this “translation” is not premised on philological accuracy, but on the conceptual organization of Jesus’ claims. It is a “translation” in the sense of how Heidegger translates Greek, trying to get at the truth of the text in terms of what seems to be unspoken in them but nonetheless present. If you can’t moderate your tone and muster some civility I won’t be posting any further comments by you in this discussion. I have said or done nothing to deserve being addressed in this rude and bellicose fashion.
May 7, 2009 at 4:40 pm
well, of course, I know the problems around the “accuracy” of any and all the gospels. But if you wanted for instance to take ONLY Q and the gospel of Thomas as your texts, there’s still plenty of room for all the sectarianism and conflicting interpretations that we see today with the Bible as is.
And there’s as much “superstitious spookinness” in both Q and Thomas, if you want to see it.
Look for instance at all the kerfuffle around Lacan’s seminars and the “Millerian” school of interpretation, quibbles about the accuracy of the text (even when it was recorded on tape!) and the “editing” done pre publication etc. etc. and he’s only thirty years gone.
I’ll go back to the idea of Christ as and event. If he’d wanted to transmit nothing more than an ideology or set of “guiding principles” I’m assuming he’d have written a book. The technology was there.
Ok, don’t fly off the handle, I know I’m getting kinda “transcendental” on ya . . . can’t help it.
May 7, 2009 at 4:41 pm
And again, the thesis that the community Jesus envisions is a set-theoretical community rather than a class-theoretical community arises from observing who he congregated with, the passage on familial relations, and the story of the Good Samarian. For the sake of clarity for anyone who might be reading, sets allow for the membership of anything without the members of the set sharing a common feature or characteristic beyond the minimal relation of membership. That is, they do not require any common intensional content. By contrast, classes require a common intensional content or a common feature such as being the class of all red things. Construction of social participation around classes is what I refer to as Imaginary social organization as the social is premised on a shared identity. The fact that Jesus congregated with the excluded (thieves, prostitutes, beggars, tax collectors, lepers, etc), that he evokes the story of the Good Samarian, and that he makes such a claim about familial relations makes a strong case, I believe, that Jesus had a set-theoretical conception of social relations, where ethnic and family relations, obedience to customs, was not a required feature of participation in this type of community. Moreover, my translation of “neighbor” as “stranger” has to do with precisely this point as the neighbor, in its more familiar connotations, is the person who is like me (i.e., class-theoretical), whereas Jesus has so broadened the extension of this one law that it applies to everyone, overflowing the boundaries of ethnic and familial membership criteria. My thesis that the genuine Christian would not call him or herself a Christian is a self-reflexive application of this principle in that the signifier “Christian” as a condition of membership would re-instantiate a class-theoretical form of the social tie, re-establishing these ties as tribal.
May 7, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Sure Exeter, I’m not suggesting that there isn’t a “conflict of interpretations” here. I’m not sure what you’re getting at with your point about Jesus writing a book. I take it that if you’re out to change society you have to, well, get out into society among the people.
May 7, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Levi: “When I “translate” the term “neighbor” as “stranger” this “translation” is not premised on philological accuracy, but on the conceptual organization of Jesus’ claims. It is a “translation” in the sense of how Heidegger translates Greek, trying to get at the truth of the text in terms of what seems to be unspoken in them but nonetheless present.”
Kvond: And Heidegger’s “translations” also should be rigorously critiqued, as I have personally done. (A big mistake is made when people just buy into his translations.) When you present a translation as a translation and you simply occlude any number of the aspects of word, you are inventing a historical truth. Heidegger’s translations are abuses, as far as I am concerned. But at least they capture distinct qualities of the word.
On the other hand, your translation of “plesion” isn’t even a distortion, it is a complete invention and really goes against the grain of the very core of the word. To say that you can translate any word in any fashion you like just because you are getting “unspoken” truth of that word is plain old willy nilly, especially when you seem to not even looked at the word itself. If you find it rude that I question your methods and justifications, this is what one does. Question mine anytime you like.
May 7, 2009 at 4:52 pm
I’m making a point about interpretation.
If you see him only as proposing a certain “way of living” along the lines of “do this, do that, it’ll be best for all of us”
that sets you going in one direction.
If you see Christ as an event that continues . . .that’s another direction.
I’m making the point that if it was so important that his words were transmitted exactly as said. he’d have written them down. He could, easily, have done both – political activist and “writer”
but I’m heading in a mystical direction that I’m not sure even I am comfortable with.
May 7, 2009 at 4:55 pm
I don’t find it rude that you question my methods, I find how you express this questioning rude and scornful (all your little snide words like “nice”, “go ahead and invent whatever you want”, etc., etc., etc.. This is first rate assholery that you wouldn’t engage in were you actually interested in having a discussion. Given that you don’t seem to recognize your lack of civility and what is rude about it, I will not be posting any further comments from you in this discussion.
Oh, and Heidegger’s translations are only “abuses” if he is trying to give an accurate representation of the text. But as Heidegger states very clearly in his various glosses on these issues, he’s trying to release unspoken potentials in the texts he is working with. I think the use of the term “stranger” is consistent with parables Jesus told, who he related to, etc. Of course I didn’t “look up” the word because the point wasn’t one of philology. In fact, I wrote a post on this blog a few months ago where I explicitly say “it’s too bad Jesus chose the word ‘neighbor’ rather than ‘stranger’ to express the law”, i.e., yeah yeah yeah, I know that’s not the word he uses.
May 7, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Exeter,
Why can’t it be a political event? As for why he didn’t write it down, I can’t say. It seems to me that much philosophy was conducted this way during this period. If we take Plato as an example a few centuries before, there was a lot of distrust of written text.
May 7, 2009 at 5:08 pm
it clearly WAS a political event, otherwise he would never have been put to death.
I may be out of my depth here, but I’m trying to get at another “reading” of the significance of Christ. Not as just another philosopher or “ideas man” but as a disruption beyond any text or information however transmitted.
So the different interpretations so called (including absolutely your own) are not attempts to restore a continually fading message, but a contemporary “speaking” of a continuing event in the present.
See, I said I was going mystical, I should probably stop and go get a scone and some tea.
May 7, 2009 at 5:13 pm
A scone and tea sounds good. I guess the reason I’m digging my heals in is that I’m not sure what I would be committing myself to were I to read him as an event in the sense you’re suggesting. I’m more than happy to read him as an event in Badiou’s sense of the term or in Deleuze’s sense as an “encounter”, but it sounds like you’re suggesting something more than this. Clearly my reading of Christ refuses to attribute any divinity to him in the supernatural sense. For example, I would see stories of the various miracles he performed as “Paul Bunyan” legends that got superimposed on his words with the passage of time to lend them more potency.
May 7, 2009 at 5:29 pm
something of what I’m groping towards is perhaps included in Augustine’s
“Love and do what you will” where love isn’t something you can read or even “learn” how to do exactly, it’s a “position” maybe, which once you adopt (and that would be an event) the texts, any texts, including biblical or jesuitical would be redundant. Everything you do becomes an act that would be both “yours” and somehow an outreaching of and from the original “event”
This is all very very tricky and I’m being deliberately tentative. You can take Augustine’s saying and soon get to Nixon’s “If the president does it it’s legal” . . .
ok, scone time.
May 7, 2009 at 6:05 pm
I don’t think the selective quotation is the issue here. The quote from Luke (14:26) is a Q gospel quote, which means it has a corresponding version in Matthew (10:37)that goes like this:
He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; 10.38 and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.
And two correlates in the Gospel of Thomas (55 and 101):
Jesus said, “Whoever does not hate his father and his mother cannot become a disciple to Me. And whoever does not hate his brothers and sisters and take up his cross in My way will not be worthy of Me.”
“Whoever does not hate his father and his mother as I do cannot become a disciple to me. And whoever does not love his father and his mother as I do cannot become a disciple to me. For my mother […], but my true mother gave me life.”
kvond refers to the parable of the Good Samaritan, but this narrative for example is found only in the Gospel of Luke with no correlates in any other gospel. This doesn’t make it less important; one could maybe argue it’s less “central”. I don’t think the parable of the Good Samaritan has a different message from the “hate your father and mother” –In both cases Jesus is saying that those who you TRADITIONALLY have thought are your family/neighbors are no longer. These old bonds no longer hold; I am all that matters now.
So in terms of this argument on the blog, hating your family and loving Jesus and God hardly strikes me as a textual oddity.
The real question is whether Jesus’ “dissolution of “the law” into two vast identifications (God/neighbor)” as kvond puts it is a resolution of the imaginary OR a “challenging of this dimension of the imaginary” as larval subjects puts it.
May 7, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Thanks for the additional passages, Guavatree. Based on your remarks, I wonder if I haven’t missed the point of some of Kevin’s criticisms. You write:
If I’m following your gloss correctly Guavatree, then the dispute revolves around Jesus’ declaration to love one’s neighbor as ourselves and his charge to hate our parents, where it is being claimed that there is a contradiction between these two positions. With respect to the second command, it had never occurred to me to read the demand to hate our family literally. That would be a bizarre reading of the Gospels no matter how you cut it, so I’m surprised to discover that others might have read me as claiming such a thing. Rather, I am interpreting Jesus’ charge as the injunction to cease privileging familial relations or tribal identifications. As such, this separation from the primacy of kinship structures would be a precondition for love of the stranger or the neighbor. This is also why I’ve drawn attention to the story of the Good Samaritan because here we have an instance of a love extended to the other that falls outside the tribal community.
I reject, of course, the remainder of the traditional interpretation of Jesus’ injunction to “hate” one’s family, where it is argued that we are to place Jesus and God above all other things. First, I reject this reading because I think it covers over the whole socio-political issue that he’s getting at with respect to the role that kinship relations play in his historical setting. Second, however, I don’t think this reading is very well supported given how cagey he always is about identifying himself as the son of God (doesn’t he only directly say this in the book of John?). I think this traditional reading places too much emphasis on the person or figure of Jesus, turning him into a screen as described in the post above, thereby allowing us to ignore the truly radical and revolutionary form of social organization that he seems to be proposing.
May 7, 2009 at 6:42 pm
By explaining the difference between interpretations: traditional (Jesus and God above all things) and “radical and revolutionary” — I think you clarify what I think the blog dispute is about. Is Jesus “Resolving” the Imaginary or “Challenging” it?
more than whether Jesus is really asking you to hate your family or not, I’m interested in how you think the Imaginary can be challenged. Is this even possible? To what extent does challenging the bonds of the tribe/family/Imaginary involve the Real and the Symbolic?
May 7, 2009 at 6:51 pm
And isn’t the debate between Challenging and Resolving played out in Lacan’s famous statement to the student revolutionaries:
“Ce à quoi vous aspirez comme révolutionnaires, c’est à un maître. Vous l’aurez.”
This same line of argument I think kvond is using against you up there (before it gets ugly) when he implies that Jesus is teaching projections—and putting himself up as the new Master, the kingdom of heaven/God resolves the crisis of the imaginary.
May 7, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Guava,
I’m really interested in how you are framing the debate, but I can’t quite get my head around it. Can you explain it to somebody who hasn’t read Lacan?
I’m almost certain that I remember that in the Gospel of Thomas during the last supper Jesus says something like, “He who eats of this will become me.” From this sort of perspectives the weird me, me, me stuff that is way to the fore in John is not quite so weird.
I realize that that’s all gnostic and weird and stuff, but it illustrates an important point. In early Christianity there was no conformity about the nature of Jesus’ divinity (it’s very hard to make sense historically of why so many wars were fought over the issue; on the one hand you want to try just read the battles in an economically reductive sense; but on the other, those people really took pretty abstruse metaphysics seriously, and to their detriment).
So I think to some extent larvalsubjects is correct to try to bracket that issue in this context. But one does not want to treat either philosophical or religious movements as laundry lists of propositions either. Does that relate to the issue you are raising?
May 8, 2009 at 1:05 am
[…] Much to my surprise and delight, I have been exceedingly pleased by the discussion my post “The Monstrosity of Christ” has generated. For me, Jesus is an incredibly important political thinker who proposes a new […]
May 10, 2009 at 10:09 am
Too much so far to comment on in any detail, but I am with Levi on this (although I am still awaiting the arrival in Australia of the copy of ‘The Monstrosity of Christ’ ordered via Amazon). But, as a Catholic priest, Dominican friar (‘no one expects the Spanish Inquisition’) and Lacanian by conviction and training, may I refer the readers of this link to the following article, written by Paul Moyaert, a professor of philosophy at Louvain in Belgium (and a former teacher of mine), who is also a leading Lacanian psychoanalyst) – the article is a bit stilted (not well translated): but it should shed some light on a few misunderstandings generated in the course of this discussion. See:
http://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?url=article&id=630064&journal_code=EP
May 10, 2009 at 10:32 am
Further to my previous post: having just realised that the URL given there will take you to a pay site, may I suggest that you go instead to the following link which will provide Moyaert’s article on love of God and neighbour for free:
http://www.kuleuven.be/ep/viewpic.php?LAN=E&TABLE=EP&ID=819
May 14, 2009 at 8:34 pm
For what it is worth, I posted a draft review:
A Lacanian Reading of The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? by Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank, edited by Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA. & London: The MIT Press, 2009) with the Television Series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
See: http://www.scribd.com/doc/15242017/
May 26, 2009 at 4:18 pm
I am among those who tend to think Jesus is very overrated. Historically speaking, I think one could plausibly make the case that Jesus was to Judaism as Joseph Smith was to Protestant Christianity (a story I’m familiar with, having been raised Mormon).
1. He wasn’t really that unusual or radical for his time or environment. Jesus’s sayings echo a lot of other rabbinical sayings that are likely contemporary. A lot of rabbis at the time were concerned with neighbor-love and such. (As for Joseph Smith, there were plenty of similar people having visions and preaching about them and wanting to take Protestant Christianity off in new directions, like the Shakers, etc.)
2. He took some of the more far-out doctrines of his religion and extended them to create his own sect. In Jesus’s case it was Messiahanism. In Joseph Smith’s it was the concept of prophecy mixed up with Protestant rejections of external religious authority in favor of personal relationship with the divine – setting himself up as a prophet was a move similar to Jesus setting himself up as a Messiah.
3. He was something of a huckster and a magician. The fact that the authors of the New Testament go out of their way to say Jesus wasn’t a magician (like Simon) suggests that he acted like one and there was room for confusion. In certain Jewish traditions he is characterized as one also. Likewise, Joseph Smith pulled off a lot of supernatural effects and “miracles.”
4. He became such a big phenomenon largely after and because of martyrdom.
I could go on but that’s enough for now. The upshot is that if anyone is very impressed with Jesus, they might as well be equally impressed with Joseph Smith. (Which I think most non-Mormons aren’t likely to be!)
I’m not too impressed by Paul either. He just replaces ethnic tribalism with a tribalism of belief in/loyalty to Paul’s version of Christ – the very sort of tribalism that has created such an “us versus them” attitude among the Christian right.
It’s important to realize too that the New Testament isn’t really a coherent document, but an amalgam of interpretations and oral traditions of people who mostly lived hundreds of years after Christ. The only reason the Gnostic gospels and such aren’t in there as well is because at some point some authority decided they weren’t kosher (so to speak). So a Jeffersonian Bible is kind of a rendition of a rendition of a rendition of a made-up version of Jesus.
So much has been read into the NT that even very bright highly educated people tend to forget that it’s mostly just a mashup of various currents of Hellenistic thought, not really worth as much time and focus as its been given.
What’s worthwhile in Christianity, to my mind, comes mostly from the intelligence and earnestness and good will of its interpreters and the interpretations they’ve produced (like you and yours and Badiou’s and Eagleton’s and Kierkegaard’s, and so on).
May 26, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Apologies, I didn’t read the other comments before I made mine, and I see I’ve repeated some of what was said earlier re: all the philological & text-critical problems around the NT. But maybe there’s some value in seconding (or thirding or nth-ing) the point about how problematic it is to read these texts ahistorically.
May 27, 2009 at 1:27 am
No worries, Therese. I’ve largely been persuaded by the arguments of the dissenting side on this issue, though I did come across a post over at Free Republic on Stanley Fish’s article the other day. Mostly I’m just trying to steer clear of the whole theology debate altogether, which is why I never completed the “A-theology” series.