Atheism as Truth of Christianity

Inspired by Slavoj Žižek's new publication Christian Atheism: How To Be A Real Materialist

Question of the Christian Legacy

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Conversation with

Slavoj Žižek

below on the topic of his new book Christian Atheism: How To Be A Real Materialist:

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Everything is at stake in

Slavoj Žižek

’s latest work Christian Atheism: How To Be A Real Materialist, where we basically get a proposal for how to avoid the self-destructive tendencies of contemporary Western liberal culture, unable to assert its own self-identity on the level of universality, while also avoiding the regressive particularist and populist temptations, which are clearly emerging as a reaction formation to this phenomenon. Žižek’s proposal is for a “Christian Atheism”, which affirms the Western truth of religion in Christianity, while at the same time, seeing the radical universality of Christianity itself, in atheism.¹ This move, for Žižek, opens up the conditions of possibility, internal to the West, for a global emancipatory politics. In re-affirming but also re-undermining Christianity, there is the potentiality to replace the identitarian intersectionality of oppressions and grievances — which is crucially sustained by vulgar materialist sciences and liberal humanisms rejection of real psychoanalysis² — with an intersectionality of religions, whose tensions on the level of universality are rendered meaningless in their unity with a universal atheism sustained by, not an authoritarian figure and dogmatic rules, but by an open question, for Žižek, the mystery of Christ, that leaves a community abandoned to the freedom of itself.

We will explore this in detail, in the post that follows.

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For those actually interested in understanding what is going on in our topsy-turvy world, as opposed to ruthlessly exploiting it, one should not only read Žižek’s latest work twice, but also compliment it with a deep re-reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.³

What is Christian Atheism? Why does Žižek combine these two seemingly contradictory opposites into a higher unity? The answer is that it is precisely the concept of Christian Atheism which truly breaks us into an alien world of spirit science through the self-relating negativity of an existential mistake where we find the nature of belief, not sustained by a figure of the big Other, but oddly sustained in a “purely self-relating autonomous belief” (directly quoted from our interview).⁴

Žižek is not just a madman speculating in the void, he is working with the architecture of spirit science itself, the Phenomenology of Spirit, and specifically the higher-order relationship between Religion and Absolute Knowing.⁵ This higher-order relation has been sorely under-interpreted in the history of philosophy due to the anxiety of influence that post-Hegelian philosophy has falsely suffered under. Here Hegel is only related to as a monstrous conceptual figure to be overcome. As Žižek states in the opening of the book, Hegel’s notion of God is precisely derived from understanding this higher-order relation between Religion and Absolute Knowing which does not bring us to the peak of enlightenment, but rather to its end:⁶

“Hegel’s notion of God provides the exemplary case of [a re-doubling of lack]: the gap that separates us, finite and frail sinful humans, from God, is immanent to God himself, it separates God from himself, making him inconsistent and imperfect, inscribing an antagonism into his very heart. This redoubling of the lack, this “ontologization” of our epistemological limitation, is at the core of Hegel’s absolute knowing, it signals the moment when Enlightenment is brought to its end.”

I make a similar move in Enter the Alien when I suggest that God is not to be understood as a separate identity from the world in relation to his four divine attributes: omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, omnipresence,⁷ where we must struggle through pious activity to rejoin Him; but rather God is always already in the historical world itself where we find all of these attributes — omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, omnipresence — in a constant state of positive contradiction.⁸ It is the ultimate status of this positive contradiction, on the level of the world itself, most obviously in the tension between the spirit and the body, which is at stake for Christian Atheism.⁹

To translate what may be a confusing and obscure passage from Žižek on Hegel’s God to those unfamiliar with both Hegel’s and Žižek’s work, let me summarise the mega-important theological claim that Žižek is making here about the human relationship to God, which is the most important and central theological claim to both Žižek’s philosophy, as well as his theopolitics:

• The Fall of Man from God is a Fall of/in God Himself

Read it again and again.

What is so crucial about this move/principle is that it allows us to avoid the fundamentalist and orthodox move, which appears in many different forms and guises, both theological and secular alike. While the fundamentalist tends towards reunification with God in the Beyond (After-Life), it seems the Orthodox tends towards reunification with God in a future dimension:

• God became Man so that Man will become God

The move is anyway the same insofar as it does not see the gap/negativity in man as always-already our unity with God. Not only is this move false, but it undermines the truth and authenticity of the Christian tradition, and is done in order to institute pious moral activity designed to leave behind our sinful life and close the gap between humans and God.¹⁰ The genius of Hegel, is precisely that he recognises that this gap between humans and God is already our relationship to God, and thus trying to close it is precisely where we find the problem of evil and violence in total obfuscation. Here in an unsurpassably brilliant quote from the Preface of the Phenomenology:¹¹

“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.”

To attempt to put the importance of this passage into even more simple and common sense terms, when you are in/embracing self-relating negativity (basically the opposite of liberal hedonist egoism), you are already communing with God. In other words, communing with God is not happening in an ideologically closed surface or space where you are surrounded by all the people who identify exactly like you, paradoxically, this is the exact opposite of God, and the exact opposite of truth, and the exact opposite of communion.

And here we already reach Žižek’s genius point and move in relation to the term Christian Atheism: it is precisely the recognition of this existential error which opens one to the truth of God in self-relating negativity.¹² In other words, one must pass through, be totally duped by, the transcendental illusion of religion, and for Žižek, not just any religion, but specifically Christianity, in order to know true atheism and true absolute knowing. While Hegel himself in the Phenomenology does not state this explicitly about Christianity, the structure of the Religion chapter in the Phenomenology, is pretty clearly and obviously Christian, especially as it relates to the dialectical motion between a God of the Beyond, a Christ figure, and the appearance of an emancipatory egalitarian community unified in the Holy Spirit.

What we get in this double move is:

1. The undermining of the necessary illusion of the big Other (i.e. there is no big Other)

2. The recognition of truth in the antagonistic heart of the non-Other

For those well-versed in the logic of sexuation in Lacan this also, and importantly, mirrors the truth of the sexual non-relation:

1. There is no sexual relationship

2. There is a non-relationship

For those interested specifically in my work, it is this precise logic — the movement from the lack in the big Other to the positivisation of this lack in the non-Other — which structures my analysis and historical engagement with Žižek’s work,¹³ and which can be found throughout my writings on human society in the context of technological singularity.¹⁴

Now we will leave the question aside as to whether or not this duping can occur in other denominations. Žižek does assert that Christianity offers a unique religious experience that either cannot be found in other religions, or may be difficult to find in other religious traditions, although it seems his main negation comes in relation to the structure of Buddhism. It seems to me the question of this structure in either Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, for example, is a more open question.¹⁵ But at the same time, he himself calls for — against woke leftist politics and the political correctness instituted by intersectionality — an “intersectionality of religion” which is held together by the truth of atheism.¹⁶ We should not forget, especially those philosophically and politically inclined, that this truth of atheism is crucial, for it renders meaningless the differences between institutional religions on the level of global totality:¹⁷

“What Christian atheism renders possible here is not the overcoming of the existing religions — on the contrary, it opens up the space for a spiritual bond which enables each of them to flourish freely. Here atheism plays a key role: the common space in which different religions can thrive is not some vague general spirituality but atheism which renders meaningless the struggle between particular religions.”

The potentiality of a Christian Atheism that opens towards an intersectionality of religions unified in atheism should not be understated. In this move we get the capacity to forward, or more properly reclaim, a global emancipatory project through the European legacy. The West can not only embrace dialectically its historical roots in the religious ground of Christianity, but also recognise that this ground is the condition of possibility for further emancipatory spirit. First this emancipatory spirit can be found in the historical appearance of Protestantism — and all of the violent wars for political universality which birthed its ground — as well as our contemporary secular ground, which may be best viewed as just the most successful variant of Protestantism. How to properly support this ground theopolitically? Following Žižek, we merely need to support it with a conceptual mediation, which extends from the great Christian mystic and German philosopher Jakob Böhme, through German Idealism,¹⁸ and the 20th century continental tradition of philosophy, as well as psychoanalysis.¹⁹ Here we not only escape the non-sense anti-philosophical reactionary right-wing populism of James Lindsay’s ridiculous New Discourses,²⁰ but also gives us the ability to see the seeds and new projects for this possibility, in the works of a Church of the Contradiction, from the true Orthodox Heretic, Peter Rollins.²¹

However, and just as importantly, the West can also embrace its emancipatory political roots from the French Revolution onwards, in the sense of a politicos oriented around a secular universal freedom. This project is increasingly undermined in a movement which Žižek suspects to be the “Self-Destruction of the West” in woke liberal leftist politics.²² What is happening in woke liberal leftist politics, perhaps because they are lacking the aforementioned conceptual mediation, from Böhme to Lacan, is a political drama and nightmare where the attempt at universalist emancipatory politics gets trapped in a false identitarianism. In this false identitarianism, it becomes impossible for Europeans to assert their own self-identity on the level of universality. As a result, internal to leftist liberal spaces, and as mentioned previously, we have the return of the repressed in the emergence of right populist movements asserting European identity in a particularist reactionary form:²³

“There is thus an element of truth in the well-known Rightist diagnosis that Europe today presents a unique case of deliberate self-destruction — it is obsessed with fear to assert its identity, plagued by an infinite responsibility for most of the horrors in the world, fully enjoying its self-culpabilization, behaving as if it is its highest duty to accept all who want to emigrate to it, reacting to the hatred of Europe by many immigrants with the claim that it is Europe itself which is guilty of this hatred because if it is not ready to fully integrate them… There is, of course, some truth in all of this; however, the tendency to self-destruction is obviously the obverse of the fact that Europe is no longer able to remain faithful to its greatest achievement, the Leftist project of global emancipation — it is as if all that remained is self-criticism, with no positive project to ground it. So it is easy to see what awaits us at the end of this line of reasoning: a self-reflexive turn by means of which emancipation itself will be denounced as a Euro-centric project.”

However, and at the same time, it should be emphasised, that Žižek’s call for a theopolitical emancipatory dimension to save the Western liberal project, has nothing to do with right-wing fundamentalist Christians, who are in fact, Žižek claims, not Christian:²⁴

“To put it in brutal terms, the ultimate anti-Christian force today is not hedonist individualism but the Rightest Christian fundamentalism itself.”

This is perhaps where particularist Right wing secularists and universalist Left wing secularists, beyond fundamentalism and woke respectively, can meet and discuss a new politicos. Moreover, in the spirit of the intersectionality of religion unified under atheism, what all particularist religious fundamentalisms share is the very same violent structure of an obscene underground ideology, due to the very structure of repressed libidinal investment:²⁵

“The task of the analysis is thus to recognize the same “energy” — libido, libidinal investment — in Muslim fundamentalism, Zionism, Hinduism, Christian fundamentalism: obvious differences in their narratives should not blind us for this sameness.”

To be precise, the structure of their fundamental sameness is a result of using a false transcendental figure of the big Other to repress/foreclose/disavow the fundamental antagonism at the libidinal heart of truth and the non-Other. Thus, it is only when religion can be coupled into the contradiction of absolute knowing, that its global emancipatory power can be properly developed into a theopolitical project on the level of concrete universality.

Now more needs to be said about the meaning and centrality of the proper historicisation of Christianity, which we might argue is only really made possible by both Hegel’s phenomenology and logic, which does (as will become important when we discuss the ontology of quantum physics) historicise eternity. Today we are experiencing the rise of online Orthodox Christianity, led by either totally disingenuous or irresponsible digital figures.²⁶ These figures claim that Orthodoxy is not only the “true original Christianity”, but also the solution to what is called in many intellectual circles, the “Meaning Crisis”. For the “online Orthodox”, this movement is destined to overtake both Catholic and Protestant variations of Christianity throughout the Western world. Here we should be aware, that while Catholicism aims for a theopolitics where State becomes Church, the Orthodox are the precise opposite, and aim for a theopolitics where Church becomes State. This perhaps explains the underground or background conditions for how State Communism unfolded the way it did in 20th century Russia, and why Russia today, supported by the mythopoetic non-sense of philosophers like Alexander Dugin, is still a major theopolitical threat to the secular West.

Back to the West: while obviously online Orthodoxy is mostly empty virtual larping behaviour from power seeking particularist identitarians trying to capitalise in technofeudal attentionalist dynamics, the symptom is yet another wave of exploitation and manipulation of lost and confused young men who are struggling to cope with an institutional environment that is dominated by leftist liberal woke fundamentalism. In that sense, the symptom of Orthodoxy is not so different from the symptoms that developed around the Jordan Peterson phenomenon, nor the Andrew Tate phenomenon, which brings us closer again to the importance of Žižek’s Christian Atheist project.

In Žižek’s Christian Atheism we are able to properly dialecticise and historicise Christianity in the sense of its three major denominational fissures — Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Protestantism — in the context of Western global emancipatory project. Whereas Orthodoxy obfuscates the historical process, advocating for a quasi-non-historical eschatological consciousness oriented towards overcoming sin and reuniting with God; the Lutheran/Protestant truth that the Fall of Man from God is the Fall of God himself is what was actually opened up in the real of historical universality. As mentioned this allows for a secular politics cut from a fundamentalist society oriented around explicitly Christian hierarchies (whether the Pope or the Church Fathers, or whatever). Here specifically we should pay attention to not only the truth of the Filioque in the connection between Father and Son in the reinvention of the Holy Spirit (a Catholic truth, against the Orthodox), but also the way in which the reinvention of Holy Spirit itself is mediated by historicity of technological mediums (a Protestant truth, against Catholicism).²⁷

Moreover, the reinvention of Holy Spirit is precisely what Žižek suggests is needed today, as the only proper response to the falseness of Right wing populism:²⁸

“Today, when the need for an engaged political collective is needed more than ever, the choice is between the new Rightist populism and a reinvented Holy Ghost.”

Here we also get the zero-level difference between a Jordan Peterson and a Žižek on the level of Western public intellectuals. While Peterson finds himself in close collaboration with an Orthodox convert, enflaming culture wars with a Right wing populist organisation (Daily Wire), and stuck in mythological identification (Maps of Meaning, Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories, etc.); Žižek is forwarding a genuinely emancipatory theopolitical project on the level of concrete universality. This is the difference between placing myths before drives (Peterson) or drives before myths (Žižek). As I should state explicitly, it is the Hegelo-Lacanian standpoint that drives mythify the real (and not the other way around).²⁹ Moreover, this is what (strangely) unites both Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins: neither of them understand the importance of the Hegelo-Lacanian standpoint.³⁰ For Žižek, in contrast to both, when we seek to reinvent Holy Spirit today, we should always remember that it is only possible in and through focus on the drive (with all the negativity that entails), under the genuine faith, that myths will follow drive. True myths are retroactive, after the fact, you will realise that the real has been mythified, not before.

This brings us to the important way Žižek links both science and philosophy to his Christian Atheist project, both of which could be understood to operate on the formula of drives before myth. On the scientific side we have:

• the ontology of quantum physics

And on the philosophical side we have:

• the transcendental parallax

First let us approach the ontology of quantum physics, where Žižek insists that we should avoid or resist the temptation to turn quantum physics into a new totalising mystical worldview where we precisely mystify the truth behind the appearances of the classical scientific materialist worldview. This is a path that he suggests has been traversed by figures like David Bohm with the “Hidden Variables Thesis”, where we are invited to presuppose inaccessible variables behind the appearances of classical reality in order to reify the original dream of science: a deterministic system.³¹

In opposition to this mystical approach to the ontology of quantum physics, Žižek instead points towards theories, most notably inspired by the work of the brilliant physicist Lee Smolin, who suggests, in a move reminiscent of the Kantian break in philosophy, that quantum physics limits us to the transcendental constitution of reality.³² In other words, in the work of Smolin, we are not given a complete and totalising picture of the ontology of quantum physics, we are rather given clues to the key limitations which quantum mechanics presents to us, as well as some ideas about what path may exist beyond it. Here to quote Žižek on Smolin’s work:³³

“Smolin doesn’t provide a new Theory of Everything; after bringing out the limitations of quantum mechanics, he very cautiously formulates a series of conjectures of how “what lies beyond quantum” will look.”

This is all in line with the fundamental philosophical move that Žižek would like to introduce us to in relation to the ontology of quantum physics, that is the distinction between Descartes and classical physics, and Hegel and quantum physics. In the former, we famously encounter the problem of a deceiving God who institutes Laws without exception (Laws which cannot be violated). From here we of course can make homology to the aforementioned false religious consciousness which reifies itself into a closed identitarian loop, as well as the physical clockwork picture of the deterministic universe, from Newton to Laplace, where we get the metaphysical orientation towards a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) of Everything without exception.

However, in the latter we find a God who is himself deceived where every institution of Laws is riddled by its constitutive exception (and where universality itself is discovered in the violation of Law). Žižek suggests that it is this secondary philosophical model which allows us to both approach the truth of materialism, moving from the classical to the quantum, while avoiding a mystical regression into spiritual obfuscation. The crucial thing here is that we have to pay attention to the way in which Law is both necessary as a rational totality, or an All which simultaneously limits and constrains us; but that its truth will be found in its exception, in the fact that in the mediation of every Law we discover the way in which it is non-All, doomed to be disrupted by contingencies that retroactively change the way we perceive its limitations and constraints.

Thus, what awaits the quantum physicists struggling with the unification between quantum mechanics and general relativity is a constitutive exception to the totalising frame of reference which makes impossible the solution to the two paradigms. In my work I have suggested that this exception to the contemporary frame has everything to do with the way we must include within the theory of quantum gravity the nature of the social historical community itself as a pathway to technological singularity.³⁴

As I mentioned to Žižek in our discussion, this is in fact a hypothesis that I have always described in relation to Lee Smolin’s brilliant work Three Roads to Quantum Gravity in which he outlines three paths to quantum gravity, of which my proposal, as well as I think Žižek’s philosophical work on the topic, could be situated as part of the third path. Here is Smolin on those three paths:³⁵

“Among the many different paths to quantum gravity, most recent traffic, and most progress, has been along three broad roads. Given that quantum gravity is supposed to arise from a unification of two theories — relativity and quantum theory — two of these paths are perhaps not unexpected. There is the route from quantum theory, in which most of the ideas and methods used were developed first in other parts of quantum theory. Then there is the road from relativity, along which one starts with the essential principles of Einstein’s theory of general relativity and seeks to modify them to include quantum phenomena. These two roads have each led to a well worked-out and partly successful theory of quantum gravity. The first road gave birth to string theory, while the second led to a seemingly different theory (although with a similar name) called loop quantum gravity. […]

Apart from string theory and loop quantum gravity, there has always been a third road. This has been taken by people who discarded both relativity and quantum theory as being too flawed and incomplete to be proper starting points. Instead, these people wrestle with the fundamental principles and attempt to fashion the new theory directly from them. While they make reference to the older theories, these people are not afraid to invent whole new conceptual worlds and mathematical formalisms. Thus, unlike the other two paths, which are trodden by communities of people each large enough to exhibit the full spectrum of human group behaviour, this third path is followed by just a few individuals, each pursuing his or her own vision, each either a prophet or a fool, who prefers that essential uncertainty to the comfort of travelling with a crowd of like-minded seekers.

The journey along the third path is driven by deep, philosophical questions such as, ‘What is time?’ or, ‘How do we describe a universe in which we are participants?’ These are not easy questions, but some of the greatest minds of our time have chosen to attack them head-on, and I believe that there has been great progress along this path too.”

Here I have suggested, in my aforementioned work, that we have to think about the very social historical communities searching for a solution to quantum gravity, as a part of the solution to quantum gravity itself.³⁶ Moreover, the way in which Žižek has approached the problems of quantum gravity, seem to me to also express this necessity of the third path. Here Žižek, in suggesting that Hegel is the proper philosophical standpoint for quantum mechanics, may just may be laying the philosophical groundwork for a new understanding of quantum mechanics that is capable of including the basic lessons of Hegelian dialectics and logic.³⁷

Note here that the way Smolin describes these three paths could be well situated within Christian Atheism, with the first two roads occupying the position of the religious layer of the notion in physics, and the third road occupying the strange position of absolute knowing within the notion of physics. Moreover, it could be that these two roads also mirror the religious problem that Žižek outlines, and I outlined above, in reference to the “fall from and return to God” (fundamentalist/orthodox) and the “fall from as the fall of God himself” (absolute knowing). Only when these two layers are brought together, in proper sociohistorical relation, may we get closer to figuring out the meaning and the stakes of quantum gravity.

I would again wager that this meaning and these stakes, would directly impinge on the mysteries of technological singularity, as outlined in Global Brain Singularity,³⁸ as well as Žižek’s Hegel in a Wired Brain.³⁹ As Žižek notes in relation to my work in Global Brain Singularity explicitly in Hegel in a Wired Brain, he sees my solution to singularity as bringing us to the philosophical dimension apparent in the late Lacan’s teaching.⁴⁰ Here we must recognise that we cannot deconstruct the Imaginary and get to the pure Real (e.g. God behind the appearances), but rather must recognise in a retroactive reversal the way in which the pure Real is always-already entangled with the Imaginary, opening up questions about the creation and structure of future virtual/conceptual universes.⁴¹ As is standard to Žižekian philosophy, we cannot renounce fiction to reach the real, but rather must understand the way in which “reality has to be supplemented by fiction”.⁴²

The radicality of what opens up with this view, is that our relation to space and time, what in some physics models is called our “background dependence” is inverted from the classical “eternalist” frame in which the past, present, and future are fully determined. Here recall what I mentioned at the beginning of the article about the potential connection between Hegelian belief and the necessity of background independence in quantum gravity. Whereas physicists from Bohm to Einstein had sympathies with a fully determined “eternalist” “block universe” — with again references to Bohm’s “hidden variables” — one cannot help but think about this as a type of “belief dependence” on a big Other, or a background dependence. However, what potentially occurs in this shift in the “third path” to quantum gravity is a historicised model of the eternalist block universe where past and future are “eternally” reconstructed in the present:⁴³

“[In] the historicity of block-universe itself […] each “now” — say, every historical epoch — reconstructs its own vision of the past and of the future, and when a true change happens, not just a repetition of the same, the whole block-chain is transformed.”

The mega-philosophical question that opens up here, and which Žižek sees as connected to Philosophy Portal’s project Enter the Alien, as the conditions of possibility of thinking of Hegel’s scientific logic in the context of alien encounter. Specifically: would Hegel’s “eternal” logic (all of its categories, syllogisms, etc. as supporting the conceptual mediation of subjective becoming), survive alien contact? My explicit answer to him is: yes but only in the total rewriting of the past and the future vis-a-vis the traumatic event itself.

Furthermore, to connect it to the central religious problem in Christian Atheism, that of the reinvention of the Holy Spirit without transcendental guarantee in God the Father, it is perhaps only an “alien encounter” that can shock us into a truthful existential engagement, and out of our vulgar materialist slumber. We do not here have to think about aliens literally (although who knows, the world is getting pretty strange), but rather an alien event as a metaphor for a confrontation with otherness and difference which forces us to rewrite time itself. From Žižek:⁴⁴

“This is the correct dialectical-materialist stance: the greatest creative act is not to be original and break with the past but to reinvent a new past.”

This brings us to the philosophical side of Žižek’s Christian Atheism, where we find the necessity of thinking transcendental parallax. The transcendental parallax stands for the Kantian break and approach in philosophy where we find ourselves forever separated from the objective reality approach to reality which has conditioned our classical scientific materialist universe.⁴⁵ In Žižek’s philosophy this break and approach is fundamental:⁴⁶

“It all begins with Kant, with his idea of the transcendental constitution of reality. In a way, one can claim that it is only with this idea of Kant’s that philosophy reached its own terrain: prior to Kant, philosophy was ultimately perceived as a general science of Being as such, as a description of the universal structure of entire reality, with no qualitative difference from particular sciences. It was Kant who introduced the difference between ontic reality and its ontological horizon, that a priori network of categories which determines how we understand reality, what appears to us as reality.”

Žižek affirms a similar approach in Christian Atheism:⁴⁷

“The biggest cut in the history of philosophy takes place with Kant’s transcendental revolution. Till Kant, philosophy (no matter how skeptic) was dealing with the ontological dimension in the simple sense of the nature of reality: what counts as reality, can we know it, how is this reality structured, is it only material or also, even primarily, spiritual, etc. With Kant, reality is not simply given, waiting out there to be discovered by us, it is “transcendentally constituted” by the structure of categories through which we apprehend it. After Kant, this transcendental dimension is historicised: every epoch has its own way of perceiving reality and acting in it.”

What we get here related to this break, in Žižek’s philosophy, is the capacity to separate from the way in which our reality was conditioned in the modern scientific classical universe by either a type of external arena of space and time, regulated by laws, or a type of external object or process of evolution where we can retroactively narrate the emergence of life up to the human being. What this view of reality misses is precisely the transcendental “divine dimension” which is “always-already presupposed”.⁴⁸

Žižek, following Hegel, refers to this dimension as the “night of the world”, as the radical negativity and absence of God which opens up the conditions of possibility for emancipatory politics.⁴⁹ It is interesting here to reflect on how, in Hegel’s philosophy, this dimension is clearly opened up, insofar as Hegel’s philosophy leads, not only to his own concept of absolute freedom in political context, most notably in the Philosophy of Right, but also opens directly to Marxist revolutionary politicos. This dimension of freedom is totally repressed/foreclosed/disavowed in the modern scientific universe, oftentimes with reference to deterministic models that are essentially based on neuroscientific reduction to neuronal correlation.⁵⁰ In reference to the aforementioned dimension of quantum mechanics where we must think through the historicisation of the block universe, what this modern scientific approach to freedom and determinism obfuscates, is the possibility of a radical political event, where the past and future are rewritten from the standpoint of the present.

The greatest contradiction here, which emerges internal to the modern scientific universe and its external view of space and time as well as evolution, is the looming and haunting figure of the post-human. The figure of post-human presents the same challenge of otherness and difference as does the alien. Here its potentiality can be found in the form of biotechnological design and computational algorithmic control, which precisely seeks to mediate processes of reproduction beyond the biological model.⁵¹ Crucially, this figure of the post-human stands for the radical rewriting of all history, literally at the level of genes⁵² and possibly even, who knows, at the scale of subatomic particles.⁵³ It is not that modern science describes the external universe and its evolution, it is that through this very act, modern science gains the capacities to rewrite this universe itself. However, Žižek claims that if the post-human emerges, it will not be the realisation of the techno-gnostic fantasies of figures like Ray Kurzweil⁵⁴ and Nick Bostrom,⁵⁵ of a form of digital immortality, but rather the total destruction of the major coordinates of what human beings have considered to be our common reality:⁵⁶

“While we should dismiss the vision of Singularity as a direct unity of global intelligence and our self-awareness, one thing is clear: if something resembling “post-humanity” will effectively emerge as a massive fact, then all three (overlapping) moments of our spontaneous world-view (humans, god, nature) will disappear. […] The tech-gnostic visions of a post-human world are ideological fantasies that obfuscate the abyss of what awaits us.”

While Žižek does not have a “solution” for navigating this emerging problem of technological singularity — we are rather “entering the alien” — he does also call for a warning of the political systems of control and slavery that are being erected around its technological structures, most notably with reference to Yanis Varoufakis’s framework of technofeudalism.⁵⁷ He warns that:⁵⁸

“A new social order that is emerging out of the ruins of global capitalism, the order called “technofeudalism” or “cloud-capitalism”, subordinates “real” capitalists and the workers they exploit to the monopolised digital commons controlled by our new feudal masters (Bezos, Musk, Gates…). Market exchange is more and more mediated by digital platforms (Amazon for books, etc.), and capitalists (book publishers, in this case) are vassals who pay feudal masters a rent to sell their products (if a publisher is excluded from Amazon, it becomes practically impossible for him to survive). We, buyers, are serfs who work freely for the clouds (surfing on the net and providing data with each of our clicks). Digital clouds run by self-learning and self-improving algorithms are thus the latest “divine” entity which largely escapes the control of its creators: even of the programmers who composed them.”

What is unique about the way Žižek approaches both the techno-gnostic visions of bodily uploading and the emerging techno-feudal sociopolitical climate is that he identifies in both processes an obfuscation of, on the side of the techno-gnostic visions sexual difference; and on the side of the techno-feudal sociopolitical climate class difference. Sex and class difference are fundamental antagonisms which riddle the human social body and both the techno-gnostic visions and techno-feudal structures prevent us from really working with the contradiction of this antagonism in a way that is true to a global emancipatory political project. On the techno-gnostic side:⁵⁹

“One thing is sure: from the psychoanalytic standpoint, what the shift to the Post-human amounts to at its most fundamental is the overcoming (leaving behind) of the sexual in its most radical ontological dimension — not just “sexuality” as a specific sphere of human existence but the Sexual as an antagonism, the bar of an impossibility, constitutive of being-human in its finitude. And the issue carefully avoided by the partisans of the new asexual man is: to what extent are any other feature usually identified with being-human, features like art, creativity, consciousness, etc., dependent on the the antagonism that constitutes the Sexual.”

And on the techno-feudal side:⁶⁰

“The problem with these “divine” digital clouds that regulate our actual lives is that they redouble class struggle: the good old class struggle between capitalists and proletarians, with the capitalists usurping profit from the exploitation of the proletarians, remains, but it is supplemented by the exploitation of this entire sphere (capitalists included) by the new feudal class which extracts from us the rent for our permanent usage of the privatised commons. This feudal exploitation is for most of us invisible, we experience it as our free exercise (books are on Amazon even cheaper than in the bookstores, using Google and Facebook costs nothing…) — privatised commons present themselves as mere neutral networks which connect buyers and sellers.”

This is why, in Global Brain Singularity, I warn in a paper titled “Global Commons in the Global Brain”, that the fight for a new emancipatory political project must function on the level — not of communitarian ideologies — but rather shift the focus from the basic seed form of communism, the commune, towards the notion of the commons.⁶¹ The commune, as Daniel Tutt has been exploring in his psychoanalytic work on the family,⁶² has never been able to really change the basic form of the family. Whereas the common, as perhaps most well articulated by theorist

Michel Bauwens

, does not aim to change human substance, but rather change the very political-economic space within which human substance can become subject, can subjectivise itself relationally.⁶³ In our current situation, we are struggling to mediate both sexual difference, precisely because the invisible common space in which we are subjectivising ourselves, is always-already a type of gulag or concentration camp for both proletarians and capitalists. How can we build families if the entire planet is regressing into a type of feudal structure?

Moving forward, Žižek suggests a unique mix, not only a Christian Atheism that unites through atheism an intersectionality of religion to neutralise both the self-destructive effects of woke liberal leftism and fundamentalism; but also the unity of Marxism with psychoanalysis⁶⁴ that recognises the unique theopolitical role of Christ,⁶⁵ and the uniqueness of the Western emancipatory project on the level of universality. While it seems impossible to strive for global cooperation and solidarity in the current sociopolitical climate, especially one that is unified under any ideology of a heavenly state,⁶⁶ Žižek claims that it is possible to rewrite our past and future through the divine transcendental dimension of self-relating negativity via reflecting Christ as, not a singular authority, but a singular question:⁶⁷

“Everyone is asked by Jesus the same question: “Who do you say that I am?” […] Christ is not a figure of authority telling people what they are: he is asking them about what they are saying that He is. […] Each of us has to give a reply to Jesus’ question from one’s existential depth, and then enact a reply.”

While our situation is apocalyptic and ultimately Godless, for Žižek:⁶⁸

“They were in hell, with no God to protect them, and Christ was there.”

This work at least opens up the coordinates for a new conversation around these issues: (1) the atheist core of Christianity, (2) the ontology of quantum physics, and (3) the transcendental parallax.

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Philosophy Portal’s next course starts May 18th and will focus on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right which opens the question of freedom on the level of politics. To find out more, or to join: Philosophy of Right.

The Portal’s next month will focus on the concept of Jouissance, and will be hosting theologian Barry Taylor, philosopher

Nina Power

, and coach Pamela von Sabljar, to find out more, or to join: The Portal.

1. Here we already get to a mega-difficult point, which hopefully I address throughout the article, of the uniqueness of Christianity on the level of Religion. Michael Downs of The Dangerous Maybe and I discussed this in the wake of my conversation with Slavoj Žižek and it presents many unique problems for both theological interpretations and their relevance to leftist emancipatory politics. First Žižek’s claim goes against the unitarian liberalist notion that “all religions are the same” in proclaiming the uniqueness of Christianity specifically in God’s death and resurrection (for Žižek in the emancipatory community without a God of the Beyond). For Žižek, we do not get this experience in Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, etc. However, much work still needs to be done here, not only in affirming an atheist core for the intersectionality of religions (against a vague general spirituality), but also in affirming a weird twist or inversion internal to religion where God dies and is resurrected (which Žižek claims we do not get in other “atheist religions” like Buddhism). Moreover, this privileging of Christianity on the level of Religion provokes a key intersectional reaction that goes something like: it is ok to say something unique about, say, Islam or Buddhism, where we do not get that truth in, say, Christianity, but if we say something unique about Christianity, where we do not get that truth in, say, Islam or Buddhism, it is perceived to be ethnocentric. This is part of what Žižek is pointing at with his idea of Christian Atheism related to the “Self-Destruction of the West”. Moreover, and as should be clear in the context of the article as a whole, what is at stake in Žižek’s Christian Atheism, in the end, is a Hegelianisation of Christianity. That is why, in the context of the article as a whole, I will be opening with references to the precise Hegelianised phenomenology and logic that Žižek uses to Hegelianise Christianity, which for Žižek, as for me, is necessary in order to forward a theopolitical project on the level that overcomes the West’s identitarian self-destruction, leaving the door open to Right wing reactionaries, on the both the level of explicit theology leading to particularism (Dugin) but also secular universalism leading to anti/post-humanism (Land).

2. This point is so crucial. In the first ever Dark Renaissance Productions event in Gothenburg, Sweden, I presented on a view of our situation informed by psychoanalysis, and one of the most triggered guests, was not only precisely triggered because of my use of psychoanalysis (which was apparently outdated), but also sustained in her ideology by what Žižek calls the “silent pact” between “psychiatric establishment, new brain sciences and Politically Correct Woke feminism”, see: Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How To Be A Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 235. Moreover, what was pointed towards in her triggering was nothing but pure self-destructive hatred for Western European identity on the level of universality. It is precisely this style of consciousness, which produces the reactionary populist Right in Europe, which seeks to affirm itself in a particularist form, as a obscene mirror of the woke identitarian tendencies. There are interesting questions here of how to interpret this phenomenon in relation to the future of Left and Right wing politics, and for that I would point you towards the work of Owen Cox at

Dark Renaissance Radio

for his recent article “The Paglian Right”. What I would specifically say to those interested in the movement and power of the populist Right, is that while they have something powerful on the level of particularity, as those who have struggled through Hegel’s Science of Logic know too well, it is only when the moment of particularity is negated for self-relating singularity, independent of external cognition, that one truly reaches the level of universality. In that sense, these particularist movements will only find their truth in their negativity. They are a symptom, an attractive symptom, but still a symptom. Enjoy.

3. For a full course on the Phenomenology of Spirit, see: Phenomenology of Spirit.

4. Here we should see the parallels with Žižek’s Hegelian notion of belief, and the need for background independence in quantum gravity, as should become evident throughout this article.

5. Those interested in studying Hegel should be aware that in-depth re-readings and interpretations of Hegel’s later chapters in the Phenomenology are both rare and needed. This is one of the functions of Philosophy Portal, and one of the reasons why I dedicated my chapter in Enter the Alien to a deep reading of Absolute Knowing, see: Last, C. 2022. Necessity of Absolute Knowing: Simplicity in Complexity, Philosophical Science, and the Nature of God. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 275-292.

6. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How To Be A Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 2.

7. Wierenga, E. R. 2003. The Nature of God: An inquiry into divine attributes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

8. Last, C. 2022. Necessity of Absolute Knowing: Simplicity in Complexity, Philosophical Science, and the Nature of God. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 275-292.

9. And as I try to make clear in the opening of the upcoming Philosophy Portal anthology, Logic for the Global Brain (to be published), see: Last, C. 2024. Introducing: The Logic. In: Logic for the Global Brain. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 21-30.

10. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How To Be A Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 3.

11. Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press. p. 10.

12. As I emphasise in the conclusion of Enter the Alien, see: Last, C. 2022. Conclusion — Ending with the Beginning: Notional Becoming, Self-Relating Negativity, and Cognition in the Sheer Unrest of Life. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 293-301.

13. Series on Less Than Nothing.

14. See especially: Last, C. 2020. Part IV: Field of Twenty-First Century Knowledge. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 214-312.; also: Last, C. 2023. Systems and Subjects: Thinking the Foundation of Science and Philosophy. Philosophy Portal Books.; also: Last, C. 2022. Necessity of Absolute Knowing: Simplicity in Complexity, Philosophical Science, and the Nature of God. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 275-292.; also: Last, C. 2022. Conclusion — Ending with the Beginning: Notional Becoming, Self-Relating Negativity, and Cognition in the Sheer Unrest of Life. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 293-301.

15. For this we should both consult, and attempt to extend the work of Richard Boothby, who transgress his master, Jacques Lacan, in looking for a general theory of religion, see: Boothby, R. 2022. Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred. Northwestern University Press.

16. The question, raised by Duane Rousselle, of whether or not Žižek’s claim that Christianity is unique among Religions as offering a pathway to a truly materialist/atheist standpoint, as “outlandish” is an important one. For Rousselle, this “renders impossible any authentic “materialism” for 70% of the world.” Moreover, for Rousselle, this destroys the conditions of possibility for Marxism. For me, this is the ground for many important discussions about the relationship between the global theopolitical layer of universality and secular emancipatory politics. Does Christianity offer a unique path to materialism/atheism that cannot be found in Islam? Is that the truth or not? If it is not the truth, what is the nature or alternative pathways in, say, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and so forth. This question is left totally open by the aforementioned/cited book by Richard Boothby, Embracing the Void, which strives for a general psychoanalytic theory of religion pointing towards the uniqueness and differences between pagan Greek religions and Judaism and Christianity, but leaves the question of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, wide open; not to mention leaves the question of theopolitics related to Marxism, wide open. To my mind, we have to be courageous here and ask difficult questions about the intersections of religion, and their consequences for a materialist-atheist level of theopolitical engagement/community. And here I would not be surprised if the big tension in the room is precisely on the level of Christianity, Islam and Marxism as it relates to conflicts for concrete universality.

17. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How To Be A Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 14.

18. See: Magee, G.A. 2001. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition. Cornell University Press.

19. Here I would argue many of the students at Philosophy Portal are also working to prepare this ground, most notably:

Dimitri Crooijmans

, Quinn Whelehan, Jason Bernstein

is subject

, Max Macken,

jameswilliamwisdom

, Raza Ali, and many others.

20. Which, as I have discussed privately with Owen Cox

Dark Renaissance Radio

, does not grasp the importance of New Dick Sources, which goes well with his ideas of a Paglian Right.

21. Rollins, P. 2009. The Orthodox Heretic: And Other Impossible Tales. Paraclete Press.; see also: THE ORTHODOX HERETIC (w/ Peter Rollins)

22. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How To Be A Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 5.

23. Ibid. p. 10.

24. Ibid. p. 242.

25. Ibid. p. 251.

26. There are too many to name, but if you want a good laugh check out David Patrick Harry’s Church of the Eternal Logos.

27. In the sense that the Protestant reformation should not be disconnected from the technological capacities opened by the Printing Press, which were the preconditions for Luther’s emphasis on human interpretation of scripture, and by extension, the importance of human interpretation of God. As Zizek notes regarding the importance of Jakob Böhme, we get the idea that God depends on Man, not in the humanist sense that God is Man’s imagination, but in the sense that God creates Man (dies into Man), and is only retroactively reborn in man.

28. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How To Be A Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 242.

29. See: Lacan, J. 2005. On Freud’s “Trieb” and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 724.

30. As is evident in their otherwise incredibly awkward “discussion”: Psychedelics, Consciousness, and AI.

31. Bohm, D. 1952. A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of 'Hidden Variables' I. Physical Review. 85 (2): p. 166–179.

32. Smolin, L. 2019. Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The search for what lies beyond the quantum. Penguin.

33. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How To Be A Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 95.

34. See: Last, C. 2020. Dialectical Approach to Singularity. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 293-312. (and which I discussed with

O.G. Rose

here: Cadell Last on a Dialectical Approach to Technological Singularity.

35. Smolin, L. 2001. Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. Basic Books. p. 9-10.

36. See again: Last, C. 2020. Dialectical Approach to Singularity. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 293-312.

37. See also: Žižek, S. 2011. The Ontology of Quantum Physics. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 905-961.

38. Last, C. 2020. Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer.

39. Žižek, S. 2020. Hegel in a Wired Brain. Bloomsbury Publishing.

40. Ibid. p. Chapter 4: Singularity: The Gnostic Turn.

41. Ibid.

42. Žižek, S. 2011. Introduction: Eppur Si Muove. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 4.

43. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How To Be A Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 116.

44. Ibid.

45. This approach has been explored at Philosophy Portal, most notably by Jason Bernstein of

is subject

, see: Bernstein, J. 2022. Hegel and the Concept of Realism. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 153-166. and Max Macken, see: Macken M. 2022. Hegel’s Critique of Kant — Is Kant’s Transcendental Idealism Subjective? In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 133-151.

46. Žižek, S. 2011. Introduction: Eppur Si Muove. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 9.

47. Ibid. p. 4.

48. Ibid. 4-5.

49. Ibid.

50. See: Sapolsky, R. 2023. Determined: Life Without Free Will. Bodley Head.

51. As issue which originally captured by scientific attention, see: Last, C. 2020. Biocultural Theory of Human Reproduction. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 151-164.

52. See: Church, G.M. 2014. Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. Basic Books.

53. See: Drexler, E. 2013. Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization. Public Affairs.

54. Kurzweil, R. 2005. The Singular Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Viking.

55. Bostrom, N. 2014. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press.

56. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How To Be A Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 198.

57. Which I have written about here: Stakes for Sublation in Technofeudal Society.

58. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How To Be A Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 202.

59. Ibid. p. 191.

60. Ibid. p. 202.

61. Last, C. 2020. Global Commons in the Global Brain. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 107-147.

62. See: Tutt, D. 2022. Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: the Crisis of Initiation. Palgrave Macmillan.; also our conversation: Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family.

63. For

Michel Bauwens

this change is based around and inspired by, at least in part, the work of philosopher Kojin Karatani, and the general shift from Marxist “modes of production” to “modes of exchange”, see: Karatani, K. 2014. The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange. Duke University Press.

64. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How To Be A Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 233.

65. Ibid. P. 20-1.

66. Ibid. p. 165.

67. Ibid. p. 20-1.

68. Ibid. p. 266.