Žižek's Theopolitical Philosophy Project

An Introduction to the Core of Žižek's Christian Atheism

This weekend Philosophy Portal will be hosting a conference inspired by the Christian Atheism course, titled “Rosy Cross 2: Radical Theology Meets Emancipatory Politics”. To attend, sign up at the link below:

Radical Core of Žižek’s Philosophy

In the Christian Atheism course, I position the works of philosopher Slavoj Žižek as a key opening for thinking about the history of modern philosophy as a type of struggling with “Christian Atheism”. What I mean by this is that, whether we are thinking about a figure like Schelling or Hegel, Marx or Nietzsche, Freud or Lacan, we can in a way make sense of all these figures as different philosophical embodiments of a distinctly modernist tension between Christianity and Atheism.

All of these thinkers struggle with the oscillation and the negativity between Christianity and Atheism in a unique way, and in many ways, the questions they pose, and the challenges they wrestle with, are all a type of “collateral damage” of the Kantian transcendental turn, which I claim introduces into philosophy the formal dimension of, not only the Death of God (big Other qua universal being), but also the question of Christ (transcendental subject qua a priori categories). With Schelling we get the question of revelation, with Hegel we get the question of Holy Spirit, with Marx we get the question of pragmatic politics, with Nietzsche we get the question of the overman, with Freud we get the question of familial structure, with Lacan we get the question of feminine enjoyment. While some of these figures can be positioned as more Christian (Schelling, Hegel, Lacan), and while others can be positioned as more Atheist (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud), all posses the meta-dimension of a dynamic oscillation in the negativity between the two positions.

Žižek himself takes this to another level, not just in his recent book Christian Atheism, but throughout his entire philosophical career. To develop a philosophy that is capable of moving in a higher order with the modernist philosophical project, Žižek outlines the structure of a semiotic square to make sense of both the dominant institutional paradigms of thought at the outset of the 21st century, as well as their dominant reactions on the periphery or on the outside of the dominant institutional paradigms. This semiotic square consists of, on the level of institution a mix of:

1. Scientific naturalism (Darwinism, brain/cognitive sciences, quantum cosmology)

2. Discursive historicism (Deconstruction, cultural studies, Foucaultian power relations)

And on the reactionary periphery or outside we find a mix of:

1. New Age/Western Buddhism (Eastern void spirituality, esoteric mysticisms)

2. Transcendental Finitude (Particularist traditionalism, Heideggerian phenomenology)

Here from Žižek’s Less Than Nothing:¹

“There are four main positions which, together, constitute today’s ideologico-philosophical field: first […] “democratic materialism”: (1) scientific naturalism (brain sciences, Darwinism…), and (2) discursive historicism (Foucault, deconstruction…); then, the two sides of the spiritualist reaction to it: (3) New Age “Western Buddhism”, and (4) the thought of transcendental finitude (culminating in Heidegger). These four positions form a kind of [semiotic] square along the two axes of ahistorical versus historical thought and of materialism versus spiritualism.”

It should be noted that the institutional mix solidifies the order of what Žižek (and Badiou) call “democratic materialism”, which Žižek insists should be countered or juxtaposed against dialectical materialism (a position fundamentally excluded by both New Age/Western Buddhism and Transcendental Finitude). Whereas “democratic materialism” operates in a “historicist universe” of “bodies and languages”, “dialectical materialism” thinks with the problematic and disorienting way in which the history of bodies and language is pathologised by the dimension of truth.

But how to think this dimension of truth? Are we thinking about this in a non-historical eternalist notion of Platonic truth? Are we thinking about this in the triad of the good-true-beautiful forms? For Žižek, in contrast to Badiou, we are not. We are instead thinking about truth on the terms of the core of modern subjectivity, which Žižek claims is located in the indestructible/immortal drive. For Žižek, this is not so much a challenge for rethinking Platonic philosophy (although it is), but is more so a challenge for rethinking Christianity. In a move that echoes the Christian Atheist struggling and wrestling of modern philosophy itself (Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, etc.), Žižek suggests that what we find at the core of modern subjectivity is not the liberal bourgeois subject, not the light of reason, but rather the dark ground of death drive that makes possible Holy Spirit. Here death drive is not Freud’s naive formulation of a desire to return to inanimate matter (the before times of life), but rather the libidinal insistence of living tensions beyond the cares and concerns of our individual subjectivity. Of course, what we find in this dimension is the “obscene partial object” that Lacan nominates the objet petit a, and which not only sustains Holy Spirit, but also stands for the indestructible drive.

Here again from Žižek’s Less Than Nothing:²

“The thesis […] is double: (1) there is a dimension missed by all four, that of a pre-transcendental gap/rupture, the Freudian name for which is the drive; (2) this dimension designates the very core of modern subjectivity. [/] The Freudian drive cannot be reduced to what Buddhism denounces as desire or to what Heidegger denounces as the Will: even after we reach the end of this critical overcoming of desire-will-subjectivity, something continues to move. What survives death is the Holy Spirit sustained by an obscene “partial object” that stands for the indestructible drive.”

If we want to situate these ideas in the context of the contemporary failures of liberal political subjectivity, we can juxtapose two different paths. One path represents a type of regress from liberalism, which emphasises “mythological wrestling” in “traditionalist universalism”. This is often expressed in an identification with the body of a Christian tradition (Orthodoxy, Catholicism, etc.), and then positioned as a potential theopolitical solution to the failures of liberal political subjectivity. The other path represents the sublation of liberalism in the truth of the subjective core of the liberal subject itself (death drive). In affirming death drive as opposed to affirming the body of a mythological tradition, one does not open up a regress to a traditional institutional church body as political solution, but rather the possibility of actually entering the domain that the Christian tradition refers to as Holy Spirit beyond traditional Christianity itself.

In this precise sense, Žižek’s Christian Atheism does not lead us back into the Christian Church, but rather into new forms of post-religious collectivity that are sustained by the death drive itself. In Žižek’s Less Than Nothing he suggests that this path was always the Hegelian solution to the Death of God:³

“This […] in no way leads to a […] gap between really existing Christianity and the true Christianity, so that every really existing form of the Church necessarily misses its notion. The solution here is the properly Hegelian one: the true Idea of the Christian collective was realised, but outside of the Church as an institution-which, however, does not mean that it survived in intimate, authentic religious experience which had no need for the institutional frame; rather, it survived in other institutions, from revolutionary political parties to psychoanalytic societies… It is thus only in post-religious “atheist” radical-emancipatory collectives that we find the proper actualisation of the Idea of the Christian collective-the necessary consequence of the “atheistic” nature of Christianity itself.”

Christian Atheism as Project

In Žižek’s dialectical materialist treatment of the Death of God we find a double movement (negation of negation) in regards to the social dimension of God that includes within itself the aforementioned liberal regression involved in “mythological wrestling”. This dimension is what Žižek refers to as the necessary “Theological Underpinning” qua transcendental illusion of “God as a de facto Ideal morally regulating life” (upheld by Christian traditionalists). However, we must dialectically couple into this movement the “Atheistic Undermining” qua death drive as the real dimension of “God as deceiving, evil, stupid, impotent, undead”. Žižek claims that this dialectical negation of negation (God as Ideal morality to God as impotent undeadness) is a more radical move than either a non-dialectical position framing God as perfect ideality or a non-dialectical position framing God as inexistent.

To be clear, Žižek’s thought about the “Theological Underpinning” can be framed as a type of developmental-structural recapitulation of a general human coming to terms with the inexistence of the big Other (perfect ideality, moral ideal); and the “Atheistic Undermining” can be framed as an abyssal social cognition on the frontier of the emancipatory political struggle that has characterised modern subjectivity, but also led to the most brutal nightmares (e.g. Holocaust, World Wars, Cold War, genocide, slavery, colonial-imperial forces etc.). It is from this vantage point that Žižek thinks about God itself as unable to coincide with its own ideality (God’s death), opening the necessity of modern subjective struggle (transcendental subjectivity), and ultimately reconciling with a disorienting horizon of our own freedom (Holy Spirit, or the undead God as Holy Spirit).

From Žižek in Christian Atheism:⁴

“I am […] often […] perceived as politically radioactive. The idea that political theology necessarily underpins radical emancipatory politics will for certain add to this perception. […] The basic premise of atheists today is that materialism is a view which can be consistently exposed and defended in itself, in a positive line of argumentation without references to its opposite (religious beliefs). But what if the exact opposite is true? What if, if we want to be true atheists, we have to begin with a religious edifice and undermine it from within? To say that god is deceiving, evil, stupid, undead… is much more radical than to directly claim that there is no god: if we just posit that god doesn’t exist, we open up the way towards its de factor survival as an idea(l) that should regulate our lives. In short, we open up the way to the moral suspension of the religious.”

Moreover, Žižek claims that the logical double movement implicit in Christianity is a part of the uniqueness of Christianity itself being derived in an actual historical double movement between Judaism and the Old Testament. In other words, you cannot get to Christ and the New Testament — as the realised embodiment if what all religions are pointing towards as a potential — without first traversing Judaism and the Old Testament. While for many this is an abstract theological double movement, we find this double movement in the concrete existence of our pain and suffering via (1) the experience of the imperfect universe as Other (lacking universe), and (2) a recognition that this universe as Other is itself lacking/inconsistent. For Žižek, the meaning of “Christ” is found in the negativity of this double movement, i.e. Christ as the realisation of what all religions are pointing towards is the very experience of the lack in the Other (God, absolute reality) and then an affirmation of this Other as itself lacking/inconsistent (Holy Spirit, community of belief without transcendental guarantee).

However, for Žižek, the truth of Christianity is furthermore elaborated in the actual historicity of Christianity (all of its various splits and ruptures). While many today are trying to return to forms of Christianity as if its splits and ruptures did not happen (Orthodox, Traditional Catholics, etc.), this is an obfuscation of the truth of Christianity in recognising that the gap separating finite/frail/sinful human beings from God (absolute reality) is immanent to God (as Holy Spirit). In other words, there is no way to contain/constrain via a perfect moral ideal (Church Fathers, Priestly authority) the truth of the historical absolute. For Žižek, as for Hegel and Marx, the logic of this truth is first expressed in Luther’s Protestant reformation, and then secondarily expressed in the philosophy of German Idealism itself. In this context, if one truly follows the radical threads in Luther, Hegel and Marx, we find that this tradition does not coincide with liberal bourgeois subjectivity, but rather coincides with its undermining as its own form of religious subjectivity in a different form. This is why Žižek ultimately concludes that “Enlightenment” does not contain or constrain the truths of German Idealism and Marxist politics, but rather German Idealism and Marxist politics represent the end of Enlightenment. Here it should also be noted that the often cited movement from Hegel to Marx gets reversed in Žižek, where the truth of the entire movement can be found to reach its zenith in Hegel’s notion of absolute knowing:⁵

“Is Christianity itself not unique among religions due to the fact that it cannot be accessed directly but only through another religion (Judaism)? Its sacred writing — the Bible — has two parts, the Old and the New Testament, so that one has to go through the first one to arrive at the second one. […] What is accessible to us all is the elementary move from our experience of lack (our imperfect universe, the limit of knowledge) to redoubling this lack, i.e. locating it in to the Other itself which becomes a “barred” inconsistent Other. Hegel’s notion of God provides the exemplary case of such a redoubling: 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 “ontologisation” of our epistemological limitation, is at the core of Hegel’s absolute knowing, it signals the moment when Enlightenment is brought to its end.”

When all of this is considered together — i.e. the history of modern philosophy, the core of modern subjectivity as death drive, the truth of religion as found in Christ-ianity, the truth of Christianity found in its atheistic undermining — we find the “three cores” of Žižek’s Christian Atheism:⁶

1. Atheist core of Christianity:⁷ Christianity is unique in how it overcomes gap separating humans from god, not by elevating humans through pious activity leaving behind sin (disciplinary god-regulation as moral ideal), but transposing gap that separates them from god into god himself; what dies on the cross is god of the beyond, what is resurrected after the cross is the free community which is abandoned to itself, with no transcendental higher power guaranteeing its fate (our freedom is god erasing himself out of the picture)

2. Ontology of quantum mechanics:⁸ ontological implications of quantum mechanics involve a god who is himself deceived, not Einstein’s Spinozist god of a harmonious order of laws of nature which are eternal and immutable, allowing no exception, and an objective reality that exists independently of us (human observers), but that the domain of quantum waves where chance is irreducible and things can become retroactively annihilated, escaping the control of eternal and immutable laws and allows for a domain which constitutively violates them

3. Transcendental parallax:⁹ biggest cut in philosophical history opens with Kant’s transcendental revolution, which shifts us from a given ontological dimension towards an ontology that is transcendentally constituted by the structure of our own categories and perception; no matter how we describe external reality (e.g. evolutionary theory explaining the emergence of human life on earth, etc.), we are always-already presupposing nature regulated by complex causal links (its transcendental constitution by our categories and perceptions)

In the Christian Atheism course, I propose a triad utilising these three cores that can be used to formulate the foundations for a theopolitical project:

1. Atheist core of Christianity = Abyssal community/network

2. Ontology of quantum mechanics = open-ended/incomplete ontology

3. Transcendental parallax = speculative cognition

All three of these dimension needs to be thought together, in a similar way to how Lacan’s Imaginary-Symbolic-Real triad is thought together:

1. Abyssal community/network is possible because of open-ended/incomplete ontology

2. Open-ended/incomplete ontology opens to nature of speculative cognition/thinking processes

3. Speculative cognition sustains leading edge of abyssal community/network

For Žižek, when all three of these dimensions are thought in a unity, we not only avoid the regression into illiberal or pre-liberal thinking (e.g. traditionalist closure), but embody a negativity introducing a radical cut that changes how we measure progress itself. In other words, while many today claim that we replaced the reality of myth with the myth of progress; the real challenge for us today is to rethink how we conceive and measure progress, and also how we think about progress, not in terms of the achievement of a positive stable identity, but rather in the terms of the deepening of social contradictions entangled with our collective emancipation. From Christian Atheism:¹⁰

“The book brings together these three topics into a project of “Christian Atheism”: the space for the experience of the “divine” is the gap that forever separates the transcendental from the objective-realist approach, but this “divine” dimension refers to the experience of radical negativity (what mystics and Hegel called “night of the world”) which precludes any theology focused on a positive figure of god, even if this figure of god is radically secularised in modern scientific naturalism. In Christianity, this gap registers the absence of god (its “death”) which grounds the Holy Ghost. And, last but not least, the dimension of radical negativity also holds open the space for every emancipatory politics which takes itself seriously, i.e., which reaches beyond the continuity of historical progress and introduces a radical cut that changes the very measures of progress.”

Here we should note that the aforementioned triad can be turned into, following Hegel’s own logic, a quadruplicity by supplementing (1) abyssal community/network, (2) open-ended/incomplete ontology, (3) speculative cognition, with a fourth dimension which (like the dimension of sinthome in Lacan’s ISR triad runs across the previous three dimensions): (4) emancipatory politics. Again from Christian Atheism:¹¹

“But, as we learned from Hegel, moments of a dialectical process can be counted as three or as four — and the fourth missing moment is here politics, of course. (The political dimension is not limited to the final chapter, it runs as an undercurrent through the entire book, popping up even in its most philosophical parts.)”

For Žižek this dimension of emancipatory politics is seeking to critique and undermine both the “Woke Left” and the “New Right” (or the “Pop Right”).¹² Žižek claims that what unites both the Woke Left and New/Pop Right as a dialectical symptom/sinthome is its self-destructive stance in the struggle against inequality, where equality becomes the mask for its opposite. This may be self-explanatory in regards to the Woke Left, which (as a result of obfuscating the theological dimension of emancipatory politics) becomes caught in its own weird religious pseudo-moralism, in the tyranny of a super-ego injunction towards ever more tolerance and inclusion of otherness without end (spurious infinity). For those operating within the Woke Left, no matter how tolerant and inclusive you are, you are always made to feel more guilty for not being tolerate and inclusive enough (not diverse enough, etc.). We see this practically on issues of immigration, or in terms of liberal institutional representation, which raises all sorts of weird contradictions that leftist politics refuses to think via the truth of a self-critical stance. For the New Right, we find a form of (currently hegemonic) populism which is directed against undermining liberal elites in corporate, academic and government sectors (e.g. DOGE), and forms pacts with anti-Western authoritarians (e.g. Putin) that are designed to reduce emancipatory politics to particularist identifications (e.g. National Socialism, or “socialism in one country”, as opposed to actual socialism).

As a result of this political constellation, for Žižek, Europe (and by extension North America, e.g. NATO) is no longer able to remain faithful to its greatest achievements: a politics that strives for global emancipation via holding itself to its own standards of internal and immanent self-critique.¹³ What replaces an internal and immanent self-critique, on the side of the Woke Left, is an anti-Western ideology that ignores class antagonism and foregrounds racial, gender and sexual divisions that are largely regressive attempts at reigning liberal ideology to appropriate protest movement energy from the May ‘68 “New Left” (counter-culture). As mentioned above, what is missing her is the dimension of theology (which is often claimed or re-appropriated by more conservative or right-wing social movement). For Žižek, what theology would help the Left with on the level of emancipatory politics is a new way of thinking about “true inclusivity” instead of giving the false appearance of inclusivity while remaining fundamentally exclusionary (in a self-destructive way, i.e. exclusionary of itself, of its own historical identity).

As a Leftist, Žižek walks his own talk in maintaining a strong critical stance in relationship to the Left itself.¹⁴ He theorises that the Christian Atheist dimension of “Judeo-Christianity” needs to be developed as the intersectionality of the “Woke Left” is short-circuited by Jewish ethnicity itself. For Žižek, the Woke Left’s intersectionality, operating as it down via a matrix of “oppression” and “privilege”, is problematic from the Jewish standpoint because of the perception that Jews are often occupying positions of privilege (economic, cultural, political). In this way, Anti-Semitism is not like other racisms as its aim is not to subordinate Jews, but rather to exterminate Jews; Jews in the popular imagination (of the Pop Right) are not perceived to be “lowly foreigners” but rather as “secret Masters”. But even more disturbing is the possibility that, while it is well known that right wing populists operate via a form of anti-Semitism that functions as a primitive versions of anti-Capitalism; this ideology is inverted by the Woke Left: anti-Capitalism now functions as a mask for anti-Semitism.

To cut to our political moment, and moving forward beyond both Woke Left (which is basically dead or on life support post-Trump 2.0), and the (currently hegemonic) Pop Right, we need to cut through the current opposition between liberal democracy and new populism as a false dichotomy. In short, the Pop Right (Trump-Putin axis) is not superior to liberal democracy, and while liberal democracy is not an adequate solution, we must learn to work with it in order to overcome it. For Žižek, this involves rebuilding a more active link between civil society self-organisation and political parties actually working towards a sublation of capitalism for socialism.

To conclude, the specific role of “Christian Atheism” in this link between civil society self-organisation and political parties, should avoid the temptation of an authoritarian moralistic “Christian nationalism”, and instead recognise the religious or theological dimension of Christianity to operate on the level of civil society/community self-organisation itself for its own atheistic undermining on the level of socialist politics. In this dialectical relation Christ does not function as a moral authority but as a question and a problem that is unique to each singularity (modern subject of the death drive). For Žižek, this is why he ends his opening to Christian Atheism with the idea that the question of Christ functions singularly in our depths (private, not public), while our response to the question represents the true surface in our political activity.

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This weekend Philosophy Portal will be hosting a conference inspired by the Christian Atheism course, titled “Rosy Cross 2: Radical Theology Meets Emancipatory Politics”. The conference will feature works from

Dimitri

Crooijmans, Daniel Coughlan (

Holey CoW

), Kirsty Rosenstock, Sahil Sasidharan, Andrew Robinson,

Matthew Stanley

, Chris Eyre,

Cleo Kearns

, Mark Gerard Murphy,

Julie Reshe

, Barry Taylor, Eliot Rosenstock, Carmen Hannibal, Dominic Sacranie, James Wisdom (

jameswilliamwisdom

), Pae Veo, Daniel L. Garner (

O.G. Rose

),

Jim Palmer

,

Helen Rollins

, and Peter Rollins. To attend, see:

I also released the opening part of my lecture on Žižek’s Christian Atheism, previously only available for course participants, on YouTube:

To access the entire lecture and the course, see:

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1. Žižek, S. 2011. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso. p. 6.

2. Ibid. p. 6-7 [/] 5.

3. Ibid. p. 115.

4. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 1.

5. Ibid. p. 2.

6. Ibid. p. 3-5.

7. Ibid. p. 3.

8. Ibid. p. 3-4.

9. Ibid. p. 5.

10. Ibid. p. 4-5.

11. Ibid. p. 5.

12. Ibid. p. 7-8.

13. Ibid. p. 10-11.

14. Ibid. p. 12-13.