Traumatic Neighbors

In his contribution to The Neighbor, Zizek offers this typically contrarian, typically extreme, description of the impact of God’s command to love the neighbor:

“What gets lost in this ‘critique of ethical violence’ is precisely the most precious and revolutionary aspect of the Jewish legacy. Let us not forget that, in the Jewish tradition, the divine Mosaic Law is experienced as something externally, violently imposed, contingent and traumatic – in short as an impossible/real Thing that ‘makes the law. . . . The Judeo-Christian tradition is thus to be strictly opposed to the New Age Gnostic problematic of self-realization or self-fulfillment, and the cause of this need for a violent imposition of the Law is that the very terrain covered by the Law is that of an even more fundamental violence, that of encountering a neighbor: far from brutally disturbing a preceding harmonious social interaction, the imposition of the Law endeavors to introduce a minimum of regulation onto a stressful ‘impossible’ relationship. When the Old Testament enjoins you to love and respect your neighbor, this does not refer to your imaginary semblable/double, but to the neighbor qua traumatic Thing. In contrast to the New Age attitude which ultimately reduced my Other/Neighbor to my mirror-image or to the means in the path of my self-realization . . . , Judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my Neighbor” (140).

Zizek sees an inner connection between this traumatic commandment and the equally traumatic prohibition of images: “The Jewish commandment which prohibits images of God is the obverse of the statement that relating to one’s neighbor is the only terrain of religious practice, of where the divine dimension is present in our lives – ‘no images of God’ does not point toward a Gnostic experience of the divine beyond our reality, a divine which is beyond any image; on the contrary, it designates a kind of ethical hic Rhodus, hic salta: you want to be religious? OK, prove it here, in the ‘works of love,’ in the way you relate to your neighbors” (141).