Zizek’s Apocalyptic

Zizek’s more
violent apocalypticism avoids these difficulties of the milder but less coherent apocalyptic of Alain Badiou. 

It is the commitment and
passion inherent in apocalyptic that attracts Zizek. The deconstructive
theology of John Caputo destroys the very foundations of Christianity because
it opens up a gap between the “spectral unconditional Event” and the
“contingent instantiations,” rendering incarnation an impossibility. For
Caputo, the truth sets free because it sets us free from Truth, which may be
possessed in unequal portions and lead to mastery of one over another (The Monstrosity of Christ, 257-258). Zizek argues, on the contrary, that the excess of Event over its
embodiment in the name does not free us to choose our own bliss, a stance that
can only underwrite bourgeois complacency. Instead, the Event comes to us as a
promise and obligation. Caputo has a “death of God” theology without trauma and
tragedy, a death of God in which the only thing that dies are the false
“envelope of Divinity,” our misleading conceptions God as Lord, King,
Authority, Mighty Other (260).

Zizek prefers
the more radical, and in some ways more orthodox, apocalyptic theology of
Thomas Altizer. For Altizer, as for Christian orthodoxy, God Himself dies on
the cross, though Altizer draws conclusions that most earlier theologians would
not countenance. Altizer’s apocalypse is an apocalypse for God Himself, and
this end of the world is the very heart
of Christian faith, though Altizer thinks it is usually covered over with
polite forms of dogma. Zizek finds such apocalypticism attractive for its
revolutionary power. It inspired the English and Russian revolutions, fueled
early Islam, came to expression in Marxism (261). Apocalyptic is
the “perverse core” of Christianity that Zizek wants to restore, albeit without
including God in the mix.

In the
struggle against the powers and principalities of global capitalism, Badiou’s
adherence to the Event is fundamental, Zizek claims: “To engage in this struggle means to
endorse Badiou’s formula mieux mut un &metre qu’un disetre: better to take the risk and engage in
fidelity to a Truth-Event, even if it ends in catastrophe, than to vegetate in
the eventless utilitarian-hedonist survival of what Nietzsche called the “last
men.” What Badiou rejects is thus the liberal ideology of victimhood, with its
reduction of politics to a program of avoiding the worst, to renouncing all
positive projects and pursuing the least bad option” (Living in the End Times, xv).

Yet at the level of political analysis, Zizek departs from Badiou. Economy
for Badiou is part of the “situation,” and thus it cannot be the site of Event.
By the same token, Zizek rejects Badiou’s distinction between “politics as
fidelity to an event and policing as ‘servicing the goods’ of a society.” For
Zizek, the only point of loyalty to the Event the hope of “radically
transforming” policing itself. He pushes the question back to the origins of
Leftwing thought: “What if the ‘original sin’ of modern emancipatory movements
can be traced back to the ‘young Hegelian’ rejection of the authority and
alienation of the state?” (Monstrosity, 200). Zizek is both more and less
apocalyptic than Badiou: More, because
he acknowledges the constant traumatic turmoil of political life, the fact that
there is always already eruption; less,
because he recognizes that the point of radical politics is to contribute to a
new social formation, more just than the last. Zizek’s dialectics are subtle
enough to keep this more or less coherent.

Zizek confronts some
difficulties at the other end. He wants eruptions to settle out
institutionally; apocalypse makes the world more just. Zizekian apocalypse,
unlike its Badiouan counterpart, aims at ends.
Yet in a world of violent dialectics, there is little room for the
extraordinary within the ordinary,
little room for an event like the incarnation in which the Son of God is said
to come as a normal Jewish man of the first century (Milbank in Monstrosity, 211).
If apocalypse cannot become ordinary, it is hard to see how Zizek escapes the
charge he levels against left Hegelians. If Badiou gives us apocalyptic bursts
in a static surface, Zizek offers a percolating surface but cannot explain how
it is a surface at all.