DEBATES

Religion and the Bifurcation of the Left

Slavoj iek and the
Imperial/Colonial Model of Religion
William David Hart
Hegelian Prelude
This earliest form of religion
although one may well refuse to call it religionis that for
which we have the name magic. (Hegel 1998a, 226)
The religion of magic is still found today among wholly crude
and barbarous peoples such as the Eskimos. (229)
The Negroes have an endless multitude of divine images
which they make into their gods or their fetishes. (23435)
[Africa] is no historical part of the World; it has no movement
or development to exhibit. Historical movements in itthat is
in its northern partbelong to the Asiatic or European World.
(Hegel 1988b, 92)
World history goes from East to West: as Asia is the begin-
ning of world history, so Europe is simply its end. In world
history there is an absolute East, , ..//.. (whereas the
Ne pant l a: Vi e ws f r o m So ut h 3.3
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geographical term East is in itself entirely relative); for al-
though the earth is a sphere, history makes no circle around
that sphere. On the contrary, it has a denite East which is
Asia. It is here that the external physical sun comes up, to sink
in the West: and for that same reason it is in the West that
the inner Sun of self-consciousness rises, shedding a higher
brilliance. (ibid.)
This inner dialectic of civil society thus drives itor at any
rate drives a specic civil societyto push beyond its own lim-
its [colonial expansion] and seek markets, and so its necessary
means of subsistence, in other lands which are either decient
in the goods it has overproduced, or else generally backward in
industry, &c. (Hegel 1967, 151)
The same consideration justies civilized nations in regarding
and treating as barbarians those who lag behind them in in-
stitutions which are the essential moments of the state. Thus
a pastoral people may treat hunters as barbarians, and both of
these are barbarians from the point of view of agriculturists,
&c. The civilized nation is conscious that the rights of barbar-
ians are unequal to its own and treats their autonomy as only a
formality. (219)
Introduction
In their efforts to develop a general theory of religion, scholars often employ
an evolutionary/hierarchical model. These models became evident at least
as early as the eighteenth century and reached their zenith in the nineteenth
century. Almost invariably, they exhibit the following schemata: from sim-
ple to complex religion, from primitive to civilized, from religions of the
South to those of the North, from religions of the East to those of the
West, from the religions of Africa, aboriginal Australia, and native Amer-
ica to the religions of Europe. This evolutionary and hierarchical model
of religion is more properly called the ,./// ./ / ./.
1
I
shall argue that Slavoj ieks recent book 7/. !/. //. !/, !
/. c/ !., !/ !/ !` (2000a) is a legacy of this model
of religion, the most systematic version of which is found in the work
of Hegel. I shall argue, further, that ieks and Hegels models share
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Eurocentric presuppositionshistorical, cultural, political, and econom-
icthat are troubling. What I will not argue is that iek . to recapit-
ulate the imperial/colonial model of religion. On the contrary, he stumbles
into this model. He does so, precisely, because he . . . He does
not think about the ethics and politics of religion and representation at all.
Instead, he speaks the common sense of his culture, which distinguishes
invidiously between Christianity and other religions, viewing Christianity
alternately, if not simultaneously, as the height of religious evolution and
as a revelation whose very absurdity confounds and throws into utter
disarray preexisting notions of religion, ethics, and politics. iek holds
this common sense constant and beyond questionit does not even reach
the threshold of critiqueas he queries our cultures common sense on
other matters. What he holds constant, I put into play.
The appellation ,./// ./ / ./ is apropos. For
colonial modernity beganwithPortuguese andSpanishvoyages of conquest
consecrated by the Pope in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. Thus conquest
provides the historical context for the emergence of a theory of religion
that models the hierarchical, sociopolitical relations with native peoples
in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the islands of the Atlantic,
Pacic, and Indian Oceans (the bitter fruit of conquest) that were already
beginning to develop. This development was fed by the classication of
national characters, the transatlantic slave trade, and the emergence of
racial theory, developments that in turn fed into and were conditioned by
Christian Europes lingering anxieties toward its Jewish inhabitants and by
competitionandconict betweenChristianandIslamic civilizations. When
I refer to the imperial/colonial model of religion, it is this large tableau
with its temporal, geographical, racial, and gendered hierarchiesthat I
have in mind.
That is not all that I have in mind. The imperial/colonial model of
religion has antecedents in the medieval notion of the four faiths: Chris-
tianity, Judaism, Islam, and Idolatry (King 1999, 99). !/, (or ,)
referred to non-Abrahamic religion. The singular ./ rather than the
plural ./ was appropriate since, for the proponents of the Abrahamic
religions, the similarities were more important than the differences. As
polytheists and demon worshipers, the adherents of non-Abrahamic reli-
gion were ignorant of father Abraham and certainly ignorant of Jesus the
Christ. Idolatry was the dominant category under which the Portuguese
and Spanish perceived Africans and American Indians during the fteenth
century. But we know that this was not the only way they (Africans at
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least) were perceived. When the Portuguese raided West African villages
in 1441, they shouted St. George and Santiago (St. James), the saints they
always appealed to when raiding the outposts of Islam (Raboteau 2001, 4).
At a time when the crusading spirit of Christendom was experiencing its
last revival, the Portuguese clearly saw Africans (at least some of them) as
their Muslim enemies. Ironically, their African adventures were partially
inspired by a legendary Christian king called Prester John, who resided
somewhere in Africa and whom they hoped to persuade to join them in
their crusade against the followers of Islam (ibid.).
By the time of the European Enlightenment, and certainly by the
nineteenth century, the medieval quartet of Christianity, Judaism, Islam,
and Idolatry had developed into the precursor of the world religions
model. On one side of an epistemic and normative dividing line were the
world religions, on the other side were nature religions. World religions
were dened in large part by the presence of literacy, if not a high textual
tradition. Nature religions were nonliterate. World religions were Euro-
pean and Asian. Nature religions were African, Native American, and
Aboriginal. Thus the category of Idolatry as an all-purpose description of
non-Abrahamic religion had all but disappeared as Asian religions were
distinguished from African, Native American, and Aboriginal religions
and became constitutive members of the world religions club, while the
religions of the people without history, as Hegel would put it, were rele-
gated to the category of nature, tribal, primitive, or primal religion. By the
mid-nineteenth century, the imperial/colonial model of religion was rmly
in place, constituting the common sense through which religion was un-
derstood. Indeed, the imperial/colonial model with its Christian center,
oriental periphery, and primitive outer-periphery is still the dominant
way of organizing religious studies departments (Hart 2002, 9).
In this essay, I trace the reemergence of the imperial/colonial
model of religion in the work of iek. To show that his recent work
presupposes this modeldespite his status as a progressive Marxistis my
task. To show that this model is constitutive of his politics, that his politics
are Eurocentric, and that Eurocentrism colors his view of Christianity and
Marxism is also my burden. Before I attempt to shoulder so heavy a load,
allow me to make a remark about the pleasures and the perils of reading
iek.
Reading iek is a stimulating experience. One is simultaneously
informed, edied, and entertained. His courage, his willingness to criticize
leftist conventions and common sense, is attractive, even when he is wrong,
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even when his political judgment is questionable, even when his taste is
bad. My analysis is often little more than a writing between his lines,
an effort to understand ieks deciencies in light of his own critique. If
Stuart Halls Religious Ideology and Social Movements in Jamaica (1985)
has greater depth than Marxs account of religion, then iek swims even
deeper, in the middle regions between a supercial analysis and the kind of
depth analysis that one nds, for example, in Dipesh Chakrabartys The
Time of History and the Times of the Gods (1997). ieks most explicit
effort to theorize religion in relation to Marxism is 7/. !/. //.. As
usual, one is stunned by ieks sheer intelligence, by his endless creativity
in reading both the philosophical tradition and popular culture through
Lacanian lenses. His appropriation of Jacques Lacan allows him to capture
something important about religion that Hall misses, that is, the powerful,
contradictory, and paradoxical ways in which religion works ideologically
on the level of fantasy and affect, on the level of the viscera, the stomach,
and the amygdala. Thus he gives a better account of subject formation in
religious ideology, of the sensible and infrasensible domains in which we
think, within which intensities of cultural appraisal are stored, and through
which we value and disvalue (Connolly 1999, 177).
Take the case, which iek recounts, of a woman who needs a
lifesaving blood transfusion. Her religious beliefs (lets assume that she is a
Christian Scientist) hold that transfusions are sinful. A liberal judge has a
difcult decision to make: Howdoes he get the woman to consent to a blood
transfusion without forcing her to violate her religious beliefs? The judge
attempts to resolve this problem by forcing the woman to have a blood
transfusion /. a//. Since sin is an act of will and the transfusion
violated her will, then she could not be held responsible for the act, and
would not be condemned to hell and damnation. Her life could be saved
without violating /. religious conviction that transfusions are sinful or the
liberal belief that coercing confessions is wrong.
Despite its noble intentions, which might lead him behave simi-
larly were he facing a similar case, iek despises this solution as a lie. It
does not force the woman, psychoanalytically speaking, to confront her de-
sire. For in regard to the judges question (of whether she would be guilty
of sin were the court to forcibly transfuse her), the woman in question
/.a ,././, a.// / / /. a.. ^ /. . a/ . ./.
/ (iek 2000a, 138). Thus she was in the enviable position of
saying yes by saying no. Answering no would allow her to satisfy her true
as opposed to her lying desire. Here is a formal coincidence between telling
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the truth and telling a lie, that is, a formal truth provides cover for a sub-
stantive lie. This solution does not force the woman to face the truth of her
desire, that is, the Lacanian difference between her stated desire (as sub-
ject of statement) and her unstated desire (as subject of enunciation).
Statements are propositional. They are public relations announcements for
an ego that always dissembles, deceives, and lies. Enunciations are about
affects, instincts, and ideological fantasy. They are the pronouncements of
our unconscious desire. The woman in question speaks to the letter of the
law, its propositional truth, when acknowledging the sinfulness of blood
transfusion (she truly believes that transfusion is sinful). But she lies about
her true desire and thus does not speak to the spirit of the law, to what we
might call the truth effects of affect. For on the level of her subjective
position of ., she endorses the very blood transfusion that as a
proposition she rejects (ibid.).
Through analyses such as this, iek provides a powerful set of
conceptual toolsmost notably, the idea of ideological fantasythat
help us to better understand the power of religious ideologies and the tena-
cious hold that they have on their subjects. But if we are stunned by ieks
intelligence, by his ability to illuminate the ideological power of religion,
then equally as stunning is his thorough captivity to the imperial/colonial
model of religion. This enthrallment is only underscored by his often sub-
tle and insightful analysis of ideology. If iek has identied the sublime
object of ideology as a traumatic void, constitutive lack, or ontological
absence at the center of the subject, ethnos, and nationat the center of
any notion of wholeness, completion, or plenitudethen he remains blind
to that object in his narrative of religion. In this essay, I use the conceptual
resources that iek provides to illustrate this blindness.
As one of my colleagues has said, 7/. !/. //., like all of
ieks texts, is something of a grab bag. One is never sure of how to
read iek, never sure of his mood. Is his account serious? Is it parody? Is
it analysis by way of perversion? Or analysis by way of hysteria? (Penney
2000, 3). It is hard to know as he meanders, digresses, and lurches from
ostensible Lacanian insight (often illustrated by reference to a movie) to a
stimulating reading of Marx. In this analysis, I will grab what I nd useful
in ieks bag and leave the rest behind. That I leave a great deal behind
has as much to do with limitations of space as with my desire, specically,
to explicate his concept of religion. So I have nothing to say about a lot of
things (for instance, his brilliant analysis of Coke as an example of Lacans
/. ,. ) that I otherwise nd interesting and noteworthy.
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iek (2000a, 1) begins his analysis, rather portentously, with the
following statement: One of the most deplorable aspects of the postmodern
era and its so-called thought is the return of the religious dimension in all
its different guises; fromChristian and other fundamentalisms, through the
multitude of New Age spiritualisms, up to the emerging religious sensitiv-
ity within deconstructionism itself (so-called post-secular thought). How
is a Marxist, by denition a ghting materialist (Lenin), to counter this
massive onslaught of obscurantism? Against the obvious answer of fero-
ciously attacking these tendencies and mercilessly denouncing the residual
religiosity within Marxism, iek advocates ///, . a/ .
. / : yes, there a direct lineage from Christianity to Marxism; yes,
Christianity and Marxism // ght on the same side of the barricade
against the onslaught of new spiritualismsthe authentic Christian legacy
is much too precious to be left to the fundamentalist freaks (2).
What one notices immediately is that iek puts Christianity and
Marxism on the same side and against the multicultural multitude, which
he construes in summary fashion as fundamentalist freaks. Before pro-
ceeding, a disclaimer: I share ieks disdain for liberal multiculturalism.
I think that he is right, furthermore, to criticize much of the academic-
cultural Left for fetishizing difference and underplaying the virtues of
universality, not as an antecedent, transcendental a priori but as a conse-
quent, as a result of agonistic struggle. iek is a provocative writer whose
very style invites counterprovocation. I am being intentionally provocative,
maybe perverse, in using the term/// /., which I refuse to
concede to liberalism or to ieks critique. Under the cover of a legitimate
and necessary critique of difference, iek smuggles illegitimate claims for
Europe. He seeks to universalize European difference to the detriment, I
fear, of the multicultural multitude, whose legitimate interests, fears, and
desires cannot be reduced to the language of liberal pluralism and the
politics of political correctness, even if that kind of language and politics
is multiculturalisms dominant mode of articulation. Can iek imagine
the agonistic universalization of non-European difference? Or is the non-
European markered, by denition, as nonuniversal, as nonuniversalizable?
I wonder. To answer these questions now would be premature. Thus I will
only mark the chain of equivalence between fundamentalism, freakishness,
inauthentic Christianity, New Age spirituality, and paganism, that is, the
ensemble of peoples, perspectives, and forms of religiosity, spirituality, and
piety that I call the multicultural multitude. I will return to these questions
later.
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By putting Christianity and Marxism on the same side, but more
important, by linking them uniquely, irremediably, and even essentially to
Europe, and thus placing them against the others, iek reafrms the im-
perial/colonial model in the theory of religion. This model, which iek
appears to have appropriatedwithout reservation, is givenits most thorough
philosophical exposition by Hegel in four series of !.. /. !//
,/, / !./ (1821, 1824, 1827, 1831). In these lectures Hegel develops
an evolutionary schema in which C., Spirit, God moves spatiotempo-
rally from South to North, from East to West, from the dark continent
to the continent of enlightenment, from black to white, from Oriental to
Occidental, from primitive to civilized, from fetish to Christ. Christianity
sits at the top of religious development. And while it too must be sublated
(preserved, cancelled, transformed, and lifted higher) by philosophy, phi-
losophy would not be possible without it. But do not ieks accounts of
Marxism and Christianity make similar moves? Are not Christianity and
Marxismat least in his accounttwo sides of a Eurocentric narrative of
colonial modernity? I attempt to answer these questions in the remainder
of this essay.
Judeo-Christian Logic
According to iek, there is a Judeo-Christian logic. He urges us to
stick to this logic against the onslaught of New Age neo-paganism. The
virtues of this logic are as profound as the vices of neopagans, who are
fundamentalist freaks under a different description. Judeo-Christian logic
provides the theoretical and political weapons that we need in the ght
against Capital, and against its neopagan, fundamentalist, and multicul-
tural proxies. To this point, iek has not said clearly what that logic is,
but one gets the sneaking suspicion that it is a Lacanian logic : / /.
.. In any event, what interests him most are the correlations that he can
make been this logic and Lacan. He explicates this logic, if you can call
it explication, in a set of reections that have a serial but not a narrative
relation. On my gloss of ieks (2000a, 83) account, Judeo-Christian logic
allows us to apprehend the ontological paradoxscandal, evenof the
notion of /,. Pagans, whether paleo or neo, simply get fantasy
wrong. They think that fantasy is subjective when, in fact, it belongs to
the anomalous category of the objectively-subjective (Dennett 1991, 132;
quoted in iek 2000a, 83). They think of fantasy as an idiosyncratic de-
rangement of cosmic order, rather than the violent singular excess that
every notion of such an order; that is, they construe fantasy as
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external and abnormal rather than constitutive of the norm (iek 2000a,
86). Thus they deny that error, distortion, and lying are metaphysical con-
stituents of truth. Further, they are oblivious to Friedrich Shellings mood,
his account of an innite melancholy in nature, a muteness before an in-
nite pain, a deadlock, an unresolved absolute tension that only the logos
in man can redeem. iek stops short of dismissing Shellings account as
crazy teleological speculation insofar as it has an analogue in historical
experience. By historical experience he means a movie! Federico Fellinis
, is his evidence. On ieks reading, the Ancient Roman hedonis-
tic gures depicted in this movie are permeated by an innite sadness
(87). This observation sets up a claim about the soteriological complexity
and superiority of Christianity that he has been working toward all along:
Fellini himself claimed that, precisely as a Christian, he wanted
to make a lm about a universe in which Christianity is yet to
come, from which the notion of Christian redemption is yet
to come, from which the notion of Christian redemption is
totally absent. Does the strange sadness, a kind of fundamental
melancholy, of these pagan gures not, then, bear witness to
the fact that they somehow already have the premonition that
the true God will soon reveal Himself, and that they were born
just a little bit too early, so that they cannot be redeemed?
And is this not also the fundamental lesson of the Hegelian
dialectics of alienation: we are not dealing with the Paradise
which is then lost due to some fatal intrusionthere is already
in paradisiacal satisfaction (in the satisfaction of the nave
organic community) something suffocating, a longing for fresh
air, for an opening that would break the unbearable constraint;
and this longing introduces into Paradise an unbearable innite
Pain, a desire to break outlife in Paradise is always pervaded
by an innite melancholy. (88)
According to iek, there is nothing speculative, teleological, or
nonsensical about this account. On the contrary, it is the only way of avoid-
ing the naivet of an evolutionary narrative. Now, this is quite astonishing
in light of the naivet of his evolutionary narrative of religion, of the im-
perial/colonial matrix from which it emerged, whose history makes his
Hegelian account of religion suspect. Even the wise and dusky wings
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of Minerva (that is, a retrospective assessment) are not enough to save
this account from the ridicule that it deserves. But on this matter, iek
seems oddly indifferent, even blind. And what he has to say about Walter
Benjamins idiosyncratic notions of messianism and other antievolution-
ary gestures does not save his account. They only expose more sharply its
inadequacy.
If Judeo-Christian logic is antievolutionary, as iek contends,
then it alone can give a proper account of eternity. This logic stands against
a pagan logic that denies the founding power of trauma, which is an eter-
nal, irremediable wound or innite sadness that we cannot speak or put
into historical context because it resists the symbolizing and historicizing
work of language. Judeo-Christian logic comprehends the negativity of
eternity, the ontological difference between time and eternity, eternity as
that which time excludes, eternity as the .:. condition for the emer-
gence of time. In effect, iek baptizes Martin Heideggers ontological
difference as Judeo-Christian.
2
Ignorance of this difference distinguishes
pre-Christian religions. Notice: he doesnt say other religions or non-
Christian religions but pre-Christian. He calls such religions pre-Christian
because he is employing an evolutionary model, probably Hegels model,
in which Judaism is the Sublime Religion and Christianity is the Consum-
mate Religion. Before and behind these religions, to the south and to the
east, are the pre-Christian religions: (1) Immediate or Natural Religion,
where Spirit has yet to extricate itself fromnatureSpirit being the proper
measure of man; (2) Mediated Religion, where the spiritual is elevated
above the natural; and (3) Consummate Religion, religion that is for itself,
which is self-conscious, which can take itself as an object of inquiry. If one
does an ethnography of this schema, one discovers the following ascent
of Religion Man : from Eskimos, Africans, Mongols, Chinese, Indians,
Burmese, Jews, ancient Greeks, and ancient Romans,
3
to modern Euro-
peans. In ascending rank order, the list of religions are: magic (fetishism,
animism, primitivism), Buddhism, Lamaism, the State Religion of the
Chinese Empire, Taoism, Hinduism, Persian Religion, Egyptian Religion,
Greek Religion, Jewish Religion, Roman Religion, and Christianity (Hegel
1988, 20515, 22930, 235, 391). These lists are a little misleading; not only
do the two orders of ascent fail to map up perfectly, they also obscure the
categorical difference between Christianity as Consummate (superhistori-
cal) Religion and all the others as Determinate (historical) Religion. The
differences between the others are matters of degree; the one between them
and Christianity is a difference in kind. And this is true despite the fact that
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there is no place in Hegels philosophy for the kind of gaps and conceptual
leaps that one nds, for example, in the philosophy of Sren Kierkegaard,
his dissident follower. Hegels account reects the condence of a Christian
Europe that was well on its way (in 1827) to reducing most of the globe to
a colony.
If iek explicates the antievolutionary character of Judeo-Chris-
tian logic in relation to eternity, then he ignores the context of colo-
nial modernity and, thus, the evolutionary and hierarchical episteme of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century comparative religion, which is consti-
tutive of the very notion of Judeo-Christianity. If I am correct in assuming
ieks reliance onHegelandevenif I amnot, since this episteme is bigger
than Hegelthen iek bears a certain burden of proof. He must explain
why his Hegelianism does not commit him to Hegels account of religion,
history, and politics. As the quotations with which I opened this essay show,
there is a constitutive relation between pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory,
the distinction between lower and higher races, between primitive reli-
gions and world historical religions, and claims for the preeminence of
European Man. In the absence of an account that distinguishes his views
from this tradition, it would be foolish not to raise the question of ieks
complicity. Here an inversion of the ethical-juridical mood is appropriate.
iek must be considered guilty until proven innocent.
Tsenay Serequeberhan and Jorge Larrain provide the kind of
accounts that iek needs to confront if he is to exonerate himself. Sereque-
berhan shows why Hegels political philosophywhich is integrally con-
nected to his philosophies of history and religion by the evolutionary/hierar-
chical motifrequires colonialism. Hegel is driven by the dialectics of
his own logicwith its failure to adequately address the political econ-
omy of civil society, which inexorably produces poverty, which places the
poor/nonproductive/superuous classes outside the modern system of jus-
tice that is based on property ownershipto advocate colonialism as a
solution. According to Serequeberhan (1989, 311), colonialism is the only
solutionto the market imperfections of civil society, andto the surplus popu-
lations it inevitably produces, that is compatible with the basic terms of his
[Hegels] perspective andthe Europeanreality uponwhichandout of which
he reected. The structural imperfections (contradictions) inherent in civil
society made colonialism attractive, even necessary. Thus, non-European
territories which do not share the peculiar European idea of property and
society and thus do not have the strange problem of overproduction are
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labeled generally backward in industry and thereby become the legitimate
prey of colonialist expansion (ibid.).
Larrain provides an account of what we might call the impe-
rial/colonial episteme of nineteenth-century Europe, allowing us to place
Serequeberhans account in a larger context. On this view, Hegels distinc-
tion between world historical peoples and peoples without history pre-
supposes classical political economy (Smith, Malthus, Say, Ricardo), which
regards the British bourgeoisie as the privileged representative of capitalist
emancipation and progress, and presages Marx and Engelss notion that the
most important proletariat, that is, the universal and messianic class, is the
proletariat of the most advanced European capitalist nations. What these
perspectives hold in common is a kind of Eurocentrism: the belief that the
progress brought about by these historical actors in capitalist Western Eu-
rope is inherently superior and has a historical mission which must nally
prevail in the world (Larrain 1991, 239). The concepts and images that
Serequeberhan and Larrain identify in the work of the classical political
economists, and in the work of Hegel and Marxincluding the notion of
peoples without history, the concept of the white mans burden, and the
imagery of darkest Africaare examples of what David Spurr (1993) calls
the rhetoric of empire.
Are the Jews Stealing ieks Jouissance?
ieks account of religionis anartifact of the ethno-philosophical discourse
of colonial modernity, of the imperial/colonial machine. The ethno-
graphic material on which Hegel relies and that iek presupposes became
available, primarily, through imperial encounters between an emerging
West and the restfrom the conquest of the Americas to the coloniza-
tion of India to the scramble for Africa, the latter of which occurred in the
century of Hegels death. It was during that same century, the nineteenth,
that Europeans fell in love with ancient Greece and struggled with anxieties
about the relative importance of Athens and Jerusalem in the formation
of European identity. Was Europe fundamentally Hebraic or Hellenistic?
Jewish or Greek? And what was the relation between these traditions and
Christianity? Jews were a troubling presence, an immovable foreign body
within the imagined community of the European body politic, which for
centuries had been dened externally by its Islamic other. The recovery of
ancient Greek learning, whose mediation/transformation by Arab-Islamic
culture was increasingly disavowed (on this view, Arab-Islamic culture was
merely the caretaker or valet of Western culture) often went hand-in-hand
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with an effort to establish the superiority of Christianity to Judaism. In his
1793 text, !./ a/ /. ! / !. /., Kant (1960, 116) says
that Judaism is really not a religion at all but merely a union of a number
of people who, since they belonged to a particular stock, formed themselves
into a commonwealth under purely political laws, and not into a church.
Kant is not being complimentary. On the contrary, this is an account in
which Judaism comes up short in the game of comparative religion, since
true religion is a by-product of strict adherence to the moral law, and no
religion is stricter in this regard than Christianity. As with Kant, ./
for Hegel is a term of praise. I read Kants position on Judaism, his skep-
ticism about its religiousness, in relation to Hegels expressed doubt about
whether the religion of magic is even worthy of the name ./ at all. For
Hegel religion is a mark of humanity; it distinguishes absolutely between
humanity and animality, and differentially between higher and lower races.
It would be incorrect to say that Hegel questioned the humanity
of Jews, but he certainly doubted the equality of Judaism. iek has no
such doubts: he is positively certain of Christianitys superiority. The Spirit,
as God, as History, moves from East to West and leaves Judaism behind.
In his account, iek seeks a gentle way of leaving Judaism behind while
simultaneously bringing it along. He accomplishes this sublation through
his notion of Judeo-Christian logic. Again, this logicand here we return
to the question of time and eternityis opposed to pagan or pre-Christian
religions. They remain merely at the level of wisdom because they sto-
ically emphasize the insufciency of every temporal nite object . . . in
favor of the True Divine Object which alone can provide Innite Bliss
(iek 2000a, 96). The genius of Christianityand here one suspects that
iek is following without attribution that great anti-Hegelian Hegelian,
Kierkegaardis to insist on the invasion of the temporal by the eternal.
Christianity confounds pagan wisdom by offering Christ as a mortal-
temporal individual, and insists that belief in the .,/ Event of Incar-
nation is the only path to ../ truth and salvation. In this precise sense,
Christianity is a religion of Love: in love, one singles out, focuses on, a
nite temporal object which means more than anything else (ibid; see
also iek 2000b, 663).
iek also appropriates Kierkegaards notion of innite passion.
And he poses what he calls the delicate question of the relationship be-
tween Judaism and Christianity (iek 2000a, 97). He never says why
this question is delicate. One has to read between the lines. Perhaps iek
is reticent because to speak about the anti-Semitic obscene and monstrous
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underside of Christianity (ibid.), as he might put it were he referring to fun-
damentalist freaks, would force him to deal with imperialism/colonialism
and its relation to his account of religion. In evading this question, he makes
explicit that conquest, expulsion, and/or subordination of the Jews (the ob-
scene underside), which always already entails the subordination of pagans,
is prerequisite to the universal and hierarchical claims that he makes for
the Christian legacy. Before Christianity can rise to the top, before ieks
notions of Europe and universality can be consolidated, Judaism must be
cast down.
Judaism proves decient because of its dogmatism, because of
Jews stubborn attachment (iek borrows Judith Butlers term) to the
ghost that haunts them, to their secret disavowed tradition, which brings
themup short (iek 2000a, 97). Judaism, to personify, refuses to confess, to
acknowledge the extralegal event (the founding crime and, thus, obscene
underside) that undergirds every law and every order and that haunts
the public legal order as its spectral supplement (ibid.). Judaism, to put it
colloquially, is in denial. It is split between its public and secret aspects,
between the symbolic Law (language) and secret crime. This inner split
is simultaneously the split between Christianity, which confesses, which
acknowledges its dirty secret, its obscene underside, and Judaism, which
refuses to confess.
4
But even this account, iek argues, is inadequate. It
presents a distorted picture of Christianity as tied, through what Foucault
calls the confessional mode of discourse, to an entanglement of Law and
its spectral double (100), that is, the originary crime, transgression, and
obscenity on which the Law is founded. Isnt the point of Pauls message
of agape, iek asks rhetorically, that we should leave this vicious cycle be-
hind? Doesnt Pauline agape cut the Gordianknot of Lawandits founding
Transgression?
5
If the answer to these questions is yesieks con-
dence that it is and my doubt notwithstandingthen isnt Christianitys
superiority even greater than we imagined? Moreover, what if the standard
argument that pagan (pre-Jewish) gods were anthropomorphic and that
the Jewish religion . . . was the rst thoroughly to de-anthropomorphize
Divinity is false (103)? Doesnt the very prohibition of worship of other
gods suggest that Jews had a propensity to do so?
This is the train of ieks reasoning. He disputes the claim that
Christianity stands intermediate between the thoroughgoing anthropo-
morphism of paganism and the radical iconoclasm of Judaism. On the
contrary, he argues that it is the Jewish religion which remains an ab-
stract/immediate negation of anthropomorphism, and as such attached to
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Imperial/Colonial Model of Religion
it, determined by it in its very direct negation, whereas it is only Chris-
tianity that actually sublates paganism (iek 2000a, 97100; quota-
tion on 104). Christianity goes further than Judaism. Its iconoclasm is
stricter. It is the negation of the negation. It negates, that is, Judaisms
abstract/immediate negation of anthropomorphism. To translate this
fromHegelese into English, Christians no longer need prohibitions against
graven images. Such prohibitions (negations) have done their pedagogical
work. Thus in using icons (the negation of the negation), Christians, who
are neither confused nor idolatrous, acknowledge the supersensible and
nonrepresentational nature of God. Christianity has attained a critically
mediated universality that Judaism has not.
This is the payoff that iek has been seeking, the conclusion
toward which he has been working. Finally, Judaism has been put in its
proper place. In ieks Hegelian narrative of Christian triumphalism, Ju-
daism stands above the other religions that Hegel called determinant
(excepting Roman religion) but below Christianityindeed, in a different
category altogether. This is the universalizing logic found only in Chris-
tianity and its Marxist legacy that iek suggests we hold on to in the
face of New Age neopaganism. iek names his enemies. He calls them
neopagans and fundamentalist freaks. Also on his enemies list are PC
(politically correct) racial minorities, proponents of deviant sexualities,
and liberal advocates of human rights. All attempt to rewrite the past so
as to abolish the Real of a traumatic encounter whose structuring role in
the subjects psychic economy forever resists its symbolic rewriting (iek
2000a, 1089; quotation on 109; see also iek 2000b, 676). This multicul-
tural multitude (horde) reduces the Judeo-Christian injunction to love and
respect your neighbor to an imaginary doubling or mirroring of the self.
The irreducibly traumatic character of the neighbor and, thus, of neigh-
borly love is denied. The PC horde imagines love and respect without
trauma, which is to say that it imagines a Law and Order that doesnt
wound.
6
Thus, for the politically correct, human rights is little more than
the right to violate the Ten Commandments, to worship false gods, to steal,
lie, kill, and so on. In violating the Decalogue they violate Lacan who
directly inscribes psychoanalysis into the Judaic tradition (iek 2000a,
110). But even here iek is anxious to distinguish the Jewish and Christian
components of Judeo-Christian logic, and to establish the superiority of the
latter. Thus Judaism is salutary in refusing to assert love for the neighbor
outside the connes of the Law (112). This refusal prevents neighborly love
from degrading into a narcissistic (mis)recognition of my mirror-image
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(ibid.). But Christianity is better. Christian love goes beyond Jewish law by
breaking the vicious cycle of law and sin.
iek develops this argument in relation to the views of Donald
Davidson. While he spends some time comparing and contrasting Lacans
Big Other (language, the Symbolic order, Law) and Davidsons princi-
ple of charity, according to which disagreement and agreement alike are
intelligible only against a background of massive agreement (Davidson
1984, 187; quoted in iek 2000a, 114), that discussion can be dispensed
with for my purposes. What I will focus on instead is yet another argu-
ment that iek makes for the comparative superiority of Christianity to
Judaism, on the one hand, and to paganism, on the other. In this regard,
iek contrasts the /// character of pagan religions and the :./
character of Christianity. The pagan cosmos is one of hierarchy, harmony,
and balance. Evil is dened as disharmony, derangement, and disruption.
The superiority (universality) of one principle is never asserted over others.
In contrast, Christianity, by its very nature, is subversive of this global bal-
anced cosmic Order (iek 2000a, 120). It scandalizes pagan wisdom by
speaking of the individuals .. access to universality (of nirvana, of
the Holy Spirit, or, today, of human Rights and freedoms) (ibid.). Chris-
tianity the miraculous Event that disturbs the balance of the One-All
[pagan cosmology]; it the violent intrusion of Difference that precisely
/a /. //. / /. :.. // /. / (121). That iek in-
cludes nirvana on his list of the vectors of universality does not change its
Orientalist color. On the contrary, he recapitulates the standard Orientalist
notion that the West (he marks Christianity as Western) is dynamic, his-
torical, revolutionary, and universal while the East is not. The South and
other geographies, of course, do not gure in his account, as they do not in
Hegels infamous claim that Africa is static and ahistorical and that history
moves from East to West.
The closest, so far as I can tell, that iek comes to addressing the
imperial/colonial implications of Hegels philosophy of religion is 7/. /
/. O/. / !./, (1989). There he mentions Yirmiahu Yovels critique
of Hegels inconsistency and anti-Semitism. Indeed, Hegels inconsistency is
driven by his anti-Semitism. Thus Judaism (the religion of sublimity) pre-
ceeds Greek religion (the religion of beauty) even though this violates the
Kantian orderrst the beautiful, then the sublimeon which Hegels
account depends. Rather than pursuing this point,
7
much less the evolu-
tionary/hierarchical character of Hegels overall philosophy, iek retreats
into a discussion of the philosophical sublime. Thus he turns away fromthe
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Imperial/Colonial Model of Religion
torn esh and red blood of the historical sublime, from the bodily practices,
disciplines, and tortures of anti-Semitism and colonial modernity to the
discourse of a philosophy seminar (iek 1989, 2012).
If the Jews did not steal ieks love object, if they are not respon-
sible for his ., his pain-lled satisfaction, then it seems a sure bet
that the motley crew of village idiots (pagans), and those that he skewers
as fundamentalist freaks, are. While Doug Akois (1996, 41314) point, in
the following passage, is to show how ieks analysis helps to illuminate
the fascistic moment of every culture, there is no better description of the
operation that iek performs on the multicultural multitude:
iek argues that there is an irreducible gap between the fan-
tasy of culture as a C..///ethnos/Nation-Cause/shared
thing, that is, as a community sustained by organic bonds, and
the agonism of cultural difference, where meanings are mis-
read and signs are misappropriated. This gap, opened up by
the imaginariness of culture, motivates the displacement of its
immanent impossibility onto an ideological fantasy of a patho-
logical Other who threatens the wholesome body politic. This
is the formal conversion of the negativity of cultural lack into
the despised positivity of the alien Thingthe new old nation-
alism translated into Hegelese.
In reading iek against himself, we have seen and will see how he con-
structs the non-Western, non-European, non-Christian other as lacking
true politics, true ethics, true universality. This other threatens the whole-
some Western/European/Christian body politic. The European/Christian
ethnosits possession of the love object, the object treasureis being
threatened by pagans at the gate.
The Plague of Eurocentric Fantasies
I will pursue the nal part of this analysis by way of a digression on Euro-
centrism, which as it turns out is not a digression at all but a constitutive
part of ieks argument for the universality of Christianity and its superi-
ority to paganism. This will allow me to tie in the nal thread of ieks
account of religion in 7/. !/. //..
iek has a rather odd notion of Eurocentrism. Or perhaps it isnt
so odd. He claims that politics proper is of ancient Greek derivation; as
570
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such, it is something specically European (iek 1998, 991).
8
Politics
proper always entails a paradoxical short circuit between the universal
and the particular (988). It is the universalization of the particular. The
history of European political thought, however, is nothing but a series
of disavowals (ibid.) of democratic antagonism, that is, the competitive
(and salutary) struggle for universality, which is the proper logic of politics.
Politics is not the globalization of difference but the universalization of
particularity, not a globalizing politics of difference but a universalizing
politics that everyone can identify with. Politics proper accents democratic
antagonism, while archepolitics (communitarianism), parapolitics (Jrgen
Habermas and John Rawls), metapolitics (Marxism), and ultrapolitics (Carl
Schmitt) subvert democratic antagonism in a variety of ways. They de-
antagonize politics proper by (1) construing it as a closed, homogeneous,
andplenitudinous social space that is organically structured, (2) establishing
clear rules and procedures, (3) reducing politics to the status of a shadow
theater whose real act is always economic and always offstage, or (4)
transforming antagonism (through a false radicalism) into war (99092).
iek believes that there is no politics without an agonistic strug-
gle for universality, without the paradox of particularity occupying the
space of universality. Thus archepolitics, parapolitics, metapolitics, and ul-
trapolitics are, in fact, postpolitical. Postpolitics is rule by market forces,
multiculturalism, tolerant humanism, consensus, and the police, with the
Leviathan of the sovereign state as their sum total. This postpolitical turn
succeeds in pushing real antagonism, which needs to be democratically and
agonistically mediated, out of the Symbolic realm and into the Real. As
the Real is the impossible to say, this antagonism is not spoken, but oper-
ates, in Freudian terms, below the level of the ego, on the level of the id.
It feeds the growth of what iek calls id-evil, including new forms of
racism, and the explosion of excessive ethnic or religious fundamentalist
violence. The motive of suchevil, iekcontends, is neither ego-selshness
nor superego-fanaticism, that is, an excessive devotion to some ideological
ideal. Rather, it is . (Zizek 1998, 99899), which is the enjoyment
not pleasure that we derive from our pain. It is the paradoxical satisfac-
tion, according to Dylan Evans (1996, 92), that the subject derives from
his symptom, or, to put it another way, the suffering that he derives from
his own satisfaction. Id-evil, as iek notes, stages the most elementary
short-circuit in the relationship of the subject to the primordially miss-
ing object-cause of his desire. What bothers us in the Other (the Jew, the
Japanese, the African, the Turk, and so forth) is that he appears to entertain
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a privileged relationship to the object (iek 1998, 999). This privileged
Other possesses the object-treasure, having stolen it from us (which is
why we dont have it), or threatens our possession of the object (iek
2000a, 8).
This id-logic or logic of the Real is the consequence of the postpo-
litical turn (on the Symbolic level) from democratic antagonism to tolerant
humanism and multicultural consensus. What is hard to understand, how-
ever, is why iek thinks that proper politics, a politics of democratic
antagonism and universality, is ..//, European. He stops just short of
this explicit claim, but it is difcult to draw any other conclusion. What is
at stake? I ask this question because ieks argument is in excess of his
theoretical needs. That he is in the grips of ideological fantasy is evident
by the fact that the very argument against Eurocentrismthe notion that
it can ll the constitutive emptiness at the center of thingsstarts to func-
tion as an argument in its favor (iek 1989, 49). Thus iek blames what
Europe lacks on the multicultural multitude, on fundamentalist freaks and
New Age neopagans. This is odd. iek need not argue for Eurocentrism
to justify selectively retrieving various aspects of the European legacy that
he, like many others, values. The value of such retrievals itself is sufcient
justication. That being the case, I cannot help but ask why he overstates
his case. What does iek fear? His fear as far as I can tell is tied to the
privileged role that the notion of universality plays in his thinking, in par-
ticular his view that there are only three competing and/or complimentary
forms of universalism: Christianity, Capitalism, and Marxism.
If Christian universalism has been put in jeopardy if not dis-
placed by capitalist universalism, then only Marxist universalismwhich
is a Christian legacy, ltered and augmented by Lacan, of coursecan
displace capitalism. Given what he regards as the European provenance
of Christianity and Marxism, iek fears that the decline of Eurocen-
trism may mean the loss of universality. This should give pause to any
reader who is tempted to separate ieks Hegelian, Eurocentric, evolu-
tionary/hierarchical model of religion from his politics. One is no more
likely to nd a culturally and socially autonomous and atomistic notion of
politics in ieks work than in Hegels work. The temptation, for those
who otherwise nd his insights compelling, to quarantine ieks politics
from his other views is understandable but wrong. For iek Christianity,
Marxism, universality, and Europe are a uniquely precious if fragile ensem-
ble. This is why he argues so strongly for the comparative superiority of
Christianity to paganism and Judaism. Interestingly enough, iek never
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mentions Islam.
9
Islam, which poses so many problems for the narrative
that iek constructs, is also absent from Hegels account! Is this merely an
interesting coincidence? Perhaps.
A reprise of ieks argument in 7/. !/. //., as I have
developed it, goes something like this: Marxism and Christianity share a
common ancestry. Marxism should embrace its Christian heritage. As the
only bearers of messianic universalism, Marxism and Christianity should
join forces against the competing universalism of capitalism. If Marxism
is indebted to Christianity, then Christianity is indebted to Judaism, thus
the concept of Judeo-Christianity. But it is important to maintain their
difference while acknowledging their unity. For Christianity is superior to
Judaism, goes beyond Judaism, embodies the greatest strengths of Judaism
while avoiding its greatest weaknesses. Thus Christian loveto return to
one of the threads of ieks argument that I want to pull a little further
succeeds in decoupling law and transgression, thus pulling the plug on
a vicious cycle. In describing this process, iek is clearly in a generous
mood. One is not sure whether this is a mark of genius or perversity,
perhaps perverse genius. For only a perverse genius could make Saint
Paul speak Lacanian; moreover, Paul is as rigorous an antihumanist as
Louis Althusser. One is almost forced to read this account as parody so
as not to laugh. But I suspect that this is no laughing matter for iek.
He is serious. Thus, through Pauline agape, we unplug from the law,
from theoretical humanism, from an idealized Romantic universe in
which all concrete social differences magically disappear (iek 2000a,
127). Christianity uncouples the law and its spectral obscene supplement. It
suspends this monstrous supplement, which haunts the law like an angry
ghost, while preserving the law. This is the Hegelian logic of //./,
of sublation, of simultaneously preserving, negating, transforming, and
lifting higher. According to iek, only Christianity can do this work. For
Christianity, however fragile and eeting, is /. absolute (12628).
If the ultimate outcome, the superiority of Christianity, is a fore-
gone conclusion, iek still manages to surprise us along the way. Thus he
partially rehabilitates Judaism vis--vis Christianity. On this revised view,
Judaism is ,,./, pre the vicious cycle of law and sin, of desire and guilt,
while Christianity is ,,./, postvicious cycle. True, in its cruder forms,
Christianity seems to be a case of the superego gone amok, where transgres-
sions of the spirit of the law are judged as severely as transgressions of the
letter of the law. Indeed, in its cruder, improper forms, Christianity ma-
nipulates guilt much more effectively (iek 2000a, 142) than Judaism,
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Imperial/Colonial Model of Religion
for which truth and not ones pathological, desiring, emotional investment
in that truth is what matters. Here, it seems, Nietzsche had it right. Thus
crude, improper, inauthentic Christianity simply misses the point when it
accuses Jews of being hypocritical, of trying to cheat God by seeking ways
of obeying Gods commandments and prohibitions literally, while nonethe-
less retaining what they desire (140). In making this judgment, Christians
are ignorant of a paradox: that the vicious dialectic of Law and its trans-
gression elaborated by Saint Paul is the invisible third term, the vanishing
mediator between the Jewish religion and Christianity (145). Neither oc-
cupies the middle ground of the vicious cycle: Jews do not because they do
not experience guilt, they have not //. the vicious cycle; Christians
do not because they have //. of the vicious cycle. If neither Judaism
nor Christianity is guilty of what it is commonly accused, then Christianity
is still superior because it has sublated, that is, //. of a vicious cycle
that Judaismhas never //. . Again, iek uses Paul as read by Hegel
and Hegel as read by Lacan to put Judaism in its proper place.
The task of distinguishing Christianity fromJudaism, with all the
anxieties of inuence that entails, and fromthe more subterranean anxieties
of inuence that characterize Christianitys relations with paganism, has
long vexed Christian intellectuals. They waged a two-front war against
Jews and pagans, plus an internal war against Christian deviants; thus Islam
was initially seen as a Christian heresy. Whether iek can properly
be called a Christian intellectual or not, he takes on the task. I take the
following passage, whichmay be goodChristiantheology but is badhistory,
social theory, and phenomenology, as his basic claim:
As every true Christian knows, love is the a/ of lovethe
hard and arduous work of repeated uncoupling in which,
again and again, we have to disengage ourselves from the in-
ertia that constrains us to identify with the particular order we
were born into. Through the Christian work of compassion-
ate love, we discern in what was hitherto a disturbing foreign
body, tolerated and even modestly supported by us so that we
were not too bothered by it, a subject, with its crushed dreams
and desiresit is / Christian heritage of uncoupling that
is threatened by todays fundamentalisms, especially when they
proclaim themselves Christian. Does not Fascism ultimately
involve the return of the pagan mores which, rejecting the love
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of ones enemy, cultivate full identication with ones own eth-
nic community? (iek 2000a, 12829)
On ieks account, authentic Christianity breaks out of the vicious cycle
of law and sin that characterizes the human condition by renouncing the
transgressive fantasmatic supplement that attaches us to it (149). Christian-
ity attacks itself, what it desires mostjust as Medea and Sethe attack and
kill their children, Kierkegaard binds Isaac for sacrice, and God gives his
only son to be cruciedand this is the ultimate meaning of uncoupling,
the ultimate antifascist gesture. Thus Christian love creates a new subjec-
tivity, where we catch a glimpse of Another Space which can no longer be
dismissed as a fantasmatic supplement to social reality (158). Christianity
is the fragile absolute.
Marxism is a legacy of Christian Europe, which is the abode of
agonistic universality or true politics.
10
But what about the constitutive
void at the center of Europe, the ontological lack underwriting the very
notion of Eurocentrism? To put a ner point on an observation that I made
earlier, doesnt iek blame this lack on pagans and fundamentalist freaks,
on those whom I call the multicultural multitude? Isnt he accusing them
of stealing his .? To paraphrase iek, the question that /. must
confront is how /. invests the ideological gures of the pagan and the
fundamentalist with / unconscious desire, with how /. has constructed
these gures to escape a certain deadlock of / desire. Isnt his antipa-
ganism and antifundamentalism a pathological, paranoid construction
(iek 1989, 48)? Perhaps this accounts for the severity of ieks critique
of the non-Christian other. Could it be that the multicultural multitude of
fundamentalist freaks, New Age spiritualists, neopagans, and inauthentic
Christians represent the return of the repressed (a case of the Empire
striking back) in ieks neo-Hegelian account of religion? If Christianity
is the fragile absolute, then colonial modernity is the absolute trauma. Colo-
nial modernity is that of which iek cannot speak; it is the impossible
Real in his account of religion.
Coda
In 7/. 7/// /. (1999) and in other works, iek deplores the global
reexivity or ticklish character of contemporary Western life. And yet, his
own lack of reectivity allows him, without reservation, to deploy Oriental-
ist discourse, which Edward Said and others have shown is one of the most
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tenacious and productive discourses of imperial/colonial modernity. Thus
in his essay Melancholy and the Act (iek 2000b, 67677), in a section
titled The Pope versus the Dalai Lama, he offers this bit of Orientalist
profundity: One can now understand why the Dalai Lama is much more
appropriate for our postmodern, permissive times. He presents us with
a vague, feel-good spiritualism without any specic obligations; anyone,
even the most decadent Hollywood star, can follow him while continuing
a money-grubbing, promiscuous lifestyle. In contrast, the pope reminds us
that there is a price to pay for a proper ethical attitude. Now the point
here isnt ../, that Lacanians can be Orientalist, too. Nor am I ../,
saying that iek knows as little about Buddhist scholarship as he does
about biblical scholarship. For as Mark Twain once observed, everyone is
ignorant about something. The point, rather, is that iek is ignorant of his
ignorance. Or maybe this is a case of .// /,, in which case, iek
(1989, 3233) know[s] very well how things really are,
11
but is still acting
as if he did not. If this is correct, then ieks is an .// ignorance,
the refusal of knowledge, the refusal to be self-reexive, to be tickled. He
is not ticklish/reexive where being ticklish is a good thing. In any event,
his observation about the Pope and the Dalai Lamawhich is a compar-
ative theory of religion in microcosm that recapitulates the Orientalist and
primitivist history of comparative religion, which is an important modal-
ity of knowledge production in imperial/colonial modernitydovetails
nicely with his Eurocentic fantasy in which the universality/absolutism of
Christianity (and its Marxist legacy) is the only viable obstacle to global
capitalism.
Notes
[The next issue of ^.,/, 4.1, will include a short rejoinder by Hart to the reply by
iek that follows here. !]
1. I am aware that .:/, and /.// can be construed in a variety of ways,
both negative and positive. Unless otherwise specied, I use these words as
deprecations. In employing them (or the term // .,), I intend to
move the reader toward a similar assessment.
2. Ontological difference refers, in Heideggers language, to the difference between
being and the Being of being, that is, the void, emptiness, nothingness from
which being emerges. In Spinozas language, this is the distinction between
(nature naturing) and (nature natured).
3. In the 1827 lectures, Hegel places ancient Roman religion higher than Judaism.
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4. iek cites Freuds `. `/. (1983 [1939]) to illustrate this logic. Thus
the murder of Moses and his true identity as an Egyptian are the (repressed)
obscene and monstrous underside of the Mosaic Law, which it haunts.
5. iek is no biblical scholar and neither am I. I assume that his commentary should be
understood as that of the intelligent, nonbibilical scholar. It is metacommen-
tary on the ordinary discourse of the religious community and not an effort
to engage biblical scholars on their terrain of expertise. In his effort to put
Paul to work, iek relies heavily on Alain Badious interpretation in
!/ / . . /:./. (1998).
6. I have already suggested that ieks critique of multiculturalism, while insightful, is
inadequate. If Michel Foucault moves toward liberal notions of the self in his
later work, if Jacques Derridas ,.. / ` (1994) concludes with a set
of liberal proposals, if, as iek himself argues in a 2001 ./. Z.
review of !,., the even more radical, Marxist-communist discourse of
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) succumbs to the siren songs of
human rights liberalism in its constructive proposals, then why should we
expect more from multiculturalists? Given the discursive constraints of a
deeply ingrained culture of liberalism, perhaps multiculturalists express rad-
ical, subversive, and revolutionary desires within the constraints of the only
language they know.
7. Infairness, ieks account strengthens Yovels by pointing out this very inconsistency.
While there is no absolute distinction between metaphysics and politics, i-
ek, at least in this case, is more interested in the former than in the latter.
8. On this point, many questions could be asked, not the least of which would be why
ancient Greece was necessarily European as opposed to, say, Mediterranean,
and why we should assume that Europes others are eccentric and nonconsti-
tutive of European identity. I can barely resist pursuing these matters, but I
will.
9. Should we take fundamentalism as an oblique reference to Islam? If so, why would
iek be so coy?
10. This includes Europes American and Australian diaspora.
11. It isnt reality that people misrecognize, according to iek 1989, 3233), but the
illusion that is structuring their reality, their real social activity. They know
very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did
not know. The illusion is therefore double: it consists in overlooking the
illusion which is structuring our real, effective relationship to reality. And
this overlooked, unconscious illusion is what may be called the .//
/,.
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