And so it has come to this. Philosophy is now in the hands of a Slovenian madman. Slavoj Zizek has been thought of as one part Groucho, one part Karl Marx, an idiot savant, a Shakespearean fool, or maybe Dylan's Jokerman.1 A self-declared "fighting atheist" who claims the Christian legacy is worth fighting for. A Leninist who seeks wisdom in Chesterton's Orthodoxy. A leftist accused of being authoritarian, anti-feminist, and anti-Semitic. A critic of the worst excesses of capitalism who himself so over-produces books and articles that critics despair of ever being able to pin him down before he's off on his next tangent. So full of apparent contradictions is Zizek that to some critics it appears that while it is true Zizek exists, nevertheless we may well have created him.2

When writing about Zizek, one must decide (finally) to plant the flag somewhere. For the purposes of this article, I limit the discussion to Zizek's political-religious thought.3 And in order to provide anything like a coherent account even of this more narrowed focus, I will do so by discussing Zizek's concept of "the act." Although Zizek gives his most sustained philosophic analysis of the act in two earlier works, The Indivisible Remainder (1996) and The Ticklish Subject (1999), in the five books under discussion here, Zizek's invoking of the act serves as one link between his three works on Christianity and his accounts of the two defining moments of our contemporary political world, 9/11 and the war in Iraq. While there are some signs that his red-hot status may be cooling a bit, there is still enough going on in his rants against the Bush Administration and his riffs on St. Paul to give readers pause before judging him to be a signifier of nothing. There is method to his madness, wisdom in his foolishness.

At the outset of The Fragile Absolute, Zizek offers one of his patented twists on the expected Marxist response. In castigating the "deplorable aspects of the postmodern era" and "the return of religion is all its guises," Zizek—rather than ferociously attacking religion as hopelessly obscurantist—claims that "Christianity and Marxism should fight on the same side of the barricade against the onslaught of new spiritualisms." In the strange, strange world of Zizek, there is something in the Christian legacy worth fighting for, even for Marxist materialists! Unlike classical paganism and its New Age variants in our own day, which promise a secret wisdom for their devotees, "Christianity, on the contrary, offers Christ as a mortal-temporal individual, and insists that belief in the temporal Event of Incarnation is the only path to eternal truth and salvation." Zizek recognizes a similar paradox in "the specific Christian notion of Conversion and the forgiveness of sins: Conversion is a temporal event which changes eternity itself." As a key theme in his account of an act, Zizek acknowledges that the "good news" of Christianity "is that, in a genuine Conversion, one can 're-create' oneself … and thus change (undo the effects of) eternity itself" (his emphasis). He concludes Fragile Absolute with a section fittingly entitled "The Breakout." In it, he focuses on how, through the "happy event" of the Crucifixion, Christians die to the world (renunciation) and through their re-birth "catch a glimpse of Another Space" in which the old hierarchies of power and domination are done away with. New birth and alternative space thus form two of the (revolutionary) insights of the Christian act.

For this "fighting atheist" it is not, of course, so much the truth of what Christians believe but the world-altering power of the Christian imagination that attracts him. What Zizek sees is precisely what the comfortable Western Church might be most in need of recovering: an appreciation for the explosive nature of the Christian Gospel and how it calls forth an alternative or counter way of life to the standard operating procedures of the world.4 In an edited volume published the same year as Fragile Absolute, Zizek sets out this explosive re-figuring power of the act: "An act does not occur within the given horizon of what appears to be 'possible'—it redefines the very contours of what is possible."5 The Christian legacy is worth fighting for because it has provided (and still carries with it) the historical possibility for an act to be imagined, practiced, and realized. Where New Age spiritualism (and Eastern religion in general) leaves the world and its dominant power relations in place, Christianity can still tell a story that turns the world upside down.

Zizek extends this line of thought in On Belief. He signals his concern in his introduction, "From Christ to Lenin … and Back." Where sophisticated Western Marxists reject the former and are embarrassed by the latter, Zizek boldly draws the connection between the Christian legacy and any hope for a real, true Marxism. He has no time for the banal preachments of tenured radicals, whom he describes in The Puppet and the Dwarf as "playing a game of hysterical provocation" by which they "hypocritically retain their clear radical conscience while continuing to enjoy their privileged position." Rather, Zizek embraces Lenin as an exemplar of the act because Lenin, like St. Paul, adopts the "unequivocal radical position from which it is only possible to intervene in such a way that our intervention changes the coordinates of the situation." In an interview following publication of On Belief he explains his efforts to revive Lenin:

What interests me about Lenin is that precisely after World War I broke out he found himself in a total deadlock. Everything went wrong… . After this, Lenin had to think about how to invent a radical, revolutionary politics in this situation of total breakdown. This is the Lenin I like… . Just as Lenin was forced to reformulate the entire socialist project, we are in a similar situation. What Lenin did, we should do today, at even more radical level… . What I like about Lenin is precisely what scares people about him—the ruthless will to discard all prejudices.6

Lenin's reformulation, his changing of the coordinates of the Marxist tradition, is the fruit of his act. As Zizek has more recently noted, this act was based on Lenin's recognition of the specific moment and the consequences of failing to act: "He understood that the opportunity was provided by a unique combination of circumstances: if the moment wasn't seized, the chance would be forfeited, perhaps for decades. Lenin was entertaining an alternative scenario: what if we don't act now? It was precisely his awareness of the catastrophic consequences of not acting that impelled him to act."7 For Zizek, religious belief is neither to be scorned (as vulgar Marxists do) nor understood as the key to self-realization (as New Agers preach); rather, religious belief provides the psycho-social grounds for a radical break with the past and a reinvention of the self, "to start one's life all over again, from the zero point—in short, to change Eternity itself." So discarding the inherited Marxist prejudice against Christianity, Zizek (in On Belief) celebrates its idea of rebirth as an "explosive" interruption into the pagan cycle of submission and surrender to the higher powers of destiny and fate: "Against the pagan notion of destiny, Christianity offered the possibility of a radical opening, that we can find a zero point and clear the table."8

Given these recurring themes, it is not altogether surprising when, in The Puppet and the Dwarf, Zizek announces that "to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian experience." What Chesterton called the "thrilling romance of orthodoxy" Zizek deploys "in a properly Marxist way" to mean "the truly subversive, even revolutionary, character of orthodoxy."9 But the specific experience to which Zizek alludes is not one of traditional evangelical conversion but rather that of undergoing the radical re-orienting of one's coordinates, discovering the "perverse core of Christianity" and being reborn into the Pauline community of radical solidarity that exists always in a "revolutionary state of emergency." Through the act of Christ's Crucifixion, Paul radically re-oriented himself, turning away from the "philosophic" speculation of his prior Jewish training and now setting about "his true Leninist business, that of organizing the new party called the Christian community." The early Church thus bore the same marks as Lenin's later Party, that "strong organization of revolutionaries" who were committed to "prolonged and stubborn struggle."10 And here he draws even tighter the connection between Paul and Lenin:

Paul as Leninist: was not Paul, like Lenin, the great "institutionalizer" … ? Does not the Pauline temporality "already but not yet" also designate Lenin's situation in between the two revolutions, between February and October 1917? Revolution is already behind us, the old regime is out, freedom is here—but the hard work lies ahead.

Why the work is so hard (and why it still lies a way off) becomes clear from Zizek's take on our contemporary political moment. When he turns his attention to contemporary politics, Zizek foresees a liberal-totalitarian state of emergency that threatens to suffocate the possibility of any authentic Pauline-Leninist act toward a "really existing socialism." His analysis of this emerging liberal-totalitarian emergency state derives from his interpretation of the meanings of 9/11 and the War on Terror.

Part of Zizek's modus operandi (and a key ingredient of his popularity) is to invoke pop culture artifacts. In Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, Zizek repeats the ironic greeting of Morpheus to the recently awakened Neo in the 1999 film The Matrix. When he turns to the events of 9/11, Zizek would rather focus on the U.S. reaction than on the actions or intentions of the hijackers. While Americans reacted to what seemed to them "a totally unexpected shock, [and] how the unimaginable Impossible happened," yet our "libidinal investment" in such disasters has long been a theme in American culture (especially film) and political media, so that "the unthinkable which happened was the object of fantasy, so that in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and that was the biggest surprise." But this spectacular Event also provided grounds for an act on the part of the United States. That is, 9/11 served as an apocalyptic moment, revealing the real situation of America in the world and setting forth an opportunity for an act in response to this recognition. Zizek puts the possibility this way:

[T]he USA, which until now perceived itself as an island exempt from this kind of violence, witnessing it only from the safe distance of the TV screen, is now directly involved. So the alternative is: will the Americans decide to fortify their "sphere" further, or risk stepping out of it? Either America will persist in—even strengthen the deeply immoral attitude of "Why should this happen to us. Things like this don't happen here!" … Or America will finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen that separates it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival in the Real world, making the long overdue move from "A thing like this shouldn't happen here!" to "A thing like this shouldn't happen anywhere!"

But the United States has chosen not to act, rather to re-act. The danger that lurks in the current War on Terror, was, according to Zizek, already foreseen by Chesterton in Orthodoxy. Against the militant atheists of his day, Chesterton observed how "[m]en who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they might fight the Church." In a similar way, Zizek wonders whether "the liberal warriors are so eager to fight antidemocratic fundamentalism that they will end up discarding freedom and democracy themselves, if only they can fight terrorism?" Caught in the grip of this ideology of excess, the U.S. regime has erected a Fortress America model, justifying unilateralism abroad, surveillance at home. What are such moves seemingly (pre-)determining? With the next big terrorist act always imminent, always already en route but never from a known origin, what arises inevitably is the permanent emergency state.

Zizek makes an interesting theological turn by setting this American "state of emergency" over against St. Paul's "authentic revolutionary state of emergency." Where St. Paul's end-of-time doctrine "liberated" the citizens of his community to discard received social hierarchies and form an alternative community (in which "there is now no Jew or Gentile"), the Bush Administration is erecting a "liberal-totalitarian emergency" (in which there is only friend or enemy) whose end is not liberation but suffocation: "when a state institution proclaims a state of emergency, it does so by definition as part of a desperate strategy to avoid the true emergency and return to the 'normal course of things'… . In short, reactionary proclamations of a state of emergency are a desperate defence against the true state of emergency itself."

So what about Iraq? If the aftermath of 9/11 concerned Zizek about the shape of things to come from Fortress America, then the war in Iraq has only intensified his concerns. In The Borrowed Kettle, Zizek declares that "it is the future of the international community that is at stake now—the new rules that will regulate it; the character of the New World Order." So: "The problem with today's USA is not that it is a new global Empire, but that it is not; in other words, that, while pretending to be, it continues to act as a nation-state, ruthlessly pursuing its own interests." Indeed, Zizek sees a deeper reason behind the war in Iraq than merely regime-change; it is, rather, an ideological message to the world (with Europe as the primary audience) signalling the re-assertion of global American hegemonic power. Thus Zizek: "Here, I would like to propose the hypothesis that the US-Iraq war was, in terms of its actual sociopolitical context, the first war between the USA and Europe."

In this account, the language of just war masks the violent assertion of U.S. power as it seeks hegemony over global capitalism. But it is in the conduct of U.S. soldiers in Iraq—in their worst excesses—that Zizek finds a revelation of the very nature of the American way of life. In his analysis of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Zizek critiques the initial Administration response (that these were the acts of a few bad apples who had not been properly taught the Geneva Convention Rules regarding the treatment of prisoners) by employing Freud's unconscious: "If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the 'unknown unknowns,' that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the 'unknown knowns'—the disavowed beliefs, suppositions, and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values."11

We come at last to Zizek's call for a political act that simply "cannot be reduced to the level of strategic-pragmatic interventions" but rather constitutes "an impossible gesture of pure expenditure [that] can change the very co-ordinates of what is strategically possible within a historical constellation," as he writes in Welcome to the Desert of the Real! In a move that suspends the (apparently) hard contours of the Real, an act brings into being an (hitherto) Impossible Real:

This is the key point: an act is neither a strategic intervention in the existing order, nor its "crazy" destructive negation; an act is an "excessive," trans-strategic intervention which redefines the rules and contours of the existing order.
(—The Borrowed Kettle)

So, following Zizek, we might say that with the developing emergency state and its aggressive (and armed) support of globalizing capitalism, absent such an act the world will end, first with a bang and then with a whimper. Zizek criticizes the typical leftist slogans and actions in the anti-globalization movement (as well as its manifesto, Hardt and Negri's Empire) as not radical enough because they still hold out the lure of possible change. But in our emergency situation we cannot afford the luxury of believing that things may change with a bit more striving. Only a (now impossible) act is possible. So, in The Borrowed Kettle, in an interesting secular spin on the Christian insight of dying in order to live, Zizek wonders, "What if it is only full acceptance of the desperate closure of the present global situation that can push us towards actual change?"

Does speaking in this way make Zizek's call for an act anything more than a utopian gesture? But utopia is precisely the point for Zizek. For him, as he writes in The Borrowed Kettle, utopia refers not to the imagining of impossible ideal societies (as in Plato or More) but "literally the construction of a u-topic space, a social space outside the existing parameters, the parameters of what appears to be 'possible' in the existing social universe. The 'utopian' gesture is the gesture which changes the co-ordinates of the possible." It is to make life strange.

We thus live in a utopian moment, "a matter of innermost urgency, something we are pushed into as a matter of survival, when it is no longer possible to go on within the parameters of the 'possible.' " As Christians are called, by their lives and acts, to "hasten the Kingdom of God," so in this utopian moment Zizek calls us to "summon up the strength to translate the sublime (utopian) vision into everyday practice—in short, to practice utopia" (Kettle).

In his pre- 9/11 Fragile Absolute Zizek recognizes another aspect of the Christian legacy. Contra New Age spirituality, "Christian 'unplugging' is not an inner contemplative stance, but the active work of love which necessarily leads to the creation of an alternative community." This alternative community he likens unto Lenin's revolutionary community, described as "a society of aliens speaking all languages, taking no account of difference in customs, laws, and institutions."12 But now in the "war on terror" Zizek wonders whether there is "still a space for such communities?" While he images an already existing possibility in the Pauline community of the Church, he ultimately rejects it.

It is thus left to us to consider whether and to what degree the Church in America should and can form a community of stubborn resistance against the ideologically (and some would even say, evangelically) inspired Emergency State. At a time when Christians are becoming increasingly (to cite a recent title) "anxious about Empire," it may not be so crazy to suggest that a mad Slovenian atheist is serving the Church (remember Balaam's ass!), preparing it for a possible postmodern Barmen moment. It is a consideration well worth developing. But the final word should belong to Slavoj. Asked in a radio interview about the need for such a radical community of resistance, Zizek replied: "As an atheist, I pray night and day for it."13

What's not to like?

Ashley Woodiwiss is chair of the Department of Politics & International Relations at Wheaton College.

1. For a somewhat dated but still insightful introduction to the phenomenon of Slavoj Zizek, see Rebecca Mead, "The Marx Brothers," The New Yorker, May 5, 2003.

2. One critic suggests that Zizek's manic philosophic style is a form of "acting out, for us, and that is why we like it." See Ian Parker, Slavoj Zizek: A Critical Introduction (Pluto Press, 2004), p. 127. Another remarks how "it could be argued that Zizek is a popular cultural product." See Tony Myers, Slavoj Zizek (Routledge, 2003), p. 124; emphasis in the original.

3. Leaving, for example, to postmodern Continental philosophers the analysis of Zizek's Lacanian-Hegelian themes, and to cultural critics Zizek's penchant for liberally referencing pop culture artifacts (movies, pop music, novels, etc.) throughout his oft-times dense philosophic prose. Besides the Parker and Myers commentaries noted above, one may also consult Rex Butler's Live Theory (Continuum, 2005) for a critical consideration of Zizek's major philosophic themes.

4. Thus it is not surprising that exponents of the contemporary theological movement "radical orthodoxy" have found Zizek to be a friend and fellow-traveler. See for example Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Zizek, eds., Theology and the Political: The New Debate (Duke Univ. Press, 2005).

5. Zizek, Judith Butler, and Ernesto Laclau, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (Verso, 2000), p. 121.

6. See "I Am a Fighting Atheist: Interview with Slavoj Zizek," interview by Doug Henwood, Bad Subjects 59, at: www.eserver.org/bs/59/zizek. html

7. See Zizek, "Lenin Shot at Finland Station," a review of Andrew Roberts, ed. What Might Have Been, in London Review of Books, August 18, 2005.

8. See "Fighting Atheist."

9. See Zizek, "The 'Thrilling Romance of Orthodoxy,' " in Theology and the Political: The New Debate, p. 52.

10. This from Lenin's aptly titled essay, "What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement." Eugene McCarraher has set forth an argument for taking Lenin seriously in "The Most Intolerable of Insults," in Wes Avram, ed., Anxious About Empire (Brazos Press, 2004), pp. 103-115.

11. See Zizek, "What Rumsfeld Doesn't Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib," In These Times, May 1, 2005.

12. Ibid.

13. Found at www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#zizek. Date of interview: April 17, 2003.

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