Zizek on Modernity

Slavoj Zizek has this to say at the beginning of his The Puppet and the Dwarf: "One possible definition of modernity is: the social order in which religion is no longer fully integrated into and identified with a particular cultural life-form, but acquires autonomy, so that it can survive as the same religion in different cultures. This extraction enables religion to globalize itself....on the other hand, the price to be paid is that religion is reduced to a secondary epiphenomenon with regard to the secular functioning of the social totality. In this new global order, religion has two possible roles: therapeutic or critical. It either helps individuals to function better in the existing order, or it tries to assert itself as a critical agency articulating what is wrong with this order as such, a space for the voices of discontent �Ein the second case, religion as such tends toward assuming the role of heresy." Zizek goes on to retrieve the "materialist" kernel of early Christianity and he argues that the early church was the first "revolutionary collective."

Two footnotes to Zizek's insightful definition of modernity: First, in one sense this displays modernity as the triumph of the church since, in the second place, the church has always been able to exist as the "same religion" within different cultures and from the beginning intended to "globalize itself." Perhaps he will make that point. But it needs to be pondered how the church can BE a culture and yet also infiltrate and be at home in all cultures. Sociological explanations for that, I think, must fail at some point. The only ground is theological: Jesus is Lord, and the Creator and providential ruler of history is also the God revealed in the gospel. So, however revolutionary the church may be in the midst of a pagan culture, however much it confronts an existing way of life, it is always entering onto "home territory," territory ruled by the Lord of the church. The Christian knight goes out on adventures knowing that even the darkest wilderness is not really alien territory.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, January 12, 2004 at 05:43 PM

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