Subjective destitution recurs in Žižek as the emancipatory hope that he finds in India’s Dalits and the ontic haplessness that has been assigned to the victims of genocidal tragedies. The phoenix-like rise of the refugee, the meek, the poor in spirit, has been a constantly recurring aspect of his work, where the stakes are extremely high. Žižek as a contemporary philosopher, dabbles in the realm of international relations, that is reminiscent of the late Russell who dealt with Cold War politics. The stakes are extremely high since it involves possible nuclear holocaust and annihilation of humanity itself which Žižek invokes via pessimistic currents in Jean Pierre Dupuy, Toni Morrison, Afro-pessimism etc. The extremely high stakes involving nation-states rather than humans as protagonists is constantly undermined by the subjective divestment of meaning from being.
In works such as Absolute Recoil Žižek speaks of the Hegelian wound. There he attempts a crossover from the Jewish to the Christian mythology of the void. In the beginning was the void. The god who died on the cross was the father himself. And the essentially self-undermining, and self-deprecatory tone of Žižek that have led to him being called a latter day Diogenes belie this. As Lacan has decentered the Freudian theology of psychoanalysis as a discourse of Christian feminine love, Žižek also loves to reinvent the wheel. In his fascination for British solecisms such as ‘less is more’ and Wittgenstein’s ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent’ Žižek foregrounds not the tautological emptiness of claims to wisdom, but the topological emptiness of discourse itself. Žižek gets rid of William Blake’s ‘tiger versus the lamb’ mythology for Christianity in favour of the void in the abyss of meaninglessness, where he recapitulates Job’s plaint to God and the reply that the disorderly shamble is originary and even constitutive.
The essential meaninglessness and subjective destitution of being and the diasporaic and unsettled nature of existence are central to Žižek’s Semitic theology. In India, many find it theologically difficult to swallow that a prophet of god would have to run away from his home to another land and to seek refuge there. The god who dies on the cross, creates the unfathomable abyss, where Žižek calls himself a Christian atheist. His involvement with the community of people employed in dry toilets, and their desire for annihilation of their identity as manual scavengers, is perhaps the most significant step in Žižekian socio-political praxis. The famous joke where the German-French and English lavatories are compared to the corresponding national philosophies, thus finds empirical ground in social praxis, vis-a-vis the caste system in India. Žižek is not averse to proudly resorting to theological discourse, of mystical as well as less heterodox forms of religion.
Parallel to Derrida’s wager of deconstruction, Žižek does for Christianity what Lacan did vis-a-vis Freud. He becomes a Christian Derrida, with Christianity as the religion of the original pessimistic emptiness. In the beginning was a void. The book of Job is the paradigmatic Christian text for Žižek. The god who died on the cross is the father according to Žižek’s interpretation of Hegel. Afro-pessimism and Toni Morrison’s Beloved thus figure in the horizon of Žižek’s polemic.
The Ontic versus the ontological, can have multiple iterations. The first one is the current fad among scholars in the humanities for adopting scientific and empirical methodology instead of deconstruction and other kind of ’empty’ theorising. The marriage of technology with the arts, as in digital art and the internet forms another horizon. The diaspora versus the settled is another instantiation of the binary of the ontic against the ontological. ‘Let us meet in Jerusalem’ remains an unfulfilled wager where a Utopian paradisiacal ‘avenir’ to come, is eternally deferred and never actualised. In its nonactualisation lies the potentiality and the emancipatory hope of the diaspora, Against this, we have the original dystopia of the Gaza Strip.
Umar Nizarudeen is at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has a PhD in Bhakti Studies from the Centre for English Studies in JNU, New Delhi. His poems and articles have been published in Vayavya, Muse India, Culture Cafe Journal of the British Library, The Hindu, The New Indian Express, The Bombay Review, The Madras Courier, FemAsia, Sabrang India, India Gazette London, Ibex Press Year’s Best Selection etc.
Žižekian Analysis 