My stress response to oppositional, religious language in the political interweb

The Slavoj Zizek, “Actual Politics” essay went around Facebook and several sites linked to it this past December. Zizek’s use of religious language got my attention right away, and as I continued to read, I was upset by the way its religious language exalted the Occupy Wall street movement (“we”) and condemned “them”: “We here are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street they are pagans worshipping false idols.” By upset, I mean I had the kind of stress reaction I’ve had when witnessing the sort of reductive us/them discourse practiced by Fox/MSNBC during the heyday of Keith Oberman and Bill O’Reilly. Or, more recently, the kind of broad, oppositional categorizations made by David Brooks and Maureen Dowd (for example, her description of Callista Gingrich as a “Transformational Wife” versus Michelle Obama as a “Let’s Get Real” wife).

Zizek’s “Actual Politics” was published in December, as part of a special, open access issue of the scholarly journal Theory & Event dedicated to the Occupy Wall Street movement. In general, the journal focuses on the use of political theory and political science towards the interpretation of the “surprise of current events” and “the politics of representation as it appears in protests, elections, commodities, and high and popular culture.” For example, they’ve published essays on how theories of sovereignty and the state of exception relate to anti-global capitalism movements, Thatcherism and the Bush war on terror. So, it wasn’t just Zizek’s use of religious language, but its appearance in the context of a footnote-y, peer-reviewed journal that baffled me.

So, I asked and Googled around, and found a few people who’ve spent more time than I have thinking about the use of religious language in the public sphere, and asked their opinion of Zizek’s essay.

I asked Elizabeth Sifton, a former editor at Farrar Straus & Giroux, and author of The Serenity Prayer, a book about her father Reinhold Neibuhr, a theologian who wrote about democracy, liberalism, ethics, and politics. “I used to be quite taken with (Zizek’s) work,” Sifton wrote, saying that he is “arrestingly free of inhibitions and outmoded nonsense,” but also “contrarian,” and lacking substance—not the “politics of protest” that we need.

Fritz Stern, a professor emeritus of European history at Columbia, has written about the tendency to level the charge of fascism and to make Nazi comparisons for various political ends. (He wrote Five Germanys I Have Known and The Politics of Cultural Despair, both considered pretty major works). At first Stern didn’t find much to grab ahold of in Zizek’s essay. Then he wrote, “For serious people to talk that way about selves and opponents is abominable. It destroys argument which is essential to democracy.”

But John Merz, priest at the Greenpoint Church of the Ascension, saw it differently:

There is nothing in there that troubles me. The one line you mention gives me pause about the Holy Spirit and the pagans on Wall Street. However he is using the term Holy Spirit in a way ultimately that does not trouble me. His sense of the Spirit which accords with the orthodox sense is that it is that sustaining spirit that leads to new vital life (…)
I think the way he is portraying pagans on “wall street” is in the classic Christian way it was used in that the pagans were seen to be worshipping false Gods or simulated Gods or idols at so many altars. The Christian concept I think is that the worship or remembrance at the altar when people share the bread and the wine is a “real symbol” in that it actually reflects or accesses a truth about reality that cannot be enacted in another way. The truth being that we are connected to one in other and into God in a kind of interdependence best experienced or revealed in love, service, forgiveness etc….Therefore one could imagine an action whereby people could go to wall street in order to ”throw over the tables of the money changers” not because the stock exchange is in fact a house of prayer but because on the sacramental life of everything things, that market, that altar to the false God of hyper capital, has polluted our common space and metastasizes throughout the social and political body.

And I asked Kristin Dombek, who has written about performance, rhetoric, belief, and, as she puts it, “the secular aspects of evangelicalism and the religious aspects of secularism.” (I recommend her essay on the musical, The Book of Mormon in n+1). Kristin said the article moved her, and that she shared this reaction with other people who had heard Zizek’s speech in Zucotti Park. Dombek wrote:

(Zizek posits that) With the help of the Holy Spirit, Christianity could transcend national boundaries, as the Occupy movement was beginning to do. But he revoked the notion of a divine visitation, implying instead that pragmatic, collaborative action can create a sense of revolutionary international transcendence, that we make something better than god this way, together.  He was flirting with totalitarianism, as usual, with the erasure of difference.  But doesn’t any revolutionary rhetoric?

One question I have is, does revolutionary rhetoric have to flirt with totalitarianism, or instead does it often tend to? And, why? Stern’s work addresses this rigorously, and deeply. But, to be cursory, in order for a radical ethical claim to gain traction in a democracy, must it speak in oppositional tones? What would Gandhi, MLK, or Vaclav Havel say?

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Ed Koren, from The New Yorker. Jan 31, 2011

I realized that one of the reasons Zizek’s religious language bothered me is because I personally associate these Christian concepts with a practice that can help undo the psychic loggerhead of us/them, and instead elicit a sense of the partialness of one’s own perspective. So to see these terms used to inscribe us/them more forcefully seemed as if one more possible escape from the dynamic of MSN/Fox, Dem/Rep, Red/Blue had been marshaled for the special occasion of a scholarly journal now calling the political moment too pressing for footnotes and peer review.

In contrast, though, McKenzie Wark’s essay in the same issue of Theory & Event describes a political identity of solidarity that isn’t based upon opposition.

Most people don’t really care all that much about what the 1% has. They are not concerned about someone else’s wealth, they are concerned about everyone else’s impoverishment. They are concerned about going hungry.

Maybe the mistake was mine in the first place, to separate “religious” from “secular” language. William E. Connolly writes of the oversimplification and misrecognitions involved in this opposition: “stark definitions on the outside contain the range and reach of diversity on the inside, and vice versa.” Both categories, religion and secularism, define themselves by the relative subtly, complexity, and inclusion of difference they include as opposed to the simplicity and rigidity of the other.[1] Secularism, then, becomes a kind of false category, built upon an opposition between liberalism as part of positivism, modernity, science and the rational, and the irrational and religious.

I will leave the last word to Craig Calhoun, author of The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, (taken from a post on the blog “The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere”).

To say that religion has power in the public sphere is not to say that it can be easily absorbed or that it should be. It is a basis for radical challenges and radical questions; it brings enthusiasm, passion, indignation, outrage, and love. If enthusiasm is sometimes harnessed to unreflective conviction, passion is also vital to critical engagement with existing institutions and dangerous trends. The public sphere and the practice of public reason have power too. And they not only take from religion but also offer it opportunities to advance by reflection and critical argument.