Book Review: Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute—or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000, 182 pp., no price given pbk.)
| Published date | 01 December 2000 |
| DOI | 10.1177/03058298000290030814 |
| Author | Pavlos Hatzopoulos |
| Date | 01 December 2000 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Millennium
922
perspective —the fundamentalists of all religions—actually reject th e language of
justice and e mbrace tha t he employs. For them—and, of course, especially for thei r
victims—religio us commitme nt is part of the p roblem, some thing tha t produ ces
exclusion rather than th e means to overcome exclusio n. Volf shows that this need
not be so, but those of us who cannot walk where he walks will be forced inst ead to
remain where we were before, attempti ng to find a non-tra nscendental way of
mediating between justice, differen ce and the ‘Oth er’, or, if yo u prefer, between
Dionysus and Pro metheus.
CHRIS BROWN
Chris Brown is Pro fessor of International Relatio ns in the
Department of International Relations at the London
School of Economics and Political Science
Slavoj ie k, The Fragile Abso lute—or, Why is the C hristian Legacy Worth
Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000, 182 pp., no price given pbk.)
What are we to ma ke out of a text on Christianity written by an avo wed Marxist?
Feel relieved that this is not an attempt to restate—in a contemporary conte xt—the
classic critique of Engels (‘religion is o pium fo r the masses’), nor it aims at a
refusal of the alleged con gruencies between the Marxi st and Christian discou rses
(Stalin as God, communism as paradise, Th e Commu nist Ma nifesto as the holy
text, etc.). It is not eve n a—perhaps politi cally correct—manoeuvre of recognising
peace as th e ultimate reality of Chri stian faith and thus deno uncing all past and
present crimes a nd wars fought on its na me as distortions of the Chri stian message.
Rather, Th e Fragile Ab solute promises the revelation o f a Ghost, it strives for the
(re)articulatio n of a Christian legacy that is indeed violent, b ut in su bversive and
revolutio nary modes, a gho st that will hau nt believ ers and non-b elievers alike.
The call for a strategic alliance between Christian ity and Marxi sm is not of
course completely unanticip ated; there is the thought and p ractice (in the Latin
American context) of Liberation Theology o n the part of t he commun ity of the
faithful and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew portraying
Christ as an instigato r of social revol ution on the p art of the n on-believers.
Whatever we mak e of the impa ct or success of these previous pro positions, Slavoj
ie k’s aim is distinc tly unsettling. Readers might find su rprising, even disturbin g,
that at the centre of i ek’s narrativ e is—th e princ ipal targe t of the
secularist/modern ist critique o f Christian ‘ob scurantism’—Saint Paul , and not
some supposedly authentic, pacifist, pre-institutionalised early Christian
community. As he clai ms: ‘there is no Christ outside Saint Paul; in exactl y the
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