The MONSTROSITY OF CHRIST (a review of my book by Professor Harris)

The book I did with Slavoj Zizek & John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ (The MIT Press) has received over twenty reviews in top journals ranging from The Times Literary Supplement (David Bentley Hart) to Philosophical Reviews (John D. Caputo) and the prominent on-line Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (reviewed by leading voices in post-Derridian, Continental Philosophy of Religion including, Victor Taylor, Carl Raschke, Jeffrey Robbins, and Clayton Crockett).  I have written a reply to the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, which is forthcoming in the next issue.  I wanted to share with you a few paragraphs of a recent review written by Professor Mitchell Harris and published in Reviews in Cultural Theory.

The Meaning of Christ and the Meaning of Hegel: Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank’s (A)symmetrical Response to Capitalist Nihilism

by MITCHELL M. HARRIS

2.2 | November 1, 2011

Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank. The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? Ed. Creston Davis. MIT Press, 2009. 320 pp.

In The Monstrosity of Christ, Creston Davis, the book’s relatively unnoticed editor, brings together an unconventional pair of contemporary thinkers: the Hegelian, Lacanian, Marxist materialist philosopher Slavoj Žižek and his orthodox, Western Catholic theologian counterpart, John Milbank. Davis writes an admirable introduction to the book, reminding its readers why the “unlikely debate” between a strict atheist-materialist and Christian-metaphysician is not only necessary but also the only proper response to today’s capitalist nihilism, by which thought itself is reduced to operate along the coordinates of “a false dichotomy between reason and faith” (4). The “need for a theology of resistance is necessarily dependent on the Žižek/Milbank debate,” Davis suggests, “ because it helps to open a passage beyond the deadlock of the twin ideological structures of capitalist Empire, namely postmodernism (philosophy) and Protestant and Catholic liberalism (theology)” (5). The point is fair enough. Given that the postmodern, and even the current post-secular, epoch seemingly demonstrates that “reason’s stance against myth, superstition and the theological in order to access reason, pure and autonomous reason, has proved at least wanting, if not downright irrational” (5). Though not explicitly acknowledged, Davis’s claim is a Kantian one, evoking the antinomical confusion of pure reason: “If the Middle Ages failed to employ enough reason . . . then secular modernity has employed too much of it (even to the point of contradiction!)” (5).

So how is it possible for Žižek and Milbank to move beyond the inability of faith to interact with reason (and vice versa), when the two thinkers seem to epitomize the dualistic counterpoints of rationalism (Žižek) and fideism (Milbank)? Davis answers this very question by pointing out that both Žižek and Milbank are committed to interrogating “the very foundation of reason as such,” thus helping stage “a theology that resists global capitalism” (10). His fundamental assertion is that this critique of reason is Hegelian at its core. By confronting reason, the Žižek/Milbank debate encounters reason’s “terrifying hidden supplement, that is, reason’s otherness that does not show its truth so long as we naively accept its face value (what Hegel called the ‘Ruse of Reason’)” (10). As such a response implies, the meaning of Christ (and Christianity) in relation to the postmodern and post-secular crux, for both Žižek and Milbank, is necessarily determined by how one reads Hegel—that is, the meaning and legacy of Hegel.

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