Superego and Real Since the function of the obscene superego supplement of the (Divine) Law is to mask this impotence of the big Other, and since Christianity reveals this impotence, it is, in consequence, the first (and only) religion radically to leave behind the split between the official/public text and its obscene initiatory supplement: there is no hidden untold story in it. In this precise sense, Christianity is the religion of Revelation: everything is revealed in it; no obscene superego supplement accompanies its public message. In ancient Greek and Roman religions, the public text was always supplemented by secret initiation rituals and orgies; however, all attempts to treat Christianity in the same way (to uncover Christs secret teaching somehow encoded in the New Testament or found in apocryphal Gospels) come down to its heretic reinscription into the pagan Gnostic tradition. … Or -- to formulate it even more pointedly, in more pathetic terms – what God reveals is not His hidden power, only His impotence as such. … Judaisms stubborn attachment (Judith Butlers term) to the unacknowledged violent founding gesture that haunts the public legal order as its spectral supplement enabled the Jews to persist and survive for thousands of years without a homeland or a common institutional tradition: they refused to give up their ghost, to sever the link to their secret, disavowed tradition. The paradox of Judaism is that it maintains fidelity to the founding violent Event precisely by NOT confessing, symbolizing it: this repressed status of the Event is what gives Judaism its unprecedented vitality. … A crucial line of separation must be drawn here between Jewish fidelity to the disavowed ghosts and the pagan obscene initiatory wisdom accompanying public ritual: the disavowed Jewish spectral narrative does not tell the obscene story of Gods impenetrable omnipotence, but its exact opposite: the story of His impotence concealed by the standard pagan obscene supplements. The secret to which the Jews remain faithful is the horror of Divine impotence -- and it is THIS secret which is revealed in Christianity. This is why Christianity can occur only after Judaism: it reveals the horror first confronted by the Jews. It is therefore only through taking this line of separation between paganism and Judaism into account that we can properly grasp the Christian breakthrough itself. This means that Judaism, in forcing us to face the abyss of the Others desire (in the guise of the impenetrable God), in refusing to cover up this abyss with a determinate fantasmatic scenario (articulated in the obscene initiatory myth), confronts us, for the first time, with the paradox of human freedom. There is no freedom outside the traumatic encounter with the opacity of the Others desire: freedom does not mean that I simply get rid of the Others desire -- I am, as it were, thrown into my freedom when I confront this opacity as such, deprived of the fantasmatic cover which tells me what the Other wants from me. In this difficult predicament, full of anxiety, when I know that the Other wants something from me, without knowing what this desire is, I am thrown back into myself, compelled to assume the risk of freely determining the co-ordinates of my desire. (see note 78 below) … There is a further problem with the Song of Songs. The standard defence of psychoanalytic Judaism against Christianity involves two claims: first, it is only in Judaism that we encounter the anxiety of the traumatic Real of the Law, of the abyss of the Others desire (What do you want?); Christianity covers up this abyss with love, that is, the imaginary reconciliation between God and humanity in which the anxiety-provoking encounter with the Real is mitigated: now we know what the Other wants from us -- God loves us, and Christs sacrifice is the ultimate proof of it.... Second: do not texts like the Song of Songs demonstrate that Judaism, far from being (only) a religion of anxiety, is also -- and above all -- the religion of love, an even more intense love than Christianity? Is not the covenant between God and the Jewish people a supreme act of love? As we have just indicated, however, this Jewish love remains metaphorical; as such, it is itself the imaginary reconciliation between God and humanity in which the anxiety-provoking encounter with the Real is mitigated. Or - to put it directly and brutally -- is not the Song of Songs ideology at its purest, in so far as we conceive of ideology as the imaginary mitigation of a traumatic Real, as the Real of the Divine encounter with a human face? … 78. Perhaps this also provides the key to why anti-Semitism is the privileged example of ideological fantasy: precisely because Judaism traverses the fantasy, the only way to undo the damage of this act is to elevate Jews themselves into the privileged fantasmatic object, the secret agent who pulls the strings of social life. Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, Verso, 2008 (second edition), p.liii, liv, lv, lvi, lvii and note 78 (p.ci).
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 00:33:11 +0000
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