Žižekian Obfuscations, Part Two
Is “God” a "reified/substantialized form of the gap/crack that makes our realities not-all" or is that just smart-sounding gobbledegook?
As usual, many of the comments to the first part of my Žižek essay were excellent and helpful. I deeply appreciate this community of engaged readers who share my interests, even if we make up a small coterie at this point. I’ve removed the paywall on Part One so anyone who cares can go through the essay and, also, read the responses if they want, before they read more of my critique.
A few readers challenged me, questioning the value of writing pieces, like the one on Zizek, that require a good deal of concentration to read and understand, at a time when the general attention span – among TikTok-addicted Gen Zs, for example – is shrinking rapidly. I don’t know what to say to this. I do what I can – what seems to me to be useful and valuable. I don’t know what else to do!
This is my writing process: I start to feel the tug of a question that seems unresolved to me. I seek to formulate my own answer to my quandary. Hopefully when I can fully express my answer, it satisfies the same hunger – the same curiosity – in other people. The question, in other words, begets a quest. If I know the answer beforehand, what would be the point of making the inquiry?
I wrote Breaking Open the Head because I wanted to understand psychedelic shamanism and why my (modern Western) culture suppressed and denigrated the visionary experience while indigenous and traditional societies around the world, across time, found it essential. With 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, I sought to fathom the meaning – the deep structure –of indigenous, ancient, and even some modern (for example, in the work of Terence McKenna, Jose Arguelles, and Carl Jung) prophecies. I assume, if you subscribe to this newsletter, you want to support these kinds of investigations, which few people have the time, inclination, or fanatic fixity to make.
In this week’s essays, I inquire into Žižek’s philosophy of religion and ontology, as expressed in Christian Atheism, his latest book. At 75 years old, Žižek is often called “the Elvis of philosophy,” “The thinker of choice for Europe’s young intellectual vanguard”, and a “punk philosopher.” One would, therefore, expect to find something of great substance hidden beneath the convoluted phrases, dirty jokes, and general verbosity.
I just came upon this recent clip of Žižek – old wise man of the atheist Left – offering advice to Gen Z:
Here, we agree!
Žižek’s answer is, in fact, exactly why we are running our new seminar, Embracing Our Emergency, starting April 28, with speakers including Jane Fonda, Marianne Williamson, Bill McKibben, and many others.
This is also why I started The Evolver Network, years ago: We wanted to build a mycelial web of local, Leftist/anarchist communities – living, learning laboratories – preparing for the inescapable crises that are coming. Sadly, we couldn’t find a way to sustain that initiative back then. Perhaps there will be another chance.
Today I read in The Guardian:
The UK faces food shortages and price rises as extreme weather linked to climate breakdown causes low yields on farms locally and abroad.
Record rainfall has meant farmers in many parts of the UK have been unable to plant crops such as potatoes, wheat and vegetables during the key spring season. Crops that have been planted are of poor quality, with some rotting in the ground.
The persistent wet weather has also meant a high mortality rate for lambs on the UK’s hills, while some dairy cows have been unable to be turned out on to grass, meaning they will produce less milk.
Agricultural groups have said the UK will be more reliant on imports, but similarly wet conditions in European countries such as France and Germany, as well as drought in Morocco, could mean there is less food to import. Economists have warned this could cause food inflation to rise, meaning higher prices at supermarkets.
Food prices have skyrocketed in the US, where one in four people already experience some degree of “food insecurity” (hunger). Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion with Gail Bradbrook (she will speak at our upcoming seminar), notes that the problem with agricultural collapse is that you don’t simply plant a new crop and have it spring up a few weeks later. You have to wait until the next planting season.
At the point where extreme weather conditions cause massive crop failures (which we might reach this summer), we will see severe food shortages in the developed world. That could be the threshold where people finally break out of their hypnosis about the continuity of this system — but of course, it may also be the point where it is too late to matter much, for many, many people. Surviving Tomorrow’s “Last Week in Collapse” keeps a running tally of distressing ecological news, if you want it.
We’ve waited far too long to organize, to wake up, to act.
Hopefully there is still time to do so. If this matters to you at all, why not join our seminar where we will commune with some of the most authentic and powerful voices, thinkers, and movement leaders of our time to explore our authentic prospects for the near-future, while we hone our personal and collective strategies for what is, unfortunately and inevitably, coming?
What does it take for someone to build a movement, change the world through their actions, risk themselves to fight a destructive system? Let’s speak to many such people. Let’s learn from them.
While we propose a ticket price of $300 for this five-week immersion, we do not turn anyone away for lack of funds. Please email us at hello@liminal.news and let us know what feels good for you to pay. Also, all sessions will be recorded for later replay, and there will be an accompanying social network for connecting with the community.
Anyway, getting back to Žižek: I find his ideas on religion, Buddhism, and quantum physics to be convoluted and confused. At any cost, he preserves what he calls “real materialism,” which is his belief or faith. Therefore, Žižek seeks to foreclose, in advance, on the possibility of communing with anything transcendent, such as God or divinity. In this vein, he writes (not easy to parse this but I will try):
Of course there is an infinity of entities and processes we haven’t yet discovered, but they are not “transcendent” in the sense of an In-itself beyond the phenomenal sphere.
Our claim is that when we will discover new aspects of reality up to alien lives, we will not cross the boundary of impossibility that constitutes our reality. We will not discover God or anything of this order because such figures are a priori, constitutively, or (as Hegel would have put it) in their very notion, fantasy formations destined to fill in a gap – as Hegel put it long ago, “behind the so-called curtain, which is supposed to hide what is inner, there is nothing to be seen unless we ourselves go behind it.” So yes, our epistemological uncertainty is irreducible, but whatever awaits us “out there” is NOT anything resembling our figures of “God” – to bring this point to extreme, even if we’ll eventually encounter something whose features appear to us “divine,” this will NOT be what we call “God.” ... What appears as “God” is a reified/substantialized form of the gap/crack that makes our realities not-all. There is nothing beyond this gap, every figure of “beyond” is already an obfuscation of the gap.
But why would Žižek believe he can know what is possible, in reality, for everyone else? I find this so presumptuous. He has no basis for making such a claim.
What if knowledge is, in its essence, different from what Žižek can currently conceive? What if – for example, as Gurdjieff as well as Rudolf Steiner proposed – what we can know is fundamentally related to our state or condition of being? What if certain kinds of knowledge are irreducibly state-specific? In other words, you have to achieve, at least temporarily, a particular phenomenological condition (such as an initiatory state or nondual realization) to access a particular level of knowledge and, with it, a different kind of ontological certainty?
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