The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity

A weird book. I've read it twice and remain confused, although I don't feel too dumb because an Atlantic Monthly article on Žižek states that "he contradicts himself all the time." At the very least, though, he entertains the reader with a dazzling facility for finding apt illustrations of philosophical points in popular culture (movies, jokes, consumer products) and a Nietzschean outrageousness which will alternately delight and offend readers from both the right and the left.

The thesis of the book--I think--is stated in the introductory chapter: "My claim here is not merely that I am a materialist through and through, and that the subversive kernel of Christianity is accessible also to a materialist approach; my thesis is much stronger: this kernel is accessible only to a materialist approach--and vice versa: to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian experience." With the collapse of Soviet communism, Marxism is out of fashion, while religiosity is making a comeback even among trendy thinkers like Derrida who declare that we have entered a "post-secular" age. In such an intellectual climate, the Marxist "dwarf" has to hide behind and manipulate the "puppet" of theology if it is to succeed. This approach strikes me as fundamentally dishonest, but Žižek takes for granted Hegel's doctrine of historical dialectic, according to which truth is only arrived at incrementally: "it is not possible to choose the 'true meaning' directly: that is, one has to begin by making the 'wrong' choice--the true speculative meaning emerges only through repeated reading, as the aftereffect (or byproduct) of the first, 'wrong,' reading." (83) Although he doesn't state this explicitly, I suppose Žižek would say that twentieth-century Marxism was such a dismal failure because it was a false start, an illegitimate attempt to bypass the Hegelian dialectical process in which communism would arise only after the "wrong" choice of Christianity was followed through to the uttermost.

More to come...