Zizek is famed for juxtaposing abstruse points of philosophical or psychoanalytic theory with examples from cinema or popular culture. In his recent work, the scope of religion has expanded so that the analogical digression has become the substance of an argument. The presence of Althusser in Zizek's work is hardly surprising, But a reader as attentive as Zizek would hardly have overlooked the presence of Pascal at the centre of Althusser's essay on the theory of ideology
Zizek is famed for juxtaposing abstruse points of philosophical or psychoanalytic theory with examples from cinema or popular culture. In his recent work, the scope of religion has expanded so that the analogical digression has become the substance of an argument. The presence of Althusser in Zizek's work is hardly surprising, But a reader as attentive as Zizek would hardly have overlooked the presence of Pascal at the centre of Althusser's essay on the theory of ideology
Zizek is famed for juxtaposing abstruse points of philosophical or psychoanalytic theory with examples from cinema or popular culture. In his recent work, the scope of religion has expanded so that the analogical digression has become the substance of an argument. The presence of Althusser in Zizek's work is hardly surprising, But a reader as attentive as Zizek would hardly have overlooked the presence of Pascal at the centre of Althusser's essay on the theory of ideology
Zizek is famed for juxtaposing abstruse points of philosophical or psychoanalytic theory with examples from cinema or popular culture. In his recent work, the scope of religion has expanded so that the analogical digression has become the substance of an argument. The presence of Althusser in Zizek's work is hardly surprising, But a reader as attentive as Zizek would hardly have overlooked the presence of Pascal at the centre of Althusser's essay on the theory of ideology
Copyright:
Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
Download as pdf or txt
You are on page 1of 15
Zizek, religion and ideology
There is sometimes much to be learned from a thinker’s more
apparently tangential sources, who seem to have no direct connexion
with his or her major intellectual reference points. By the same token,
there is something to be gleaned from a thinker’s choice of analogies.
Zizek is famed for the aplomb with which he juxtaposes abstruse
points of philosophical or psychoanalytic theory with examples from
cinema or popular culture. But religious analogies occur with perhaps
surprising frequency throughout his work. In his recent work, the
scope of religion has expanded so that the analogical digression has
become the substance of an argument. There is some point then in
addressing these issues conjointly, by examining the use of religious
writers and themes both in earlier and in very recent works of Zizek’s.
Althusser, Pascal and the theory of ideology
The presence of Althusser in Zizek’s work is hardly surprising: a
Marxist with Lacanian inclinations seems an obvious guest at Zizek’s
symposia. If we knew that a friend of his had been invited to keep
him company, we would have a pretty good guess who that would
be. Althusser repeatedly cited Spinoza as an inspiration, and two
of his major followers, Etienne an and Pierre Macherey, have
done important work on Spinoza.? But instead we would find Pascal.
Instead of the arch-heretic who denied the existence of a personal God,
and preached this-worldly happiness through the exercise of reason,
we find an apologist for Christianity, whose affiliations were with
the Jansenist movement, a hard-line tendency in Roman Catholicism
with a pessimistic view of human nature and a rigorous doctrine of
predestination.
A reader as attentive as Zizek, however, would hardly have over-
looked the presence of Pascal at the centre of Althusser’s essay on
the theory of ideology. (Years later, on re-reading Pascal, Althusser
recognised him as the source of the whole theory.)> Zizek prolongs
the Althusserian enterprise by using Pascal to explore the nature of
belief, in ways that go beyond Althusser himself.
Althusser's main use of Pascal in the essay on ideology is to invert the
hierarchical ordering of belief and action. The common conception,126 Paragraph
or ideology, holds that the individual should act according to his or
her beliefs. For Althusser, action precedes belief: the ideas in which an
individual believes are his or her acts, inserted into material practices
regulated by material rituals laid down by the ideological apparatus
in question. And the inspiration for this inversion is Pascal, whom
he paraphrases as follows:, Kneel move your lips in prayer, and you
will believe’ (pp. 41-3).4 Zikek’s approach is rather different. He
begins his Pascalian excursus with another fragment not mentioned
by Althusser, but recognized by Pascalian interpreters as vital.
For we must make no mistake about ourselves: we are as much automaton as
mind (...). Proofs only convince the mind; habit provides the strongest proofs,
and those that are most believed. It inclines the automaton, which leads the mind
unconsciously along with it
Zizek reads ‘automaton’ as denoting the ‘automatism of the signi-
fier, of the symbolic network in which the subjects are caught,’ and
comments as follows: ‘Here Pascal produces the very Lacanian defi-
nition of the unconscious: “‘the automaton (i.e. the dead, senseless
letter) which leads the mind unconsciously (...) with it’ (SOI, 37).
Now at first sight this looks like a simple misreading, or perhaps
a joke. The standard gloss of Pascal’s use of the term ‘automaton’
is that it denotes the body.® (This is basically how Althusser reads
Pascal: the performance of bodily rituals subjects the individual to the
ideological state apparatus that prescribes the ritual.) Iam not primarily
concerned here to show that Zizek’s reading of Pascal is sound or
unsound — there are certainly points the specialist would contest. But
although the identification of the automaton with the letter of the
unconscious seems far-fetched, it should not be altogether written off.
Another major Pascal scholar, Philippe Sellicr, takes Pascal’s concept
of the automaton to cover not only the body, but part of our psychic
life.” This brings us a little nearer to Zizek in that it allows us to
see not merely the body but also the unconscious as involved in the
production of belief, As Zizek observes:
“What distinguishes this Pascalian ‘custom’ from insipid behaviourist wisdom (...)
is the paradoxical status of a belief before belief: by following a custom, the subject
believes without knowing it, so that the final conversion is merely a formal act
by means of which we recognize what have already believed. In other words,
what the behaviourist reading of Pascalian ‘custom’ misses is the crucial fact that
the external custom is always a material support for the subject’s unconscious
(SOF, 40).Zikek, religion and ideology 127
Elsewhere, he analyses the Althusserian-Pascalian theory as follows:
The implicit logic of [the] argument is: kneel down and you shall believe thai
you knelt down because of your belief —that is, your following the ritual is an
expression/effect of your inner belief in short, the ‘external’ ritual performatively
generates its own ideological foundation.®
There is none the less an important shift here from Althusser's
concerns. Althusser’s point was that in all ideology there is a subjection
that can be conceived on the lines of Pascal’s model of conversion,
but that does not always take the subjective form of conversion.
Conversion is the special case that reveals the general law. He uses
Pascalian theory to bolster the Marxist theory of ideology, but makes
no analogy between religious conversion and political commitment.
Zizek explicitly does (SOI, pp. 39-43). That is to say, he is much
more alert to the ethical issue of how political commitment is to
be grounded or justified. This emerges from his analysis of another
fragment of Pascal’s:
Custom is the whole of equity for the sole reason that it is accepted. That is
the mystic basis of its authority. Anyone who tries to bring it back to its first
principles destroys it.”
Zizek reads this as implying that belief can never be objectively justified
by rational argument. One submits to it in the same way as, according
to Pascal in the same fragment, we submit to law: because it is law. ‘We
must search for rational reasons which can substantiate our belief (.. .)
but (...) these reasons reveal themselves only to those who already
believe’ (SOI, 37).'° That is to say, belief, or submission to the Law,
must be understood in relation to the concept of the superego, that is,
‘an injunction which is experienced as traumatic, “senseless” — that
is, which cannot be integrated into the symbolic universe of the
subject’ (p. 37); while on the other hand, this traumatic fact must be
‘repressed into the unconscious, through the ideological, imaginary
experience of the “meaning” of the Law, of its foundation in Justice,
Truth (or, in a more modern way, functionality)’ (p. 38). The section
of the wager fragment to which Althusser alludes, in which Pascal
urges the unbelieving would-be believer to follow religious rituals, is
thus quoted at length in support of the thesis of the primacy of belief
over the reasons that vindicate it— for the believer (pp. 38—9).
This assimilation of belief to Pascal’s concept of law and custom
enables Zizek to plug the gaps in Althusserian theory. Althusser failed128 Paragraph
to show how the Ideological State Apparatuses produce the effect
of recognition and subjection. But if the law is obeyed, not because
it is right, but because it is law, and we adhere to it because we
cannot justify it, then its power to subject seems more comprehensible:
“This external “machine” of State Apparatuses exercises its force only
insofar as it is experienced, in the unconscious economy of the subject,
as a traumatic senseless injunction’ (p. 43). We learn, further, from
Pascal that the internalization of the symbolic machine of ideology
never fully succeeds, ‘that there is always a residue, a leftover, a
strain of traumatic irrationality and senselessness sticking to it, and
that this leftover, far from hindering the full submission of the subject to the
ideological command, is the very condition of it’ (p. 43). Why this is so is
explained by another reference to Pascal (though also to Descartes).
Ideological commitment produces various effects but only when they
are sought as a by-product. Thus Pascal promises (Pensées, fragment
418) that religious faith will produce terrestrial advantages, in that it
will improve our moral character and offer pleasures that provide an
alternative to those we have given up. ‘But the point is,’ as Zizek
observes, ‘that I can achieve this terrestrial profit only if I really believe
in God’ (SOI, 83). Pascal has dangerously revealed the ‘enjoyment
which is at work in ideology, in the ideological renunciation itself
(p. 84)."!
Pascal’s theory of law is invoked again in For They Know Not What
They Do. Power depends on the belief that the law is authentic and
eternal, but this conceals its real foundations:
‘At the beginning’ of the law, there is a certain ‘outlaw,’ a certain Real of
violence which coincides with the act itself of the establishment of the reign of
law: the ultimate trath about the reign of law is that of an usurpation, and all
classical politico-philosophical thought rests on the disavowal of this violent act
of foundation. (p. 204)?
A theory of belief originally designed to support religion has been
diverted to other purposes. But this is not surprising. The theory,
it could be argued, has no intrinsic theological content. Pascal was
concerned with the mechanism of belief, which works irrespective of
its object (custom determines also our non-religious beliefs, attaches
us to this-worldly goals and values—religious rituals are first and
foremost a counterweight to this). Likewise, Pascal’s critical insight
into law and society can be linked to his Jansenism: the theological
insistence on the absence of God from the everyday world has
to be vindicated by a relentless ‘demystifying’ critique. But the