Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek
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organization, and his works contributed to the ideological foundation of National Socialism. His story begins with the death of Theodoric the Great, when his successors try to maintain his legacy: an independent Ostrogothic kingdom. They are opposed by the Byzantine empire, ruled by the mighty emperor Justinian who tries to restore the Roman empire to its former greatness by capturing the Italian peninsula. Witiges, Totila, and Teia, who—in that order—succeed Theodoric as kings, endeavor to defend their kingdom with the help of Theodoric’s faithful armorer Hildebrand. Meanwhile, Cethegus, a (fictional) Roman prefect who represents the majority of Rome’s population, has his own agenda to rebuild the empire: he too tries to get rid of the Goths but is at the same time determined to keep the Byzantines out of Italy. In the end, the Byzantines win and reclaim Italy, while Cethegus dies in a duel with the last Gothic king Teia. The struggle for Rome ends at a battle near Mount Vesuvius where the Ostrogoths make their last stand defending a narrow pass (a scene reminiscent of Thermopylae); once defeated, they withdraw to the island of Thule where their roots lay . . . The main motif of the book is stated in the poem which comments on the departing Ostrogoths: “Make way, you people, for our stride. / We are the last of the Goths. / We do not carry a crown with us, / We carry but a corpse.” This corpse belongs to eia, a dark, dejected man, who envisions the demise of the kingdom; even though he knows this demise to be predestined, he adopts the Germanic stance of confronting fate with courage in order to be well remembered (it is impossible to miss the echoes of darkly brooding Hagen from Nibelungs in the figure of Teia).
Although Ward-Perkins is far from peddling any such morbid heroic-fatalistic fascination, he nonetheless presents a series of theses which (even if historically accurate, as they mostly are) sustain the contemporary vision of the need to defend the secular and civilized West against the barbarian Third World onslaught, and warns against harboring any illusions about their peaceful integration. For example, one cannot but be struck by Ward-Perkins’s repeated insistence that the Roman West fell for strictly external reasons (the barbarian invasions), not because of its inherent antagonisms and weaknesses—a thesis which can be given many versions, from a Nietzschean blaming of Christianity as degenerate to the Marxist emphasis on how the gradual decline of free farmer-soldiers and their replacement by mercenary armies in the long term destabilized the empire (the Gracchus brothers, Marx’s personal heroes, can thus be seen as the last defenders of the true strength of Rome). The recent shift in the popular appreciation of Rome in the space of only two decades has resulted from similar contemporary reverberations: while in the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the United States as the sole global superpower, Rome was celebrated as a mighty empire with a strong army, the passage to a more multi-centric world (to which President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy gave no small aid) has since generated an obsession with the Roman empire in decline.
The topic of late Antiquity is full of similar ideological traps, like the naïve celebration of Aristotelian secular-empirical reasoning, violently suppressed in the Dark Ages when faith treated intellectual curiosity as dangerous, but which then returns, although still formally subordinated to religion, with Thomas Aquinas.13 Aristotelian Reason, however, is organic-teleological, in clear contrast to the radical contingency which characterizes the modern scientific view. No wonder today’s Catholic Church attacks Darwinism as “irrational” on behalf of the Aristotelian notion of Reason: the “reason” of which the Pope speaks is a Reason for which Darwin’s theory of evolution (and, indeed, modern science itself, within which the assertion of the ultimate contingency of the universe, marking its break with Aristotelian teleology, is a constitutive axiom) is “irrational.” The “reason” of which the Pope speaks is a pre-modern teleological Reason, the view of the universe as a harmonious Whole in which everything serves a higher purpose. Which is why, paradoxically, the Pope’s remarks obfuscate the key role of Christian theology in the birth of modern science: what paved the way for modern science was precisely the “voluntarist” idea—elaborated by, among others, Duns Scotus and Descartes—that God is not bound by any eternal rational truths. While the view of scientific discourse as involving a pure description of facticity is illusory, the paradox resides in the coincidence of bare facticity and radical voluntarism: facticity can be sustained as meaningless, as something that “just is as it is,” only if it is secretly sustained by an arbitrary divine will. This is why Descartes is the founding figure of modern science, precisely when he makes even the most elementary mathematical facts like 2 + 2 = 4 dependent on arbitrary divine will: two plus two is four because God willed it so, with no hidden or obscure chain of reasons behind it. Even in mathematics, this unconditional voluntarism is discernible in its axiomatic character: one begins by arbitrarily positing a series of axioms, out of which everything else is then supposed to follow. The paradox is thus that it was the Christian Dark Ages which created the conditions for the specific rationality of modern science as opposed to the science of the Ancients. The lesson is thus clear: the utopia of a direct passage from late Rome to the “high” Middle Ages is a false one, ignoring the necessity of the Fall into the early “dark” Middle Ages which alone created the conditions for modern rationality.
Does this fact, however, justify the Dark Ages? In theological terms, we stumble here upon the deadlock central to religion: how to deal with the Fall? Why does the Fall have to precede Salvation? The most radical and consistently perverse answer was provided by Nicolas Malebranche, the great Cartesian Catholic, who was excommunicated after his death and whose books were destroyed on account of his very excessive orthodoxy—Lacan probably had figures like Malebranche in his mind when he claimed that theologians are the only true atheists. In the best Pascalian tradition, Malebranche laid his cards on the table and “revealed the secret” (the perverse core) of Christianity; his Christology is based on an original proto-Hegelian answer to the question “Why did God create the world?”—so that He could bask in the glory of being celebrated by His creation. God wanted recognition, and He knew that, in order to gain that recognition, He would need another subject to recognize Him; so He created the world out of pure selfish vanity. Consequently, it was not that Christ came down to Earth in order to deliver people from sin, from the legacy of Adam’s Fall; on the contrary, Adam had to fall in order to enable Christ to come down to earth and dispense salvation. Here Malebranche applies to God Himself the “psychological” insight according to which the saintly figure who sacrifices himself for the benefit of others, to deliver them from their misery, secretly wants these others to suffer so that he will be able to help them—like the proverbial husband who works all day to support his poor crippled wife, yet would probably abandon her were she to regain her health and become a successful career woman. It is much more satisfying to sacrifice oneself for the poor victim than to enable the other to overcome their victim status and perhaps become even more successful than ourselves.
Malebranche pushes this parallel to its conclusion, to the horror of the Jesuits who organized his excommunication: in the same way that the saintly person uses the suffering of others to bring about his own narcissistic satisfaction, God also ultimately loves only Himself, and merely uses man to promulgate His own glory. From this reversal, Malebranche drew a consequence worthy of Lacan’s reversal of Dostoevsky (“If God doesn’t exist, then nothing is permitted.”): it is not true that, if Christ had not come to earth to deliver humanity, everyone would have been lost—quite the contrary, nobody would have been lost, that is, every human being had to fall so that Christ could come and deliver some of them. Malebranche’s conclusion is here shattering: since the death of Christ is a key step in realizing the goal of creation, at no time was God (the Father) happier than when He was observing His son suffering and dying on the Cross.
The only way to truly avoid this perversion, not just to obfuscate it, is to fully accept the Fall as the starting point which creates the conditions of Salvation: there is no state previous to the Fall from which we fell, the Fall itself creates that from which it is a Fall—or, in theological terms, God is not the Beginning. If this sounds like yet another typical Hegelian dialectical tangle, then we should disentangle it by drawing a line of separation between the true Hegelian dialectical process and its caricature. In the caricature, we have God (or an inner Essence) externalizing itself in the domain of contingent appearances, and then gradually re-appropriating its alienated content, recognizing itself in its Otherness—“we must first lose God in order to find Him,” we must fall