Notes from Zizek: Why Atheists Are the Only True Believers

Last week I went to hear the Lacanian cultural critic Slavoj Zizek speak. Surprisingly, I could understand most of what he was saying, if I could not always follow the connections between his points. Here is a basic outline of his discussion, with my thoughts in italics:

The first part of Zizek's speech seemed the most difficult to engage. He spoke of the scene in Hitchock, where there are generic clothes hung on the line but viewers think they see underwear because of the context. The generic clothes are hung instead of underwear because of the censors. Leading Zizek to wonder: if everyone automatically thinks "the worst," who are we trying to protect? In the same way, he brings up the Soviet Encyclopedia. After Beria was killed, everyone was ordered to replace the page on him with a page on the Bering Straits. Why this meticulous subterfuge, if everyone knew Beria used to be there? According to Zizek, Sovietism is a sort of religion.

He next spoke of the recent rash of 9/11 movies. He posited that we would have reacted differently if the WTC had collapsed because of an earthquake. He sees an underlying theological dimension. When the plane crashes into the tower, we never see the plane, but a shadow, what he considers to be symbolizing angels of death, the apocalypse, divine retribution. He notes that both the religious right (Falwell) and Islamic fundamentalists explicitly believe that 9/11 was a judgment. Yet he argues the ultimate point of these movies is that 9/11 was a blessing in disguise--it "brought out the best" in us. The catastrophe was a distraction that allowed the message of social solidarity to come forward. Zizek considers this implicit message manipulative and underhanded: if we want social solidarity, we don't need to have a "cover" for it.

He believes that Christianity and the "religions of the Book (particularly OT)" are actually a corrective for the judgment theory. He argues that the Book of Job denies us the justification to read meaning into catastrophe. Job's response to his 3 friends is to deny that suffering has meaning rather than that he merely doesn't deserve it. Yet we ignore this message because people would rather have a bad meaning than no meaning.

He considers the "big picture" mentality towards disasters to be "obscene". Here he connected it to Christ's death somehow...He said that Christianity is the only religion in which "God at one point doesn't believe in God," where Christ finds himself in the position of Job.

He condemned Rumsfeld for saying "there are no unknowns." Zizek categorized epistemology into "unknown unknowns"--things we don't know that we don't know; and "unknown knowns"--things we don't know that we know, i.e. the unconscious, fantasies.

Zizek believes that most people don't fully believe in what they say they believe in. Atheists will project their belief onto someone else--a child or parent whose "innocence" they are protecting. He quoted Asimov: "either we are alone or we are not alone," and said humans find either option equally horrible. So we compromise and don't truly believe either. We don't like externalizing our beliefs or discussing them. Rituals are ways we internalize. We also engage in fetish disavowment. An example of this is global warming and the environment. We know empirically that we are destroying the earth, yet because the birds are twittering and the sun is shining, we are unable to truly "believe" and act upon it at an elementary level. Our senses contradict it. We are embedded in a life. Zizek says we must cut the links of our embeddedness to truly believe. In Q&A, he gave an example of escaping from embeddedness as the Japanese movement towards "playing" with technology in order to free ourselves from it.

What holds our society together are the explicit rules we don't use--"empty gestures." These are the unknown knowns embodied. Our ability to torture a person in front of us is an evolutionary regression. We bypass the "unknown known" through technology.

Zizek discussed the biblical concept of "neighbor" in relation to the "other." We fear the abyss between us and the other will disappear with our "neighbor." Our politics are against the Neighbor--we are mobilized by fear. Liberals now rephrase all problems in terms of tolerance. But, for example, the problem of racism used to be a question of equality rather than just generic tolerance. This is ludicrous, for example, in relation to feminism: women don't want their husbands to tolerate them: they want to be treated as equals. Now all proper economic problems are turned into administrative problems--there is no true struggle. He likes Wendy Brown, who wrote a book saying that tolerance is evidence of a post-political society.

Zizek objects to solving problems by "always listening to the other side's stories." Hitler was our enemy not because we didn't listen to him, but because he was evil. The stories we tell ourselves are not ourselves. The story Hitler told himself, and would have told us, was a lie. Religions of the Book can be a corrective against this destructive form of liberalism. Zizek says he agrees with Fukayama here and disagrees with the liberalism of Rorty, who says we can live in harmony with different ideas.

The only true respect for Otherness is not to impose your universality on it, according to Wendy Brown. Zizek says she is too Marxist/classist here. Even if universality is false, even if we create it, it is taken up by others. We are not aware how our particularity affects universality. Once a society experiences capitalism, etc., it is no longer part of the original culture. There are problems in all societies, so the only solution is struggle. The Book allows us to bypass our particular culture to universality. There is universal truth, but it is attained dialectically. There must be struggle, cut, negativity.

So those notes probably didn't make a whole lot of sense. But I think the lecture raised valuable questions for me:

Can we really escape our embeddedness? How? If not, how can we ever believe?

Do we agree that there must always be "struggle"? What is the place of tolerance? Is tolerance a valuable concept?

Is there a way to re-engage true politics in our post-political society (i.e. how do we encourage people to break away from all thinking the same basic thing)?

I think I agree with him that by "tolerating" a society engage with, we will change it to some extent, but I'm not ready to throw out Rorty yet.

Oh--and he never did explain why atheists are the only true believers.