Zizek, the Siberian Jesus, and Schizophrenia

For the benefit of the reader who has never encountered Slavoj Zizek’s The Fragile Absolute, here is the short spiel behind the book:

One of the signal features of our era is the re-emergence of the ‘sacred’ in all its different guises, from New Age Paganism to the emerging religious sensitivity within cultural and political theory.

The wager of Zizek’s ‘The Fragile Absolute’ – published here with a new preface by the author – is that Christianity and Marxism can fight together against the contemporary onslaught of vapid spiritualism. The revolutionary core of the Christian legacy is too precious to be left to fundamentalists.

Certainly, contemporary culture has witnessed the regeneration (and degeneration) of organized religion into different forms and amalgamations; while watching Don’t Tell My Mother in National Geographic, where they featured Russia for that particular episode, Zizek’s thesis came into mind. In the show, they documented a religion (or ‘a cult,’ as the Russian Orthodoxy is concerned) called The Church of the Last Testament. The Church worships a sort-of-Zarathustra-Jesus-Cult-like-figure called Vissarion who is very much alive today.

You have to hand it to him; he's got all of this likeness thing going on

Their religion forbids any form of monetary exchange, cultivates their own veggies (as they are not allowed meat), believe in reincarnation (Vissarion himself is claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus of Nazareth – note the similarities), and assert the inherent unity of the major world religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism – it is peculiar that Hinduism is not included) as represented by their cross (which I feel to be plagiarized from some Celt cemetery):

This is not the cross; this is from Ireland. But their cross bears some striking similarities, especially with the circle crossing the four corners of the crucifix

Originality aside (can we ever claim to be original these days?), the religion seems to have something going on: 4,000 followers in the Siberian Taiga, and 10,000 worldwide. You look at yourself and say, with that Obama-meme-face: not bad! Indeed, it is “not bad” in the most real sense (as far as we know), setting it apart from Jim Jones’ self-destructive cult: their religion has indeed lived a relatively long life (relative to other cult-like religions), and while they have preached the impending end of the world (what religion doesn’t, anyway?), they have not been destructive about it, calling their preparation “a desire to fully commit oneself to others.”

One characteristic of our contemporary society is its insistence on some form of tolerance and acceptance for the basic fact that people have different background ontologies, different contexts and prejudices (to use the Gademerian term). If we were truly relativist, we would just dismiss these historical reemergences of the spiritual as different forms of articulating the Absolute. And indeed! When somebody asserts that people must be expelled from a country because of religious difference, the whole world lights up in anger and instead asserts the universal rights of the human person.

The problem with this position is the people tend to disregard the notion of religious identity, i.e., difference. If everybody proceeds to accept everything as true, what becomes of the notion of the Absolute that is so espoused by religions? This becomes even more of a problem in religions that seek to fuse other religions and incorporate some of their teaching into one amalgamation of a religion – what of the Absolute?

It is indeed schizophrenic to accept everything as an absolute – to make manifest contradictory and irrational tendencies, the degeneration of every facet of human experience into fantasies of unity and the delusion of uncritical belief. This schizophrenic tendency gains its terrible face in fundamentalism: to interpret everything, disregarding the simple fact of difference, according to my standards, and nothing else.

The simple fact of difference – it could go both ways: on one hand, it could be a call to relativism; on the other hand, it could also be the very thing that fuels fundamentalism. What is needed is to radically question these tendencies via socio-cultural diagnosis, and in turn piece together the Absolute in such a way that is rooted in something truly Other, truly different: not in the case of relativism or fundamentalism, but of exclusive inclusion, of agonism.

Zizek undertakes precisely this, and with calculative precision, surveying all the capitalist tendencies of the unreality of the Real, the retreat of the subject into emptiness, replacing it with the trash of capitalist accumulation, and eventually, the emergence of these spiritualities as a response to the capitalist tendency to create spaces that are already full of trash. There must be an absolute to respond to the alienation – this is the main hinge of the critique.

But are we wont to relegate the absolute as a mere response to the terrible face of capitalism? If the Absolute is merely this, then it is not strictly the absolute. It becomes a mere participant of the cycle of capitalist accumulation.

Going back to Vissarion, how are we to understand this religion? Perhaps, we cannot truly know since we do not have direct experience of the said religion, but we can be content in asserting, with a sense of caution, that perhaps this religion is also a response to the prevailing ideology. It should be noted that The Church of the Last Testament emerged only after the fall of the Soviet Union, because they claimed that the past ideology prevented them from fully expressing their views. If Fukuyama asserted that history ended in the fall of the Wall, he forgot the people within those walls, that there is also a history of the oppressed. Vissarion’s religion is thus a symptom of the capitalist tendency to exclude whatever is not “free,” of whatever does not understand the logic of exchange.

But it only goes so far: it is a response to the tendency of Capitalism to exclude, but as regards the appropriateness of the response, perhaps it might be missing the point. The Absolute is still interpreted to be a response: the disregard for money, the fusion of religions, and whatever is that they believe. If there must be an absoute, it must precede all responses, all experiences. But as for articulating this Absolute, we are still, I’m afraid, searching for a way to speak outside our language.

And until then, until we unlearn the language of Schizophrenia, we will always respond according to the market, according to the prevailing ideology. Perhaps the utopian vision does not lie in unity, but absolute difference, but it is in this that creates the space for infinite understanding. Until then, we are crazy.