Abstract
After introducing Žižek’s conceptual framework of Hegel, Marx and Lacan who shape the general method of his critical analysis as a philosopher of contradiction, the chapter provides an account of Žižek’s engagement with theology, its importance for his political thought and the outcome thereof—a radical universalism grounded in the theology of dialectical materialism. It also offers an admittedly cursory yet functional account of theological engagement with Žižek thus far in order to show the potential but also imperative for what is to follow—a Žižekian critical examination of Bonhoeffer’s demonstration of the sociological potential of theology.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
In this sense Žižek’s reading of Hegel is not dissimilar to that of Gillian Rose, who argues that Hegel’s Phenomenology is not a dominating absolute knowledge, but a gamble. See Rose’s Hegel Contra Sociology (1981, p. 159). Žižek himself acknowledges Rose’s interpretation of Hegel in For They Know Not What They Do (1991a, p. 103).
- 3.
For a good presentation of the Hegelian dialectics of contradiction in Žižek’s thought, see Todd McGowan’s ‘The Necessity of an Absolute Misunderstanding’ (2016, pp. 43–56).
- 4.
Žižek’s presentation of the historic understanding of atonement as crude dualism, whatever one makes of it, is not completely arbitrary, since what he describes here is essentially a recognition of the Christian approach to salvation, which, while complex, lies in two different areas. In the first place, salvation is understood to be grounded in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; in the second, the specific shape of salvation within the Christian tradition is itself formed by Christ—Jesus Christ provides a model or paradigm for the redeemed life.
- 5.
Here too Žižek recognises that the atonement is a very rich concept, and that it is impossible to adequately describe what happened or what happens in the atonement with one clear figure of speech or analogy.
- 6.
Indeed, this is the main thought behind The Fragile Absolute (Žižek 2000).
- 7.
Insofar as it is how people relate to society, Gramsci argues, ideology will always exist, even in a classless society. This is contra Marx, who suggests that in such a society its appearance will be equal to its essence.
- 8.
Žižek’s analysis of subjectivity as an ideological process is the main burden of The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), which was published in the Laclau-Mouffe series of post-Marxist books reworking the Left project in terms of ‘radical and plural democracy’.
- 9.
For a good presentation of Žižek’s development of Althusser’s thought, see Geoff Pfeifer’s The New Materialism (2016).
- 10.
This is aptly illustrated in the documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), directed by Sophie Fiennes, in which Žižek appears in the scenes of various movies, pieces of music and day-to-day activities, exploring and exposing the ideological framework of our society.
- 11.
A prime example of this is certainly his explanation of Lacan’s ‘graph of desire’ (Žižek 1989, pp. 100–124).
- 12.
For example, Stavrakakis expresses concerns about the ‘intricacies of Lacan’s discourse, his baroque and complicated style’ (Stavrakakis 1999, p. 4). Lacan himself said ‘I am not surprised that my discourse can cause a certain margin of misunderstanding’, but this is done ‘with an express intention, absolutely deliberate, that I pursue this discourse in a way that offers you the occasion of not completely understanding it’ (Lacan cited in Samuels 1997, p. 16).
- 13.
These cosmic ambitions were grounded in Freud’s ambition to give a psychoanalytic interpretation of human culture. It was in the 1950s that Lacan began to reread Freud’s works in relation to contemporary philosophy, linguistics, ethnology, biology and topology.
- 14.
For a clear introduction to Lacan that is broadly in line with Žižek, see The Lacanian Subject (Fink 1995). The bulk of Žižek’s references to Lacan are drawn from his seminars. Foremost among them are Seminar XX on feminine sexuality (Lacan 2000); Seminar VII (Lacan 1997) on ethics, which includes Lacan’s reading of Romans 7; and Seminar XI (Lacan 1998), presenting the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis.
- 15.
Lacan’s notion of the three interacting orders first appears in detail in what can be considered as the founding lengthy manifesto of Lacan’s original thought, the 1953 Écrit: The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (2006), often referred to as the ‘Rome Discourse’. It is important to stress the complexity of Lacan’s thought and therefore what follows is not an attempt to summarise the meaning of his triad, but rather an attempt to provide an elementary outline of Žižek’s employment of Lacan’s Orders in his thought. For an illuminating article about the difficulties associated with summarising exactly the meaning of Lacan’s triad, see Bowie (1979).
- 16.
Lacan also defines psychoanalytic praxis as a ‘concerted human effort […] which places man in a position to treat the Real by the Symbolic’ (Lacan 1998, p. 6).
- 17.
Žižek also uses the example of AIDS (Žižek 1993, p. 44; 2012b, p. 4), which, so he argues, is interpreted by some people as a punishment for homosexuals, or a divine retribution for carrying on a non-Christian way of life. Others see it as part of a plot by the CIA to stem population growth in Africa, while other people consider it the result of humankind’s interference in Nature. All these explanations revolve around the same brute fact of the disease which carries on regardless of the reasons attributed to it.
- 18.
It is only in the Imaginary that two terms can be reconciled in a harmonious synthesis, with the Symbolic functioning as the state where they are defined differentially. That is, where one is something because it is not something else.
- 19.
However, that does not in any way mean that Žižek’s reading of Hegel is Lacan’s reading. The latter read Hegel in a more traditional way. Žižek is aware of this challenge and attempts to show that his own ‘Lacanian’ reading of Hegel is credible by demonstrating compatibility between Lacan’s concepts and the basic structure of Hegel’s thought. He argues that Lacan had a Hegelian style of thought even when he believed himself to be totally in opposition to Hegel (Žižek 1991a, p. 94).
- 20.
This strategy is particularly evident in For They Know Not What They Do (1991a), where Žižek provides an explanation of a concept from Lacan, such as the Real as the inconsistency of the symbolic register, then draws a parallel to Hegel’s writings, such as the dialectical negation of negation, and then links it to Marx’s understanding of ideological structure as void.
- 21.
In some way this is also true of Pound’s brief introduction to Žižek’s engagement with theological thought in Goodchild and Phelps’ Religion and European Philosophy (2017, pp. 479–491—particularly page 482) for the author himself relies upon Sharpe and Boucher (among others).
- 22.
Kotsko (2008, pp. 6–7) is thus correct in his inference that that theology merely comes to play an increased role in Žižek’s later thought.
- 23.
Even though he still speaks of a theological turn in Žižek’s thought or ‘conversion’, Roland Boer offers a valuable account of Žižek’s development as a political thinker and the role of theology in that process.
- 24.
Likewise, Laclau argues that Žižek’s political thought is not advanced and ‘remains fixed in very traditional categories’. In other words, it is underdeveloped and is merely juxtaposing Marx and Lacan (Laclau in Butler et al. 2000, pp. 206, 209).
- 25.
- 26.
I am here following Žižek’s presentation of Badiou’s theory in Chapter 3: ‘The Politics of Truth, or, Alain Badiou as a Reader of St. Paul’ of The Ticklish Subject (1999, pp. 127–170). Badiou’s Pauline application of event is developed from his seminal Being and Event (2006), which is built in reliance upon Heidegger’s Being and Time (1962). For a good discussion of Badiou and Žižek’s radical act, see Pfeifer’s New Materialism (2016).
- 27.
This reading of Paul without the presupposition of any specifically Christian belief or commitment is perhaps pioneered by Jacques Lacan, who, in his seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis in 1959, as the lecture draws to a conclusion, uses Romans 7 and paraphrases it to discuss desire (Lacan 1992, p. 83). Lacan explains his use of Paul and the religious text in the following manner: ‘We analysts […] do not have to believe in these religious truths in any way, given that such belief may extend as far as what is called faith, in order to be interested in what is articulated in its own terms in religious experience – in the terms of the conflict between freedom and grace, for example […]. There is a certain paradox involved in practically excluding from debate and from analysis things, terms and doctrines that have been articulated in the field of faith, on the pretext that they belong to a domain that is reserved for believers’ (Lacan 1992, pp. 170–171).
Similarly, Badiou writes in his preface to St Paul: ‘I care nothing for the Good News he declares, or the cult dedicated to him. But he is a subjective figure of primary importance’. Like Lacan, he emphasises that it is possible and indeed legitimate to read Paul: ‘we may draw upon [him] freely, without devotion or repulsion’ (Badiou 2003, p. 1). For Badiou, Paul is taken to be exemplary of a kind of commitment that he believes to be necessary for contemporary politics.
- 28.
Žižek on the other hand contrasts being and truth-event as between law and love. The order of being is the domain of law, whereas the truth-event and fidelity to it belongs to the way of love—what he calls ‘the properly Christian way of Love [agape]’ (Žižek 1999, p. 47). This construction seems theologically odd, since in Pauline theology the contrast is between law and grace, and this is also emphasised by Badiou. See Badiou (2003, pp. 63, 66–67, 74–85). This is picked up by Boer, who argues that Žižek realised his mistake and moved onto grace in On Belief (Boer 2009, pp. 337, 349–351). However, Žižek seems to be highlighting the importance of fidelity to the truth-event here. He does say later that the life in ‘love is accessible to all of us through grace’ (Žižek 1999, p. 147).
- 29.
Interestingly, while Badiou does not require a historical Jesus, he does on the other hand desire a historical Paul. See ‘Who is Paul?’ in Badiou (2003, pp. 16–30).
- 30.
In Being and Event, Badiou describes the church precisely as the post-evental ‘operator of faithful connection to the Christ-event’ (Badiou 2006, p. 392).
- 31.
Reading the crucifixion as key is also evident in Taubes’ Die politische Theologie des Paulus, where he insists that it is precisely the message concerning the crucified Messiah which subverts Imperial authority. Indeed, he regards Romans as a declaration of war on the Roman Empire (Taubes 1993, p. 16).
- 32.
For an interesting theological examination of Žižek’s use of Paul, see O. J. Løland (2018) who discerns Žižek’s ‘introspective’ Paul (pp. 113–148) and then considers its application in Žižek’s political thought. Løland challenges it and advocates Nancy Fraser’s political theory (pp. 149–196). What is most interesting is Løland’s endeavour to show Žižek’s presuppositions in his reading of 1 Corinthians (see “Rewriting the Apostle Against Wisdom in 1 Corinthians”, pp. 87–112). However, this hermeneutical piece misses the point of Žižek’s interpretative endeavour or anti-hermeneutic.
- 33.
See also Žižek (2018, pp. 36–43).
- 34.
- 35.
Their reading of Romans 7 here essentially follows Lacan’s reading of the Law as Symbolic in ‘On the Moral Law’ (Lacan 1997, p. 83).
- 36.
Hegel’s phrase ‘night of the world’ is employed by Žižek frequently (1992, pp. 50–52; 1994, p. 145; 1996, p. 78; 1997, pp. 8–10; 2006, p. 44). It is used to express the radical negativity of the subject, the overwhelming excess at the moment of doubt, which is the origin of the Cartesian subject. In ‘PART 1: Spirit according to its Concept’ of the Jena lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit, Hegel writes that ‘the human being is this night, this empty nothing, which contains everything in its simplicity – an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him – or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here – pure self […]. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye – into a night that becomes awful’ (Hegel 1983).
- 37.
See also p. 159.
- 38.
However, while Žižek clearly connects Paul’s universalist legacy to Christianity, Badiou places it in the transhistorical revolutionary/communist context. Thus, in Del’ideology, Badiou and his co-author François Balmès regard Paul as a ‘communist invariant’, together with Thomas Müntzer and the German peasant revolt (Badiou and Balmès 1976, pp. 60–75).
- 39.
The term is here by Žižek perceived in a broader sense, applied beyond its usual sexual context primarily to political situations—thus for instance describing Stalinism and Nazism as utterly perverse political ideologies (e.g. 1993, p. 195; 1997, p. 69; 2001a, p. 139; 2007, p. 227). It marks a conservative ‘solution’ to the problem of the decline of the big Other, which reveals a belief in its existence. In that sense, ‘perversion is not subversion’ (1999, p. 247).
- 40.
See also Chapter 1: ‘On the One’ of Žižek (1991a, pp. 7–60).
- 41.
As an example, Žižek goes on to mention the imposition of ‘traditional values’ by the Christian fundamentalists in the United States. While on the surface this imposition represents an attempt to suppress destructive pleasures, the Christian fundamentalist position is at the same time sustained by an ‘ambiguous attitude of horror/envy with regard to the unspeakable pleasures in which sinners engage’ (Žižek 2003, p. 68).
- 42.
For example, upholding democratic values through torture (Žižek 2003, p. 37).
- 43.
While otherwise following Chesterton, Žižek here critiques him for his ‘doctrine of conditional joy’—joy that depends on what is forbidden (Chesterton 1996, p. 40). By insisting that there is a constitutive exception (you may have joy, if you…), Žižek argues, Chesterton remains within perversion.
- 44.
This draws on Žižek’s previous discussions of the philosopher Malebranche as proposing that God incited Adam and Eve to sin in order to be able to redeem them (Žižek 1999, pp. 116–119 at p. 118).
- 45.
See also Žižek’s ‘A Meditation on Michelangelo’s Christ on the Cross’ in Davis et al. (2010a, pp. 176–179).
- 46.
Žižek compares the three friends and their insistence on inscription of meaning to the three doctors in Freud’s account of a dream in which he examines his patient Irma’s throat (Žižek 2009a, p. 53).
- 47.
Žižek simply ignores Job’s response to God in 42:1–6, where Job admits that he was wrong and God was right. No doubt, he could argue that Job’s reply is in a sense part of Job’s subsequent decision to keep the status quo. Still, he is quick to notice verses 7–9 regarding Job’s friends. Chesterton certainly doesn’t understand God as silent, but as rebuking not only Job’s comforters, but also Job—the accuser: ‘God rebukes alike the man who accused and the men who defended Him’. See Chesterton, The Book of Job, http://www.chesterton.org/introduction-to-job/.
- 48.
Judaism is thus in a dialectical relationship to Christianity: Without Judaism first identifying and remaining faithful to the fantasmatic kernel, Christianity would not have been able to identify with it and show it to be empty. Without the Jewish community constituted as an ethnic remainder, Paul would not have been able to claim that the whole of humanity is a remainder.
- 49.
In his quotation of Christ’s cry of dereliction in Matthew 27:45–46, Žižek replaces ‘eloi – God’ with ‘Father’, thus bringing it into a smoother compatibility with Lacan and Freud’s role of the father in psychoanalysis. Pound contends that in this way Žižek conflates two distinct events: Christ’s forsakenness by ‘God’ in Matthew and his committal to the ‘Father’ in Luke 23:46. The result is of course that abandonment has the last word. See Pound (2008, pp. 48–49). Thus Žižek’s ‘error’ is indeed intentional, like his selectivity.
- 50.
Žižek probably derives this understanding of kenosis from Chesterton. The concept appears also in Gianni Vattimo’s integration of the concept of the death of God in ‘the God who is Dead’ (Vattimo 2002, pp. 11–24).
- 51.
The examples of Tertullian and Athanasius are here mentioned only to illustrate the extent or importance which a theoretical understanding of the Cross in Christianity has occupied.
- 52.
For a good presentation of this, see Pfeifer’s ‘Žižek and the Materialism of the Immaterial, or Why Hegel Is Not an Idealist’ (2016, pp. 93–113).
- 53.
See his recent ‘Marx Reads Object-Oriented Ontology’ (Žižek 2018, pp. 23–31), where quantum physics provides an insight into immateriality of materialism. See also Žižek (1996, p. 230), where Žižek uses quantum physics to provide a scientific grounding for the idea that the realm of deterministic physical law is ‘non-all’. Thus human subjectivity emerges out of the order of determinism in a dialectic manner.
- 54.
A little earlier Žižek actually invokes the term ‘miracle’, quoting Lenin’s contention that ‘in some respects, a revolution is a miracle’ (Žižek 2001a, p. 84).
- 55.
Žižek actually compares Lenin as a revolutionary figure to Paul and Christ to Marx, although he is not the first to do so—Badiou does so as well. See Badiou (2003, p. 2), cf. Žižek (2000, p. 2). Of course, Žižek’s Lenin is the Lenin of the revolutionary moment from April to October 1917 (not the earlier or later one). He is presented as the purest historical example of an evental subject who has had the courage to act without the sanction of the big Other. Boucher and Sharpe critique Žižek that this image of Lenin is not actual, complete or true. See ‘Repeating Lenin, an Infantile Disorder?’ in Sharpe and Boucher (2010, pp. 225–228). Of course Žižek is well aware that there are more controversial aspects to Lenin, but he refuses to reduce the potentiality of Lenin to that contentious figure. This is also his reply to accusations of supersessionism on account of his re-appropriation of Hegel’s problematic model of religion (see Hart 2002, pp. 553–557). Žižek is more than aware of Hegelian narrative as ideological legitimization of Western colonialism, but argues that it is wrong to stop there and overlook Hegel’s philosophy as providing the ‘ultimate subversive intellectual tools that allow us to discern and question the very Eurocentric colonialist bias’ (ibid., p. 580). By doing so, Hart reduces Hegel to a mere racist ideologue of capitalist colonialism.
- 56.
Thus for example the Arab Spring, a surge of collective action throughout North Africa and the Middle East, was unpredictable and indeed unpredicted.
- 57.
Following this, see Vladimir Safatle’s attempt in his ‘Politics of Negativity in Slavoj Žižek’ (2016, pp. 69–84) to think institutions of ‘negativity’ that would ‘de-identificate subjects’.
- 58.
Žižek therefore sees Christ as an example of the death drive—bringing into focus the desire for death in his relentless pursuit of Calvary. It is this desire for death that upsets the socio-symbolic (Žižek 2001a, pp. 107–110).
- 59.
For how this non-literal resurrection functions, see ‘Paul and the Truth Event’ (Žižek in Davis et al. 2010b, pp. 87–92).
- 60.
The move from religion to politics by the Young Hegelians that was to follow, and that was in a way more obviously critical of religion, was thus traced out already by Hegel. Such is the case of Das Leben Jesu (1864), in which David Strauss examined the representation of Jesus’s life in terms of an elaborate understanding of myth, in which the incarnation of the Logos was not solely limited to Jesus, but was through him distributed among the multiplicity of individuals.
- 61.
In an interview, ‘Žižek and Dupuy: Religion, Secularism, and Political Belongingʼ, given together with Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Žižek, after delivering an account of his understating of the resurrection, explains or rather defends it by saying: ʻMaybe my reading of the resurrection is too simplistic, but it is my reading!’ (Žižek and Dupuy 2014, 1t 44:20).
- 62.
Žižek is here using Eagleton’s exposition of the sacrament of the Eucharist (Eagleton 2008, p. 272).
- 63.
Žižek is diverging from trend here by focusing on Christ, for it is usually Paul’s emphasis on love, which becomes especially important for materialist readings. Beginning perhaps with Jacob Taubes’ (1993, pp. 52–53) warning that Paul’s love is not to be understood as in any way sentimental, but as ingredient to a rather clear-eyed political project. With reference to Romans 13:8–10, Taubes supposes that it is Paul rather than Jesus who is the decisive inventor of a love ethic and notes that where Jesus is said to have reduced the commandments to two—love of God and of neighbour—Paul dispenses with the first and emphasises only the latter. Of course, Žižek does uphold Paul to Christ as a Lenin to Marx, but it is important to note the engagement of Žižek with Christ and his teachings as a theological figure (just as Paul), rather than a militant figure.
- 64.
For an interesting read, see Tupinamba’s ‘Concrete Universality’ (2019, pp. 104–116), where the author reads Žižek’s Holy Spirit community against Jean-Claude Milner’s ‘paradoxical community’.
- 65.
Of course, Žižek puts a political spin on this verse by explaining that it is about respect and obedience towards superiors, while the original context is not so much about superiors but about familial ties. Nevertheless, the basic logic of argumentation can stand. This is another example of Žižek’s symptomatic attitude, where the text and theology do not necessarily match, as we have seen in his exegesis of Job and of Christ’s last words.
- 66.
This is my own translation of the German: ‘Auf den ersten Blick sagt der Verstand, daβ dies Wahnsinn ist. Der Verstand fragt: Was springt für mich dabei heraus? Die Antwort lautet: nichts’.
- 67.
According to Žižek, this is also how one is to read the imperative to ‘turn the other cheek’, found in Matthew 5:38–40, as a subversive gesture which destabilises, rather than an act of obedience of either doing nothing or striking back. Again, the latter is really a constitutive exception.
- 68.
A horrific example of this is illustrated in the brutal act of execution of the Jordanian pilot by ISIS in early February 2015. Upon capturing the pilot, ISIS supporters launched a Twitter campaign (global neoliberalism?) calling for brutal execution suggestions, prompting numerous ideas, including the actual execution. Thus they used a ‘democratic’ method of deciding the pilot’s fate, which, however, with its determined outcome, was far from democratic, but merely an act of formal, rather than actual freedom.
- 69.
I.e. the only thing we have in common is the missing other.
- 70.
The Arab Spring protests were not merely negative in that they represented a reaction to the corruption and abuse by their government, but included an attempt towards or experiment in communality.
- 71.
The student and academic protesters were then proclaimed as the enemies of the movement by the religious fundamentalists, whose dream was religiously fundamental and intolerant of any other vision.
- 72.
- 73.
Milbank here insists on his consideration of the Lutheran theologian Søren Kierkegaard as a Catholic. He argues that Kierkegaard’s linking of faith with reason restored a basically Catholic perspective and further mentions Kierkegaard’s Catholic critique of Luther for exalting faith at the expense of works.
- 74.
An example of this is Žižek’s re-appropriation of the words of Chesterton’s detective Father Brown: ‘he was made man’ (Chesterton 2006, pp. 394–395). Chesterton used these words to portray how Western culture’s retreat into spiritualism and its willingness to believe in anything must be read as an inability to sustain the traumatic reality of the incarnated God. For Žižek, however, these words mean, along the lines of Hegel, that the external or transcendent God is now a contingent fact of human freedom itself. See Delpech-Ramey (2010, pp. 122–123). However, this criticism of Žižek, as right as it may be, can also be made of Milbank, who compares Kierkegaard to Eckhart and Chesteron. See Harris (2011, pp. 35–41 at p. 38).
- 75.
That is, ‘strange’ in the sense that Žižek’s resulting interpretation of Christianity is something completely alien to the traditional conception. Indeed, Žižek’s materialistic interpretation of theology appears odd to the classical theological reader, insofar as it lacks a serious consideration of the wider traditional or current biblical scholarship, or engagement with the multifaceted theological scholarship. For example, in Žižek’s presentation of the weakness of the legalistic reading of the atonement (2003, pp. 102–103), he simply ignores the response to that in the form of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo (1898) in the eleventh century. He also rarely refers to any contemporary New Testament scholars or contemporary theologians in general. There are few exceptions, such as when in his description of God as perverted he refers to the English edition of Rudolf Bultmann’s New Testament Theology (Žižek 2003, p. 118), or when using John Howard Yoder’s rejection of the ‘Constantinian shift’ as an illustration of a non-reconciled political standpoint (Žižek 2010c, pp. 129–130).
- 76.
- 77.
Particularly the chapter by its editors ‘The Slovenian and the Cross’, pp. 1–45.
- 78.
Such as Brian Becker’s ‘From psychoanalysis to metamorphosis’, pp. 67–85, Chase Padusniak’s ‘No wonder, then, that love itself disappears’, pp. 86–103, and Jack Louis Pappas’ ‘Rethinking universality: Badiou and Žižek on Pauline theology’, pp. 154–166. The exceptions are Grimshaw, Ventis and Hamza. Grimshaw argues that Žižek should have considered the potential of radical (Death-of-God) theology (‘Žižek and the Dwarf: a short-circuit radical theology’, pp. 199–2180). Ventis’ challenge from a liberal perspective argues that Žižek’s (and indeed wider Christianity’s and Marxist) truth-claims are deeply ideological and as such vice, rather than virtue (‘Pacifist pluralism versus militant truth: Christianity at the service of revolution in the work of Slavoj Žižek’, pp. 117–153).
- 79.
See also Frick’s thoughts on the confrontational method of critical theology in (2017, pp. 217–219).
- 80.
However, Milbank does not proceed any further from critiquing Žižek’s nihilism and the Hegelian metanarrative. This has already been observed about the debate in Theology and the Political (Kotsko 2009, p. 117).
- 81.
Interestingly, this is also what Gustavo Gutierrez says in his Theology of Liberation (which, it can be said, is a manifesto of Liberation Theology in some ways), in which he praises Augustine’s City of God as the classic correct method of theological approach, because the Word of God is being brought to bear on the present historical situation (Gutierrez 1974, p. 5).
- 82.
Yet another example expressing the indispensable contribution of theology’s socio-political import is Løland’s work that wishes to demonstrate how Žižek’s philosophy, with all its cultural and political analyses, serves theology to broaden its view of what is existentially at stake in our time’ (Løland 2018, p 11).
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Koltaj, B. (2019). Žižek’s Political Theology. In: Žižek Reading Bonhoeffer. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26094-1_2
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