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The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity

by Slavoj Zizek
MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2003
190 pp. Paper, $16.95
ISBN: 0-262-74025-7.

Reviewed by Rick Mitchell, Associate Professor
Department of English, California State University-Northridge
18111 Nordhoff Street, Northridge, CA 91330-8248, USA


rick.mitchell@csun.edu

Slavoj Zizek's The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity borrows part of its title from the first of Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," the one in which an automaton, or puppet (historical materialism), "wins all the time" in chess (or historiography) with the crucial assistance of a hidden dwarf (theology). According to Zizek, we must now "reverse" Benjamin's thesis so that theology always wins by enlisting "the service of historical materialism, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight" (3). Theology, particularly Christianity, has moved center stage, and the cultural theorist must read it dialectically–through the material conditions of both past and present–while harnessing the revolutionary, "perverse core" of Christianity which will lead, paradoxically, to Christianity's end. As his wide-ranging argument zigzags back and forth from the Bible, to critical theories, to today's consumerist, globalized societies, Zizek continually returns to Christianity's founding gestures and principles as seen through the writings of St. Paul, which he implies are increasingly relevant in an always-catastrophic world whose current manifestations include the War on Terror, pleasures without substance, and the "weird," fetishistic trend of victims (and/or their heirs) seeking monetary reparations for such post-Enlightenment catastrophes as American slavery, the Holocaust, or a steady diet of unhealthy meals from McDonalds.

Central to Zizek's thesis is that the Christianity so prevalent in everyday machinations of modernity maintains a "hidden perverse core" (15) that is particularly evident within two founding "Events": Adam and Eve's Fall and Christ's sacrifice. Zizek asks, for example, "if it is prohibited to eat from the Tree of Knowledge in Paradise, why did God put it there in the first place" if not as "a part of His perverse strategy first to seduce Adam and Eve into the Fall, in order to save them?" (15). Similarly, God creates Judas, "the ultimate hero of the New Testament, the one ready to lose his soul and accept eternal damnation so that the divine plan could be accomplished" (16). Although Zizek implies that God is a perverse opportunist who introduces the world to misery so that He can later save the world, God's power is by no means absolute. While suffering on the cross, for example, Christ calls out, "Father, why hast thou forsaken me?", thereby committing "what is, for a Christian, the ultimate sin: he wavers in his Faith" (15), suggesting that: 1) God is not divine, for He (in the form of his son) doesn't understand why He had been hung up to die in the desert; or 2) (and more importantly) that God is unable to help his son because God is impotent, and, ultimately, absent, a reading which seems to be in agreement with "Lacan's thesis that the big Other no longer exists" (53).

Zizek's often devastating critique of conventional Christianity and the contemporary world, neither of which we can view in isolation, hinges upon Pauline Christianity's radicalness which, when followed to its logical conclusion, results in Christianity's death (and subsequent radical rebirth as something else). And Zizek's emphasis on Christianity's "perverse core" enables him to embrace "Christianity as the religion of atheism . . .[which] attacks the religious hardcore that survives even in humanism, even up to Stalinism [and the War on Terror], with its belief in History as the 'big Other' that decides the 'objective meaning' of our deeds" (171). Following Judas' example, the world's next "hero" of Christianity will participate in a major (self) sacrifice, "the ultimate heroic gesture that awaits Christianity: In order to save its treasure [the obscene fact that there is no big Other], it has to sacrifice itself–like Christ, who had to die so that Christianity could emerge" (171). Since the "big Other" remains so central to oppression and alienation within a variety of (interrelated) cultural forms——including religion, democracy, totalitarianism, the family, and everyday life——awareness that the (absent) "big Other" no longer exists, the central objective of Lacanian psychoanalysis, must become, according to Zizek, the major goal of a radical theological/materialist social praxis that can renew the world not through a messianic reintroduction of the big "big Other," but through its wholesale liquidation.

The Puppet and the Dwarf, frequently punctuated with jokes that exemplify abstract concepts, provides the reader with a witty, informative trip through Paul's subversive Christianity, related philosophies and critical theories, popular culture, and pressing problems of the early twenty-first century. This volume, both erudite and accessible, will be a welcome addition to research and large public libraries, and it should prove valuable to students of cultural studies, philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and theological excess.

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