The Brutal Obscenity of Slovej Zizek…and Corrie Ten Boom

There is perhaps no public intellectual today more vigorous, more fascinating, more ambitious, more mystifying and simultaneously more illuminating than Slovej Zizek. In a recent lecture at the New York Public Library entitled "God without the Sacred" Zizek presents his case for a materialistic Christianity.

In accordance with the lecture's subtitle, "The Book of Job, the First Critique of Ideology," Zizek suggests that the ancient book's radical thesis is that suffering in the world is, finally, fundamentally meaninglessness.  He argues this, purportedly, with the help of G.K. Chesterton. In actuality, however, he has turned the great Catholic author on his head; for the radical skepticism played out in God’s cross examination of Job which Zizek references functions, according to Chesteron, to undermine the very skepticism Zizek’s here positing. Is Zizek misreading Chesterton?  Deliberately misrepresenting him? Or does Zizek interpret Chesterton's comments as something of a Freudian slip, and - like a good psychoanalysist - pushes these toward their (psycho)logical conclusion?

Whatever the case, there is one particular question Zizek’s lecture raises for us that I believe deserves serious reflection.  Namely:

Which obscenity is to be preferred, Zizek’s obscene assertion that suffering is without meaning, Or, the obscene orthodox assertion that suffering is divinely orchestrated, and hence morally meaningful - even if that meaning is to us inaccessible?

Zizek fiercely rejects the supposition of the latter view regarding “the God who sees the entire picture in what appears to us as a stain…,” and asserts as patent that “if there is a whole totality which can teleologically justify and thus redeem an event like the holocaust…then we are finished.”

Over and against this skepticism is the remarkable faith of the Dutch holocaust survivor, Corrie Ten Boom. She reasons, in direct contradiction to Zizek's claim, that the “stains” of the world are in truth all part of a divine patchwork.  And though incomprehensible to us ‘this side of heaven,’ the unperceived pattern is real and imbues our sufferings with a transcendent significance.

In recounting the horrors of the death camps, Corrie would often hold up a purple cloth with a crown embroidered on it. She would first show the tangled, confused underside of the cloth.  “What is it,” she would ask. We cannot make sense of it.

Nevertheless, she insisted, there is a pattern. She would then turn the tapestry around, showing a bejeweled, golden crown. This is the pattern the King is weaving for His children.

Given these two, diametrically opposed understandings of suffering, it is perhaps remarkable that Zizek and Ten Boom both look to the same event as decisive in determining what our response to "the problem of suffering" ought to be: the cross of Christ. 

In our next post we will explore the meaning of Jesus' death as understood by Slavoj Zizek and Corrie Ten Boom, respectively...