Caputo on Milbank and Zizek

"Church and Postmodern Culture" author John Caputo has provided an extensive review of The Monstrosity of Christ for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.  The long, generous review essay ultimately (and not surprisingly) ends with questions like the following:

As I do not think that matter is ultimately the matter at issue for Milbank, or that Christ is the issue for Žižek, I am also overwhelmed by a compelling sense of how uncompelling is either view. What exactly is the compelling need we are under to agree with either one of these positions or to choose between them? Why do we have to love either one of these monsters? Why do we need the notion that at the metaphysical base of things there lies either a primordial peace or a primordial violence -- or a primordial anything, at least one that we could ever get our hands on? Why do the multiple repetitions of which our lives are woven need to be cast either as a downbeat and futile search that will be always frustrated or as underwritten by an uplifting metaphysics of participation? Why inscribe either absolute contradiction or absolute peace at the heart of things instead of ambience and ambiguity? Why chaos instead of the unsteady chaosmotic process of unprogrammed becoming? Why not see life as a joyful but risky business that may turn out well or badly, a repetition forwards in which I produce what I am repeating, in which I invent what I am discovering, but in which I am divested of any assurances about what lies up ahead -- let alone deep down at the metaphysical base of things? Žižek's notion of the contingency of necessity is close to this insight, but he insists on treating the Deep Trauma like some Metaphysical Meteor that cratered downtown Ljubljana. Is this not just the search for a transcendental signifier all over again? Why do we have to believe that something deep is out there but alas it is lost and we are hopelessly searching for it? That is repetition as reproduction. Why not rather say that by searching for it, it is there, produced by the repetition? The repetition is generative, engendering, positing something not merely as a dream but by the dream, the active dreaming of the dream, the dreaming up, which gathers momentum as we dream, repeat, desire, pray and weep, over the coming of something whose coming we are engendering, or is being engendered, as the very structure of desire. Dreaming is the pharmakon, a risky supplement, a joy that flows through our veins that is liable to poison us if we are not careful. Nothing is lost from which we have been traumatically cut off. This is just desire desiring, what desire does, how it works, its happy work, and if desire is a fault, it is a happy fault.

Why not adopt the post-metaphysical idea that gives up searching for all such primordial underlying somethings or other?

I'm not convinced that metaphysics and Jesus are as antithetical as Caputo goes on to suggest, nor am I sure that theology is as marginal and distrusted as he claims in his conclusion.  (Impressions here no doubt depend on the circles in which one runs; but I think it would be hard to be a regular reader of the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, or even the New York Times and suggest that theology is some quaint backwater pursuit.  I'd think if we sampled those pages 30 years ago, that claim would have been more true.)  But in any case, despite quibbles, Caputo's review repays a read. 

And we could wish that more scholars of Caputo's stature would take the time to review the work of their peers.  As I've noted elsewhere, I think book reviews are a crucial aspect of scholarly discourse and we abandon such labor at our parallel.  Unfortunately, the culture of scholarly reviewing seems to leave this important work to graduate students and emerging scholars, for whom a published review is a kind of early, "mini-publication" for a CV.  As scholars become established, they don't "have" to do such work any more.  But a different sort of "ought" suggests they should.  I'm grateful for Jack taking the time to do such work.  May his tribe increase.

Read the rest of Caputo's review at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Comments

[John]

Great review. It really takes the mickey out of these two pompous windbags and their towers of babel.

[Michael]

The essay was surprisingly long and generous, as you say. An excellent introduction to the book, which unfortunately must be on next year's reading list.

I found this interesting: "I readily agree that something important is contracted in the name of Jesus, that this name harbors a marvelous mysterious event, a monstrous monstration, a perplexing paradoxical poetics. All this I locate in the reversals that mark the Kingdom of God, where the first are last, the outsiders are in and the insiders are out. But I do not see that this marvel must amount to either Žižek's void or Milbank's metaphysics of participation. Rather the marvel is the promise/risk of mercy and love, of compassion and forgiveness, and that is all we know on earth and all we need to know. Does anyone really think the Sermon on the Mount has anything to do with any of this bombastic metaphysical tilting and jousting?"

Caputo here sounds almost like the caricatures of Mennonites I hear and read from non-Mennonites. That's both a good and unfortunate thing. But given his actual view of Christian orthodoxy, doesn't that make his critique of Zizek a bit ironic? "He discusses Christian doctrines like the Trinity, the Incarnation and the Crucifixion the way an analyst talks with a patient who thinks there is a snake under his bed, trying patiently to heal the patient by going along with the patient's illusions until the patient is led to see the illusion."

[Barry R]

Interesting, generous review from Caputo, even if it seemed to me to say nothing especially new (anyone familiar with C's work could have predicted this would be his evaluation of both M and Z). But it was useful of him to do it, and thanks for posting it.

John, it would seem M and Z are not the only pompous windbags. Indeed, perhaps your own brand of pompous windbaggedness is the more dangerous...

[John]

Nice one Barry!

[Mike L.]

Zizek is a much needed prophetic voice for Christianity. I'm puzzled by Caputo's statement...

"Why not adopt the post-metaphysical idea that gives up searching for all such primordial underlying somethings or other?"

Isn't this basically what Zizek suggests in his brand of atheistic Christianity? I call it Post-belief Christianity, and I tend to like it.

[Jeremy]

While it might be true that Caputo and Zizek have some agreement when it comes to Christianity (e.g. interpretation of the cross as Zizek makes notes of in Monstrosity of Christ), Caputo has continually attacked radical death-of-God theology throughout his career as being decidedly atheistic. Also, one of Zizek's primary opponents in his political project is deconstruction and its adherents who have given up on metaphysics. Zizek (along with Badiou) does not want to do away with metaphysics. I also believe that Zizek would not be in favor of something like 'post-belief' Christianity that sounds way more along the lines of Spong/Cupitt (i.e. liberal theology) than the type of analysis Zizek pursues. Somewhere, he argues that this understanding that we live in an age of cynicism where nobody believes anything anymore is in fact a myth that he argues against.

[Arty Morty]

My yeast is rising...