Speculative Grace: On Caputo on Zizek/Milbank

In my previous post on "The Frustration of Desire," I argued that God's grace should not be understood as that miraculous supplement which solves the problem of desire by satisfying it.

I think that this same (mis)understanding of grace plays a crucial part in John Caputo's recent (and incisive!) review of Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank's exchange in The Monstrosity of Christ. (Thanks to Jaime and Jack for bringing the review to my attention).

In reviewing Caputo's review, I'll argue three basic points: 

(1) Caputo is clear that Milbank (mis)understands grace as that which solves the problem of desire by satisfying it. 

(2) Caputo's account of Zizek's take on grace misreads, in part, Zizek's position as basically remaining (though negatively) within the same logic of "grace as satisfaction."

(3) Nonetheless, the basic problem with the positions staked out by Zizek and Milbank is that their ontologies are simply too thin. In other words, their account of what is given (and, in particular, the grace of what is actually given) is too thin.

I. Milbank & Satisfaction

The first point is the simplest. If disagreement arises, it is likely to focus not on my (and, I think, Caputo's) judgment that Milbank understands God as a supernatural supplement that saves the material world from it's own poverty, but with my judgment that such an understanding of grace is undesirable.

As Caputo puts it (note: all the following citations are from Caputo's review):

In the place of Hegel’s broken promise, Milbank would put an ontology of primordial peace and reconciliation, "the (unreachable and untraceable) prelapsarian golden age," made possible only by means of a metaphysics of analogy.

Here, the given world is understood as a lapsed, impoverished world. The key to saving this world, to restoring it to its satisfying prelapsarian unity, is to supplement that poverty with the grace of God, because "the material world in itself, apart from God, is nothing at all." The world, in order to avoid being worthless, must be seen "as a created share and reflection of the goodness and glory of God."

In short, if we find this lapsed world un-satisfactory (and surely we do!), then the only solution (save being resigned to nihilistic dissatisfaction) is for God to offer himself as the world's own satisfaction.

According to Caputo:

For Zizek, Milbank’s ontology of peace is so much fantasy – does Milbank think that there really was a prelapsarian age? – an unchecked exercise in what Lacan calls the imaginary, or of Nietzsche’s observation that the power of an idea to comfort us is no guarantee of its truth.

Zizek's response isn't far from Caputo's own assessment of Milbank's position, Caputo's primary charge being that Milbank's metaphysics is conveniently constructed in such a way as to "insure that matter does not have the last word, that there is room in matter to triumph over death, to enter a domain where the bite of space and time and corruptible flesh have been vanquished." 

However, to take the ambiguous "bite" out of this world - out of space, time, matter, and finitude - is to gloss over the bite of resistance that marks this given world as the solid, real, and complex grace that it actually is. Indeed, as I've argued before, we might more properly understand grace itself as the bite of this world's resistance. (And, if there is a world to come, we might rather pray that it, like this one, continues to have bite!)

But for Milbank, having cast this lapsed world as unable to satisfy  - and, moreover, having cast his lot with the judgment that it ought to satisfy - there is nothing left to do but read both God and his gospel as the metaphysical keys to just such a kingdom of satisfaction and completion.

II. Zizek & Satisfaction?

   

This second point is more difficult. In the main, Caputo's reading of Zizek is comprehensive and insightful. Nonetheless, it wavers on a detail that seems of crucial importance to me.

Caputo notes that, unlike Milbank, Zizek does not offer the promise of any divine supplement come to save us from our dissatisfaction with the world. Rather, as in psychoanalysis,

the treatment is over when the patient realizes there is no ‘Big Other’ (God or Man, Nation or Party, Father or Big Brother, Lacan’s symbolic order or what Derrida called the ‘transcendental signifier’).

Caputo then points out that in Zizek's version of the Hegelian dialectic

the negation of the negation leaves us with a deeper negation, not with an affirmation. It is not that the spirit is first whole, then wounded, then healed; rather such healing as is available to it comes by getting rid of the idea of being whole to begin with. The antithesis is already the synthesis.

This assessment hits, I think, the mark. Zizek doesn't aim to show that (a la Milbank) we live in a lapsed world that was once whole. Rather, he aims to unveil as fantasy the idea that the world ever was or ever could be a satisfying whole. 

In other words, Zizek aims to show that the world never was and never could be without bite.

However, I disagree in part with Caputo's later account of the effects of this unveiling. For instance, Caputo later describes Zizek's position as an unveiling of

the impossibility of a deep and fulfilling Jouissance and its replacement by the endless and futile search for precisely what we cannot have.

I agree with the first part of this statement: Zizek shows the impossibility of solving the problem of desire through the satisfaction of that desire. 

But I think that Zizek, and the psychoanalytic tradition he is drawing upon, offer a slightly different solution than one that, as a result, condemns us to an "endless and futile search for precisely what we cannot have." In fact, in my view, the mainspring of Lacan's philosophical (and even theological) contribution depends on the fact that therapy does not simply aim to replace the debunked Big Other with a hopeless search for what we now realize we cannot have.

What does Lacan propose? 

Note Caputo's characterization of Zizek's position in the following passage:

It is like, almost exactly like, I would say, a patient who resolves to sustain a belief in the narrative the psychoanalyst is constructing, regardless of whether it is true, because believing the analyst is the only way out of this hole.

Granted that I have never myself participated in analysis, I believe this description misses the essential "twist" that Lacanian analysis means to therapeutically deploy. 

First, in Lacanian analysis (unlike in many more traditional forms of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy) the analyst doesn't speak, doesn't actively construct an interpretation of the analysand's speech for the analysand. In fact, the role of the analyst is to relentlessly relate to the analysand in such a way as to perpetually throw the analysand back upon their own responsibility both to speak their desire and to interpret the meaning of their own speech.

To what end? The aim is not to fashion some workable supplement or substitute fiction as a way of compensating for the analysand's loss of the Big Other. Rather, the goal is to relate the analysand to their own desire as something other than an object to be satisfied and dispensed with, as something whose "bite" ought to be valued and received as such and in its own right as the gift that it is. 

This, for me, is the key point. 

I don't think that Zizek's project (unlike Milbank's) remains simply locked into the logic of satisfaction. That is, I don't believe that the difference between Milbank and Zizek is the difference between the hope of satisfying our desires via a divine supplement and a hopeless (eyes-closed-again-now-and-humming-very-loud) attempt to satisfy our impossible desires anyhow. On the contrary, I think that Zizek's position marks a decisive (though inadequate) advance over Milbank's position insofar as psychoanalysis breaks with the logic of satisfaction and proposes that we receive the work (and bite!) of desire as itself the gift we must receive and be faithful to.

III. Thin, Too Thin

Caputo, however, is right that Zizek's position nonetheless leaves something to be desired. And he's right to argue that Zizek and Milbank are inadequate in precisely parallel ways. Having more clearly separated out a decisive difference between Zizek and Milbank, I propose that we might summarize their mutual weakness in the same way: their ontologies are simply too, too thin.

For both Zizek and Milbank, the world seems a relatively barren, impoverished place. In both, the world seems to be too poor a thing to receive as grace itself. Why? Because both misidentify the location of the Real and, as a result, leave aside so much of what has actually, already been given.

We might frame their shared problem in terms of what Quentin Meillassoux calls "correlationism." Both Milbank and Zizek view ontology as essentially dependent on a "correlation" of the whole of what is given with just one particular aspect of what is given. 

(One ought to hear in the term "correlation" all of the phenomenological resonances that the world entails; in many ways, because it depends entirely on the correlation of subject/object, phenomenology may be the clearest - though certainly not the only - example of what Meillassoux has in mind with the term.)

For Milbank, the whole of the "material" world is essentially dependent on its correlation with the mind and will God. Matter is "nothing" if it is not ontologically correlated with God. The rest of what is given has no standing of its own. All must pass through the reducing valve of the world's correlation with God. Whatever doesn't fit through is left aside and whatever does fit through is shown as too poor a thing to be given as itself, by itself, or for itself. Someone else, something else, must authorize it's grace. Something additional must rubber-stamp it's givenness.

(And it would be entirely appropriate here to bring into play the whole machinery of Jean-Luc Marion's own massive, persuasive, and deeply Christian critique of every phenomenological choke-point of correlativity.)

For Milbank, Caputo explains,

to embrace materialism materialistically is to embrace matter in itself, and this is nothing but nihilism. For the material world in itself, apart from God, is nothing at all.

Uncorrelated, the world is a poor, thin gruel that cannot possibly sustain life and love. The world, if it gives itself as itself, opens only the door to nihilism.

Zizek, though he works to unveil that the world is not supplemented by an uber-correlation with God nonetheless presents an ontology that is fundamentally correlative - and fundamentally thin as a result. 

For Zizek, the world is entirely overwritten with and constituted by its (co)relation to the Symbolic order. There are cracks in this Symbolic order (to be sure), but the Real that shines through these cracks is nothing but void. It is only in this "thin" sense that Zizek, having decentered God as the locus of the Real, is a "realist."

[His] realism springs from his Lacanian notion of the Real, of the deep cut in our hides, the profound trauma by which we are constituted, the impossibility of a deep and fulfilling Jouissance and its replacement by the endless and futile search for precisely what we cannot have. 

Correlated with and overwritten by the Symbolic, the world is given in such a way that it inevitably shows its Lack as the Real. Or, again, as Caputo says:

Zizek is not a realist in the epistemological sense; far from it. What matters for him is our ability to sustain our fantasies, to act as if we have a grip on things. 

This, then, is the key for Zizek: the question of our "grip" (and lack thereof!) on things.

Caputo does point out, early on in the review, that for Zizek this correlation is not "purely subjective." Rather than depending on an individual subject's correlation with the world, 

Zizek offers the notion of a contingent multitude that organizes itself and self-mediates, engendering and positing its own immanent necessity. It retroactively posits its own essence or presuppositions. . . .  The result is that there is neither a mere assemblage of atomic individuals, as in liberal individualism, nor an absolute Mega-Spirit . . . what they both lack is the auto-organizing or auto-emergent collectivity, which is a necessity recognized after the fact.  

In this sense, Zizek's position is admirably sophisticated because it recognizes the ability of the multitude to self-organize, self-mediate, and self-posit as an emergent collectivity. 

But this, in the end, simply amounts to a more sophisticated description of the Symbolic order. Though it is no longer subjective at the level of the individual, it remains subjective at the level of the collective. 

Everything that is given must pass through the reducing valve of its subjective correlation with the Symbolic. Though this valve is wider than the individual subject, the valve remains only as wide as collective subjectivities. The non-human, if not overwritten by the symbolic, is given only as void.

In this respect, Caputo's critique of Zizek retains its force. Zizek's ontology is too bleak, too reductive, too thin. Even if the aim of Lacanian psychoanalysis is to bring us into a novel relation with our own desires that does not treat those desires as something that ought to be satisfied and overcome, the Lacanian ontology he deploys, so dominated by the Symbolic and the subjective, remains so thin that it gives the impression that we are left, in the absence of God, with nothing but a spectral materialism and the fantasies fabricated by our analysts. 

When our grip on the world loosens or slips, Zizek leaves us with the impression that the world itself lacks sufficient life, reality, and richness to hold us in its Real and irresistable grip. 

About this, he's wrong. And in this respect, he's failed to see the grace that this world is.

The world (these worlds!) do not depend on their correlation with a single locus of Reality, whether God or the Symbolic. 

The Real is the bite of this world's (these worlds!) own complex, self-organizing, and un-masterable unfolding.

IV. Deconstruction

From its inception, the aim of deconstruction has been to loosen our grip on the world. 

Its critics cry foul: "If you loosen our grip on the world - or, better, if you show that no one thing has a privileged handle on the world (e.g., God, the transcendental subject, etc.) - then we will be left with nothing! Nihilism will be unavoidable!"

No. 

Deconstruction - having loosened our grip on the world, having shown that we've always already lacked the grip on the world that we've pretended to have - reveals that the world itself has more than sufficient bite to keep a grip on us.

And it is here, in this being gripped - in a multitude of ways and by a multitude of people and things, human and nonhuman, material and immaterial, brief and enduring - that we are confronted with grace itself: the grace of being bitten, being gripped, being pulled and needed and devoured both by that which exceeds us and that which composes us.

The weakness of deconstruction is its fundamentally critical pose. The work at hand is to move beyond critique to a positive, profligate articulation of the world that does not begin and end with a single, dominant correlation. 

In this respect, fidelity to Grace itself may be prompting us to step outside of that uber-correlative ontology that is Theism.

What might such ontologies look like? Among the multitude of possibilities, one might begin with notions like this. 

Comments

[Jeremy]

I wanted to say that I really enjoyed this assessment overall. However, I have some questions about the accuracies of your assessment of the therapeutic process of (Lacanian) psychoanalysis. For one, I believe you are correct to an extent that a Lacanian would be less likely to interpret the transference that arises in analysis than someone coming from a classical background. Many of Freud's insights with his patients are contingent on the interpretation he offers of the various symbols and associations that emerge from the session. However, I believe Caputo is right that the analysand does have to believe in the narrative that's being constructed because certain theoretical constructs are necessary to sustain analysis: belief in the unconscious, importance of childhood memories, the importance of repetition (i.e. object relations) in relationships. While the analysand may relate to the analyst as the subject-supposed-to-know they still have to buy these aspects otherwise the person will likely receive no benefit. Not to mention the Lacanian technique of scansion tends to go against this idea that the analysand has to do all of the interpreting herself. This technique interrupts analysis at any point when the analyst deems fit to end the session for the day. Basically, to prevent patients from filling up unnecessary space and to attempt to punctuate the session when the most striking statement is said by the analysand. Here the analyst pushes the analysand to realize certain aspects of desire on which that the analyst is the apparent authority. So, while Lacanian analysis may resist the temptation to tell the analysand what X means (although things are clearly more subtle than this) this technique seems to certainly lead the analysand to have faith in the analyst to guide them to the truth of her desire.

I also think Caputo's assessment of psychoanalysis is very much influenced by his disbelief in the efficacy of analysis and its 'unscientific' nature. Somewhere he distinguishes that one of the differences that separates him and Derrida is Derrida's belief in the importance of psychoanalysis.

[Adam Miller]

Jeremy,

Thanks for the thoughtful response. A couple of stabs at answering your excellent questions:

1. I'm unsure about the extent to which it is necessary or even desirable for an analysand to be clear about the theory underlying the analyst's practice. I'm only guessing here, but I wonder if analysts might rather prefer that their analysands knew less rather than more about the theory. (I can certainly imagine Zizek's analyst, for instance, wishing precisely this :)

2. I think that scansion (and the more work-a-day tool of punctuation) both function primarily as interruptions meant to break up the flow and continuity of an analysand's narrative. The idea being that, by way of interruption, the analysand will be forced to consider and re-consider for themselves the meaning of what they have said. It's true that the analysand presumes that the analyst has some "Knowledge" that justifies their interruption at precisely this point, but I think that in practice this isn't the case (or certainly need not be). The analyst doesn't know any more than the analysand and their choice of moments for scansion or punctuation may (and should?) tend to depend more on the formally rich features of the punctuated statement (it's being a pun, ambiguous, etc.) than on the pertinence of the content. But, again, everything I know about the process is second hand. The main point, though, being that, in the end, the goal is to traverse this fantasy of someone having the answers and disabuse the analysand of the (only temporarily fruitful?) fiction of the analysand's "Knowledge."

In other words, from what I understand, the analyst begins by agreeing to play the role of the subject-who-knows simply out of necessity: this where the analysand is at, this is the place from which they must begin, but this is not the desired end point.

I've written at some greater length on this issue here.

3. I think that for the purposes of this essay, we could leave aside the question of the practical efficacy of analysis. I am myself uncertain on this question, but think that, either way, the theoretical point (which is central for Zizek as a philosopher rather than practitioner) would hold nonetheless: Zizek's position explicitly wants to twist free of the logic of satisfaction.

[Jeremy]

Thanks for the response

1) I remember Zizek was interviewed by Victor Taylor on JCRT and made this exact point. He said these days people come to analysis with their Oedipal dynamics unearthed and their defenses identified. In fact, he recalls one of his friends who is an analyst that had a rather evil patient, according to Zizek. This guy came to the analyst seeking relief and justification for his behavior by scapegoating onto his authoritarian father. As opposed to buying into this dynamic, Zizek's friend resisted exonerating his patient and actually shamed him for not obeying his punitive superego. Needless to say Zizek was humored.

2) I think you more or less correct in your response to the issue of scansion. Fink offers an example of a time he 'scands' when a patient had a slip-of-the-tongue where the actual word she said contradicted the suppose conscious messages. This is a minor point and given that my knowledge of Lacanian technique is wholly reliant on Fink, I'm not in the position to say for sure. I agree with you on the goal of Lacanian analysis.

3) As someone who is being trained in a graduate program that specializes in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, I meant that Caputo's rejection stems more from American suspicion of the efficacy of analysis as opposed to therapies that focus more on 10-session 'symptom-relief'. This is mostly an American phenomena. In fact, many of his presentations of Freud caricature analysis as infantilizing the patient and reducing him to some whiny infant who didn't receive enough love from his mother.

[Adam Miller]

Thanks, Jeremy. Agreed!