4.29.25 - Book Review: The Fragile Absolute
I just finished this book. It was my girlfried's first--she bought it during a younger lefty phase I'd imagine (incorrectly thinking this would be about Marxism or something). But she never read it so I stole it.
I was going to write a proper review but I am employed and have a lot of things going on, and think I may write about Zizek’s interpretation of Christianity. Because this is just one entry in a "saga" of sorts he has on the subject of the "emancipatory" potential in Christian theology, an idea he doesn't ever quite articulate but he's been circling around in this book, The Puppet and The Dwarf, Christian Atheism (which I have yet to read in full but have heard him talk about on the Youtube), and the Monstrosity of Christ (which I also have to get through). I think I will write about this at length one day, during a quieter moment.
I'm taking a late night Amtrak back to New York, and I am more interested in writing about The Demon Haunted World, a book I read more carefully (and understood better) on this ride.
Here’s what I will say about the Fragile Absolute.
It's Messy. This isn't a surprise for people who read or listen Zizek. It has a lot of tangents. I find them enjoyable. I reject a lot of people's argument that he goes down rabbit holes that don't advance his thesis. I take a much more charitable view and really see thse as him thinking out loud to advance some very subtle ideas––which gets to my next point. However, I will say this feels slightly less focused even for his work. The title doesn't really give you a sense of what he goes on about in this book.
Lots of Paradox. My favorite part of Zizek and this book is very generous with dishing them out. Everything is really its opposite under the surface. Certain ideals or only advanced by their subversion, and undermined by adherance to them. And so on and so on. This is always the parts of Zizek I enjoy the most, and after reading Chesterton, I see very clear parallels in this respect specifically. I'll find a representative example to reproduce here; near the end there are very clear ones that directly relate to the "thesis" (if you can call it that) and add a layer of paradox to the conventional distinction between how Christians and Jews relate to the law, but those wouldn't be representative of what's in the book, so I'll pick a slightly more "tangential" one:
"[important context that cannot be reproduced] Do we not find something quite similiar in the superb final scene of My Best Friend's Wedding, when at the wedding of Cameron Diaz, Julia Roberts[], resigned to the loss of her ex-partner, accepts the proposal of Rupert Everett, her close gay friend, and performs a passionate dance act with him in front of all the wedding guests: they are the true couple, to be opposed to the 'official' real couple of Cameron Diaz and her bridegroom, engaged in a full 'straight' sexual relationship. What is crucial here is that Julia Roberts and Rupert Everett, in contrast to this actual couple, are not engaged in sex: although they just put on a spectacle, although they are engaged in performing a fake appearance, it is precisely as such that their performance is way more real than the common reality of the 'actual sex' of the other couple. In short this dance is sublime in the strict Kantian sense: what the two of them stage, what appears -- shines through -- their act is the fantasyy, the impossible utopian dream, of the ultimate 'perfect couple' that the other 'actual' couple will never be able to come close to . . . the paradox is that they can do it precisely in so far as they are not an 'actual couple,' precisely in so far as (because of their different sexual orientations) their relationship can never be consummated."
This is the sort of thing that you'll find throughout the book. As a sidebar, I don't think these are really tangents. To be honest, what I think goes on with Zizek's writing is he's warming up the reader––and probably himself, as a writer––to think in a sort of dialectic, paradoxical lens, before getting to the real point, or the "real thing" (although, as the book argues, such a concept, "the real thing" is often, hollow -- and funnily enough that's what people critique him for, not getting to what is ultimately a phantom. He has a great portion on Coca-Cola which is enjoyable read. Is searching for a "thesis" in a work that is inherently about a paradoxical underpinning of a foundational belief system not a little bit like looking for "the real thing" in an object that is pure commodity?)
I like this excerpt on My Best Friend's Wedding specifically, because I often do think about how representation or performance of a thing is more real than the thing itself. Actors and Influeners are inherently "fake," but in trying to perform an idealized or fantastical reality, I sometimes wonder whether they live a more real human experience than the average normie. Actors, through portrayal, often have to "experience" a huge range of human emotions. They have to learn a broad set of skills and arts---many sing, dance, do fashion––in some sense isn't this a lot more real than our own lives? But they are only liberated to do these things BECAUSE they are doing it in the context of fantasy. Does the act of portraying a fantasy of a thing actually let you DO the thing in a much purer way than people who are trying to do the REAL thinng, unmediated by fantasy? Isn't this really what underpins our private (or I guess not so private, in our oversharing culture) preoccupation with BDSM/roleplay/CNC? We can only access the real through representation of the real . . . anywho that's an idea I think he was getting at with this anecdote. It's the kind of insight you sometimes tap into, or clarify when going through is streams of consciousness. I like it.
What's it About?So I looked online and apparently this book is supposed to be about how Marxists and Christians can work together against Capitalism. I checked the back of the book and it says something similar. This is really a hamfisted, and frankly disingenuous way to characterize the book, but I'd imagine it's the kind of thing a publisher puts on a book to sell copies to idiot communist graduate students and posers.
As an aside, I will say that perusing GoodReads and YouTube comments, I do think that many people who read Zizek are uniquely ill equipped to comprehend what he's even doing or talking about half the time. It's clear that most of the people who pick up the book are looking for lefty-nonsense. People who come in with an open mind, some background in psychoanlytics (or are unashamed to use wikipedia here and there, like me) will probably have more fun with his stuff. I often think that the least interesting thing about Zizek is him being a "communist," although I do think that label is sincere and is not superficial (as Tyler Cowen once hinted at in a podcast interview).
But I digress, what is this book really about? Fuck if I know. Here's a really rough, and very short, shot.
Basically, Christianity––specifically how its expounded by Saint Paul––offers a fundamentally different way to relate to the law, one that can address the paradoxes of how the law creaates sin, creaetes the desire to transgress, etc. But Zizek works around the idea that the very basic understanding of Christianity––that it solves this by shifting the focus to the spirit/faith/internal states––isn't right. In fact, that is really another source of an even more sinister oppression, it creates a permanent guilt because now the law proper is not there to mediate our relationship with sinful desires and absolve us of that guilt (as Zizek suggests it does for the Jews, he flips a conventional idea on its head––its really Christians who are damned to eternal guilt because they can't just have adherance to law absolve them, they have to think about their internal state and desires). No, he think Christianity solves this with something . . . else.
I think that's enough for now, because I think trying to articulate what that "else" is warrants a whole post that also touches on some of his ideas in the Puppet and the Dwarf, and maybe would warrant me rereading some of the gospels. So that's all for now, folks.
Actually, also, first, I will note that his chapter on "The Structure and Its Event" very directly articualted some of my ideas in this blog post:
https://knxnts.xyz/blog-4.14.25
I was really surprised by how on point it was, and it leads me to imagine not that I had come to the ideas in that post independendently, but that they were knocking around my head from college when I read Zizek, Badiou, and others. Here's a brief excerpt:
"Christianity, on the contrary, offers Christ as a mortal-temporal individual, and insists that belief in the temporal Event of INcarnation is the only path to eternal truth of salvation. In this precise sense, Christianity is a 'religion of Love': in love, one singles out, focuses on, a finite temporal object which 'means more than anything else.' This same paradox is also at work in the specific Christian notion of Conversion and the forgiveness of sins: Congresion is a temporal event which changes eternity itself."
I love this insight. Anyways, that's all, for real folks.
knxnts