Che vuoi? Judaism’s stubborn attachment to the unacknowledged violent founding gesture that haunts the public legal order as its spectral supplement enabled the Jews to persist and survive for thousands of years without land or a common institutional tradition: they refused to give up their ghost, to cut off the link to their secret, disavowed tradition. The paradox of Judaism is that it maintains fidelity to the founding violent Event precisely by NOT confessing, symbolizing it: this “repressed” status of the Event is what gives Judaism its unprecedented vitality. … A crucial line of separation is to be drawn here between the Jewish fidelity to the disavowed ghosts and the pagan obscene initiatory wisdom accompanying public ritual: the disavowed Jewish spectral narrative does not tell the obscene story of God’s impenetrable omnipotence, but its exact opposite: the story of His IMPOTENCE concealed by the standard pagan obscene supplements. The secret to which the Jews remain faithful is the horror of the divine impotence—and it is THIS secret that is “revealed” in Christianity. … This means that Judaism in forcing us to face the abyss of the Other’s desire (in the guise of the impenetrable God), in refusing to cover up this abyss with a determinate fantasmatic scenario (articulated in the obscene initiatic myth), confronts us for the first time with the paradox of human freedom. There is no freedom outside the traumatic encounter with the opacity of the Other’s desire: freedom does not mean that I simply get rid of the Other’s desire—I am, as it were, thrown into my freedom when I confront this opacity as such, deprived of the fantasmatic cover that tells me what the Other wants from me. In this difficult predicament, full of anxiety, when I know THAT the Other wants something from me, without knowing WHAT this desire is, I am thrown back into myself, compelled to assume the risk of freely determining the coordinates of my desire. Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, The MIT Press, 2003, pp.128-9
Posted on: Sun, 14 Dec 2014 04:01:02 +0000