The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
The contrast between Judaism and Christianity is the contrast between anxiety and love. The idea is that the Jewish God is the God of the abyss of the other’s desire. Terrible things happen, God is in charge but we do not know what the Big Other, God, wants from us, what is the divine desire.
He needs to add: we do know because His character is myth laden. Sky Alpha is a demand-oriented alpha. Lacking the immediate and material presence required to punch us in the face or push us off a high branch, Sky Alpha tells us what we must do to stave off his anger. Yahveh is the “Here’s how to assuage me” god.
But Zizek’s main point is true—the Other Mind is not really present, because we cannot interrogate it. We cannot learn about His desires live. All we have is a record of his past tantrums and demands. The point is that we look outwards for explanation from the personal unity behind all the myriad of pain-making features of life. If there is a maker behind all this (and the model for our meaning here is our own making in imagination, which does work precisely by fiat, hence it is dreamt by Vishnu through the engineer of Brahma, or the Isvara of Nyaya who causes the synthetic unity of pre-existing atoms—an in-formative creator), what is his goal? If I know why this happens, then I can finally have a standard to evaluate my actions and pick a course that is guaranteed to be the right one. I can will with confidence when I know my willing ought to be.
The revelation that I will never get an answer is a bitter pill. It is as or more nauseating that the nausea felt by the brute numbness and blindness of lumpen material stuff. The corollary of Sartre’s nausea is the absence of God, the most poignant expression of which is Christ asking the Absence Why have you forsaken me? The end point, the big reveal and boon, of the Christian hero’s journey is that the God he’s been going on and on about does not exist. Sky Alpha’s death occurs exactly in parallel with Christ’s, because Christ (the Best Person hero type) dies.
To designate this traumatic experience Lacan used the Italian phrase ‘che vuoi?’ What do you want? This terrifying question: but what do you want from me?
It is our instinct to try to placate the alpha. Asking Him what He wants is terrifying because it could be death—the primordial heterotrophic Other archetype, the other who wants to eat you. (Surely this is a good candidate for a Jungian archetype! If we are looking for an other’s character-based analog for the Kantian categories, I think the Other That Eats You would definitely be in there. Especially for mobile organisms who can respond to approaching predators. This is surely archetypal: the relationship of the candidate escapee to the candidate killer. Who I am in that state, which is a conjunction of being-food-for-another and your mobile powers’ realization that distance is the only thing between “I am” and death.
Only other minds can be negotiated with. Physical necessity—that is something deaf, unthinking, without goals or even desire. If there is a mind there, an other-self, that is directing all this, and it can communicate but chooses not to, then it is either blind to the painful isolation of human subjectivity
God is an infinite circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
(our chemical-emotional brand of aware-yet-isolated consciousness, beings who are supervenient on lawful physicality, yet also agents of novel actions (to the extent that quantum indeterminacy is situated in pathway modifications that do precipitate into (as) magnified
or then
sense of i or an ass by disjunctive syllogism. If it cannot communicate, then it is unintelligent or not actually creating and controlling things. We cannot help asking, because we cannot help trying. Our only chance of really feeling at home in the world is if it really is an idea in the mind of God. Then, there is another mind on the other side, and all this is for a (good) cause.
The idea is that Judaism persists in this anxiety, like God remains this terrifying other. And then Christianity resolves the tension through love. By sacrificing his son, God demonstrates that he loves up. So it’s a kind of imaginary, sentimental even resolution of a situation of radical anxiety.
Yep. And notice that the most popular Christian (Fundamentalist Evangelical) apologist makes exactly and only this argument. Ravi Zacharias
Another answer is here.
If this were to be the case then Christianity would have been a kind of ideological, reversal or pacification of the deep, much more shattering Jewish insight.
But I think one can read the Christian gesture in a much more radical way. This is what the sequence of crucifixion in Scorsese’s film shows us. What dies on the cross is precisely this guarantee of the Big Other. The message of Christianity is here radically atheist. The death of Christ, is not any kind of redemption of commercial affair in the sense of Christ suffers to pay for our sins. Pay to whom? For what? And so on. It’s simply the disintegration of the God, which guarantees the meaning of our lives. And that’s the meaning of that famous phrase: ‘Eli ele lama sabachthani’ Father, why have you forsaken me?
Just before Christ’s death, we get what in psychoanalytic terms we call ‘subjective destitution’—stepping out totally of the domain of symbolic identification, cancelling or suspending the entire field of symbolic authority, the entire field of the Big Other. Of course, we cannot know what God wants from us because there is no God. This is the Jesus Christ who says, among other things, ‘I bring sword, not peace. If you don’t hate your father, your mother, you are not my follower.’ Of course, this does not mean that you should actively hate or kill your parents. I think that family relations stand here for hierarchic social relations.
The message of Christ is ‘I’m dying but my death itself is good news. It means you are alone, left to your freedom, be in the Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit, which is just the community of believers.’ It’s wrong to think that the second coming will be that Christ as a figure will return somehow. Christ is already here when believers form an emancipatory collective. This is why, I claim, that the only way really to be an atheist is to go through Christianity. Christianity is much more atheist than the usual atheism which can claim there is no God and so on. But nonetheless it retains a certain trust into the Big Other—this Big Other can be called natural necessity, evolution or whatever. We humans are none the less reduced to a position within a harmonious whole of evolution, whatever. But the difficult thing to accept is again that there is no Big Other—no point of reference which guarantees meaning.