KIERKEGAARD, DERRIDA, AND ZIZEK: TOWARD A CHRISTIAN EXISTENTIALISM BEYOND POSTMODERNISMI observe nature in order to find God, and I do indeed see omnipotence and wisdom, but I also see much that troubles and disturbs. The summa summarum of this is an objective uncertainty . . . Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript

The Father of Existentialism It might seem somewhat ironic that Kierkegaard came to be known as the father of existentialism in light of the Christian faith he possessed a faith that scandalized so many after him who were likewise labeled existential philosophers. But as Mark C. Taylor observes, while Kierkegaard always insisted that Christianity was the radical cure, he sometimes found it difficult to take the medicine he so forcefully prescribes for others.i A closer look at his work could leave one bedazzled. Karl Jaspers warns: It might be that theology, like philosophy, when it follows Kierkegaard is masking something essential in order to use his ideas and formulas for its own totally different purposes.ii Examples of existentialists after Kierkegaard include those like Jose Ortega Gasset, who made statements like, Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia (I am myself and my circumstances). One facet to Kierkegaard that unites him still with others like Jaspers or Sartre is that at times he is more fervent about energizing the quality of life than communicating the knowledge of truth. Those more in tune with or attentive to their own subjectivity and self-examination are much more likely to live truthfully. Climacus puts it succinctly: The objective issue, then, would be about the truth of Christianity. The subjective issue is about the individuals relation to Christianity.iii Kierkegaard is less interested in the former issue, but cares deeply for the latter. He asks, How can I, Johannes Climacus, share in the happiness that Christianity promises?iv

Already at age twenty-five Kierkegaard doubts the veracity of any self-evident, epistemological foundations of modern philosophy when he confesses his longing to serve the unknown God.v Jaspers is fascinated not by Kierkegaards Christian faith but by how thoroughly he had been penetrated by reflection, even at such an early age.vi What is more, Jaspers was suspicious that Kierkegaards faith itself was forced and symptomatic of a suppressed nonbeliever: the godless can appear to e a believer; the believer can appear as godless; both stand in the same dialectic.vii Even Miguel de Uamuno, one of the most notable Christian existentialist to follow Kierkegaard, frequently made statements like the following: Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God Himself.viii This faith described by Unamuno was not the faith that characterized the Danish Christendom against whom Kierkegaard often wrote. Kierkegaard meant to awaken them not necessarily to assert what should be done, but to unmask certain inconsistencies and dishonesties. Kierkegaard saw how easy life was and resolved to create difficulties everywhere.ix Taylors description of the situation is illuminating:

The religious tendencies of Christendom and the philosophical orientation of Hegelianism reflect and are reflected by the dissipation of concrete individuality in the mass movements in Europe that gave birth to the modern industrial state. Kierkegaard labels this erasure of subjectivity "leveling." Leveling is the sociopolitical counterpart of customary Christianity and the purported Hegelian repression of the individual. Speculative reflection and bourgeois irresoluteness give rise to a condition of spiritual laxity in which the tensions which generate authentic selfhood dissolve.x

With this voice which calls for authentic selfhood, Kierkegaard intends to wound or heal with the knife, and thereby to spur other Christians on to act, to choose risk and make a leap but to where is not always clear. Certaintly he advocates faith, but faith that could lead to teleological suspension of the ethical the faith that could make monsters out of us. In contrast to Hegel as cited above, who tended to constitute the individual in terms of the broader social, historical and cosmic process, for Kierkegaard the consciousness of ones eternal responsibility to be an individual is the one thing needful (though Kierkegaard does incorporate a dialectic, but transferred from Hegelian logic to individual existence).xi And in contrast to the Kantian moral imperative, as one discovers in the Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard trusts not in a universal, objective ethic, but in the particular secrecy of revealed religion and commitment to ones subjective, inward relationship with the Divine. Like Luther, Kierkegaard is typically classified as anti-philosophical and individualistic. Walter Kaufman dares to say he rashly renounced clear and distinct thinking altogether.xii For this reason, Kierkegaards analysis of faith is especially revealing of the existential dilemma facing in the postmodern world.

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche Radical loneliness, suffering, and maybe even egotistical isolation characterized both the lifestyles of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche at different times. Kierkegaard scoffed at the idea that he was either an authority or a prophet. Whether Niezsche thought of himself as an anti-Christ or the crucified one, he definitely had little patience with his Lutheran upbringing despite his admiration for Jesus. European philosophy and the question for knowledge about truth had been exhausted. God was dead, but the masses didnt know it yet. They went on distracted and concerned about their meaningless everyday-ness and passive nihilism. Nietzsche realized that

any closed-ended system that tries to make the whole of truth communicable especially the stroke of genius that was Christianity would succumb to ruin when culture caught up with his ideas. Are we not witnesses Niezsches foretelling all these years later with religionless, secularized Europe? But for Nietzsche the death of God gave a chance for new creation and selfactualization apart from the crowd. It became conventional to compare Kierkegaard to Friedrich Nietzsche even before Heideggers time, such that Heidegger was compelled to offer the following corrective: Kierkegaard is not a thinker but a religious writer; that is, for Heidegger, an ontic writer.xiii This somewhat cynical reading of Kierkegaard admittedly may have merit, but not without qualification. I will return to this issue below. First, having mentioned this possible distinction, it behooves us to nonetheless consider their similarities. Neither Nietzsche nor Kierkegaard should be defined strictly in terms of their existentialist features, but existentialism as it is conceived today could not be known without them. Nietzsche, as Freud says, maybe have had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live.xiv Kierkegaard gives the injunction to know ourselves before we know anything else, and Nietzsche alludes to something comparable when he declares satirically at the beginning of On Genealogical of Morals, we dont know ourselves, we knowledgeable people.xv From the Kierkegaardian perspective, Christianity is essentially lived from without of the interiority of the individuals faith, which is constituted by an absolute devotion to the paradoxically figure of Christ. Kierkegaard speaks of the obscurity of God in the incarnation and the paradox of the historical God-man. Johannes Climacus remarks that Faith has, namely, two tasks: to watch for and at every moment to make the discovery of improbability, the paradox, in

order then to hold it fast with the passion of inwardness.xvi Religion, for Nietzsche, however, in view of the dynamics of the will-to-power, was a sign of weakness and deception an unwillingness to know what is true. With Kierkegaard, Gods disclosure in history as Jesus Christ is the point of departure for a passionate faith in the impossible. Faith in such nonsense according to Nietzsche hinders human development and enables people to live hypocritically behind the veil of so-called morality. Indeed, Nietzsche severely criticizes the supposed value of the unegoistic, selfdenying lifestyle and wonders how it is humanity ever contrived such an unreasonable moral system. Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche calls into question not only the Kantian categorical imperative but also utilitarian values, because both are too general, framed in terms of commonality. These are moralities of the herd, and so the critique is grounded on the same basis for which Kierkegaard suspects Hegelian collectivism. Even from a Christian standpoint, ethics cannot explain sacrifice, grace, or atonement, all of which are major themes in Kierkegaards writings as well. Kierkegaard has the awareness that existential subjectivity and volition alone cannot obtain the grace needed for transformation into authentic selfhood, which is a mode of being that is central to much of existentialist thought, Christian or not. For both thinkers, existence itself becomes interpretation, and no thoughts rest against solid backgrounds.xvii Nietzsche regards the various classical theories of morality as sign languages, interpretation of which will reveal that what has moved their propounders to produce them is the desire to justify, flatter, abase, elevate, avenge, or forget themselves.xviii

Why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence; because nihilism represents the ultimate

logical conclusion of our great values and ideals because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these values really had. We require, at some time, new values.xix

It is important to note, however, that Nietzsche doesnt mean to leave morality completely behind. He isnt calling for an immorality or even amorality, but a supra-morality. It is a kind of value monism that says yes to humanity and yes to the morals of the highest man yes to everything in fact, and even suffering, where a person overcomes herself and her all too human humanity.xx The advent of nihilism is not to be dreaded but welcomed joyfully and embraced as opportunity. If Kierkegaard finds refuge in absurd Christianity under which everything else sinks away, Nietzsche offers something indeterminate, distant, and no more substantive or livable. But should the Christian be so quick to dismiss Nietzsches protest against sympathy and virtue? If Kierkegaard is Christianitys ally, how is it that someone like Derrida can say, it is Kierkegaard to whom I have been most faithful?xxi Is not Nietzsches move beyond good and evil in some sense akin to Abrahams obedience to the absolute when God commands him to sacrifice his son Isaac? One might immediately object: that is a detestable act! And indeed, Kierkegaard and Derrida, as we will see in a moment both concede this to a degree, but to ignore these questions is to neglect the task before us which may have at stake the subsistence of Christianity in the postmodern era.

Heideggers Understanding of Kierkegaard The great twentieth century philosopher Martin Heidegger expresses some degree of appreciation for Kierkegaard. But ultimately when it comes to pondering ontological matters, he

claims to be more indebted to Nietzsche.xxii John Caputo actually challenges this statement by Heidegger and argues for instance that Heideggers very notions of Daseins care and angst can be likened to Kierkegaards concepts of interest and despair. Just after an excursus on care, Heidegger says this about what he calls hopelessness:

Hopelessnesss [like despair], for example does not tear Da-sein away from its possibilities, but is only an independent mode of being toward these possibilities. Even when one is without illusions and is ready for anything, the ahead of itself is there. This structural factor of care tells us unambiguously that something is always still outstanding in Da-sein which has not yet become real as a potentiality-of-its-being.xxiii

Though not the with quite the same focus or outcome, Kierkegaard similarly examines the human condition of despair in terms of potential or possibility for the individual in the world:

Every actually moment of despair is to be referred back its possibility; every moment he despairs he bring it upon himself; the time is constantly the present; nothing actual, past and done with, comes about; at every moment of actual despair the despairer bears with him all that has gone before as something present in the form of possibility.xxiv

Despite the title of his work, Sickness unto Death, this sickness Kierkegaard speaks of as despair can be viewed as a sign of health health insofar as one recognizes herself before God. Since the self is partly free, the path to human becoming and authenticity necessarily lies through the narrow pass of anxiety.xxv From Kierkegaard's point of view, human becoming is incomprehensible apart from an adequate understanding of anxiety.xxvi By giving an overview

of the variety of conflicted states into which individuals can descend Heidegger would say it could be the case that the who of everyday Da-sein is precisely not I myself Kierkegaard's analysis of despair shows the way toward the equilibrium that characterizes authentic existence.xxvii Not only taking issue with Heideggers refusal to acknowledge any influence on his own work by Kierkegaard, Caputo makes what for some would appear to be a rather audacious proposition: Kierkegaard did not merely anticipate Heideggers Being and Time; he had moved beyond it and was pressing the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence.xxviii In addition, Caputo suggests that Kierkegaard had already seen the end of philosophy. Relying on Derridas work Spurs, Caputo says the following about Heideggers understanding of Nietzsche and Kierkegaards relationship:

The deep alliance of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche that Heidegger never saw, because he never saw this point at all, is their invocation of laughter in the face of metaphysics, not only their own enormous wit, but their appreciation for the fact that truth is a woman, a light-footed dancer upon whose feet ponderous German metaphysicians and dogmatic philosophers of all stripes are always stepping.xxix

This striking parallel to Nietzsche notwithstanding, Caputo argues, allegedly on Kierkegaards behalf, that the radically inner advance Christianity demands cuts [even] deeper . . . and requires a more fundamental renunciation that can move ahead only in virtue of the absurd.xxx C Dogmatic theology on the other hand tends to make God into the worlds image of fixed substances, and thus to subject itself to conceptual idolatry. But if faith is the rule, theology can permit the most astonishing irregularities and unpredictable divine actionxxxi (italics added).

For in Kierkegaards work Repetition, Constantins character of the young man, to some extent like Job, arrives at a place of surrender. This is the substance of authentic selfhood. With Sickness unto Death in mind, this moment for the young man can only be one before God when despair causes him to refuse being himself in the name of gaining himself, rather than insisting on remaining himself and thereby losing himself the latter of which is the greatest form of despair that differentiates Kierkegaard from Nietzsche, at least in theory.

The Derridean Kierkegaard Christianitys coming isnt already, but not yet for Jacques Derrida and other any form of revealed religion as well for that matter. What draws Derrida to Kierkegaard? Perhaps it is partially that Derrida believes religion is responsibility or it is nothing at all.xxxii But this responsibility does not exist without a breaking from the tradition a dissident and inventive rupture with respect to authority, orthodoxy, rule, or doctrine.xxxiii Thus, the aporia of responsibility is that one always risks failing to accede to it in the process. In the case of Abraham as seen through Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling, the tension and uncertainty about responsibility becomes bound to God in faith, which is the absolute duty beyond and against all duty.xxxiv When Abraham is commanded to offer Isaac to God as a burnt offering, rather than consulting his family or explaining the situation to Isaac, he keeps silent. When Isaac asks Abraham about the lamb for the sacrifice, he responds by telling what Derrida calls a nontruth. This instant of decision in Kierkegaards mind is madness.xxxv Kierkegaard writes imaginatively, as Abraham, that it is better after all that [Isaac] believes I am a monster, that he curses me for being his father, rather than he should know it was God who imposed the temptation, for then he would lose his reason and perhaps curse God.xxxvi

Derrida agrees such a responsibility must keep its secret.xxxvii Kierkegaard is required to hate Isaac and the rest of his family not out of hatred, but love.xxxviii Abrahams decision is paradoxically both responsible and irresponsible:

There is no language, no reason, no generality or mediation to justify this ultimate responsibility which leads us to absolute sacrifice; absolute sacrifice that is not the sacrifice of irresponsibility on the altar of responsibility, but the sacrifice of the most imperative duty (that which binds me to the other as a singularity in general) In favor of another absolutely imperative duty binding me to the wholly other.1

Ones singularity in committed relationship to the other is absolutely binding such that one cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other, the other others, Derrida says, and so every other becomes completely other (tout autre).xxxix

Derrida After Kierkegaard Derrida claims there is nothing outside the text.xl The signified has no identifiable signifier. All reality is a construction of language and yet instability typifies all language, even such that the subject of the Cartesian cogito vanishes. The only remainder is a relationship between the signs themselves. What can be known? Only a desire for I am not sure exactly what, and this is what one loves when she loves her God.xli It is the coming of the Event that never arrives. In Levinasian terms, it is a relation with that which always slips away.xlii Any positive conceptual determination already betrays whatever the ideal is (God, religion,1

Derrida, The Gift of Death, Second Edition & Literature in Secret, 72.

democracy, justice, etc.). Why? Because messianic claims lead to violence and fundamentalism. Systems must be disturbed. If not, they are susceptible to marginalizing others. Derrida has launched an assault even on negative theology, which despite its refusal to avow God in human language, nevertheless for Derrida turns out to be triumphal and certain that it has surpassed differance and come to know God somehow, the transcendental signified.xliii Rather than unambiguous apophasis, Derrida practices general apophasis. In this way, faith truly is blind and without privilege or presence, and too open-ended to cogitate the particular. The closure and determinability of onto-theology is the greatest peril of all.xliv Any emergence of the messianic must be disclosed from beyond human anticipation, without horizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration.xlv This is precisely so that the screen upon which the other will appear can be purified of all expectation and categorization. What Derrida has done is not atheistic per se, at least not in any modern conception of the term. Examples of atheism of a more militant nature are popularized by Richard Dawkins and Samuel Harris, but not without the aid of their theistic counterparts in figures like Alister McGrath, Norman Geisler and R. C. Sproul. Both camps in this debate, however, manage to recapitulate the premises with which each side begins those of secular reason, which perpetuate and reproduce the debate itself, and which obviously, as indicated by Derridas infatuation with Kierkegaard, are sustained on a totally different plane.xlvi This helps clarify why Derrida is fond Kierkegaard. Derrida is convinced that with what Kierkegaard acknowledges in the Abraham story, at most there is only a reference to the highest being that says nothing about that being.xlvii God does not give reasons for Gods request to Abraham. With this absurd demand on Gods part, Abrahams loyalty to the covenant with God

undergoes a desertification and is devoid of anything normative or reasonable besides absolute faith.

Kierkegaard and Zizek Just as with Derrida, Slavoj Zizek is quite taken by Kierkegaards reading of Abraham and the Mount Moriah story. Zizek mentions it this way: The temporary betrayal is the only way to eternity or, as Kierkegaard put it apropos of Abraham, when he is ordered to slaughter Isaac, his predicament is an ordeal such that, please note, the ethical is the temptation.xlviii Zizek compares this betrayal to Nietzsches depiction of Brutus noble betrayal against Caesar in the name of the higher ideal. Abraham is the subject makes the crazy, impossible choice of, in a way, striking at himself, at what is most precious to himself.xlix Zizek understands this to be the impossible, ultimate act of faithful betrayal. It is the fidelity of betrayal. By transgressing what one loves, one bears witness to ones fidelity to the Thing by sacrificing (also) the Thing itself.l By doing so, Zizek says the Christian answers Kierkegaards enjoinder to hate the beloved himself out of love.li

Zizek and Derrida Derrida finds some agreement with Zizek: We should stop thinking about God as someone, over there, way up there, transcendent, and, what is more into the bargain, precisely capable, more than any satellite orbiting in space, of seeing into the most secret of the most interior places.lii This is what Zizek is getting at when he invokes Lacans quilting point and asserts that the quasi-transcendental, enigmatic Master-Signifier that guarantees the consistency

of the big Other, is ultimately a fake, an empty signifier without a signified.liii A big Other gives meaning that gets us off the hook so to speak. As developed by Claude Levi-Strauss, every signifying system necessarily contains such a paradoxical excessive element, the stand-in for the enigma that eludes it.liv Like human beings who live in a capitalist world and know that the reality presented to us is not real, but continue to believe in it anyway because of an inability to see past immediate appearances, so it is with human beings and God. Belief in God comes from an ideology that pre-exists our knowledge and is imbedded in what we do, not what we know. Zizek takes this definition of ideology from Marxs Das Capital: They do not know, but they are doing it.lv The difference with Zizek is that even the relationship itself is removed, leaving only the Real. Whereas Derrida is unable to assert anything definitely atheistic, Zizek is comfortable with explicitly denying even the space for the transcendent. Zizek, with Lacan, urges people to break away from safe reliance on the big Other as a guarantee of the consistency of the symbolic space within which we dwell: there are only contingent, local and fragile points of stability.lvi Zizek, like Spinoza and Lacan, wants to drop the Otherness that Derrida preserves, altogether:

This is why Christianity, precisely because of the Trinity, is the only true monotheism: the lesson of the Trinity is that God fully coincides with the gap between God and man, that God is this gap this is Christ, not the God of beyond separated from man by a gap, but the gap as such, the gap which simultaneously separates God from God and man from man. This fact also allows us to pinpoint what is false about Levinasian-Derridean Otherness: it is the very opposite of this gap in the One, of the inherent redoubling of the One the assertion of Otherness leads to the boring, monotonous sameness of Otherness itself.lvii

Zizek wants to know why does Derrida, Levinas, and others have this peculiarly postmodern obsession with the Other as alien.lviii If each other is absolutely other, then difference collapses into sameness, or so the argument goes. The same criticism can be applied to Nietzsches yes to humanity and elimination of metaphysics. Jan-Olav Henriksen argues that Neitzsche's "annihilation of the metaphysical world" renders the notion of a "radical or distinct otherness ... impossible".lix To Zizek, this preoccupation with purifying otherness of every apriori conditions causes Derrida to throw away all of the positive content of messianism.lx Whence comes the shocking claim: Zizek understands his next move after Derrida to mirror the passage from Judaism to Christianity. By this Zizek means that Judaism always preserves the prophetic that never arrives, conserving and protecting the place of the transcendent Other. Conversely, Christianity testifies to a God in the flesh that came to known here and now. Transcendental otherness is the root of all kinds of evil. Zizek repeatedly makes reference to the folly of paganism for just this reason. Christians are living in an age of the Spirit where in Christ still resides. Christianitys God in Zizeks understanding is totally immanent and fully realized in fleeting instances as in the movie The Shawshank Redemption:

[O]ne should distinguish between ordinary escapism and this dimension of Otherness, this magic moment when the Absolute appears in all its fragility: the man who puts on the record in the prison (Tim Robbins) is precisely the one who rejects all false dreams about escaping from prison, about life Outside . . . but all the men listening to them were, for a brief moment, free. . . . What we have here is the effect of the sublime at its purest:

the momentary suspension of meaning which elevates the subject into another dimension in which the prison terror has no hold over him.lxi

In the same way that Caputo reads Kierkegaard as a foreshadowing of what Heidegger later calls onto-theo-logic, Zizek believes Hegel has predicted something as well not by claims of absolute knowledge, as Derrida suspects, but by signaling toward an in-between in the gap separating concept and actuality or ideal and present reality. Derrida insists on the irreducible excess in the ideal concept which cannot be reduced to the dialectic between the ideal and its actualization that is, the messianic structure of to come, and the excess of an abyss which can never be actualized in its determinate content and this is too close to ultimate idolatry for Zizek. lxii Idolatry is not the idolizing of the mask, according to Zizek, but the belief that some kind of concealed, substantial ideal like justice might be lurking behind the image, which is what Derrida does not wholeheartedly dismiss. Referencing Christopher Hitchens defense of atheism as protection of the world against transcendent powers that pray upon it, Zizek cites Lacans anti-Dostoevsky motto, If God doesnt exist, everything is prohibited.lxiii Someone like Hitchens, however, finds virtually every aspect of religion to be harmful or at least unnecessary. Such is the stance of modern atheism and secular humanism that depend on reason, science, and philosophy to undermine evidence for God. So Zizek is atheistic on the one hand because he rejects the transcendent. The incentive for such a directive, however, is not coming from his doubts about the example of Christ; nor is he interested in preaching the New Atheist gospel because of his disbelief in the utility of the Christian religion. More interestingly, hes atheistic on the other hand because for him the Christian legacy is precious, and Christ is the model and means for achieving, not anything idealistic, but the interruption of the circular logic of re-establishing balance.lxiv For

Zizek, Christian charity is rare and fragile, something to be fought for and regained again and again.lxv Even more surprisingly, Zizek affirms the picture of radical communal living portrayed by the early Christian church of the New Testament. With a materialized reading of Paul, and in keeping with his Marxist convictions, the Christian unplugging is not an inner contemplative stance, but the active work of love which necessarily leads to the creation of an alternative community.lxvi Thus one finds in Zizek pungent traces of communist sympathies but without the utopian tendencies:

It is precisely in order to emphasize this suspension of the social hierarchy that Christ (like Buddha before him) addresses in particular those who belong to the very bottom of the social hierarchy, the outcasts o the social order (beggars, prostitutes . . .) as the privileged and exemplary members of his new community. This new community is then explicitly constructed as a collective of outcasts, the antipode to any established organic group.lxvii

This is the crucial element in Zizek that is not present in Derrida. Its also the share piece that unites Zizek with the strand of Christianity that is likewise painfully absent in Kierkegaard, and yet it is vital for an authentic existentialism in the twenty-first century. Consider the fairly severe and leveling assessment given by the moral philosopher and Christian ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr: Kierkegaardian existentialism gives up the culture problem as irrelevant to faith, not because it is existentialistic and practical, but because it is individualistic and abstract; having abstracted the self from society as violently as any speculative philosopher ever abstracted the life of reason from his existence as a man.lxviii

In exchange, Niebuhr articulates a social existentialism wherein individual responsibility does not occlude obligation to the exterior situation. Though not for the same reasons, and while working from a different place, with this sentiment Zizek vehemently concurs. If Zizek is any example, it may be the case that existentialism in the contemporary world is not an isolated, individualistic and overly despairing philosophical movement. Further shattering the existentialist stereotypes, in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky remarks, In truth we are each responsible to all for all, its only that men dont know this. If they knew it, the world would be a paradise at once.lxix Such a quasi-Kantian declaration flies in the face of Kierkegaardian thought and Derridean/Levinasian otherness. Overall, however, it would be misleading to suggest that Zizek is a friend to Christianity in any remotely traditional characterization of the faith. Like Nietzsche before him, Zizek despises Christian theology. Zizek reiterates what Nietzsche has already sarcastically called Christianitys stroke of genius, or the scenario where only God is able to redeem humanity from what has become irredeemable for humanity itself the creditor sacrificing himself for his debtor, out of love (would you credit it? ), out of love for his debtor! . . .lxx Zizek repeatably conveys that this orthodox teaching is the ultimate fake of Christianity, supposedly sustaining inner peace and redemption by a morbid excitation, namely, a fixation on the suffering, mutilated corpse of Christ.lxxi Zizeks adopton and re-appropriation of Christian language is for sheer pragmatic and political purposes. He cares not for Christianitys truth-value but for the translation of its truthvalue. What is appealing about Kierkegaard to Zizek is the notion of subjective truth-value, which consists in Christianitys ability to properly break out of the vicious superego cycle of the Law and its trangression via Love, and this Love as its called, has even the transgressing,

violent power to kill what is most loved by someone (Abraham of course is the archetype, but Zizek gives numerous other examples from recent movies like The Usual Suspects).lxxii

A Kierkegaardian Response to Derrida and Zizek Let us consider now how Kierkegaard might respond to the views outlined above of Derrida and Zizek. John Caputo is proposing that what happens in deconstruction has an inner sympathy with the very kingdom of God that Jesus calls forlxxiii sympathy, yes, but is that enough for Kierkegaard? That Derridas deconstruction bolsters the messianic essence of Christianity precisely by deferring is a curious proposition. Certainly the incarnation as a particular revelation is prerequisite for Kierkegaard, so this is obviously one problem. Caputo may be right, however, about what the implications are for Kierkegaards subjectivism and if so, he has an important point but Kierkegaard himself does not come to same conclusions about faith, and Caputo fails to make this acknowledgement. Mark Taylor once described deconstruction as the hermeneutics of the death of God.lxxiv Caputo on the other hand treats deconstruction as the hermeneutics of the kingdom of God, as an interpretive style that helps get at the prophetic spirit of Jesus.lxxv Though Caputos treatment sounds preferable from the Christian standpoint, one might be inclined to wonder how honest Caputos assessment of deconstruction is here. While Taylors statement is more disturbing, it is also more straightforward and maybe more accurate. The breaking in and rupturing of Christ in Kierkegaards thought as the absolute paradox is not just the model for existence but also the means. This is where both Zizek and Derrida depart from Kierkegaard, and in this respect, he is certainly not the postmodern thinker they wish for him to be. Caputo as well in my view could be accused of making Kierkegaard into his own post-metaphysical image.

Furthermore, Derrida forestalls movement toward God, or Gods movement toward us (whatever God is desire), but nevertheless keeps the place for God just beyond reach. This is the nature of deconstruction. Is Kierkegaards faith really about claiming to know or reach God though? Why does signifying with a name for the signified have to be oppressive? Genuine faith never grasps anything. The task of faith for Kierkegaard instead is that of loving both God and neighbor faithfully . . . undertaken not with blessed assurance but, rather, with "fear and trembling."lxxvi Derrida readily admits as much himself: we dont think or speak of Abraham from the point of view of a faith that is sure of itself, any more than did Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard keeps coming back to this, recalling that he doesnt understand Abraham, that he couldnt be capable of doing what he did.lxxvii Somehow, in spite of agreement with Derrida on the nature of faith, Kierkegaard continues to confess the specific name Christ. Zizek too says that we love because we do not know all as imperfect and lacking beings.lxxviii Kierkegaard would not disagree with this, but would he be entirely on board with deconsruction and the end of metaphysics as Caputo would have it? Kierkegaards leap of faith is not founded upon some kind of value monism, as Derrida would like to suggest. That was Nietzsches view of the world. Rather, in Kierkegaard one finds an unconditional obedience that relies heavily on faith in a revealed commandment to love and to self-sacrifice. This is not to deny that there are heavy hints of what could be construed as moral subjectivism, but with the God of Jesus Christ as the guide, this subjectivism succeeds ethics not by the will to power, but by love of enemies. Finally, the question can be raised, why are all forms of determinate faith traditions determined by Derrida to be imperialistic, when exceptions abound? If Derridas chief concern is that every other be exempted from prescription or constitution by the transcendental I or the

ego, then he has exchanged this precondition for another the arrestment of particularly religious potentiality for exhibiting the same kind of deference toward the other (in humility consider others better than yourselves Phil 1:3). The shortcoming with Derrida exists in his universal abstraction of all substance from the historical and the social. But to go on living without deconstruction completely would equally be misguided and irresponsible. One may envision a course where Derridas penetrating contribution is applied constructively toward a faith in a God whose names are proliferating and excessive rather than deficient, as has been attempted by Jean-Luc Marion.lxxix The weakness in a position like Marions, for Derrida, will ever be the attribution of positive content to Revelation. Now concerning Zizek, whose opponents are the fundamentalists, is he not a fundamentalist about immanence himself? Derrida at least maintains the possibility for the impossible advent of the transcendent (that never arrives). Zizek should ask, is this knight of faith the quintessential illustration of one whose absurd belief in God did not warrant the apathy and stagnation that was exemplified by his charlatan, Danish Christian neighbors? The evidence might affirm that Kierkegaard confounds Zizeks assumptions about the function the big Other. Zizek even cites Kierkegaards assertion about the risk of radical obedience: We do not laud the son who said No, but we endeavour to learn from the gospel how dangerous it is to say, Sir, I will.lxxx Is it really plausible that Zizek and Kierkegaard are saying yes to the same thing? Zizek, not unlike Nietzsche, has no reservations with leaving behind the modern separation between good and evil, which Kant was unwilling to abandon. Kant recognized the amoral nihilistic repercussions. Zizek embraces the death drive that is the negative horror of the Real,lxxxi collapsing any notion of Kants diabolical evil into the Good. This is where Zizek

becomes troubling. Perhaps Richard Kearney responds appropriately to Zizek by consigning himself instead to continue exploring alternative possibilites of hermeneutical discernment capable of negotiating such distinctions without lapsing into apocalyptic dualism.lxxxii Zizek and Caputo both admirably recall Kierkegaards statement that love believes everything and yet is never to be deceived. If taken at face value, these words could come back to haunt them. Maybe one could ask if Kierkegaards faith in an absolute Other is any less absurd than the Lacanian Real or Derridean semiotics? The answers to these questions will depend on ones valuation of Derrida and Zizek who, like the prophet of post-modernity, Nietzsche, come across as unwilling to lay claim to a substantive trust in particular kinds of revealed religion. Zizek and Derrida raise formidable, profound and probably unprecedented objections to Christianity and theistic religion everywhere. And with several considerable aspects of Christian social teaching missing from Kierkegaard, it would be unwise to declare him the resolution. Nonetheless, one might find enough epistemological humility in Kierkegaards posture toward the transcendent to justify his position as livable for people unwilling to forfeit their dependency on revealed religion altogether. If a Christian wishes to imagine an existentialism for today, it might be with the faith of Kierkegaard, the prayer for the coming transcendent and the protection against ideology in Derrida, and the socio-historical commitment to fragile charity of Zizek.

Kierkegaardian Ethics Today? Despite the possible merit of the objections to Derrida and Zizek raised above, it would be difficult to refute that for Kierkegaard, ethics finds itself in the same predicament or impasse Caputo claims metaphysics experiences. Ethics is limited to the sphere of immanence and reason like that of Kant or Hegel as already discussed. But what really is at stake with Abrahams

actions in this narrative? Does the validity of the Christian faith really stand or fall on the interpretation here? In light of what Christ reveals in the Gospels, it does not seem so. A Christian might be inclined to side with Levinas take on the story:

In his evocation of Abraham, he describes the encounter with God at the point where subjectivity rises to the level of the religious, that is to say, above ethics. But one could think the opposite: Abrahams attentiveness to the voice that led him back to the ethical order, in forbidding him to perform a human sacrifice, is the highest point of the drama . . . It is here, in ethics, that there is an appeal to the uniqueness of the subject, and a bestowal of meaning to life, despite death.lxxxiii

Kierkegaards meditation on the Mount Moriah incident ought not merit his being equated with endorsing Abrahams actions themselves. For even Silentio admits that "although Abraham arouses my admiration, he also appalls me."lxxxiv C. Stephen Evans contends, The main point of Fear and Trembling is not that faith is opposed to morality, but that genuine religious faith cannot be reduced to a life of moral striving, or completely understood using only the categories of a rationalist morality.lxxxv Evans also argues that what is most irrational and absurd for Kierkegaard about Abraham is not his willingness to kill Isaac, but rather the joyful embrace after the angel of the Lord appears to stop Abraham. Frankly, to the naked eye, both episodes probably appear to be somewhat absurd. Whether Evans is right, and regardless of whether Kierkegaard really was irrational, it does seem what Evans describes with respect to faith and reason is exactly what is lacking and needful both in the other thinkers considered here, and in our time.

As Kaufmann highlights in his anthology on existentialism, while Kierkegaards favor of the passionate idolater who prays in a false spirit is attractive, this underscores a problem: if passionate faith is what should be admired, why stop at Christianity, and why wouldnt fanaticism be tolerable? Case in point is Abrahams willingness to murder his son. If Kierkegaard fails to endorse Abrahams action, isnt it true that he has no ground to call it unethical? Both Testaments of the Bible however are clear. Thou shall not kill! Once more from the Christian point of view and Levinas confirms this reliable, secret messages from God will not contradict this injunction. The worldviews of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and arguably Derrida with them appear incapable of envisaging any concretized, unified, socially responsible collaboration amidst diverse people groups for the purpose of striving toward addressing the global crises of the times. In their defense, Kierkegaard and Nietzsches contexts were not very conducive to cultivating historical consciousness beyond Western Europe. Derrida, on other hand, the admiration that is due him notwithstanding, removes all common ground between human beings for establishing solidarity. In order to supersede what were fast becoming the intellectually bankrupt modern theories, Ortega proposed the doctrine "vital reason."lxxxvi The truth of relativism is that each person occupies a unique point of view; the truth of rationalism is that such points of view look out on a suprapersonal reality.lxxxvii This subtle but pivotal adjustment may provide a way forward after postmodernity and beyond the atheistic existentialism represented by Zizek, the fideism of Kierkegaard, and the despairing, perpetual suspension of the ideal in Derrida. Whether it is Christian or existential is another matter, but that remains for the individual to decide.

Mark C. Taylor, Reinventing Kierkegaard., Religious Studies Review 7, no. 3 (July 1, 1981): 208. ii Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (Plume, 1975), 207. iii Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript 1 : Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol 12.1 (Princeton University Press, 1992), 17. iv Ibid. v Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, 198. vi Ibid., 109. vii Ibid., 200. viii Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense Of Life (Qontro Classic Books, 2010), 213. ix Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, 15. x Mark C. Taylor, Refiguring religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 77, no. 1 (March 1, 2009): 209. xi Soren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart: Is To Will One Thing, First Edition. first paperback. (HarperOne, 1956), 188. xii Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, 18. xiii Robert L. Perkins, Fear and Trembling and Repetition (Mercer University Press, 1993), 201. xiv See Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud., 1st ed. (Basic Books, 1981). xv Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. By way of clarification and supplement to my last book Beyond Good and Evil (Oxford University Press, USA, 2009), 3. xvi Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript 1 : Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol 12.1 (Princeton University Press, 1992), 233. xvii Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, 208. xviii John Llewelyn, Margins of Religion: Between Kierkegaard and Derrida (Indiana University Press, 2008), 112. xix Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, 131. xx Llewelyn, Margins of Religion, 114. xxi Jaques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret (Polity, 2001), 40. xxii Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? (Harper Perennial, 1976), 213. xxiii Martin Heidegger and Joan Stambaugh, Sein und Zeit (SUNY Press, 1996), 219. xxiv Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition : Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol. 6 (Princeton University Press, 1983), 47. xxv Taylor, Reinventing Kierkegaard., 209. xxvi Ibid. xxvii Heidegger and Stambaugh, Sein und Zeit, 108. xxviii Perkins, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, 205. xxix Ibid., 214. xxx Ibid., 216. xxxi Ibid., 223. xxxii Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, Second Edition & Literature in Secret, 2nd ed. (University Of Chicago Press, 2007), 5. xxxiii Ibid., 29. xxxiv Ibid., 64. xxxv Ibid., 66.i

S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: the Sickness Unto Death, Reprint. (Double day Anchor book, 1954), 10. xxxvii Derrida, The Gift of Death, Second Edition & Literature in Secret, 61. xxxviii Ibid., 65. xxxix Ibid., 69. xl Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Corrected. (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 158. xli See John Caputo, On Religion (Routledge, 2001). xlii Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, 1st ed. (Duquesne University Press, 1985), 67. xliii Anselm Kyongsuk Min, Solidarity of Others in a Divided World: A Postmodern Theology after Postmodernism (T & T Clark International, 2004), 30. xliv Ibid., 31. xlv Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, Religion, 1st ed. (Stanford University Press, 1998), 17. xlvi Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, First Edition, First Printing. (The MIT Press, 2009), 8. xlvii Llewelyn, Margins of Religion, 14. xlviii Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (The MIT Press, 2003), 19. xlix Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For (Verso Books, 2000), 150. l Ibid., 154. li Ibid. lii Derrida, The Gift of Death, Second Edition & Literature in Secret, 108. liii Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, 114. liv Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 72. lv Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Second Edition), Second Edition. (Verso, 2009), 28. lvi Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, 117. lvii Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 24. lviii Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (Routledge, 2002), 99. lix See Jan-Olav Henriksen, The Reconstruction of Religion: Lessing, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001). lx Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf. lxi Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, 159. lxii Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 140. lxiii Ibid., 96. lxiv Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, 125. lxv Ibid., 118. lxvi Ibid., 130. lxvii Ibid., 123. lxviii H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and culture, 1st ed. (Harper, 1951), 244. lxix Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 8th ed. (Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004), 292. lxx Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 63. lxxi Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf.xxxvi

Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, 145-150. John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (Baker Academic, 2007), 33. lxxiv Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (University Of Chicago Press, 1987), 6. lxxv Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 26. lxxvi Amy Laura Hall, Self-Deception, Confusion, and Salvation in Fear and Trembling with Works of Love., Journal of Religious Ethics 28, no. 1 (March 1, 2000): 41. lxxvii Derrida, The Gift of Death, Second Edition & Literature in Secret, 80. lxxviii Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, 147. lxxix See Jean-Luc Marion, Robyn Horner, and Vincent Berraud, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena (Fordham Univ Press, 2004). lxxx Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, 148. lxxxi Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters, 100. lxxxii Ibid. lxxxiii Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names (Stanford University Press, 1997), 77. lxxxiv Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 60. lxxxv Perkins, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, 10. lxxxvi Rein JanHendrik Staal, The forgotten story of postmodernity, First Things, no. 188 (December 1, 2008): 38. lxxxvii Ibid.lxxii lxxiii

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