Liza Thompson: You are well known for the expansive and eclectic range of ideas you wield but where did it all start? Can you recall when you first encountered a concept that excited you?
Slavoj Žižek: Yes! I can pinpoint it precisely. I was 15 and my worldview was one of naïve realism: “I am here, I can think, blah blah blah”. I had just started high school and found something written by Kant. It intrigued me so much. I know now it was his transcendental Idealism – we don’t simply perceive how things are out there. There is a nice ambiguity in Kant – we don’t encounter reality immediately the way it is but this also doesn’t mean that it’s just a projection of our mind. This was my primordial intellectual moment. And I clearly remember this. Then I began reading primitive Lenin stuff for some reason but it is the Kant that stayed with me.
It continues to be my enigma. I’m struggling with this even now in my last books – Freedom and Christian Atheism – how to reach beyond the transcendental dimension but without regressing to medieval realism.
This is why I return to a materialist reading of religion to find a way to work through this seemingly irresolvable tension.
LT: This return to reading religion is intriguing because in your new book Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist you claim that we need to reject Christian Theology. So why even grapple with it in the first place?
SZ: Firstly, like to annoy most of my friends and fellow intellectuals. That is always an impulse for me.
But more seriously, I try to answer this in the first chapter of my book. The crucial paradoxical claim based on Hegel and Lacan is that truth rises out of misrecognition. You say something which is obviously wrong and it’s only through seeing the nonsense of what you’re saying that you can arrive at truth. Hegel’s point is that you can’t just contrast truth with untruth, you need to actually stumble through the nonsense to reach a point of truth. It has to be indirect.
I return to your question! Christianity is the model for all of this. I consider Christianity, in my crazy reading, the religion of the death of God.
I always come back to the question in the book of Matthew (24.3) when the disciples ask Jesus when he will return:
And Jesus says “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there..."
I interpret this very literally - the return of Christ happens in the Holy Ghost (so not some vague moment in the future) and the Holy Ghost is the spirit of egalitarian community. I often say this with irony (but today the times of irony are over!) - the idea of the Holy Ghost is the first primordial form of a communist party!
This is also how I read that beautiful moment, again from Matthew, when Jesus is preaching and someone comes in and says some of your family are outside waiting for you and he says.
“Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”
What I read here is not an instruction to ignore your mother and father – it doesn’t mean hate them as people, it means rejecting the patriarchal familial structure in favour of a communal one.
Will I tell you something that’s not yet in any of my books but I have been thinking about a lot? Do you know the film (and it is not a very good film) The River Runs Through It?
LT: The 90s one with Brad Pitt? Yes, it’s kind of terrible.
SZ: At the end of the film Brad Pitt’s endless self-destruction means he is killed. His father, a preacher, performs a wonderful short sermon at his funeral. He doesn’t talk about everlasting life or how to be a true Christian. In essence, he says that real Christianity is saying to someone, “I know you are a mess, I know I cannot help you but nonetheless you deserve my infinite love”.
LT: So contrary to lots of people’s perception of Christian theology, at its most pure it is about radical acceptance rather than rules and judgements?
SZ: Yes, eternal life isn’t about being a nice person who will be given their reward in heaven when they die. It is about being given acceptance without prejudice or criticism. That is eternal life.
LT: It reminds me of the theologian Paul Tillich’s idea in The Courage to Be: “accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable.”
SZ: Yes, but I prefer to quote A River Runs Through It
LT: You have mentioned Hegel, Lacan and Marx as we’ve been talking and they are looming figures in your work. Who else do you keep coming back to?
SZ: Schelling is another person I haven’t mentioned but he immediately got me. Although, I think ultimately Schelling and Hegel are incompatible. More and more, I think that if you held me at gunpoint and said I had to choose between Hegel and Schelling, I would say, I have learnt infinitely more from Hegel blah blah blah but as to the basic existential, metaphysical insight, I go to Schelling.
I even read some analytic philosophers. There are some very bright ones. Bernard Williams’ Moral Luck. This is the book. Luck is not just a matter of your intention you need at least a minimal amount of luck. Even your best intentions can produce catastrophes. The big lesson is how difficult it is to be really good.
And Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity revolutionised things for me. I like to be shocked!
Rowan Williams is also important for me. The way he reads The Idiot by Dostoyevsky. Even if we Stalinist atheists take over we will still proclaim Rowan Williams an honorary atheist!
LT: What about writers who aren’t philosophers or psychoanalysts?!
SZ: The writer I would have loved to meet but she died a couple of years ago is Ágota Kristóf (not to be confused with Agatha Christie). Her trilogy beginning with The Notebook features these young guys who are totally honest, in some ways immoral, but incredibly ethical. Totally crazy ethics! This novel for me is the ultimate ethical novel.
And Tana French is one of my favourite writers. These are properly scary murder mysteries. She might even be my favourite writer of all time!
LT: What are you excited about watching or reading this year?
SZ: I am now preoccupied by The Three Body Problem. You know there are two versions? One Chinese and one that just appeared on Netflix. My favourite thing is to analyse different versions of things. It is a passion of mine. I already prefer the Chinese version even though it is heavily edited. Anyway, the book is a true modern classic.
And finally, is there one idea, a Žižekian concept, that you’re most proud of?
SZ: My detractors say I don’t have any new concepts, I just move ideas from one domain into another. And perhaps they are right! If I do one thing well, it might be putting things together in an unusual way. Like my new project which is applying ideas from quantum physics to how we read history. People say things – idiots, not people like me and you – that the past is determined and the future is open. No! The past can be endlessly reconstructed and it is, rather, the future that is determined (because everything is shitty and doomed – from politics to the environment). But the important point is that we have to start from where we are now. We can re-tread the past over and over again from our present moment but the future is doomed. Maybe this is a new concept! Anyway, that is my new book and it will be a short one!
Slavoj Žižek is a Hegelian philosopher, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, and a Communist. He is the author of numerous books, including Christian Atheism (2024) and Freedom (2023), and is International Director at the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities, University of London, UK, Visiting Professor at the New York University, USA, and Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Find out more about his views on religious belief in Christian Atheism.
