I have always/already read Žižek, The puppet and the dwarf: the perverse core of Christianity, p. 138:

This compels us to detach the Christian “love for one’s neighbor” radically from the Levinasian topic of the Other as the impenetrable neighbor. Insofar as the ultimate Other is God himself, I should risk the claim that it is the epochal achievement of Christianity to reduce its Otherness to Sameness.

By always, I mean that the book strikes me as a peculiar slice of the ever reconstructed Christian theological edifice. And by already I mean that it is strange, in the middle of a post-Nietzschean, psychoanalytical, and socio-political discourse in which theology is normally suspended, to come suddenly across developments on Job, Paul, Jesus on the cross, messianism, and recognize snippets of traditional theology. Do they drop their old patina and acquire a revolutionary aura synecdochally, by contact with their “post-modern” environment?

And what kind of theology, actually? that of the passage above brings up questions and comments. First of all, why not capitalize love, rather than other and otherness? I’m perfectly happy that love and neighbor are not capitalized, as I like to think of them as interstitial and not in need of mundanities, but why put capitals elsewhere, as if there is a remainder of temples on mountain tops? Especially for real and reality: does capitalization help to think? Second, is this opposition between a love of one’s neighbor (the Christian one) and the Levinasian view of the other really so radically different? The difference, it seems to me, is not as radical as opined here. Third, about God (capital again—would it hurt the reasoning to say something like “the divinity in the Christian notion”?): is God the radical Other, or aren’t we, the humans, as the Bible says repeatedly, making ourselves aliens to the divinity? Which way does the alienation go? Fourth, on the epochal achievement of Christianity: a dwelling of the other person in me, human or divine, is not the same as a “reduction of otherness to sameness”. To speak of achievement is strange: is it talking about Jesus, in which case one cannot speak of Christianity apart from Judaism (if one can speak of Christianity at all!), or is the sentence referring to the century-long shaping of [somewhat, or badly] Christianized nations and peoples? Finally, and most difficult to analyze, as one wonders what the author exactly means, is his notion of reduction of otherness to sameness. Christian texts and theology speak of the mystery of incarnation (capital?), but certainly not of reduction. The et verbum caro factum est, read even with the story of the resurrection, is stark, a reduction indeed. But there is no story of Christianity and its good Friday without paschal Sunday.

Last page of the book: no resurrection either but a final variation on Jesus’s cry on the cross, “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?” Christianity and its beholders better get round to the idea that big daddy is no more. And this is a good thing, I suppose, if one thinks of the avatars of this “big Other” in authoritarian churches and political regimes, revolutionary or not. Anti-idolatry is at the root of Judaism and Christianity. Atheisms in that sense.

Last paragraph of the book, page 171:

In what is perhaps the highest example of Hegelian Aufhebung, it is possible today to redeem this core of Christianity only in the gesture of abandoning the shell of its institutional organization (and, even more so, of its specific religious experience). The gap here is irreducible: either one drops the religious form, or one maintains the form, but loses the essence. That is the ultimate heroic gesture that awaits Christianity: in order to save its treasure, it has to sacrifice itself—like Christ, who had to die so that Christianity could emerge.

Can one redeem the core without having the institution, the magisterium, the canons, etc., that is, the tradition? Can one conceive of freedom, social justice, learning without the existence of political, social, and educational institutions, or in a pure beyond? Likewise, is it possible to have an understanding of one’s fallibility, of its destructive results across space and time, and of the possible redemption of these, without a coralreef-like institution that transmits the tradition? Or to put it another way: is it possible to imagine the grace of, say, a wide receiver turning at the right split second and get the ball in full run, without the well matched opponents, the dreary long preparations, the complex set of rules, the gigantic expenditure of energy on stadiums and transportation, etc. etc.? One graceful moment out of hours of play…. One would like a better yield of grace for toil: religion?