Philosophy arguably began by asking two questions, the first ‘on what there is’, and the second, concerning the nature of the good. While at least in the natural sciences our culture seems fairly certain as to how to ground answers to the first question, how to ground answers to the second one remains problematic. The philosophical tradition, broadly, affords us three predominant candidates:

- The first type of moral theory wants to ground what is good on a conception of human nature. This type of ontological ethics argues that the primary locus of moral questioning ought to remain the character. In its classical forms, it enumerates four cardinal virtues (courage, temperance, prudence, justice). In the middle ages, Thomas Aquinas grafted onto its Aristotelian figuring three, further ‘theological virtues’ (faith, hope, and charity), in line with the new Christian ontology of a creator God and his mediator Jesus the Christ.

- The second type is the utilitarian answer. Again, what is decisive is an ontology of ‘the human things’. However, the locus of morality has shifted to actions, rather than the character. Since humans are conceived as ‘naturally’ wanting happiness, conceived as pleasure (= absence of pain), acts will be good that produce ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’.

- The third type is Kantian, deontological moral theory. The moral correlative of Kant’s critical postulate of the epistemic finitude of human beings is the impossibility of our grounding an ‘ontological ethics’ in knowledge of the summum bonum (highest good). Accordingly, the law for actions is conceived of as wholly formal, and having no preordained content. Moral will be those actions whose maxims can also be willed by the agent without inconsistency to become universal law. Any ‘pathological’ motivations that might support this action are conceived by Kant to be contingent to its morality.

It is the third type of moral theory that will be our concern here. Its virtue is that it answers to a sense we have that to act for the good involves an important deprioritising of our own personal interests. However, its deontologism also produces notorious difficulties. Commentators have long remarked how difficult it is to translate Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ into any concrete directives for action. Moreover, Kant’s postulate of respect as the only proper motivation for moral action in The Critique of Practical Reason arguably drives too deep a wedge between happiness and the moral life for it to be adequate as a descriptive moral theory.

This paper addresses a recent attempt to produce an adequate post-Kantian morality, in the light of especially the second concern. It looks at the works of the contemporary critical Marxist Slavoj Zizek. Zizek has repeatedly broached Kant’s ethics in the hope of trying to ground a paradigm of, and reason for, a transformative politics. He is attracted to the formalism of Kant’s account of moral agency, and sees in it the contours of a mode of action that can transcend and transform existing social conditions. However, his notion of such a radical ‘act’ is a clearly inadequate paradigm of the good, for reasons very like those we have cited above concerning Kant.

In two of his most recent works, The Ticklish Subject and The Fragile Absolute, however, Zizek has begun to address these problems through an explicit linking of the Kantian paradigm with its Christian heritage. In this paper, I want to take a critical look at this interesting move. I begin in Part I with Zizek’s reading of the French moral and political philosopher, Alain Badiou on St. Paul. Part II looks at how Zizek believes we might conceive agapaic love with the notion of the modern post-Kantian subject open to universal law. Part III looks at The Fragile Absolute’s discussions of Paulinian agape.

My ultimate question in this paper is this: can or do Zizek’s most recent texts commit him to a regrounding of a universalist morality via a post-Christian, post-Kantian ethics? At issue here, therefore, is the possibility of our affirming what Kant denied in the second Critique, when he spoke as follows concerning the Christian ‘law of laws’ (love God above everything, and thy neighbour as thyself):

What is particularly vital for Zizek and us, though, is how this positioning aligns Badiou vis-à-vis Nietzsche's critique of St. Paul in The Anti-Christ. Nietzsche, of course, was well aware that Paul’s texts turn around certain key oppositions: ‘life’ and ‘death’, and ‘spirit’ and ‘flesh’. He also knew that when Paul spoke of ‘life’ and ‘death’, he was not referring to biological phenomena. What was at stake in Paul are two existential attitudes: one that lives the life of the spirit ‘in Christ’, and one dead to His Truth. Life in Christ is ‘beyond Law’, Paul claimed.

However, the thing is that Nietzsche interpreted Paul’s ‘beyond Law’ as far from a liberating potentiality. For him, Saint Paul instituted a heightened repression of humanity’s vital instincts. With Christianity, Nietzsche claimed, it is no longer enough to obey the Law. We must also censor our every desire. But, as Zizek notes, what Badiou suggests is that Nietzsche misread Paul. For Badiou, Paul’s motivation for elevating a subject-position ‘beyond law’ is quite different than what Nietzsche imagined. Crucial here is the peculiar Paulinian understanding of sin. The crucial passage is Romans 7:7:

As Zizek glosses this:

Accordingly, Badiou claims that Paul advocated anything but a heightened repression of our ‘spontaneous’ drives. His point was rather that, for us ‘fallen’ creatures, there are no such spontaneous drives. Note how this at once conforms with, and radicalises Kant’s notion of the opposition between respect and our ‘pathological desires’. It is not only that desire is the desire to transgress. It is the mediation of the law that opens the space for the play of our desire, by introducing us to the possibility and lure of its transgression. Far from ‘affirmative’, my desires in this ‘natural’ state are thoroughly reactive to the law ‘from the ground up’ (Zizek: TS, 149-50). "The ultimate result of the rule of the Law", Zizek expands Badiou/Paul here, is that situation which Kant’s moral psychology also addresses (cf. esp. Kant: CPrR, 319 ff.):

We note with interest that is precisely such a regime that so revolted Nietzsche. But here again is Paul, near the beginning of Romans, 7:

In other words, according to Badiou, like Nietzsche’s: "… St. Paul’s entire effort is to break out of the viscious cycle in which the prohibitive Law and its transgression generate and support each other" (Zizek: TS, 149, my italics). The fact that a genuine Paulinian might not do certain things is then not because of his subjection to a prohibition. As 1, Corinthians 7:12 says, a believer is someone whose moral attitude is: "‘All things are lawful for me’, but I will not be dominated by anything" (cf. Zizek: TS, 150-1).

Our concern here is to understand and evaluate the philosophy of moral value that appears in Zizek’s work, and his post-Kantian attempt to answer the questions: why be good, and how? Given this interest, and although he deplores the return of ‘the religious’ in new age philosophies and deconstruction, in The Ticklish Subject, Zizek is profoundly attracted to Badiou’s reading of Paulinian Christianity.

Zizek’s interest, in fact, turns around his subscription to a post-Freudian understanding of moral psychology, drawing on the work of the French theorist Jacques Lacan. The key thing about this understanding here is that Paul’s understanding of sin closely anticipates Lacan’s understanding of desire. Sexual desire is a desire conditioned by what its impulses seek to transgress: namely, standard social conventions and ‘ways of behaving’, for Zizek after Lacan. This most powerful, and seemingly natural motive, is thus thoroughly reactive and mediated by law, he holds.

And accordingly, as Zizek highlights, the question of Lacanian ethics closely matches Paul’s. In Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, after quoting Romans 7:7, Lacan asked exactly:

What Zizek is interested in qua moral philosopher, then, is the possibility of a desire which is not experienced by the subject as necessarily transgressive of his ‘better impulses’ (TS, 153). His argument is effectively that Kant’s proscription of our desire as necessarily (at best) amoral is an adequate description of the way we experience our desires ‘everyday and for the most part’, as Saint Paul argued. Nevertheless, it is illegitimate to argue that this experience exhausts all our moral possibilities. Saint Paul’s interest for him lies, then, in his conceiving of agape as a desire which would effectively reconcile man’s ‘pathology’ with the law. It is in locating and defending such a desire as a distinct and attainable possibility that Zizek thinks ‘the Christian Heritage is fighting for’, to cite his subtitle to The Fragile Absolute.

Zizek’s new conception of Christian agape, and how he locates it vis-à-vis the tradition of moral philosophy, can be approached through his adumbration of a crucial distinction in The Fragile Absolute. There are "two basic attitudes" discernible in the history of religion of which Christianity forms a part, Zizek claims:

1. Firstly, there are the global paganisms. These religions, and their ‘new age’ derivatives, propound a hierarchical Order of cosmic principles. Within this cosmos, each element has its ‘proper’ place. The moral philosophy that corresponds to these religions, then, is roughly of the first type we expounded in our introduction. It holds that the good of the individual corresponds to her accordance with her place within the social body; this latter being conceived as a microcosmic reflection of the global whole. ‘Evil’ designates any excess that upsets the harmony of the cosmos.

2. Secondly, Zizek says that Judaism and Christianity are religions of the universal. They introduce "into this global balanced ... Order a principle that is totally foreign to it" (Zizek: FA, 120). He means by this not only the orientation of Judaeo-Christian worship towards a God held to be meaningfully transcendent. Also, the question of human value, as it is framed in these religions, involves a ‘bracketing’ of the ‘pagan’ concern for individuals’ place within the cosmic and/or social order. The ‘call’ of God and/or Christ is not different for master or slave, but addresses something equally within them both (Zizek: FA, 119).

Once again, then, Zizek notes, a parallel (if not a lineage) between Judaeo-Christian ‘universalism’ and post-Kantian moral philosophy is apparent here, which would legitimate at least the investigation of the possibility of a post-Christian grounding of morality today. The construction of Rawls’ ‘original position’, for example, turns around an abstraction of individuals from the ‘accidents’ of their birth comparable to that enshrined by the ‘universal’ religions. It is only in a beneficent ignorance, as nameless atoms, that they decide the principles of justice. Similarly, the subject of the great liberal constitutions, who is the bearer of rights (ideally) independently of his/her age, sex, race, sexuality, etc. is a post-Judaeo-Christian, declasse subject (cf. Zizek: FA, 112).

The only peculiarity, given that Zizek is concerned specifically to restore Paulinian Christianity to moral relevance, concerns how Zizek has earlier conceived of this ‘universal’ religion, versus its Judaic progenitor. In both The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) and Enjoy Your Symptom! (1992), in fact, Zizek argued that, of the religions which locate the source of moral value in individuals independently of their social places, it is Judaism which is most profound. The clearest cultural figuring of a supracultural subjectivity is the Judaic God, he notes, whom one is prohibited to name or represent. Accordingly, as Levinas has contended, what a Judaic ethics will turn around is a continual refusal to assume that one knows what the Other qua subject wants or needs (Zizek: ES, 56). The Other here is not respected conditionally, insofar as she follows a good we conceive for her. Nor (in line with Kant) is the Other’s moral worth a function of whether and how their actions impact favorably upon us, or anyone else. Finally, a Judaic ethics does not locate the source of moral worth in individuals insofar as each is a subject addressed by public Law, to be respected as a ‘citizen’ of our polity, above and beyond how s/he might live and act as a private individual.

My point, then, is that the correlative of this Zizekian praise of Judaism is that until 1993 at least he held that the ‘good news’ of the new testament represents a withdrawal from Judaism’s radical ethical status. The fascinating image of Christ’s sacrifice, Zizek argued: "... conceals the anxiety-provoking abyss of the Other’s inconsistency, thereby performing the turn from the religion of anxiety (Judaism) to that of love (Christianity)" (Zizek: ES, 57). At the point where he re-raises this idea in The Fragile Absolute (2000), however, Zizek intervenes with a crucial set of contrary suppositions that shows that he is now open to a reconsideration of this earlier understanding. What if Paul’s designation of agape as ‘beyond Law’ enjoins us to love the Other exactly "... in the very abyss of its Real, the other as a properly inhuman partner"?, Zizek now asks (Zizek: FA, 112). And what if Christianity, because of this, represents not a withdrawal from Judaism’s ‘proto-Kantian’ radicality, but a richer articulation of its transcendent dimension and legacy? (cf. Zizek: FA, 130 ff)

These, in fact, are the questions that focus his closing discussion in The Fragile Absolute, and introduce what is of most telling philosophical interest for us.

Certainly, the final pages in The Fragile Absolute contain the most fruitful attempt that Zizek has yet mustered to address the question of moral value, and how it might be grounded. As I indicated in our introduction, perhaps the most crippling problem facing his work surrounds its avowed Kantian heritage. Zizek wants to model a notion of transformative moral and political agency around the possibility of what Kant called a ‘non-pathological’ act. In such an act, he specifies, we do not accomplish anything within our pre-given moral community or form of life, with its set of prescriptions on how to live and flourish. As in a Badiouian event, in the type of post-Kantian act he is interested in, we recast this form of life itself, or at least reshape our standing towards its norms and practices (cf. Part I). This is why one of the things in which Zizek is deeply interested in The Fragile Absolute is the Christian idea of conversion. "In a genuine conversion, one can ‘re-create oneself", he says. The force of the Paulinian language of being ‘born again’, he notes, refers to how even the fruits of man’s ‘original sin’ posited by Christian theology are said to be undone in a conversion act. In it, we, as it were, "repeat" the timeless Adamic act. As Zizek puts it: "... without the Divine act of grace (in Christ), our destiny would remain immovable, forever fixed by this eternal act of choice." Yet "(t)he ‘good news’ of Christianity", he now says, is that we can (as it were) "... undo the effects of … eternity itself" (Zizek: FA, 97).

But what is crucial here is that The Fragile Absolute, via its reference to Paul, also offers us further thoughts. What I want to suggest is that, to the extent that Zizek holds to these thoughts, he proffers a position that allows two things:

1. A move beyond the obvious impasses which such a valorisation of ‘conversion for itself’ would entail, and

2. A Kantian ethics per se (which of course is not reducible to anything like Zizek’s reading of Kant) to be conceived, and even grounded, in a moral psychology grounded on an affirmative desire to do good much more psychologically robust than what Kant called ‘respect’ (Kant: CPrR, 321).

Let us consider these thoughts.

As in Lacan, Zizek says, it is a question of a certain ‘anti-humanism’ which is at stake in St. Paul’s Christian ethics. He cites II, Corinthians, 5: 16-17: