Christianity’s Perversion - Zizek and Latin American Liberationn Theology

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Loyd EricsonPhilosophical Interpretations of PaulIngolf DalferthFinal PaperMay 2, 2011

Christianity‟s Perversion:

Zizek and Latin American Liberation Theology

The next to final scene in Mel Gibson‟s

Braveheart

features several minutes of theprotagonist, William Wallace (played by Mel Gibson), being beaten, choked, racked, castrated,disemboweled, and finally beheaded in front of a cheering fourteenth-century English crowd.

Taken by itself, the scene would be akin to a snuff film or contemporary horror “torture

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porn”(like Eli Roth‟s

Hostel

). Instead, however, it evokes a powerful reaction from the viewer because

of the context in which Wallace‟s torture and deat

h is given in the movie. For nearly three hoursbefore this violent presentation we are shown the exploits of Wallace as he rallies the peasants of

Scotland together to fight against England‟s

King Edward in an attempt to gain their freedom.Fearing Wallace as a threat to his power, Edward sees that he is eventually captured andsentenced to death. With this long background, the climactic scene is not just difficult to watchbecause of its violence, but because of that which led up to these final moments. His death pointsto his life and is presented as a testimony to his cause.In

The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity

, Slavoj Zizek concludes

that the “perverse core” of Christianity is the message that Christianity is the “religion of atheism” wherein when “Christ dies, what dies with him is the . . . hope that there is a father.”

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Though they would hardly consider themselves advocates of a religion of atheism, liberationtheologians from Latin America

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have made similar departures from the traditional

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understandings of the cross,

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sharing with Zizek the view that “in theological terms, . . . it is not

we, humans, who can rely on the help of God

—

on the contrary,

we must help God.

”

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In thispaper I hope to compare and contrast the departures of Zizek and Latin American liberationtheologies as they both contrast themselves from the more traditional theology of the cross

—

acontrast that is particularly evident in a comparison of

Braveheart

with Mel Gibson‟s other

blockbuster,

The Passion of the Christ

.That Wallace in

Braveheart

is portrayed as a Christ-figure is abundantly evidentthroughout the film

—

both are betrayed by their own (Wallace by the Scottish nobles and hisdisciple, Robert the Bruce; Jesus by the Jewish elite and his disciple, Judas), both are sentencedto death by representatives of the British or Roman empires, both are carried on crosses (Wallacebefore his torture, and Jesus following his torture), both are executed before taunting masses andsolemn disciples, and, although Wallace rides into town on a horse before his betrayal, the soundof a donkey braying is added to the scene, evoking the imagery of Christ riding into Jerusalem onboth a colt and an ass. And yet the Real of the torture and deaths of the protagonists in both

Braveheart

and

The Passion

are strikingly different. According to Zizek,It was God Himself who made a Pascalian wager: by dying on the Cross, He made a riskygesture with no guaranteed final outcome. . . . Far from providing the conclusive dot onthe I, the divine act stands, rather, for the openness of a New Beginning, and it is up tohumanity to live up to it, to decide its meaning, to make something of it. . . . [T]he Eventis a pure-empty sign, and we have to work to generate its meaning.

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In both the Middle Ages of England and (what became) the meridian of time of Jerusalem,execution by the government was a common affair

—

even entertainment (wherein today we go tothe theatres to watch these executions reenacted on screen). How, then, were the deaths of Christ-Wallace and Christ-Jesus any different

—

or, how did they get their meaning?

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As Zizek points out, the

real

meaning of their deaths, or what is posited as the Real, “is

not external to the Symbolic [their torture and death]: the Real is the Symbolic itself. . . . [T]ostep into the Real does not entail abandoning language, throwing oneself into the abyss of thechaotic Real, but, on the contrary, dropping the very allusion to some external point of reference

which eludes the Symbolic.”

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In other words, the meaning of the symbol, the Real, must beunderstood in and through the terms of the symbol itself

—

instead of projecting its real meaningoutside of the symbolic and even outside of language, to some ineffable, unreachable Real.This, however, does not mean that the Real is self-evident, or that the symbolic carries orshows its meaning by itself. After describing two identical maps of a tribal village drawn by bothsome of the elites who live in the area more central to the temple and the less individuals who arepushed to the outskirts of town, Zizek points out that while the two maps may be identical, whatthose maps mean and symbolize can be very different. While one group may see an equallydispersed layout, the other may see an invisible, but present, line delineating the elites of thevillage from the rest. He writes,It is here that we can see in what precise sense the Real intervenes through

anamorphosis. First we have the “actual,” “objective” arrangement of the houses, a

ndthen its two different symbolizations that both distort, in an anamorphic way, the actual

arrangement. The “Real” here, however, is not the actual arrangement, but the traumaticcore of the social antagonism that distorts the tribe members‟ view of the

actualantagonism.

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He further adds that “the „truth‟ is not the „real‟ state of things, that is, the „direct‟ view of the

object without perspectival distortion, but the very Real of the antagonism that causes

perspectival distortion. . . .” In other wor

ds, the truth of the Real is not a hard objective kernelthat we attain by peeling away subjective perspective. Instead it is the truth of the reality of those

perspectives. As with Wallace‟s death, the truth is not the facts of his torture and death, but

rather, the truth is the experience of his torture and death through the eyes of his disciples who