KIERKEGAARD, DERRIDA, AND ZIZEK: TOWARD A CHRISTIAN EXISTENTIALISM

BEYOND POSTMODERNISM

“I 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 individual’s 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 Taylor’s 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 one’s 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

one’s 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, Kierkegaard’s 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 didn’t 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 Niezsche’s foretelling all these years later with religionless,

secularized Europe? But for Nietzsche the death of God gave a chance for new creation and self-

actualization apart from the crowd.

It became conventional to compare Kierkegaard to Friedrich Nietzsche even before

Heidegger’s 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 don’t know

ourselves, we knowledgeable people.”xv

From the Kierkegaardian perspective, Christianity is essentially lived from without of the

interiority of the individual’s 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, God’s 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, self-

denying 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 Kierkegaard’s

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 doesn’t mean to leave morality

completely behind. He isn’t 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 Nietzsche’s protest against sympathy and

virtue? If Kierkegaard is Christianity’s ally, how is it that someone like Derrida can say, “it is

Kierkegaard to whom I have been most faithful”?xxi Is not Nietzsche’s move beyond good and

evil in some sense akin to Abraham’s 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.

Heidegger’s 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 Heidegger’s very notions of Dasein’s “care” and “angst”

can be likened to Kierkegaard’s 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 Heidegger’s 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 Heidegger’s 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

Derrida’s work Spurs, Caputo says the following about Heidegger’s understanding of Nietzsche

and Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s

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 world’s 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 action”xxxi (italics added).
For in Kierkegaard’s work Repetition, Constantin’s 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

Christianity’s coming isn’t “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 Kierkegaard’s 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 “non-

truth”. This instant of decision in Kierkegaard’s 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 Abraham’s 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

One’s 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 Derrida’s

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 God’s request to

Abraham. With this absurd demand on God’s part, Abraham’s 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 Nietzsche’s 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 one’s fidelity to the Thing by sacrificing (also) the Thing itself.”l By doing

so, Zizek says the Christian answers Kierkegaard’s 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 Lacan’s “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 Marx’s 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 Nietzsche’s “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. Christianity’s God in

Zizek’s 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 Lacan’s anti-Dostoevsky motto, “If God

doesn’t 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, he’s 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. It’s 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, it’s only that men don’t 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

Christianity’s 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

Zizek’s adopton and re-appropriation of Christian language is for sheer pragmatic and

political purposes. He cares not for Christianity’s truth-value but for the translation of its truth-

value. What is appealing about Kierkegaard to Zizek is the notion of subjective truth-value,

which consists in Christianity’s ability to properly “break out of the vicious superego cycle of

the Law and its trangression via Love,” and this “Love” as it’s 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 for”lxxiii – sympathy, yes, but is that

enough for Kierkegaard? That Derrida’s 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 Caputo’s treatment

sounds preferable from the Christian standpoint, one might be inclined to wonder how honest

Caputo’s assessment of deconstruction is here. While Taylor’s statement is more disturbing, it is

also more straightforward – and maybe more accurate. The breaking in and rupturing of Christ in

Kierkegaard’s 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 God’s movement toward us

(whatever “God” is – desire), but nevertheless keeps the place for God just beyond reach. This is

the nature of deconstruction. Is Kierkegaard’s 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 don’t 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 doesn’t understand Abraham, that he

couldn’t 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? Kierkegaard’s leap of faith

is not founded upon some kind of value monism, as Derrida would like to suggest. That was

Nietzsche’s 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 Derrida’s 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 Derrida’s 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 Marion’s, 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 Zizek’s assumptions about the function the big Other.

Zizek even cites Kierkegaard’s 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 Kant’s 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 Kierkegaard’s faith in an absolute ‘Other’ is any less absurd than

the Lacanian Real or Derridean semiotics? The answers to these questions will depend on one’s

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 Kierkegaard’s 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 Abraham’s
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: Abraham’s 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

Kierkegaard’s meditation on the Mount Moriah incident ought not merit his being equated with

endorsing Abraham’s 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 Kierkegaard’s 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 wouldn’t

fanaticism be tolerable? Case in point is Abraham’s willingness to murder his son. If

Kierkegaard fails to endorse Abraham’s action, isn’t 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 Nietzsche’s 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.
i
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.
xxxvi
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.
lxxii
Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, 145-150.
lxxiii
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.

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