Brian Hamilton-Vise

Believing in one’s neighbor

One of the points I’m trying to make to my students right now is that Christian faith is not only a matter of “believing in God,” if by that we only mean adding another bullet point onto the list of things we think we know; it is a matter of being opened up to the hidden depths of all things. As I’m putting it in class, the vision of faith makes it possible to see the invisible. And in this lies an important principle of the theological response to the kind of atheism represented by Harris or Dawkins, which operates instead according to the conviction that “what you see is what you get” with respect to the material world. There is for them no invisible depth to the earth or to other human beings, no intrinsic mysteriousness to being or to life.

But Zizek makes the brilliant point in Violence that this is precisely the perspective that enables Sam Harris to justify torture. Our visceral opposition to torture, according to Harris, is simply a leftover instinctual repulsion to the sight of concrete suffering, an ethical illusion that tricks us into thinking that torture constitutes something different than other more distant forms of targeted, goal-oriented force. What we need, he says, is “a drug that would deliver both the instrument of torture and the instrument of their utter concealment” (The End of Faith, p. 197)–which we might, in the end, simply call a “truth pill.”

Zizek sees in this line of thought an attempt to abolish proximity: our proximity to visible suffering, first, but also our proximity to another human being as one who can stake a claim on us. “What Harris is aiming at with his imaged ‘truth pill’ is nothing less than the abolition of the dimension of the Neighbour. … What disappears here is the abyss of the infinity that pertains to a subject” (p. 45). What is lost is the dimension of depth and mystery in other human beings that would forestall the possibility of reducing someone to a passing figure in some grand utilitarian calculus. “The end of faith,” says Zizek, must refer not only to the end of faith in God, but also to the end of faith in the neighbor. “Another subject (and ultimately the subject as such) is for Lacan not something directly given, but a ‘presupposition,’ something presumed, an object of belief–how can I ever be sure that what I see in front of me is another subject, not a flat biological machine lacking depth?”

6 October 2008 | Comments (0)
Tags: Ethics, Politics, Slavoj Zizek