Though MacIntyre is certainly right, Žižek would say, to accuse liberalism of a false universality, of claiming a neutrality that masks their hidden partiality, he fails to recognize the obverse truth, that in championing particular, internally coherent traditions, he himself masks the “universal” excess of his own judgment. He therefore ends up making the opposite criticism of liberalism than is necessary. Instead of insisting that we fill back in the notion of universality with the contents given it by one or another rival tradition–which is, after all, only the reactionary negation of filling it in with a content that transcends traditions–we ought instead to negate the negation, and insist that we leave the concept of universality totally empty, as yet undetermined by any particular political arkhe or all-encompassing concept of “the good and the best.” We should insist that the discovery of such an empty universality constitutes liberalism’s true advance, and that their mistake was to try to “complete” it with some determinate positive content just like the Aristotelians had always done.

As with Parsifal, so with the Scriptures. The Bible itself demands to be decontextualized, never content to be read as an historical artifact, always appealing directly to the reading believer. In the structure of the historical events themselves, as presented by the scriptural writers, there exists a universal ambition that imposes itself on the reader. This is the sense in which it is perfectly legitimate and indeed necessary to speak of the Bible as self-interpreting. This is why Bonhoeffer is right to tell his students to read the Bible as appealing directly to them, in whatever moment they read it.

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?”

“The notion of objective violence needs to be thoroughly historicised: it took on a new shape with capitalism. Marx described the mad, self-enhancing circulation of capital, whose solipsistic path of parthenogenesis reaches its apogee in today’s meta-reflexive speculations on futures. It is far too simplistic to claim [as Williams occasionally seems to] that the spectre of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction and that behind this abstraction there are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources capital’s circulation is based and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. The problem is that this ‘abstraction’ is not only in our financial speculators’ misperception of social reality, but that it is ‘real’ in the precise sense of determining the structure of the material social processes…. Marx’s point is not primarily to reduce this second dimension to the first one, that is, to demonstrate how the theological [?] mad dance of commodities arises out of the antagonisms of ‘real life.’ Rather this point is that one cannot properly grasp the first (the social reality of material production and social interaction) without the second: it is the self-propelling metaphysical dance of capital that runs the show, that provides the key to real-life developments and catastrophes. Therein resides the fundamental systematic violence of capitalism…”