Žižek’s Paul

Abstract

Slavoj Žižek has pretended to identify the non-ideologized core of Christianity in order to find a point of departure to criticize global capitalism. First of all, as conceptual clarification, we want to expose how Žižek let his idea of dialectical materialism come out of trinitarian dogma of Encarnation, which was first formulated through St. Paul’s doctrine of God’s kénosis. According to his lecture of Schelling and Hegel, the materialist subversion of philosophical discourse can’t be understood without paying attention to how the notion of Absolute was elaborated in German Idealism as decision-scission and self-alienation of God. Lastly, we will try to show why only a praxis that has faced the predicaments which follow from it is able to obtain a non-abstract universality. Such a praxis was the one which Paul tried to shape at the constitution of the Church.