Thank God that Jeffrey Robbins takes Zizek seriously. Robbins finds one of the problems with Milbank and Radical Orthodoxy is in their rather fanciful account of history by wishing modernity never happened because it opened the door to the disenchantment of the universe and thus nihilism. Unlike John Caputo, Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, who see the death of the death of God theology as something to be celebrated, Milbank sees this as capitulating to the enemy. Zizek argues against both groups but appreciates ideas in both; in Caputo/Vattimo, their use of the weakness of God and in Milbank, his imaginative spiritual commitments. Still, he thinks their problems theologically are that they try to cover up the void and meaninglessness that one sees in human history and best described in the book of Job.
I think that one of the things that makes Zizek as a sort of theologian is his taking of evil seriously especially because the biblical narrative seems to take it serious; Robbins writes: "Perhaps it is the case that Žižek can come to his conclusions just as easily by Lacan or Hitchcock as by Christ, but there is no denying that when it comes to his analysis of the meaning of Christ‘s death on the cross he has the power to evoke the original scandal of the gospel as well, if not better, than any other contemporary thinker. And further, this reminder of the scandal of the gospel is an important and timely corrective to the triumphalistic tendencies of Christianity, as well as to the facile, self-help, or fundamentalist tendencies of contemporary religion. As Žižek writes, 'Christ‘s death on the Cross thus means that we should immediately ditch the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts, the guarantee of historical teleology—Christ‘s death on the Cross is the death of this God, it repeats Job‘s stance, it refuses any deeper meaning‘ that obfuscates the brutal reality of historical catastrophes'".
Robbins ends his review by writing the following: "Our history may very well be a misbegotten path, but there is a great distance between the notion that the modern world is the historical triumph of the necessary outworking of a material logic and the notion that we may reverse or repudiate our history at our whim. It is true that our history is full of latent possibilities and of roads not taken, but the way to build a different and better future does not come by way of denial. Beware of the return of the repressed."
This is exactly my problem with Radical Orthodoxy. Better to read history via Benjamin's more radical history of the missed opportunities and thus in the present try to jump start those events than fall into the trap of blaming Protestantism wholly for the so-called misdirection of history.
