Žižek on Job
November 13, 2009
This is the last of my videos of Žižek from the AAR.
What do you think of his interpretation of Job? Is he following Chesterton properly?
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Once again — by putting up these videos, I am not saying I agree with all he has to say, but rather, because I think they provide some ample opportunity for real discussion and dialogue.
Do you know where Chesterton discusses Job? I don’t remember.
WJ
No, I don’t. It’s been a long time since I read Chesterton, and it could be in many places of his works. It is why I wonder if his interpretation of Chesterton is correct here or not.
http://chesterton.org/gkc/theologian/job.htm
This is from Chesterton’s “Introduction to the Book of Job” from the link provided above. In my view, Zizek is being pretty faithful to Chesterton’s meaning.
“Thirdly, of course, it is one of the splendid strokes that God rebukes alike the man who accused and the men who defended Him; that He knocks down pessimists and optimists with the same hammer. And it is in connection with the mechanical and supercilious comforters of Job that there occurs the still deeper and finer inversion of which I have spoken. The mechanical optimist endeavors to justify the universe avowedly upon the ground that it is a rational and consecutive pattern. He points out that the fine thing about the world is that it can all be explained. That is the one point, if I may put it so, on which God, in return, is explicit to the point of violence. God says, in effect, that if there is one fine thing about the world, as far as men are concerned, it is that it cannot be explained. He insists on the inexplicableness of everything. “Hath the rain a father?. . .Out of whose womb came the ice?” (38:28f). He goes farther, and insists on the positive and palpable unreason of things; “Hast thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is, and upon the wilderness wherein there is no man?” (38:26). God will make man see things, if it is only against the black background of nonentity. God will make Job see a startling universe if He can only do it by making Job see an idiotic universe. To startle man, God becomes for an instant a blasphemer; one might almost say that God becomes for an instant an atheist. He unrolls before Job a long panorama of created things, the horse, the eagle, the raven, the wild ass, the peacock, the ostrich, the crocodile. He so describes each of them that it sounds like a monster walking in the sun. The whole is a sort of psalm or rhapsody of the sense of wonder. The maker of all things is astonished at the things he has Himself made.
This we may call the third point. Job puts forward a note of interrogation; God answers with a note of exclamation. Instead of proving to Job that it is an explicable world, He insists that it is a much stranger world than Job ever thought it was. “