Zizek, religion and ideology There is sometimes much to be learned from a thinker’s more apparently tangential sources, who seem to have no direct connexion with his or her major intellectual reference points. By the same token, there is something to be gleaned from a thinker’s choice of analogies. Zizek is famed for the aplomb with which he juxtaposes abstruse points of philosophical or psychoanalytic theory with examples from cinema or popular culture. But religious analogies occur with perhaps surprising frequency throughout his work. In his recent work, the scope of religion has expanded so that the analogical digression has become the substance of an argument. There is some point then in addressing these issues conjointly, by examining the use of religious writers and themes both in earlier and in very recent works of Zizek’s. Althusser, Pascal and the theory of ideology The presence of Althusser in Zizek’s work is hardly surprising: a Marxist with Lacanian inclinations seems an obvious guest at Zizek’s symposia. If we knew that a friend of his had been invited to keep him company, we would have a pretty good guess who that would be. Althusser repeatedly cited Spinoza as an inspiration, and two of his major followers, Etienne an and Pierre Macherey, have done important work on Spinoza.? But instead we would find Pascal. Instead of the arch-heretic who denied the existence of a personal God, and preached this-worldly happiness through the exercise of reason, we find an apologist for Christianity, whose affiliations were with the Jansenist movement, a hard-line tendency in Roman Catholicism with a pessimistic view of human nature and a rigorous doctrine of predestination. A reader as attentive as Zizek, however, would hardly have over- looked the presence of Pascal at the centre of Althusser’s essay on the theory of ideology. (Years later, on re-reading Pascal, Althusser recognised him as the source of the whole theory.)> Zizek prolongs the Althusserian enterprise by using Pascal to explore the nature of belief, in ways that go beyond Althusser himself. Althusser's main use of Pascal in the essay on ideology is to invert the hierarchical ordering of belief and action. The common conception,126 Paragraph or ideology, holds that the individual should act according to his or her beliefs. For Althusser, action precedes belief: the ideas in which an individual believes are his or her acts, inserted into material practices regulated by material rituals laid down by the ideological apparatus in question. And the inspiration for this inversion is Pascal, whom he paraphrases as follows:, Kneel move your lips in prayer, and you will believe’ (pp. 41-3).4 Zikek’s approach is rather different. He begins his Pascalian excursus with another fragment not mentioned by Althusser, but recognized by Pascalian interpreters as vital. For we must make no mistake about ourselves: we are as much automaton as mind (...). Proofs only convince the mind; habit provides the strongest proofs, and those that are most believed. It inclines the automaton, which leads the mind unconsciously along with it Zizek reads ‘automaton’ as denoting the ‘automatism of the signi- fier, of the symbolic network in which the subjects are caught,’ and comments as follows: ‘Here Pascal produces the very Lacanian defi- nition of the unconscious: “‘the automaton (i.e. the dead, senseless letter) which leads the mind unconsciously (...) with it’ (SOI, 37). Now at first sight this looks like a simple misreading, or perhaps a joke. The standard gloss of Pascal’s use of the term ‘automaton’ is that it denotes the body.® (This is basically how Althusser reads Pascal: the performance of bodily rituals subjects the individual to the ideological state apparatus that prescribes the ritual.) Iam not primarily concerned here to show that Zizek’s reading of Pascal is sound or unsound — there are certainly points the specialist would contest. But although the identification of the automaton with the letter of the unconscious seems far-fetched, it should not be altogether written off. Another major Pascal scholar, Philippe Sellicr, takes Pascal’s concept of the automaton to cover not only the body, but part of our psychic life.” This brings us a little nearer to Zizek in that it allows us to see not merely the body but also the unconscious as involved in the production of belief, As Zizek observes: “What distinguishes this Pascalian ‘custom’ from insipid behaviourist wisdom (...) is the paradoxical status of a belief before belief: by following a custom, the subject believes without knowing it, so that the final conversion is merely a formal act by means of which we recognize what have already believed. In other words, what the behaviourist reading of Pascalian ‘custom’ misses is the crucial fact that the external custom is always a material support for the subject’s unconscious (SOF, 40).Zikek, religion and ideology 127 Elsewhere, he analyses the Althusserian-Pascalian theory as follows: The implicit logic of [the] argument is: kneel down and you shall believe thai you knelt down because of your belief —that is, your following the ritual is an expression/effect of your inner belief in short, the ‘external’ ritual performatively generates its own ideological foundation.® There is none the less an important shift here from Althusser's concerns. Althusser’s point was that in all ideology there is a subjection that can be conceived on the lines of Pascal’s model of conversion, but that does not always take the subjective form of conversion. Conversion is the special case that reveals the general law. He uses Pascalian theory to bolster the Marxist theory of ideology, but makes no analogy between religious conversion and political commitment. Zizek explicitly does (SOI, pp. 39-43). That is to say, he is much more alert to the ethical issue of how political commitment is to be grounded or justified. This emerges from his analysis of another fragment of Pascal’s: Custom is the whole of equity for the sole reason that it is accepted. That is the mystic basis of its authority. Anyone who tries to bring it back to its first principles destroys it.” Zizek reads this as implying that belief can never be objectively justified by rational argument. One submits to it in the same way as, according to Pascal in the same fragment, we submit to law: because it is law. ‘We must search for rational reasons which can substantiate our belief (.. .) but (...) these reasons reveal themselves only to those who already believe’ (SOI, 37).'° That is to say, belief, or submission to the Law, must be understood in relation to the concept of the superego, that is, ‘an injunction which is experienced as traumatic, “senseless” — that is, which cannot be integrated into the symbolic universe of the subject’ (p. 37); while on the other hand, this traumatic fact must be ‘repressed into the unconscious, through the ideological, imaginary experience of the “meaning” of the Law, of its foundation in Justice, Truth (or, in a more modern way, functionality)’ (p. 38). The section of the wager fragment to which Althusser alludes, in which Pascal urges the unbelieving would-be believer to follow religious rituals, is thus quoted at length in support of the thesis of the primacy of belief over the reasons that vindicate it— for the believer (pp. 38—9). This assimilation of belief to Pascal’s concept of law and custom enables Zizek to plug the gaps in Althusserian theory. Althusser failed128 Paragraph to show how the Ideological State Apparatuses produce the effect of recognition and subjection. But if the law is obeyed, not because it is right, but because it is law, and we adhere to it because we cannot justify it, then its power to subject seems more comprehensible: “This external “machine” of State Apparatuses exercises its force only insofar as it is experienced, in the unconscious economy of the subject, as a traumatic senseless injunction’ (p. 43). We learn, further, from Pascal that the internalization of the symbolic machine of ideology never fully succeeds, ‘that there is always a residue, a leftover, a strain of traumatic irrationality and senselessness sticking to it, and that this leftover, far from hindering the full submission of the subject to the ideological command, is the very condition of it’ (p. 43). Why this is so is explained by another reference to Pascal (though also to Descartes). Ideological commitment produces various effects but only when they are sought as a by-product. Thus Pascal promises (Pensées, fragment 418) that religious faith will produce terrestrial advantages, in that it will improve our moral character and offer pleasures that provide an alternative to those we have given up. ‘But the point is,’ as Zizek observes, ‘that I can achieve this terrestrial profit only if I really believe in God’ (SOI, 83). Pascal has dangerously revealed the ‘enjoyment which is at work in ideology, in the ideological renunciation itself (p. 84)."! Pascal’s theory of law is invoked again in For They Know Not What They Do. Power depends on the belief that the law is authentic and eternal, but this conceals its real foundations: ‘At the beginning’ of the law, there is a certain ‘outlaw,’ a certain Real of violence which coincides with the act itself of the establishment of the reign of law: the ultimate trath about the reign of law is that of an usurpation, and all classical politico-philosophical thought rests on the disavowal of this violent act of foundation. (p. 204)? A theory of belief originally designed to support religion has been diverted to other purposes. But this is not surprising. The theory, it could be argued, has no intrinsic theological content. Pascal was concerned with the mechanism of belief, which works irrespective of its object (custom determines also our non-religious beliefs, attaches us to this-worldly goals and values—religious rituals are first and foremost a counterweight to this). Likewise, Pascal’s critical insight into law and society can be linked to his Jansenism: the theological insistence on the absence of God from the everyday world has to be vindicated by a relentless ‘demystifying’ critique. But the