the future of emancipationresponds to this issue in one of his recent books. Needless to say,
Žižek’s interest in theology is deeply connected with his overarching
interest in reformulating and reopening the potentialities of
materialism. In this respect, of course, he can be seen as a dedicated
inheritor of Benjamin, even if he rarely acknowledges this debt in any
explicit or detailed way. It is safe to say, in any case, that this affiliation
is nowhere clearer than in the book entitled, precisely, The Puppet and
the Dwarf, in which, as the title implies, Žižek directly takes up and
reinterprets — albeit rather briefly — Benjamin’s parable from the
Theses. Or, to be more exact, Žižek reverses the roles of the major
“actors” in the parable: the puppet, we learn, should now be played
by theology, whereas the role of the dwarf that is to drive the machine
but stay out of sight should be assumed by historical materialism. Why
is this reversal necessary according to Žižek? Of course, the answer
that immediately springs to mind, prompted and supported by an
overwhelming dominant discourse, is that anything called “historical
materialism” would do well to keep a low profile at present; but, for
Žižek, this cannot be the whole story. As it turns out, he wants to
relate theology and historical materialism because he locates a certain
“subversive kernel” in Christianity and claims that this core element
is not only of great value for a materialist approach but that it is also
uniquely accessible to such an approach:
My claim here is not merely that I am a materialist through and
through, and that the subversive kernel of Christianity is accessible also
to a materialist approach; my thesis is much stronger: this kernel is
accessible only to a materialist approach — and vice versa: to become a
true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian
experience.^6What is this element of Christianity, then, with which one needs to
get acquainted if one is to become “a true dialectical materialist”? As
it turns out, Žižek offers several formulations of this “hidden core” in
his book. For example, referring to the myth of the Fall, he raises the
- Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, Cam-
bridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 2003, 6. Henceforth, page references
to the book are given in parentheses.