God Without The Sacred
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQKMtU3O1q4
Zizek: God is here no longer the miraculous exception which guarantees the normality of the universe, the unexplainable X who enables us to explain everything else; he is, on the contrary, himself overwhelmed by the overbrimming miracle of his Creation. Upon a closer look, there is nothing normal in our universe -everything, every small thing that is, is a miraculous exception; view from a proper perspective, every normal thing is a monstrosity.
Societies are created by codes, rules and beliefs about one-another, about nature, about altruism, about love and so on. There are certain rights and wrongs that become performative (i.e., we agree upon certain behaviors as a society) and over time , the performance becomes routine, the routine becomes truth and truth becomes dogma and people stop thinking. In comes comedians, blasphemers, and heretics. These are the voices who wake us up from our slumber. This is an article in defense of them. In defense of their platform. That humor is an anthropological tool toward making us better humans (or it can be). Their is social value in blasphemy. In most the ironic sense, these are the keepers of the a new form of dogma. A dogma that resists dogma. For to be a heretic one must rely upon the system of thought it is critiquing. For most, blasphemy is the inability to deal with ‘monsters’ (that which is other/different to us) – the temptation is to domesticate it. Blasphemy reminds us that it is not our responsibility to do so.
So, yes, I am claiming that words from the lips of Borat, John Stewart (Daily Show), Saturday Night Live, Russel Peters, and even South Park must be taken more seriously. For their role resides beyond a functional one. Emile Durkheim once made the claim that societies rely upon a functional theory. Meaning that ‘each part of society [and] how it contributes to the stability of the whole’ is the foundation of this theory. That each contribution is toward a ‘whole-r’ version of society. Including blasphemy.
Take for instance the above scene from South Park where the boys are told that there is a need to confess one’s sins to G-d to be forgiven. However, one of the questions that are raised is what about those who can’t speak, does that mean that they will not be forgiven? Yes, they go on to tasteless parody both sides of such a silly question. Yet, is not what they offer a window into the concreteness of our ideology or that of religion and the catholic church? That somehow they have become so unaware of their claims that they no longer follow the line of logic. That the system itself is corrupt. It actually ostracizes the very people it is meant to embrace? In other episodes they parody: rape, racism, christianity, islam, war, vegetarians and much more. Does this make what they do wrong, if it actually wakes people to changing their perspectives toward the betterment of the human experience for all?
There is this point where Jesus is in the middle of a conversation with some religious leaders about a holy day. Shabbat, or sabbath. What is sabbath if not a mnemonic device? To remind someone of something. To inscribe a memory of an event in the back of one’s mind. Yet, the peculiarity of this particular event (i.e., the day of rest that G-d took) was not populated with human eyes. (If one takes the Eden story as a literal event, sure, one might argue for the possibility of Adam and Eve being present on the ‘day’ of rest; but ultimately, not even then can one surmise what G-d was/was not doing on this event-less day; it is merely conjecture). So, in this sense, if we take the story to be just that, a metaphor of something else, then we are left with another possibility – that the Sabbath is the memory of an absence (i.e., you and I were not present of this so-called divine rest, therefore we are borrowing someone else’s memory and creating a doctrine out of it).
When Jesus challenges the notion of the Sabbath not being doctrinal, you better believe that this pissed-off the religious keepers of Jewish theology, he was being heretical here. He was making a point about memory, about identity (i.e., is not our identity, a composite of memories?), about power and how they seem to all get confused with one another. And how we seem to confuse them all as one-in-the-same. This was an act of blasphemy. A sin. A social contract was being challenged in a public setting. It was embarrassing. It was an act of castration. This was an attack on static forms of thinking. This is but one time where Jesus of Nazareth, a humble Rabbi stands up to the religious elite and forces them to re-think their position (which, in the end, they do not); but, how did he do it? Through blasphemy. Through all-out shame. By employing obscenities and publicizing their ideology as a sham and as being oppressive. No, blasphemy can be very healthy and even advantageous to a system that has become the status quo when it is meant to wake people up to what is really wrong.
The movie Crash takes our presupposed judgements along with our embedded/agreed-upon social codes and amplifies them to their extreme perversions. There is one scene where actress Sandra Bullock is walking along the street with her husband (Brendan Fraser) and clutches his arm tighter as they walk by two black guys (who ironically are talking about the visceral prejudices found on the streets of Los Angeles today; and also who happen to be hiding a weapon). Taking racism to its extreme does two things: (1) Highlights the innate inequality in the structures we use to identify ourselves and (2) Forces us to re-evaluate our role in such a situation (i.e., our we the perpetrators of such inequality, or are we the defenders against it). However, I think this is even itself a reduction of a plethora of responses to the dilemma found in identity politics.
So, what do we do in countries where blasphemy can still get you stoned? Do we remain at a distance and become pseudo-sensitive or do we take humor seriously and employ (or the countries themselves do so) paradox and parody to help heal the dogma that so enslaves? No, I argue here that blasphemy in any setting is a necessity, for it brings about change if people will listen. Think of the prophet who started his own cooking show with cow dung. What he did was unspeakable. We need parody, we need the shit to remind us of what kind of shit we have got ourselves into.
In a religious sense, the word blasphemy is the line of demarcation (i.e., you shouldn’t cross this line or else) between what is holy (what is transcendent, metaphysical, untouchable) and what is unholy. Blasphemy then takes what has been anthropologically (culturally) established as untouchable and makes it touchable. Is this not the radicality of the incarnation in the Christian cosmos? For me, this is blasphemy par excellence. In that, a divine holy being becomes touchable. The holy becomes unholy. The sacred becomes blasphemous – covered in shit and mire. For the sake of what?
The benefit of human experience. This is the benefit of satire. Of blasphemy. For it demands that we question the very foundations of our belief systems, our identities (does not Paul do the same in his diatribe again social-contractual-identities?
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