The paradox (which grounds so-called ‘conservative modernism’) is thus that the innermost possibility of modernism is asserted in the guise of its apparent opposite, of the return to an unconditional authority that cannot be grounded in positive reasons. Consequently, the properly modern God is the God of predestination, a kind of Schmittian politician who draws the line of separation between Us and Them, Friends and Enemies, the Delivered and the Damned, by means of a purely formal, abyssal act of decision, without any grounds in the actual properties and acts of concerned humans (since they were not yet even born). In traditional Catholicism, salvation depends on earthly good deeds; in the logic of Protestant predestination, earthly deeds and fortunes (wealth) are at best an ambiguous sign of the fact that the subject is already redeemed through the inscrutable divine act – that is, he is not saved because he is rich or did good deeds, he accomplishes good deeds or is rich because he is saved … Crucial here is the shift from act to sign; from the perspective of predestination, a deed becomes a sign of the predestined divine decision.
—Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999; rev. ed., 2008),136 .
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In