In light of the ensuing discussion, it seemed like a good idea to fill out the whole issue of the ethical relevance of intentions a bit more. What is absolutely important in regard to this issue is to understand the way “intention” must never be used to absolve us of our actions. This is at the heart of what I was putting forth earlier. So, rather than the stark language of “intentions don’t matter” that I used to cheaply grab your attention, what really needs to be said is that any attempt to posit a morally meaningful disjunction between intention and action is illicit. What absolutely cannot be allowed is for ethical analysis to take the shape of, “Yes, this horrible thing happened, but when you see it from my ‘inside view’ you’ll understand why I’m not really all that culpable.” This is exactly the way the “appeal to intentions” functions in regard to the example given by Bacevich in regard to America’s action in Iraq. It is this sort of attempt to posit a disjunction between intention and action that is morally disastrous, and shrouded in self-deception.
Slavoj Žižek, in his book Violence makes this point absolutely clear with regard to the horrors committed under Soviet Communism:
When, in the 1960s, Svetlana Stalin emigrated to the U.S. through India and wrote her memoirs, she presented Stalin “from inside” as a warm father and caring leader, with most of the mass murders imposed on him by his evil collaborators, Lavrenty Beria in particular. Later, Beria’s son Sergo wrote a memoir presenting his father as a warm family man who simply followed Stalin’s orders and secretly tried to limit the damage. Georgy Melenkov’s son Andrei also told the story, describing his father, Stalin’s successor, as an honest hard worker, always afraid for his life. Hannah Arendt was right: these figures were not personifications of sublime Byronesque demonic evil: the gap between their intimate experience and the horror of their acts was immense. (Emphasis added)
This crystallizes my point. Whenever appeal to “the inside” functions by way of introducing a disjunction between what is happening “out there” and “the real me/you,” then everything is wrong. That is what absolutely cannot be allowed within morally meaningful ethical discourse. The reason for this is because who we really are, the true story about us, lies not in our self-contemplations, but in who we are to others. Whatever Svetlana thought about who her father “really was,” in his private, tortured soul, the truth of who Stalin was is inscribed the masses of unmarked graves he left behind. That, not any internal reflection or emotional complexity he may have felt is who he was. The truth of who we are is not found inside us, but always outside ourselves in how we act on others and how they act on us (I think there’s a christological point in here somewhere).
Žižek drives the point home:
The experience that we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally a lie—the truth lies outside, in what we do. (p. 47, emphasis added)
So, when put carefully, it isn’t that intentions have no relevance at all to ethics. Rather it is that they can never be allowed to function in an exculpatory way in ethical discourse. Appealing to the intentions may be licit in terms of condemnation of what seem, on the surface, to be acceptable acts, but they can never function as justification for ostensibly evil ones. Thus, to pull some sort of axiom out of all this, one might say that there cannot be any licit appeal to intentions to justify an act. Intentionality may, however serve to indict what may appear as acceptable acts in some cases. However, the overriding point must always be that any attempt to establish a disjunction between intention and act for the purpose of self-justification is to be rejected in all circumstances.
Žižek takes Dostoyevsky’s dictum “If God doessn’t exist, then everything is permitted” to task, claming, in true Žižek fashion, that the opposite is in fact true: if God does exist everything is permitted to those who speak for God:
Further to this point, Rowan Williams’ theology offers a helpful response to Žižek’s critique in that for Williams it is completely impossible for the church to ever make a strict identification between their work and the will of God. The only possible “direct link” we have to the Christian God is the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ which forbids us from gingerly locating ourselves on the side of God and God’s cause. Rather, according to the Christian gospel we are addressed by God precisely as those whose agenda is at cross-purposes with God. Any attempt on the part of the people called by God to equate their will and action with that of God is always to exchange the true God for some miserable godlet, an idol. Moreover, the God whose power is manifest precisely as cross and resurrection does not allow those who would follow God recourse to any other mode of power:
It was a delight last night to go and listen to Slovoj Žižek speak here in Portland. Though he was, allegedly here to speak on and promote his most recent book, his actual lecture, was of course something rather different. He spoke about the “culture of politeness,” the nature of academic discourse, the problems with contemporary liberalism, and of course made countless references to contemporary films, in most of which he detected horribly fascist undertones–especially in “The Dark Knight,” the discussion of which I found the most entertaining by far.
This kind of way of conceptualizing nature clearly has its problems, though I respect it for at least taking the empirical reality of what happens “naturally” in our world seriously. What I appreciated even more was the way in which Žižek uncompromisingly berated “new age spiritualism” with its goddess language and deification of the earth. There were hushed murmurs and quiet quasi-boos in the audience when Žižek insisted that Christians and secularists should be behind the same barricades fighting against any sort of new age spiritualism, particularly the rather lame incarnation of Zen Buddhism in the West.
However, this way of reading the matter is deceptive. The truth of the matter is that there are precious few true fundamentalists around these days. Or at the very least, the people we tend to nominate as such, are in fact not authentic fundamentalists at all. If fundamentalism is understood as “
Herein lies the fascination of pseudo-fundamentalism, their very passionate intensity “bears witness to a lack of true conviction. Deep in themselves, terrorist fundamentalists also lack true conviction–their violent outbursts are proof of it. How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be, if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a low-circulation Danish newspaper.” And here is the crux of the matter, the issue is not that the rest of the world thinks fundamentalists are inferior and stupid, “but rather that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior.” “The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite fact that fundamentalists are already like us, that secretly they have already intenalised our standards and measure themselves by them.”
I’m currently reading Savoj Žižek’s latest book, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. The book it vintage Žižek, going off on somewhat related tangents frequently that are always thought-provoking and often entertaining. What is helpful about the book is the way in which it rightly complexifies talk of violence and peace. Žižek delineates three forms that violence takes, one which we are familiar with, and two which tend to happen below the surface of our perceptions about society. The first form of violence that Žižek describes is what we commonly think of as violence: the event of one person perpetrating harm on another. This Žižek calls “subjective violence.” It is clear and visible and it is always perpetrated by a guilty subject. The central thing to note about how we perceive this form of violence is that it is always an interruption into a prior background of tranquility and peace. First things are in a state of peace and then that peace is disrupted by an act of violence.
Whether or not Žižek is correct about everything he seeks to say about these three modes of violence, it is certainly the case that if we construe violence as simply visible acts of harm perpetrated by agents, we have a woefully naive notion of violence. What is helpful about Žižek’s account is that he complexifies violence in a way that helps us to eye with suspicion any sort of self-righteous liberal pacifism that assumes we can “reject violence” simply by not punching or shooting someone else. For Christian pacifists, this sort of reflection is absolutely essential. Nothing is more dangerous to the Christian witness for peace than the assumption that we are not implicated in the violence of our world, and that is an assumption that is all to easy to make. For Žižek of course, it seems to be an open question whether there can be any real occurrence of true peace in a world so ubiquitously determined by violence. That is certainly something to talk about in another post. However, the main point I’ve enjoyed having Žižek remind me of thus far is the importance of understanding the depths and vicissitudes of violence that shape and enable our own lives. I’m only able to type this post on this iMac because Bill Gates has taken vast amounts of money, resources, and indeed, lives to make it possible (for more on this buy the book and read Žižek’s discussion of Bill Gate’s and his philanthropy). Any notion that I can somehow “withdraw” from the systemic violence that enables my life is absurd and I need to recognize the absurdity of any pacifism that would seem to say that I can so withdraw.
I’ve often wondered what kind of Christian Slovoj Žižek would be if he converted. Would he likely be a Roman Catholic? Protestant? Eastern Orthodox? I’d say his theology lends itself to a particularly protestant flavor, sometimes reading almost just like Eberhard Jüngel or Jürgen Moltmann. His notion of the crucifixion as the end of any sort of abstract transcendence or God as a guarantor of meaning has a particularly Lutheran-theology-of-the-cross ring to it. However, Žižek’s socialist politics would certainly be at home among the radical Catholicism of someone like Herbert McCabe, so perhaps he could at least conceivably become a Catholic. Of course we would be hard pressed to ignore both his slavic roots and his very Eastern Orthodox-worthy beard, which indicate he would be quite at home among the Orthodox. But, what think you? If Žižek were to really take the plunge and become a Christian, what branch of Christianity do you think he’d likely wind up in?
In The Fragile Abolute, Slavoj Žižek opens his book with a discussion about how to best encapsulate the “gist of an epoch.” He argues that to understand the cultural-political reality of a particular time and place we must look, not so much at the explicit features that define the “social and ideological edifices” of that cultural formation, but rather for the “disavowed ghosts that haunt it”. The example of this he turns to is the “Balkan ghost”, the way in which the people of the former Yugoslavia are seen from the perspective of the rest of Europe. For all the various countries in Europe, ”the Balkans” constitute the “barbarian Other”, encoding an ideological antagonism into the fabric of European consciousness which embodies a particularly modern form of racism.
One of the interesting elements of Johann Baptist Metz’s political theology are the multiple interstices between it and the theological-philosophical expostulations of Slavoj Žižek. One of the essential points of continuity is the way in which both of the, drawing on Frankfurt School Marxist critical theorists, try to take seriously the realities of how modern capitalism has shaped history. Both attempt to work out a form of critical social theory (and, at least for Metz, a praxis) that takes the situation of modern suffering and nihilism seriously. A key convergence between these two thinkers on this point lies in how both reject theoretical strategies to fashion conceptual systems that provide guarantees of meaning and existential closure in light of the modern history of human suffering and death. Žižek and Metz both insist in their distinctive ways that a theological reading of the modern age does not provide a seamless integration or sublimation of the history of human suffering into a divine history of salvation, but rather requires our reading of historical human suffering to become more radically historical and open-ended. 
Metz’s reading of the history of modernity ensconces a similarly stark frame of reference. Like Žižek, Metz is against any tidy narrative of salvation history which renders intelligible and understandable the history of human suffering. The history of human suffering is precisely a nonidentity for which no “explanation” can be given without betraying the distinctive character of that history of suffering. Metz resists any theodicy which proffers simple closure in the face of the reality of radical evil. Rather, for Metz it is precisely within the context of the inexplicable reality of radical evil that theology, prayer, and hope in the apocalyptic future of God in Christ must take shape. For Metz, the Christian theologian must point to the radical openness of the future in light of God’s past of interrupting the world in Christ. For the Christian theologian, the agenda is not to find a way to give the world’s history of suffering some sort of “meaning”, but rather to point to the radically new transformation that is hoped for in Christ’s apocalyptic invasion of the world. By construing history apocalyptically, the theologian testifies to the world as a history which is held open for the redemption of the hopes of those who have died stripped of any hope whatsoever.
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