When Žižek met the Church Fathers: A contextual consideration

Abstract

This article considers the functionality, method and import of the critical theorist Slavoj Žižek’s engagement with theology against the wider intellectual backdrop of the relationship between an idea and its cultural context. I propose that his engagement can be better understood and interpreted with reference to how Christian theology has historically come to understand its own cultural context. When Žižek’s appropriation of theology is read alongside theology’s appropriation of classical philosophy in the patristic period, a distinctly speculative understanding of theology as an idea developing through a dialectical process of determinate negation in its various contexts.