a rumination on the notion of a master signifier and christianity

This morning I was reading Zizek's Parallax View and among many intriguing observations I came across his discussion of the master signifier and his assertion that such a signifier must be empty. The "nation" for instance is such a signifier in the way the concept is used. People talk about "the nation" as the rational for all kinds of behavior - but what do they mean? The master signifier must be always in the offing, never concrete, thus empty; and the reason is something I relate to Merleau Ponty's thought in the Phenominology of Perception: that the Other is transcendent to me up to the point where he speaks. Speech breaks the illusion of transcendence because then that person is just like me. And so the master signifier cannot speak ever - it must remain mute in order to have an effect or evince power. And what then is the master signifier of Christianity but Christ - between the burning bush and the Damascus Road there is a great silence - that is, for us, between the encounter with the law and the encounter with grace the Christian pivots on a necessarily empty, potential, space. And so Jesus is emptied by the believer (a phenominon we see in the church where people don't know what to say about Jesus, or Jesus is the sum of their projections, having no resemblance to the person depicted in the gospels) -What is the Christian experience: God is crucified, and thus the demand of the law is cancelled. And so we believe in an empty tomb, and we call this emptiness, this poetntial of resurrection or rebirth from death, Christ. At the Damascus Road God is reborn (a weaker but parallel rebirth would be the Emmaus Road and some other appearances - but these appearances fail to produce change, a new direction - the law is abbrogated, but people have nowhere to go - it remains for Paul to give them somewhere: the new creation). And this time instead of enjoining law, the new believer is ushered into grace.

This is Paul's discovery. This is perhaps why Paul's letters, big on the cross and what it accomplishes, are so abbreviated in painting any portrait of Jesus. Paul emphasizes the emptiness of Jesus when he says we no longer know him in the flesh but in the spirit. That is, any attempt to supply biographical content to Jesus as master signifier breaks the illusion of transcendence and robs the believer of the gift of grace. In all this Paul is not docetic - he retains the sense that God in Jesus became a man - but he empties out the actual life of that man. Jesus = 0. Marcion indeed did understand Paul, but Marcion's error is to suppose two Gods, an old one of violence and a new one of love, when what we have is the crucified law-God, the God that demands, reborn as the God of grace, the freedom-giving God who enjoins us to act "true to ourselves" in the phrase "what will you give in exchange for your soul."

The other meditation I had was a reflection on faith and works inspired by my cursory reading of Jean Luc Nancy. In considering what "my faith by my works" in James' letter might be, I inverted the Pauline/Lutheran concept "justification by faith alone without works" as "non-justified by non-faith alone." I applied an artistic prinicple of defining an object by its negative space - when I outline an object's negative space I should arrive at the same contours as if I had outlined its positive space. In this I saw that what non-justifies me is my non-faith. No work or no non-work non-justifies me. That is, the category of non-fiath has no works of sin. Sin, it seems, does not condem me. Sin as faith's opposite (where in Romans Paul says that what is not faith is sin) is put forth by Paul - but Paul does not speak of any classic "sin" as being that which non-justifies me. He doesn't say that people are non-justified by any action on their part (no matter how eggregious, perverse or outside the bounds). So I wonder if when we talk about justification by faith - and then talk about needing to quit sinning, if we're talking about two different things. Paul talks about entering the gift of grace via leaving non-justification by non-faith behind and moving into the category of justificaiton by faith and finding life - hence we are set free by the reborn God. Paul does not talk about entering this state in terms of "not sinning" - that term is the language of the dead God that we crucified. So we find life when we crucify the God of demands (the super ego, the big other, policeman) and in fact we must crucify this God so that God, when reborn, ushers us into a new life (our vocation) of grace and freedom. All this we have in Jesus - out of whose emptiness comes all abundance.