ABSTRACT
This chapter uses Žižek’s multiple references to Chesterton’s works as a way into the dilemma for communists about Žižek’s apparent deference to Christianity while simultaneously seeking ways to undermine capitalism. The universalism Žižek latches onto in Christianity, and admired by people like Milbank, is of a different stripe from the universalism of egalitarianism sought by communists. One need think here only of the differences in hierarchical structures in Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism, as opposed to the suggestions of someone like Kojin Karatani (Transcritique), who posits choosing leaders by lottery, not by ordination. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Žižek claims that “atheism bears the mark of the religion out of which it grew by negation,” and the author aims to repeat that structure by showing, through Chesterton’s Father Brown and Žižek’s own Lacanian model of the detective described elsewhere in Looking Awry, that Christianity bears the mark of the anti-hierarchical polytheism out of which it grew by negation, if only by being Janus-faced in the way Jan Assmann describes in Religio Duplex.
