



































Disenchantment:


[Expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 95-104]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747-5367 

 

To Enchant or Disenchant? A Plea for Ambiguity in the Contrasting 

Musical Ontologies of Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank 

BRIAN D. ROBINETTE 

Saint Louis University  

 

 

If Jean-François Lyotard famously described the postmodern condition as incredulity 

towards metanarratives, the projects of Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank might well be 

described as metanarrative‟s revenge. The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? 

is nothing if not a shootout between dueling genealogists.
1
 Indeed, the pairing of Žižek 

and Milbank in this co-authored volume seems wholly fitting, almost inevitable, if at 

times insufferable. Granted the intellectually intoxicating quality of the contest, one 

cannot help but sense that what most unites them in their densely elaborate exegeses of 

Eckhart, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Chesterton, Lacan, Deleuze, and Badiou – among 

many others – is their relentless determination to exhaust and finally dominate the 

opponent. It is perhaps not a fit of histrionics that compels Creston Davis to declare in his 

introduction that the encounter staged here is “the intellectual equivalent of Ultimate 

Fighting” (19). The satisfaction derived from such blood sport will in some measure 

depend upon the reader‟s appetite. It may be, however, that a reader less moved by such 

“titanic” styles of thought will look for ways to bring mediating finesse to coarse 

opposition, or at the very least seek out ambiguity and permeability between positions 

that in the thick of battle seems all too fleeting.  

In his spirited response to Milbank‟s only (though quite lengthy) essay, Žižek attempts 

to clarify and sharpen the nature of their debate – a debate which, Žižek confesses, looks 

more like a sequence of monologues than a genuine point-counterpoint (235).
2
 The 

principle issue at stake, declares the Slovenian philosopher, is not merely that one 

believes in a transcendent, creator God while the other takes the “death of God” with 

unflinching, metaphysical seriousness. Nor is it that one advocates an analogical mode of 

thought as superior to a dialectical mode in the task of theology. (Žižek fully embraces 

the work of theology precisely as a radical materialist-atheist and is far more willing to 

take on its doctrinal content than many postmodern theologians, whom he routinely 

accuses of cynical obfuscation.) Push come to shove, the difference between them can be 

expressed in this way: whether we can, or should, declare that life has transcendent 

meaning, i.e., whether life in this “out-of-joint” universe can be considered “whole,” 

whether it makes some ultimate, even if hidden, “sense.” It is a matter of ontology as 

much as it is question about the “modern disenchantment of the world.” 

Appealing to Jacques Lacan‟s view of religion as drowning the world in sense, and 

thus congenitally prone to domesticating “the Real” – Lacan viewed psychoanalysis as 



To Enchant or Disenchant?  96 

 

 

squarely opposed to the all-too-human tendency to mask the constitutive Void at the heart 

of desire – Žižek declares that we must renounce the effort to re-enchant the world and 

instead follow the modern forces of disenchantment all the way down, follow them to 

their bitterest end, and accept with honesty (and not a little humor) that our symptoms 

admit of no final cure. To follow such a path is, Žižek argues, to opt for a direction 

diametrically opposed from the one Milbank would lead us on. It is a path that, rather 

than yearning with nostalgia for a harmonious order of being, a world dripping with 

“juicy sense,” to borrow again from Lacan, chooses to accept the desert of the Real as the 

first step towards discovering the truth about ourselves. Such a path represents the true 

legacy of Christianity, a legacy whose founding moment is and remains Jesus‟ cry of 

dereliction from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Against 

Milbank‟s “neo-pagan” effort to re-enchant the universe with a quaint ontology, which 

only serves to frame his genealogy of modernity as the story of a “fall,” Žižek proposes a 

more radically Christian enterprise that can be named so, not despite his atheistic 

materialism, but precisely because of it. The de-sacralizing impact of modernity is not a 

“fall” but a moment we must pass through and radicalize. “So while Milbank advocates a 

post-secular re-enchantment of reality,” writes Žižek, “I claim that we should learn to 

„live in a disenchanted world without wanting to re-enchant it‟” (247).  

Milbank, for his part, thinks his opponent‟s Hegel-fueled materialism is not just a 

piece of heterodoxy; it‟s hopelessly drab. Whereas a Catholic metaphysics “achieves a 

materialism in a joyful, positive sense,” Žižek‟s atheism “achieves only a sad, resigned 

materialism which appears to suppose that matter is quite as boring as the most extreme 

of idealists might suppose” (125). Milbank wonders how genuine love, whether agapeic 

or erotic, is possible in a “disenchanted cosmos” (123). Indeed, once we imagine human 

desire as hollowed out by an infinitely yawning Void that promises nothing but the hell 

of interminable dissatisfaction; or once we replace a “Catholic” metaphysics of 

participation with the “Protestant” metaphysics of dialectic, which only devalues the 

sacramental-aesthetic character of being; or once we affirm modernity as a necessary 

moment in the historical itinerary of world spirit that only comes to itself through self-

alienation, which would give priority to ontological violence over eschatological peace 

(didn‟t Heraclitus declare war as the “father of all,” and didn‟t Hegel boast that not a 

single fragment of this pagan master was left out of his system?): once we‟ve entertained 

and embraced all this, can we finally say that life is worth bearing, much less a gift, or 

worthy of social and political redemption? “Must we be confined within this Protestant, 

Jansenist, and totalitarian gloom?” Milbank asks. “Or can an alternative Catholic 

metanarrative be sustained by both the metaphysical plausibility of the Catholic outlook 

and its fidelity to the core of Christian doctrine” (131)? 

As both Žižek and Milbank are only too willing to acknowledge, their views about the 

origins, history, and legacy of “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) – a term first made 

prominent by Max Weber to describe the way modernity progressively purges the pre-



97  Robinette 

 

 

modern cosmos of “sacrality” – are thoroughly shaped by their ontological commitments. 

Perhaps without too much distortion those commitments can be summarized as follows: 

whereas Milbank envisions being in terms of “original peace,” as freely imparted by a 

triune God in whose infinite, and infinitely pacific, relations creation “participates,” 

Žižek argues for what he describes as the “ontological incompleteness of reality,” a view 

of being in terms of rupture and instability, a “being thrown” (in an expanded 

Heideggerian sense to include the whole universe), a sprawling multiplicity that can 

neither lay claim to an anterior peace nor expect some eschatological dénouement in 

which all discordant pieces will be made to fit, i.e., “make sense.” This is why Lacan saw 

a “life-and-death struggle” between religion and psychoanalysis (241): the former posits 

some “big Other” that can guarantee meaning through the promise of human desire‟s 

fulfillment, whereas the latter, while recognizing that such desire cannot finally be 

extirpated, resists and critiques the fantasy of wholeness and allows the trauma of our 

primal alienation to remain uncovered. Understood thusly, the difference between 

religion and psychoanalysis cannot be reduced simply to whether one believes in God; 

for it is quite possible to operate with an implicit ontology that valorizes “harmony” and 

“balance,” yet without making any explicit theistic or atheistic claim. Žižek regularly 

cites in his writings the modern ecological movement, New Age movements, and 

Western appropriations of Buddhism as illustrations of late modern nostalgia. In their 

different ways, whether by romancing the “balance of nature” or through meditative 

techniques of “letting go,” aspirants can soften the trauma of the Real – and meanwhile 

inure themselves from the disorienting effects of modern technological society and global 

capitalism. 

To say more about ontological commitments, and their role in shaping assessments of 

modern disenchantment, it might be useful to invoke a few musical references. To do so 

is hardly beside the point, despite the fact that music is not much discussed in The 

Monstrosity of Christ. (Žižek dedicates a section of his first essay to Richard Wagner, but 

it is the composer‟s plays and librettos that preoccupy him.) Žižek drops a musical 

allusion early on in his first essay that is especially suggestive. It is in reference to the so-

called “Pittsburgh Hegelians,” a recent North American retrieval of Hegel‟s philosophy 

that engages his dialectical logic to elaborate theories about discourse and argumentation. 

Žižek complains that such a movement would slay the “scarecrow image” of Hegel as 

thinker of the Absolute by separating his ontological commitments from his logic. It is 

Hegel‟s procedure, not the content of his metaphysics, that interests them – and which 

might render him “safe.” The problem with this sanitizing effort is that it dismisses 

outright the epochal character of his work, which, willy-nilly, casts everything in a 

different light after him. To be a Hegelian, without undergoing along with him the 

“breakthrough into a unique dimension of thought,” is to feign innocence. The effort 

would be like writing tonal music after Arnold Schoenberg‟s atonal revolution (26).
3
 



To Enchant or Disenchant?  98 

 

 

Žižek‟s throwaway reference to early twentieth century atonal music – as the end of 

musical innocence – might seem unworthy of lingering over were it not for the fact that 

Milbank‟s ontology is so characteristically Baroque. Those familiar with Milbank‟s work 

will likely recall the role Augustine‟s De Musica plays in his Theology and Social 

Theory, as well as his early programmatic essay, “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism: A 

Short Summa in Forty-two Responses to Unasked Questions.”
4
 In the latter piece 

Milbank sketches an ontology that accounts for the “differential flux” of creation in terms 

of harmony. The doctrine of creation ex nihilo means that being is suspended between 

nothing and infinity – “a reality without substance, composed of only relational 

differences and ceaseless alterations” (267). It is just this “being suspended” that Milbank 

elaborates quite at length in The Monstrosity of Christ, and in conversation with William 

Desmond‟s philosophy of the “between” (or metaxu) of being. (More on Desmond later.) 

On its face this differential flux of creation seems rambling and cacophonous, perhaps 

indistinguishable (musically speaking) from atonal serialism, which organizes sound by 

working through all twelve tones in the chromatic scale before one tone is repeated – a 

compositional process that effectively dismantles all “classical” canons of tonality and 

harmony. But this is not to Milbank‟s tastes, nor is it consistent with a Christian ontology 

that embraces the serializing differences of creation as a dynamic openness to polyphonic 

reciprocity, i.e., the “body of Christ” (268). To say as much does not imply that creation 

is a closed system. Milbank very much wishes to affirm an open ontology, even to the 

point of coming near to some postmodern accounts of differential flux. And yet a 

Christian ontology would internalize and redeem postmodern equivocity by showing how 

the differences in creation, no less than the difference of creation from God (ex nihilo), 

participate and share in God‟s own pacific relationality. Such an ontology is redemptive 

since it affirms “difference” as originally given in peace, as gift, and as open to an 

eschatological reconciliation yet to come. It is difference, after all, that allows for 

harmonic relationships to take shape. Though created differences may (and frequently do) 

produce conflict and violence, such amounts to a diminution or privation of being, which 

is how Milbank, in Augustinian fashion, characterizes evil: as a “fall” from the 

primordial peace of a triune God who at once is infinite relationship and perfect unity. 

Violence, on such a view, might be thought of as “an unnecessarily jarring note, a note 

wrong because „out of place‟, or else the premature ending of a development” (268). By 

saying “unnecessary” Milbank means that conflict is not constitutive of being (as Žižek‟s 

ontologizing of the negative would have it) but instead a contingent happening that is 

parasitical upon a prior good. That violence and conflict exist, there can be no doubt. 

That violence and conflict must be; this is what a Christian ontology denies by describing 

it as “fallen.”  

In the conclusion of his Theology and Social Theory, Milbank puts the matter this 

way: “The harmony of the Trinity is not the harmony of a finished totality but a „musical‟ 

harmony of infinity” (424). There is, he declares, “something „Baroque‟” about such a 



99  Robinette 

 

 

view, aesthetically speaking, and “in contradistinction to both the antique-classical and 

the modern avant-garde. In Baroque music, the individual lines become increasingly 

distinct and individually ornamented; there is an increasing „delay‟ of resolutions, and an 

increasing generation of new developments out of temporary resolutions.” Such temporal 

delays and spatial differences entail a fluidity and openness that allow for the surprise of 

contrapuntal interplay; and though it may seem that the interplay is on the verge of 

careening out of control as the possibilities of consonance are stretched to their outermost 

limits, “yet the path of dissonance is not embarked upon” (428).
5
  

Of course, it is the “path of dissonance” that is the very stuff of Schoenberg‟s atonal 

revolution, which is why Žižek‟s reference to it as a loss of musical innocence is so 

suggestive when characterizing the legacy of thought after Hegel. His point is obviously 

not to compare Schoenberg to Hegel, as though the latter‟s philosophy in some way 

“sounds like” the early twentieth century composer‟s music, but to describe the game-

changing significance of situating dialectical difference (rather than harmonic 

coincidence) at the heart of the philosophical enterprise. Neither is this to say, 

incidentally, that Žižek slavishly follows Hegel, any more than he mindlessly parrots 

Lacan or Marx; for how else could we explain the sometimes-ferocious opposition to 

Žižek from those who lay claim to greater interpretive fidelity?
6
 In any case, Žižek‟s 

ontology is very far from the Baroque sensibilities of Milbank. It is not as though Žižek is 

unwilling to grant something of the “spiritual authenticity” of Milbank‟s vision, which 

has as its premise “the beauty of an order mysteriously emanating from its unknowable 

center” (248). This is indeed one of the most basic insights of positive religion – that our 

“commonsense reality is not the true one,” that there is a “higher order” that casts into 

question mundane appearances (240). But if positive religion would make the world of 

common sense problematic in some way, it finally undermines the insight by promising a 

final reconciliation for all the world‟s loose ends. It covers over the traumatic gap at the 

heart of fidgety human desire, i.e., our non-self-coincidence, by assuring us of a 

wholeness (or pleroma) yet to come. Religion is fabulously effective in the effort to 

enchant because it identifies while repressing the symptom. It detects the disturbing non-

sense that resists our best efforts at present harmonization only to re-contextualize it by 

some hidden, transcendental sphere of meaning. “Religion is made to do this,” says 

Lacan, “to cure people, that is to say, to make it sure that they do not note what doesn‟t 

go smoothly.”
7
  

It is just the “smoothness” of Milbank‟s ontology (despite the hardness of his 

opposition) that Žižek finds so objectionable, and indeed un-Christian. Never mind that 

Christianity is typically regarded as a species of religion. Žižek thinks of genuine 

Christianity less as a religion in this sense and more as “the religion of the end of 

religion,” to borrow a phrase from Marcel Gauchet.
8
 Christianity is the religion of “the 

death of God,” and as such must be thought of as leading to the (apocalyptic) undoing of 

religion itself (260–8). By identifying God precisely where alienation from God is at its 



To Enchant or Disenchant?  100 

 

 

most extreme – the dialectical logic of Jesus‟ cry of abandonment implies that God is 

where God most is not, or that God is alienated from God‟s self – Christian faith exposes 

a rupture in the fabric of being that not even the most elastic application of the analogia 

entis can hope to repair. Whereas Milbank would take safe harbor in the Chalcedonian 

formula that affirms Christ as God and human in paradoxical unity, which he believes 

underwrites the medieval Catholic “synthesis” of matter and spirit (as well as reason and 

faith), Žižek opts instead for a Hegelian (or “radical Protestant”) trajectory that situates 

these terms in dialectical opposition, with the effect that Christ is seen, not as the earthly 

“manifestation” of an absolute, invisible transcendence that remains self-subsistently in 

reserve, but as the absolute kenosis of God in which divinity is at last emptied of all 

content. The death of Jesus does not mean that once there was a transcendent God and 

now there isn‟t; it means that there never was a transcendent God who might rescue this 

“miserable individual, this ridiculous and derided clown-king” from the horror of the 

cross – and now we have no way to avoid this monstrous truth (80).  

“A truly logical materialism accepts the basic insight of religion,” writes Žižek, “its 

premise that our commonsense reality is not the true one; what it rejects is the conclusion 

that, therefore, there must be another, „higher‟, suprasensible reality. Commonsense 

realism, positive religion, and materialism thus form a Hegelian triad” (240). Put with 

such economy, it is not difficult to see why Milbank accuses Žižek of reading the history 

of thought as a “series of ineluctable advances” leading finally to the “voluntarist 

disenchantment of the cosmos” (115). Though Žižek vigorously denies the charge that he 

reads history as in any way a “necessary” process, Milbank is quite right to urge a 

reading of nascent modernity with far greater sensitivity to historical contingency than 

Žižek seems to allow. Of course, such urging also applies to Milbank‟s own genealogical 

effort, which at times appears equally reductive.  

One thinks especially in this regard of the detailed and remarkably nuanced account of 

modern disenchantment provided by Charles Taylor in his A Secular Age.
9
 What makes 

Taylor‟s presentation a helpful intervention here, at least potentially, is its success in 

demonstrating that any attempt to comprehend the relationship between late-medieval 

reform movements and modern secularization will not easily yield to a narrative of 

decline or ascent. Only with a painstaking “zig-zag” account, as Taylor puts it, will we be 

able to make much sense of the many passages to modernity and postmodernity; and even 

then only the most tentative conclusions can be reached, given the emergent complexity 

and frequently ironic mutations that inflate the “expanding universe of disbelief,” which 

Taylor also describes as a historical “nova effect” (299-419). The effort to discern the 

connective tissues between the pre-modern “cosmos” and the modern (and postmodern) 

“universe” requires a patient eye for granularity that big-picture accounts too often 

simplify or distort. There are the many proximate factors that contribute to this shift, 

naturally, including a growing “this-worldly” orientation in popular devotional practices, 

increased emphasis on interiority, the “democratizing” instincts of late-medieval 



101  Robinette 

 

 

mysticism, the flourishing of courtly love traditions, renewed interests in classical 

literature and rhetoric, the growing influence of nominalist realism and technical reason, 

and the hardening conflicts between ecclesial and temporal power that set the stage for 

dramatic realignments. But there are the more tectonic forces of a de-sacralizing sort that 

run very deep in Jewish and Christian self-understanding, and which therefore require us 

to assess modern disenchantment as an ambiguous achievement of that self-

understanding. Taylor points for example to the deep “Abrahamic unease” with sacral 

kingship (to borrow a phrase from Francis Oakley
10

), the legacy of creation ex nihilo 

(which views the world as “wholly other” to God, yet sustained by divine will), the 

anthropological significance of the imago dei traditions, the incarnational imagination 

that gave earthly “grip” to spiritual aspiration, the extension of ascetical regimes to 

society, and the universalizing impulses of apostolic mission: in these and many other 

ways we can identify structural patterns that, while not leading ineluctably to the modern 

sense of worldly “immanence,” are unmistakably involved in its formation.  

Although Taylor is certainly willing to risk generalized assessments, the overall 

impression when reading his account, especially in light of the encounter between Žižek 

and Milbank, is that, while a debate may genuinely be had over the nature and ongoing 

significance of modern disenchantment, adequate comprehension of the complexity 

involved is not best served by viewing it through the scopes of polemically-shaped 

metanarratives, especially those as narrow as a “Catholic” versus “Protestant.” It is not as 

though Žižek and Milbank provide no historical insight, of course; and surely the sort of 

detail and shade offered by Taylor is not news to them. (Milbank cites Taylor, in fact, and 

Taylor himself acknowledges a debt to Milbank.) Yet their readings of the history of 

theology, governed as they are by their sharply contrasting ontologies, do not often 

permit them to offer the tentative and conciliatory gestures that a more dialogically-

shaped engagement is likelier to produce. And so a plea: Is it possible to acknowledge 

greater ambiguity in historical assessment where excessive clarity dominates? Or, to put 

it in the terms frequently used in The Monstrosity of Christ, is there more room for 

equivocity where interpretive univocity tends to crowd? 

Which brings me to my second and final plea for mediation. It is a great strength of 

Milbank‟s essay that he enlists the philosophical work of William Desmond
11

 in support 

of his claim that “metaxalogical” thinking provides a richer and more generous account 

of being than does univocal thought (which we might associate with nominalism), 

equivocal thought (which we might associate with many postmodern modern accounts of 

difference), and dialectical thought (which obviously aligns with Hegel and Žižek, [131–

60]). Though Milbank has long championed a “metaphysics of participation” as the 

appropriate philosophical-theological response to modern univocity and postmodern 

equivocity, with the Monstrosity of Christ serving now as his most extended engagement 

with Žižek‟s self-described “postmetaphysical idealism” (91), Desmond‟s work allows 

him the opportunity to clarify and flesh out how the “between” (or metaxu) of being is 



To Enchant or Disenchant?  102 

 

 

most richly accounted for through analogical thinking because, among other things, it 

accords a legitimate place for univocal, equivocal, and dialectical aspects of reality 

without reducing to the sum of them (166). The generosity of such a view (as well as its 

rigor) is on open display throughout the whole of Desmond‟s stunning work, and not 

least in his handling of Hegel, on whose thought he is a widely acknowledged authority. 

It is precisely the subtlety of Desmond‟s work, however, that may lead those familiar 

with and appreciative of it to be disappointed in Milbank‟s comparative lack of subtlety 

when treating of those very aspects. By so thoroughly opposing paradox to dialectic as an 

either/or proposition, which the mimetic doubling of the debate seems to require, the 

capaciousness and “finesse” of analogical thinking (as Desmond frequently puts it) 

becomes constrained and unnecessarily defensive, at times overly systematized and self-

confident in ways that make it vulnerable to Žižek‟s charges of nostalgic insularity. This 

is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Milbank‟s tone deafness to the trauma of the 

cross.  

When Žižek accuses Milbank of a “regression to paganism,” what he means is that his 

musical ontology sounds strangely innocent of the shocking dissonance of Jesus‟ 

crucifixion (248). “In Hegelese, Milbank‟s vision remains that of a substantial immediate 

harmony of Being; there is no place in it for the outburst of radical negativity, for the full 

impact of the shattering news that „God is dead‟” (249). What ontological whole, Žižek 

asks, could possibly justify the historical disasters that Jesus‟ crucifixion so horrifically 

typifies? What invisible harmony, what teleological outcome could make “juicy sense” 

of, or finally redeem, the Holocaust, the recent slaughters in Congo, the AIDS epidemic, 

or ecological devastation (53–55)? “Christ‟s death on the Cross thus means that we 

should immediately ditch the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees 

the happy outcome of our acts, the guarantee of historical teleology – Christ‟s death on 

the Cross is the death of this God, it repeats Job‟s stance, it refuses any „deeper meaning‟ 

that obfuscates the brutal reality of historical catastrophes” (55). It is with statements like 

these that the reader is made to understand that when Žižek declares the universe as 

“ontologically incomplete” and “originally out-of-joint,” it is not just the heady brew of 

Hegelian dialectic, quantum mechanics, and Alain Badiou‟s use of Cantorian set theory 

that is talking (90–101); it is also a protest to the scandal of evil, and the greater scandal 

of its domestication through enchantment.  

It may well be that readers who do not find Žižek‟s manner of ontologizing the 

negative especially convincing will nevertheless find his commentary on Job and the 

crucified Christ among the most gripping and challenging pages of the entire volume. If 

those same readers are, like myself, far more inclined towards to the sort of analogical 

thinking that funds Milbank‟s incarnational materialism, and which looks to the paradox 

of Christ as the “infinite particular” or the “concrete universal” (187), they will likely 

have hoped for a more thorough and humble engagement with the disturbing reality of 

evil and suffering than Milbank provides. Readers may justifiably be troubled with 



103  Robinette 

 

 

Žižek‟s own approach to evil, which, as Milbank points out, incorporates several gnostic 

motifs. (Witness Žižek‟s reading of the Void and desire‟s tragic lack through what Cyril 

O‟Regan calls the “haunted narrative” of Jacob Boehme
13

, which Hegel also incorporated 

[41–2; 111–12; 194–6].) And yet those same readers may be disappointed that Milbank‟s 

basic reply is to declare theodicy only “a modern project, mostly unknown to the Middle 

Ages […] For that epoch, as for the earlier Patristic one, evil was the „impossible‟ denial 

of one‟s loyalty to the all, to being as such. It was an act of privation and of self-

deprivation – a matter of trying absurdly to be less than one really is. Evil therefore had 

no ontological status, and in consequence did not need to be explained” (196). To declare 

evil of “privation” of the good may not be inappropriate when properly understood; and, 

indeed, it may itself reflect a hopeful protest against (and not merely a rationalization of) 

its reality in a way that stimulates ardent action for its overcoming, to the extent this is 

possible for us here in “the between.” But the sort of response Milbank offers here, 

namely, to summarily declare it without ontological status on account of the 

plenitudinous goodness of being, neither does justice to the lived reality of evil in its 

disturbing equivocity nor to the scandal of the crucified Christ that the very incarnational 

materialism of Milbank demands. It will not due to turn up the volume on a Bach cantata 

to drown out the wails of Penderecki‟s threnody, or to characterize the gravelly, dolorous 

growls of Blind Willie Johnson as the privation of Claudio Monteverdi‟s vespers. “An 

outcry from the stricken soul,” writes Desmond, “a rasping plea: we do not know what 

evil means at all, what it all means – this is what the stutter says, and perhaps the sleek 

argument too.”
14

 As Desmond is careful to show, a more comprehensive and finessed 

account of the “betweenness” of being will expose itself to the equivocity of evil, its 

many meanings, its baffling resistance to meaning, and the “primordial strain” its power 

places on “any naïve faith in the goodness of being itself”
 
(79). Such exposure in the 

passio essendi need not render faith in the created goodness of being a matter of willful 

ignorance, much less the “soft-Fascist” ideology that Žižek attributes to it (250). But it 

will give added poignancy to Jesus‟ apocalyptic cry of dereliction that invites us to 

imagine how precisely in our suffering and exposure to evil we “participate” in the 

trinitarian life of God. 

 

Notes 

 

1. Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? ed. 

Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009). 

2. An assessment only confirmed by their post-publication responses (see Milbank, “Without 

Heaven There is Only Hell on Earth: 15 Verdicts on Žižek‟s Response,” Political Theology 

11.1 (2010): 126–35; Žižek, “The Atheist Wager,” Political Theology 11.1 (2010): 136–

40.). 

3. Žižek makes clear that the “breakthrough” achieved by Hegel cannot itself simply be 

accounted for in Hegelian terms. Hegel is “the last of the idealist metaphysicians and the 



To Enchant or Disenchant?  104 

 

 

first of the postmetaphysical historicists,” which means that Hegel‟s thought is more 

properly fulfilled when passed through (26–7). 

4. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell 

Publishers, 1990); “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism: A Short Summa in Forty-two 

Responses to Unasked Questions,” in The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, ed. 

Graham Ward, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 265–78. 

5. Compare to the striking assessment given by David Bentley Hart, Milbank‟s best known 

student: “Bach is the greatest of Christian theologians, the most inspired witness to the ordo 

amoris in the fabric of being; not only is no other composer capable of more freely 

developing lines or of more elaborate structures of tonal mediation (wheresoever the line 

goes, Bach is also there), but no one as compellingly demonstrates that the infinite is beauty 

and that beauty is infinite. […] Bach‟s is the ultimate Christian music; it reflects as no other 

human artifact ever has or could the Christian vision of creation” (The Beauty of the 

Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 282–3). 

6. It is worth noting that for as much as Milbank and Žižek dispute each other‟s readings of 

Chesterton, Kierkegaard, and Eckhart, with Milbank dedicating an inordinate amount of 

space in his essay to reclaim the “hyperbolic orthodoxy” of the Meister – and with 

somewhat uneven results – Milbank declares Žižek to be a “relentlessly accurate 

interpreter” of Hegel, who, he hastens to add, was “already a Christian nihilist and „atheist‟” 

(112). One wonders whether Milbank‟s eagerness to push Hegel into Žižek‟s corner too 

readily serves the tactical purpose of treating them with minimal discrimination. Might 

there be greater space between Hegel and Žižek than is here supposed? Without venturing a 

reply here, the effort to determine the suitability of this nihilist-atheist reading of Hegel 

might profitably be served by interacting with the kind of assessment characteristic of, say, 

Rowan Williams, perhaps all the more so given the theological proximity of Williams and 

Milbank (see especially, Rowan Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” in Wrestling with 

Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology, ed. Mike Higton (Grand Rapids, MI: William 

B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007]: 35–52). 

7. Quoted in Žižek and Milbank, Monstrosity of Christ, 242. 

8. Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. 

Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 

9. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard, 2007). 

10. Francis Oakley, Kingship: The Politics of Enchantment (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 

2006). 

11. William Desmond, God and the Between (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2008). 

12. Cyril O‟Regan, Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme’s Haunted Narrative (Albany, NY: 

SUNY Press, 2002). 

13. Desmond, God and the Between, 78. 


