Det posttraumatiska subjektet - subjekt, kapitalism och kristendom hos Slavoj Žižek.

Abstract

The study is aimed at investigating the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižeks theories of the ontology of the subject, the crisis of our modern society and his views on how theology, especially Christian theology, can provide the answer for the threats to our society. My main object is the article Descartes and the post-traumatic subject (2008) where Žižek elaborates thoughts about the subject and our capitalistic society. To be able to grasp these thoughts in full I have undergone an investigation not only on the writings of Slavoj Žižek, but also on the philosophers to whom he owe much of his theories, such as G.W.F. Hegel, Friedriech Schelling, Karl Marx and Jaques Lacan. In the study I have shown how the subject is, according to Žižeks psychoanalytic theories, decentered. That it's lacking a stable core, that it basically is lack. One of the main problems, creating our global capitalistic “worldless“ and excluding society is, according to Žižek, the fact that we do not realize this, but instead are forever attached to the fantasy of returning to the paradise from which we once came. I have done the above to provide an understanding of how the psychoanalytic goal of “traversing the fantasy” is for the subject to realize its status as a decentered subject, to no longer search for its lost origins, a paradise from which it has been thrown out. I have also shown how Christianity today can be the answer to these problems by rethinking the death of Christ as the death of God, the death of transcendence, and as the death of objet petit a, the object-cause of desire. And last I have provided an interpretation of Jesus Christ as the revolutionary grounding post-traumatic subject as the starting point from where our society must go to become a totally inclusive one, and how the ritual of the Eucharist is the main vessel for the overcoming of the society into a new social community, an egalitarian community in the Holy Spirit.