Marcus Pound ( Zizek: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Interventions) ) summarizes the Kabbalist account of creation that he finds analogous to the move of “withdrawal” that Zizek thinks is fundamental to Schelling, German Idealism, even, in a different register, Descartes: “Kabbalists who sought to maintain the absolute difference between the fallen world and God, while avoiding also a Gnostic rejection of the material world, gave expression to creatio ex nihilo as radical separation or tzimtsum , meaning ‘contraction’ or ‘constriction.’  According to thinkers like Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, for God to create the world he first had to create nothing.  In other words, God had to create first ‘a vacated space’ for creation itself to subsequently fill.  This was achieved by God’s founding act of contraction, a withdrawing into himself, reducing his essence to an immeasurable point form which there appears a place of possible separation.  Within this space God then sends out his rays of emanation . . . only to be immediately countenances by his contraction, thereby securing difference again.”

Something like this is the basis for the dialectical dynamic that is ontological necessary for Zizek.  Zizek writes,

“the ontological necessity of ‘madness’ resides in the fact that it is not possible to pass directly from the ‘animal soul’ immersed in its natural life-world to ‘normal’ subjectivity dwelling in its symbolic universe - the vanishing mediator between the two is the ‘mad’ gesture of radical withdrawal from reality that opens up the space for its symbolic reconstitution.”  And, “all reality involves a fundamental antagonism, and is therefore destined to fall prey to Divine fury, to disappear in the ‘orgasm of forces.’  Reality is inherently fragile, the result of a balance between contraction and expansion that can, at any moment, explode into one of the extremes.”

Zizek spins John 1:1 into this scheme.  How can the Absolute break out from the contraction necessary for creation: when one “‘finds the word’ that breaks the deadlock, the vicious cycle, of empty and confused ruminations.”

Except that the Word is eternal.  And, more importantly, creation is not withdrawal and contraction but something more interesting and, we might even say, daring.  Certainly more paradoxical.  Nothing is more straightforward and un-paradoxical than the truism that you can’t have two things in the same place at the same time.   Creatio ex nihilo confounds that common sense: Without contracting or withdrawing or shrinking, the Creator forms a world that is different from Himself, and occupies the same “space” that the Creator has always occupied.  God and world occupy the same space, wholly and at the same time.  The incarnation is the same model: No contraction of the Son in taking flesh; no squeezing of the Son to a point, and yet truly an incarnation, an embodiment and a placement of the Son in the human flesh as Jesus of Nazareth.

We can make sense of this two-occupying-one-space by stressing the transcendence of God, and we should.  But ultimately, it’s not going to be smoothed out.  Creation in Christian theology just is the paradoxical claim that God makes something other, truly other, without limiting or bounding Himself, and thus without establishing fences between Himself and creation.