Zizek’s more violent apocalypticism avoids these difficulties of the milder but less coherent apocalyptic of Alain Badiou. 

It is the commitment and passion inherent in apocalyptic that attracts Zizek. The deconstructive theology of John Caputo destroys the very foundations of Christianity because it opens up a gap between the “spectral unconditional Event” and the “contingent instantiations,” rendering incarnation an impossibility. For Caputo, the truth sets free because it sets us free from Truth, which may be possessed in unequal portions and lead to mastery of one over another (The Monstrosity of Christ, 257-258). Zizek argues, on the contrary, that the excess of Event over its embodiment in the name does not free us to choose our own bliss, a stance that can only underwrite bourgeois complacency. Instead, the Event comes to us as a promise and obligation. Caputo has a “death of God” theology without trauma and tragedy, a death of God in which the only thing that dies are the false “envelope of Divinity,” our misleading conceptions God as Lord, King, Authority, Mighty Other (260).

Zizek prefers the more radical, and in some ways more orthodox, apocalyptic theology of Thomas Altizer. For Altizer, as for Christian orthodoxy, God Himself dies on the cross, though Altizer draws conclusions that most earlier theologians would not countenance. Altizer’s apocalypse is an apocalypse for God Himself, and this end of the world is the very heart of Christian faith, though Altizer thinks it is usually covered over with polite forms of dogma. Zizek finds such apocalypticism attractive for its revolutionary power. It inspired the English and Russian revolutions, fueled early Islam, came to expression in Marxism (261). Apocalyptic is the “perverse core” of Christianity that Zizek wants to restore, albeit without including God in the mix.

In the struggle against the powers and principalities of global capitalism, Badiou’s adherence to the Event is fundamental, Zizek claims: “To engage in this struggle means to endorse Badiou’s formula mieux mut un &metre qu’un disetre: better to take the risk and engage in fidelity to a Truth-Event, even if it ends in catastrophe, than to vegetate in the eventless utilitarian-hedonist survival of what Nietzsche called the “last men.” What Badiou rejects is thus the liberal ideology of victimhood, with its reduction of politics to a program of avoiding the worst, to renouncing all positive projects and pursuing the least bad option” (Living in the End Times, xv).

Yet at the level of political analysis, Zizek departs from Badiou. Economy for Badiou is part of the “situation,” and thus it cannot be the site of Event. By the same token, Zizek rejects Badiou’s distinction between “politics as fidelity to an event and policing as ‘servicing the goods’ of a society.” For Zizek, the only point of loyalty to the Event the hope of “radically transforming” policing itself. He pushes the question back to the origins of Leftwing thought: “What if the ‘original sin’ of modern emancipatory movements can be traced back to the ‘young Hegelian’ rejection of the authority and alienation of the state?” (Monstrosity, 200). Zizek is both more and less apocalyptic than Badiou: More, because he acknowledges the constant traumatic turmoil of political life, the fact that there is always already eruption; less, because he recognizes that the point of radical politics is to contribute to a new social formation, more just than the last. Zizek’s dialectics are subtle enough to keep this more or less coherent.

Zizek confronts some difficulties at the other end. He wants eruptions to settle out institutionally; apocalypse makes the world more just. Zizekian apocalypse, unlike its Badiouan counterpart, aims at ends. Yet in a world of violent dialectics, there is little room for the extraordinary within the ordinary, little room for an event like the incarnation in which the Son of God is said to come as a normal Jewish man of the first century (Milbank in Monstrosity, 211). If apocalypse cannot become ordinary, it is hard to see how Zizek escapes the charge he levels against left Hegelians. If Badiou gives us apocalyptic bursts in a static surface, Zizek offers a percolating surface but cannot explain how it is a surface at all.