Puppet, Dwarf and Chess: to a Dialectic of Happiness and Salvation

Abstract

This article examines the role of theology in the philosophical and political projects of Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben. Existing interpretations generally range from the thesis of the authors' radically atheistic position to elevating them to the rank of peculiar theologians. On the one hand, Žižek and Agamben criticize the existing secular order precisely because it still retains a hidden dimension of the sacred (in the form of the Other or the dispositive); on the other hand, in both cases, it is necessary to resort to theological tools in order to overcome it.

This duality in relation to theology in Žižek and Agamben is considered in the article as “inherited” from Benjamin, an author who is significant for both philosophers. The central image here is the famous one from the thesis “On the Concept of History”: a chess-playing automaton in the form of a doll in Turkish dress, which always manages to win (historical materialism), but only because it is secretly controlled by a dwarf inside (theology). As a rule, when interpreting this image, researchers, including Žižek and Agamben, focus on the figures of the dwarf and the doll, but what their joint efforts are directed at — the chess game itself and the stakes in it — remains outside the scope of consideration. The main hypothesis of the article is that in order to determine the role of theology and philosophy in the projects of the authors under consideration, it is necessary to ask about the goals of these projects. Thanks to this formulation of the question, behind the dialectic of the activation and deactivation of theology, it becomes possible to distinguish another dialectic—the dialectic of happiness and salvation, the analysis of which allows us not only to describe the source of the differences between these projects, but also to see them as moments in the dialectical movement of truth and authenticity, as presented in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.