Christ Without Adam by Dunning Benjamin H.;

Author:Dunning, Benjamin H.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI027000, Philosophy/Movements/Deconstruction, REL051000, Religion/Philosophy
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-04-22T04:00:00+00:00

“Adam and Christ Are One and the Same”

This is the problem that Žižek uses the Adam-Christ typology to solve. He thus employs a version of the point just examined—the identity of fall and redemption—to frame his reading of Adam and Christ in the same vein: “the properly Christian Redemption is not simply the undoing of the Fall, but stricto sensu its repetition. The key to St. Paul’s theology is repetition: Christ as the redemptive repetition of Adam. Adam has fallen, Christ has risen again; Christ is therefore ‘the last Adam’ (1 Corinthians 15:45–49). Through Adam, as sons of Adam, we are lost, condemned to sin and suffering; through Christ, we are redeemed” (PD, 81). Here I want to note a certain slippage in the movement of Žižek’s argument, hinging on the different possible senses of “repetition.” While it is true that Paul presents Christ as “the redemptive repetition of Adam,” this is an exceedingly complex (and in certain ways opaque) undertaking. Furthermore, it is one that, at least in the Pauline text, emphasizes the irreducible interplay of similarity, repetition, and identity on the one hand and contrast, difference, and rupture on the other. Whereas Badiou, as we have seen, more or less dismisses the significance of the Adam-Christ typology by emphasizing Christ’s radical difference from Adam, here Žižek inverts that move, shifting the center of gravity in the direction of identity. That is to say, even though his pithy summation of the Adam-Christ typology lists a series of contrasts, the larger conclusion is one about sameness/repetition. Although 1 Corinthians 15 is cited, the point seems governed by Romans 5, insofar as the concrete concerns with anthropology and embodiment that characterize the Corinthians passage are ignored. What Žižek takes to be most fundamental about the typology is the notion of repetition. But crucially, by situating the Adam-Christ typology as he does within his larger argument, he manages to pull Paul’s distinctly typological sense of repetition into a new philosophical register—that is, Žižek’s Hegelian notion of repetition that we have just examined.

On this reading, then, the Adam-Christ typology comes to support Žižek’s contention regarding the identity of fall and redemption. Accordingly, he argues, “It is not that things went wrong, downhill, first with Adam, and were then restored with Christ: Adam and Christ are one and the same (‘Christ is Adam’—perhaps the ultimate speculative judgment); all that changes in order for us to pass from one to the other is the perspective” (PD, 87). He goes on to elaborate and clarify the same point in technical Hegelian language, thereby tying it more tightly to the broader arc of the foregoing argument: “Adam and Christ also relate as ‘negation’ and ‘negation of negation,’ but in the above-mentioned precise meaning—Adam is Christ ‘in itself,’ and Christ’s Redemption is not the ‘negation’ of the Fall, but its accomplishment, in exactly the same sense that, according to Saint Paul, Christ accomplishes the law” (PD, 87–88, emphasis added). Thus, in what would appear to be an interpretive

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