[PT 11.

1 (2010) 121-125] Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317X

doi:10.1558/poth.v11i1.121 Political Theology (online) ISSN 1473-1719

Supernatural Capital:
A Note on the Žižek-Milbank Debate

Joshua Delpech-Ramey
Rowan University
Glassboro, NJ 08028
USA
ramey@rowan.edu

Abstract
One of the more interesting points of contention between Slavoj Žižek and
John Milbank in their recent debate, The Monstrosity of Christ, is over the
nature and status of belief in the supernatural. For Žižek belief in the super-
natural is an ultimate symptom of capitalist domination; for Milbank it is
a sign of the reality of the elusive promise of a world whose beneficence
exceeds both the imagination and the administrative powers of empire and
capital. I contend that even without Milbank’s orthodox perspective, Žižek’s
reduction of magic to fantasy obscures the black magic of capitalism itself
and so arbitrarily and unnecessarily forecloses on modes of resistance that
are allied to liturgical, theurgical, and spiritual practices.

Keywords: Adorno, capital, magic, Milbank, Žižek.

Beginning with Marx himself, astute critics of capitalist ideology have

noticed a strange resonance between belief in the market and belief in
magic. In “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” Marx
deftly and ironically demonstrated that this most modern and disenchanted
of things, the commodity, is charged with “metaphysical subtleties and
theological niceties,” capable of a “table-turning” more mysterious than
any parlor trick. As Marx put it,
The existence of the things qua commodities, and the value relation between
the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely
no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations
arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that
assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.1

1. K. Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” in Capital

(London:  Penguin, 1992), ch. 1 §4, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/
ch01.htm#200

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010, 1 Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, London SW3 5SR.
122 Political Theology

On the market, relations between inanimate objects do not merely reflect

but actually create value, since (supposedly) no individual producer or
consumer can dictate price. In effect, we await the pronouncements of
commodities as expectant suppliants wait for the verdict of the god on the
sacrifice, the stars upon our fates.2
Following Marx, Theodor Adorno observed that decadent and despair-
ing bourgeois subjectivity increasingly turns to occult sources of meaning
precisely to the degree that it despairs of real freedom.3 As capitalism and
administration tighten their grip on things, fetishism of the commodity is
overcoded by a vague and generalized fetishism or animism, an occultism
whose vogue is the promise of a powerful and meaningful connection to
things alienated from their being as commodities. Ordinary sources of
significance become accessible only through occult forms of mediation.
As Adorno realized, this turn to the spirits is pathetic. In Minima Moralia
he writes,
The same rationalistic and empiricist apparatus that threw the spirits out
is being used to reimpose them on those who no longer trust their own
reason. As if any elemental spirit would not turn tail before the traps that
domination of nature sets for fleeting beings. But even this the occultists
turn to advantage. Because the spirits do not like controls, in the midst of all
the safety precautions a tiny door must be left open, through which they can
make their unimpeded entrance. For the occultists are practical folk. Not
driven by vain curiosity, they are looking for tips. From the stars to forward
transactions is but a nimble step. Usually the information amounts to no
more than that some poor acquaintance has had his dearest hopes dashed.4

In his debate with John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or

Dialectics?, Slavoj Žižek continues the Marxist critique of magical thinking,
this time rendering the ruse of occultism in terms of what Chesterton’s
detective Father Brown analyzed as a “fear of four words: He was made
man.”5 Chesterton’s idea was that Western culture’s retreat into spiritual-

2. Philip Goodchild has brilliantly updated Marx’s (and Weber’s) perspective on the
intimacy between belief and captital with Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (London:
Routledge, 2002) and Theology of Money (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Wil-
liam Connolly has also explored the specifically American Christian dimensions of this
situation with Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2008).
3. Bourgeoise fascination with occultism and spiritualism began as early as the failure
of the 1848–1849 revolutions, even though Adorno was observing early twentieth-century
times.
4. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N.
Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 143.
5. G. K. Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories (Ware: Wordsworth Editions,
2006), 394–5.

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 Delpech-Ramey  Supernatural Capital 123

ism, and its willingness to believe in anything (from ESP in Chesterton’s

time to the Gaia hypothesis in our own), must be read as an inability to
sustain the traumatic reality of God incarnate. As Father Brown puts it,
People readily swallow the untested claims of this, that, or the other. It’s
drowning all your old rationalism and skepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and
the name of it is superstition. It’s the first effect of not believing in God that
you lose your common sense and can’t see things as they are. Anything that
anybody talks about, and says there’s a good deal in it, extends itself indefi-
nitely like a vista in a nightmare. And a dog is an omen, and a cat is a mystery,
and a pig is a mascot, and a beetle is a scarab, calling up all the menagerie of
polytheism from Egypt and old India; Dog Anubis and great green-eyed Pasht
and all the holy howling Bulls of Bashan; reeling back to the bestial gods of the
beginning, escaping into elephants and snakes and crocodiles; and all because
you are frightened of four words. He was made Man.6

Refusal to believe in God incarnate leads not so much to atheism as to

general superstition. Eliminating God means reproducing divinity every-
where. With all this Žižek agrees. But “he was made man,” for Žižek, does
not mean, as it does for Chesterton, that God has included humanity in
the divine economy, but rather that, as with the Hegelian interpretation
of Christianity, what was formerly perceived as an external Creator or
Master is now comprehended as nothing but the ungrounded and utterly
contingent fact of human freedom itself. For Žižek, the decadent super-
naturalism identified by Chesterton has its source not in the rejection of
God but in the rejection of the radicality of freedom. Rather than sustain
the responsibility entailed by freedom, humanity drifts back into variet-
ies of the deus absconditus, re-populating the disenchanted universe with a
panoply of ancient gods and familiar spirits.7
Žižek is convinced that what he shares with Chesterton is—ironically—
the endorsement of a direct link between incarnationalism and a kind of
naturalism, a reduction of the supernatural to the ironies of contingency.
But as Milbank points out in his rejoinders to Žižek, Chesterton was himself
convinced of the reality of angels, miracles, magic, and the importance of
fairy stories. In Orthodoxy, Chesterton claimed that it was because ordinary
reality was so astonishing that he himself was willing to entertain angels,
miracles and magic. Chesterton also astutely noticed that in general angels
appear and magic happens to the most hard-headed ordinary people, like
shepherds and fishermen, and not to pathetic warlocks begging demons
to bring them power.8

6. Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories, 394–5.

7. Slavoj Žižek, John Milbank and Creston Davis, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or
Dialectic? (Cambridge: MIT, 2009), 25.
8. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Bodley Head, 1957), 262.

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124 Political Theology

Žižek does not so much deny the supernatural as reduce it to one kind
of thing: subjectivity. For Žižek, “the death of God” means not that there is
no supernatural dimension to the universe, but that there is only one thing
that is supernatural, the subject. There is only one form of supernatural
life, and that is the undead life of “God” qua living human community
of revolutionary believers. Read in this way, Christianity and atheism are
allied against all forms of animism, occultism, and all spiritualism, and
truly authentic Christianity would be against the cult of the Saints and
other pagan trappings of Catholicism, including all liturgical practice,
perhaps even against all religion.
Žižek and Hegel expose here a fundamentally Protestant attitude. If
Protestantism (and the Enlightenment) shared a common enemy, it was
Catholic superstitions: belief in unctions, multiple sacraments, and above
all in liturgical practices as sacred rites—theurgies. Ritual practice claims
to perform and to engender the divine in the material world, to render the
cosmos fitting for the divine, to marry the worlds according to the ancient
Hermetic principle, “as above, so below.” For Žižek, religious ritual is
unchristian because it involves an ambiguous medium that is neither
strictly human nor sheerly divine, neither wholly rational nor wholly vol-
untary. Ritual action, because it depends upon the invocation of powers
that operate unpredictably and beyond human ken, in principle denies the
radical autonomy of the subject. Thus, for Žižek, ritual is a fantasy that
sutures the absence of God and abnegates freedom and responsibility.
But this is precisely where Žižek’s atheist incarnationalism is actually
in tension with his critique of occultism as the spiritual supplement to
capitalism. As Charles Taylor and others have now shown, it was by aban-
doning the sphere of the supernatural, and relegating ritual practice to
the irrational, that both Christians and atheists together paved the way
for the triumph of marketplace superstition. To counter capitalism’s black
mass, Milbank may be right that the theurgic, even magical, dimension of
Christian belief (that reads the ordinary as already extraordinary, nature as
already supernatural) must not be expunged but rather more emphasized
than ever before. Milbank’s view that a renewed Christian-esoteric view
of nature may provide the terms in which to renew the apprehension of
creation as a suspended middle between finitude and the infinite remains
compelling for how subversive such a gesture would be to the rites of the
administered world.
Even if one does not prescind with Milbank from the rites of contem-
porary capital to the rituals of Catholic mass, even from the perspective of
his fellow materialist Adorno, Žižek has missed what the desire for magic,
as the obscene “spiritual supplement” to capitalism, truly occludes. For
Adorno, the nostalgia of occultism was the sign of an alienated world that,

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 Delpech-Ramey  Supernatural Capital 125

even as lost, pointed toward utopia and the end of domination. In Negative
Dialectics, Adorno writes,
The materialist longing to grasp the thing aims at the opposite: it is only in
the absence of images that the full object could be conceived. Such absence
concurs with the theological ban on images. Materialism brought that ban
into secular form by not permitting Utopia to be positively pictured; this is
the substance of its negativity. At its most materialistic, materialism comes
to agree with theology. Its great desire would be the resurrection of the
flesh, a desire utterly foreign to idealism, the realm of the aboslute spirit.
The perspective vanishing point of historic materialism would be its self-
sublimation, the spirit’s liberation from the primacy of the material needs
in their state of fulfillment. Only if the physical urge were quenched would
the spirit be reonciled and would become that which it only promises while
the spell of material conditions will not let it satisfy its material needs.9

If capitalism’s spell has made ordinary life itself the most inaccessibly
supernatural of things, perhaps the liberation of humanity from this
enslavement will clarify the meaning of its occult aspirations. It may be
the task of the invocative and apostrophic language of liturgical practice to
mediate this utopia to us, in the meantime.

Bibliography
Adorno, T. Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1973.
——Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso,
2005.
Chesterton, G. K. Orthodoxy. London: Bodley Head, 1957.
——The Complete Father Brown Stories. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2006.
Connolly, W. Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2008.
Goodchild, P. Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety. London: Routledge, 2002.
——Theology of Money. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Marx, K. “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.” In Capital. London: 
Penguin, 1992. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#200.
Žižek, S., J. Milbank and C. Davis. The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? Cambridge:
MIT, 2009.

9. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum,

1973), 207.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.