The text titled “Materialism and Theology” before you is a translation of the “Religion” section from the “Foreword to the Second Edition: Enjoyment Within the Limits of Reason Alone,” which was added in 2008 to the book For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (Verso, 1991).
In this section, Žižek approaches the critique of ideology with a materialist reading of the Western religious tradition and, by examining the God of Judaism and Christianity, compares Job with Christ. Unlike Freud, who considered Christ to be a repetition of Moses, Žižek views Christ as a repetition of Job.
He believes that the key to understanding Christ lies in the figure of Job, although Christ’s divinity radicalizes his cries on the cross, rendering this gesture far more fundamental and consequential.
