In Slavoj Žižek’s Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, he comments on the song “Climb Every Mountain” and its function in the film The Sound of Music. In his commentary, Žižek identifies that the Catholic Church, and institutions in general, often allow members to maintain a sense of moral superiority, even while frequently transgressing their own stated convictions. This is a form of ideology. “Where the power of [the] attraction of Catholicism lies… If you really try to discern what deal they are offering you, it’s not to prohibit, in this case, sexual pleasures. It’s a much more cynical contact… between the church as an institution and the believer troubled with sexual desires. It’s this hidden, Obscene Permission that you get. You are covered by the divine Big Other, you can do whatever you want, enjoy…. Pretend to renounce, and you can get it all.” Your identity with the institution grants you the favor of Big Other, and thus gives you Obscene Permission to enjoy without moral encumbrance.
This reading of Catholicism continues to trouble me, especially in regards to the sacrament of confession, a regular in the diet of a practicing Catholic. The sacrament purportedly reminds us of our identity as sinners in need of grace, and purges us from sin, restoring us to grace. Cynically however, it can appear to say that the institution has moral superiority, and that it is willing to restore you to a self-regard of moral superiority despite your failings, given you attempt to be restored to this institution. You are released from your sins, and though you were temporarily like the world (sinners), you are now restored to being above the world. This is true of all institutions. Take the current American political scene. Generationally rich, socially privileged Americans are given moral justification for benefiting off the sufferings of the lower classes because they are Democrats, the party of the lower classes. Politicians that sacrifice the unhealthy to stimulate the economy are given moral high ground because they are Republicans, the party of life. Both groups are allowed to live in contradiction, as their institutional allegiance to their ideal absolves their lived contradiction to their stated morality. Institutional allegiance absolves one of personal responsibility.
Confession does run a great risk of becoming a way of removing oneself from the reality of life, into a fantasy of purity. Think of the many homilies that accuse the homosexuals, pornography users, the secular other (that are presumably not part of the congregation). Such immoral behavior is presumed to be a result of modernity and secularity. Of course, every priest knows that is not at all the case. These are precisely the sins that they will hear every time they hear confessions, from people they know are serious about practicing Christianity. Yet in this mindset, sin remains the domain of the secular other and not the Catholic self.
If the sacrament is to have any validity, it has to be an act of taking responsibility for one’s actions, and not merely the removal of one’s responsibility. It is to restore the vision of one’s lowliness back from the vantage of sin, which elevates oneself over the other. Or in short, a way of accountability, where sin is almost always unnamed, or named by people with no voice. Forgiveness offered in the sacrament of confession is not invalid, but that forgiveness ought not be understood as a restoration of the self as redeemed and the other as despicable. The Obscene Permission is obscene because it enables what it disavows. The Obscene Permission allows one to participate in the same sin as the ‘worldy’ other even while retaining a sense of religious purity and superiority. Compare sin to this Obscene Permission, and they are strangely the same thing, because sin is also elevates oneself to be above the other, and thus justifies acting unjustly on the lower. Confession, in the naming of one’s sins, allows one the opportunity to reject both the elevation of self that comes from participating in cycles of Obscene Permission, and the elevation of self that comes from sin.
Confession allows one to undertake a Christological movement. As Christ who was without sin became sin, we who are with sin are given the sacrament to name our sins and thus acknowledge our identity as sinners. There is no longer a Big Other, removed from sin, that we can be restored to. The Big Other, God, has become sin, and thus for Christians the move towards divinity is no longer an increasing ascent towards the Big Other who stands outside of this existence, but a descent into solidarity with sinners, of which we are one, and the temptation is always to think that we are not one. Confession is an opportunity to move away from the instinctive perception of the soiled other and pure self, towards the Christological identification with humanity that indiscriminately encompasses saint and sinner.
Žižek’s favorite articulation of the Obscene Permission is a phrase that challenges Dostoevsky’s famous aphorism. “Dostoevsky says ‘if God does not exist, everything is permitted’, but the truth is precisely the opposite. If God exists, everything is permitted.” Christ is God without Big Other, Christ is God as the neighbor, as the despicable, soiled other. Sin under Christ is sin without Big Other, without Obscene Permission, it is sin against the neighbor, which is elevated to the highest sin. The sacrament avoids obscenity, if it can take this Christological turn.
