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The [[concept ]] of the vanishing mediator is Fredric Jameson’s invention, but he created it to explain what he saw as Max Weber’s central insight, namely that there are moments or events in [[history ]] which propel us into a [[future ]] that on the surface at least would seem to contradict their very spirit. The central [[case ]] in point is [[Protestantism ]] which, as Weber famously demonstrated in his seminal [[work ]] The Protestant [[Ethic ]] and the Spirit of [[Capitalism ]] (Weber 1976), paved the way to secular capitalism by sanctifying labour. Once labour became godly, it was a very short step to [[thinking ]] that work was by itself sufficiently worshipful such that [[other ]] forms of [[religious ]] observation were unnecessary or even redundant. Protestantism is in this [[sense ]] a vanishing mediator because it brings [[about ]] its own [[disappearance ]] by means of its own [[doctrine]].

On this view of things, secular capitalism came into [[being]], then, not because religiosity was suppressed or theological thinking was negated, but for precisely the opposite [[reason]]: it was the very [[insistence ]] on the strict [[letter ]] of Protestant doctrine that brought about its [[undoing]]. This was not because the new Protestant doctrine effectively made [[life ]] less religious or because it dismantled traditional religious [[structures ]] and thereby paved the way to secular [[existence]], as the vulgar [[Marxist ]] [[position ]] would have it. As [[Jameson ]] explains, Weber’s brilliance was to show that the transition from medieval religious existence to modern secular existence came about because Protestantism made life more religious: “Calvin did not desacralize the [[world]]; on the contrary, he turned the entire world into a monastery” (Jameson 2008: 329). And in doing so, Protestantism drained its [[particular ]] rites, [[rituals]], practices and eventually beliefs too of their religious substance.

As Žižek points out in For They [[Know ]] Not What They Do, which is where he offers his most detailed account of Jameson’s concept, the really interesting problem concerning the vanishing mediator is its [[necessity]]:<blockquote>In other [[words]], the point not to be missed is that one cannot [[pass ]] from medieval “closed” [[society ]] to bourgeois society immediately, without the intercession of Protestantism as “vanishing mediator”: it is Protestantism which, by means of its universalization of [[Christianity]], prepares the ground for its [[withdrawal ]] into the sphere of privacy. (TK: 183)</blockquote>He goes on to [[suggest ]] that, in [[political ]] life, the Jacobins were fated to play a similar [[role]]: their very “radicalism prepared the way for its opposite, for the bourgeois [[universe ]] of egotistic and acquisitive individuals who care not a pin for egalitarian moralism” (TK: 184). It is easy to see the Jacobins as modern precursors to twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, but “far more difficult and disquieting to acknowledge and assume fully the fact that, without Jacobinical ‘excess’, there would be no ‘normal’ pluralist democracy” (ibid.).

Žižek extends Jameson’s conception of the vanishing mediator to encompass the same realm as Badiou’s [[notion ]] of the [[event]]. It is the [[moment ]] when “truth” emerges (TK: 188). The vanishing mediator does not, then, refer to “those other- wise invisible or overlooked moments in major historical processes” as Rex [[Butler ]] defines it (Butler 2005: 76). On the contrary, and perfectly [[dialectically]], as Žižek himself defines the [[dialectic]], it refers to those moments in history that one has to look at twice, as it were, in [[order ]] to see that they really are precursors to the very [[thing ]] that spells their end. In The [[Sublime ]] [[Object ]] of [[Ideology]], Žižek stakes out this conception of the dialectic, which holds [[true ]] throughout his work, with reference to Jane Austen, whom he describes as “perhaps the only [[counterpart ]] to [[Hegel ]] in literature”(SO: 62). [[Misrecognition]], he argues, is the source of [[truth ]] in Pride and Prejudice: it is only because they begin by failing to see each other in their true light that Darcy and Elizabeth are able to “work through” their respec- tive [[character ]] flaws (Darcy’s [[false ]] pride and Elizabeth’s equally false prejudice) and arrive at mutual [[understanding]]. In each case, both pride and prejudice can be described as vanishing mediators because they give rise to their opposite, namely truth.

* [[Historicism]]/Historicity