In the early 2000s, Žižek began an intensive project of generating his own account of Christian origins, at once inspired by and in opposition to Alain Badiou’s reading of St. Paul. Žižek’s goal in so doing was to find a way to preserve what he found most attractive in Badiou—his insistence on a politics of truth—while also overcoming his most serious reservation about Badiou’s philosophy: his exclusion of negativity or death drive. As this rereading of Christianity proceeded, it opened up a possibility that seemed to be excluded in Žižek’s earlier work: that of a durable social order that would...