Excremental Identification

Excremental Identification names Žižek's reading—drawn from Luther—of the Incarnation as God's real, non-symbolic identification with the lowest, most abject stratum of creaturely existence: the excremental Real. In Luther's formulation, humanity is "divine shit," expelled from God's anus, and Christ's Incarnation is accordingly not an ennobling descent but a kenotic plunge into this excremental matter. The theological logic here is irreducibly parallactic: the God of Love and the God of punishing, cruel justice are not two separate deities but the same God seen from different perspectives, just as das Ding and the Sovereign Good are not simply opposed but identical when viewed through the correct angle of distortion. Excremental Identification is therefore the name for that moment in Christology where the distance between the transcendent God and the Real of human abjection collapses entirely — not into sublimation or idealization, but into literal, material identification with filth.

Within Žižek's argument, this move is structurally unavailable to two alternative Christian traditions: Orthodox Christianity, which operates by an imitation-logic (the believer imitates a dignified, transfigured Christ), and Catholic theology, which operates by symbolic exchange (sin/redemption, debt/payment). Both traditions maintain a minimal symbolic dignity for the divine. Only Luther's excremental formulation reaches the properly Lacanian register of the Real — what is left over after every symbolic and imaginary covering has been stripped away. In this sense, Excremental Identification is the theological correlate of the Lacanian move of identifying das Ding with the Sovereign Good: in both cases, the highest term (God, the Good) is shown to be secretly identical with its opposite (filth, the Real kernel of horror), and this identity is accessible only through a parallax shift rather than a dialectical synthesis.

This concept appears once in the-parallax-view-slavoj-zizek (p.190) and sits at the intersection of several canonical Lacanian concepts. Its primary anchor is das Ding: Žižek's argument is that the excremental Real occupies exactly the structural place that das Ding occupies in Lacan's ethics — the excluded interior, the abject kernel that is simultaneously the closest and most foreign thing to the subject. Just as das Ding is the "beyond-of-the-signified" around which desire orbits without ever touching, the excremental God of Luther is the beyond-of-theology that orthodox and Catholic frameworks cannot approach without dissolving into imaginary dignity or symbolic exchange. The concept also draws directly on Parallax: the God of Love and the God of cruel justice are not two Gods but one seen from irreconcilable perspectives, which is the structural definition of the parallax view. No synthesis is possible — only the shift in standpoint itself is real.

The concept equally implicates Jouissance and Superego. The cruel God of justice who commands absolute submission — and whose logic Luther's excremental theology exposes — is structurally homologous to Lacan's superego, which does not simply prohibit enjoyment but commands it, turning the Law into a spectacle of abject compliance. Excremental Identification names the moment when this jouissance-dimension of the divine is made explicit rather than covered over by the imaginary (dignity, beauty, sublimation) or the symbolic (redemption, exchange). It is thus an extension and theological specification of the Ethics of Psychoanalysis — specifically its insistence that genuine ethical confrontation requires passing through the Real of das Ding rather than sustaining a "service of goods" at a safe symbolic distance. The excremental is what remains when every imaginary and symbolic buffer has been removed.

The Parallax ViewSlavoj Žižek · 2006 (p.190)

Martin Luther directly proposed an excremental identity of man: man is like divine shit, he fell out of God's anus... Christ as a God who, in his act of Incarnation, freely identified himself with his own shit

The phrase "freely identified himself with his own shit" is theoretically loaded on two counts: "freely" signals that this is not a fall or a degradation imposed from outside but a kenotic act of will, placing the Incarnation squarely in the register of the Real rather than the Imaginary (no dignity is retained, no symbolic exchange is performed); and "his own shit" collapses the distinction between Creator and the most abject product of creation, making the excremental not an external other but an intimate excrescence — the very structure of extimacy that defines das Ding.