The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief
Peter Rollins
by Rollins, Peter (2008)
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Synopsis
Peter Rollins's The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief (2008) advances the paradoxical argument that the deepest fidelity to Christianity requires a structural act of betrayal of its institutional, doctrinal, and ideological forms — that, like Judas and Abraham, the truly faithful believer is compelled to "crucify" the religion they love in order to reach what the tradition actually points toward. The book is organized around three interlocking problems: the nature of scripture (Part 1), the nature of God as a being or event (Part 2), and the nature of Christian truth as miracle and communal practice (Part 3). Rollins argues that the dominant Western theological tradition — from Augustine and Duns Scotus through Descartes — has systematically turned God into an object of contemplation, a "greatest conceivable being" whose existence and essence can be named, debated, and defended as propositional fact. Against this, he recovers a counter-tradition in which the divine is encountered as an irreducible Event or happening (das Ding, the Real in Lacanian terms) that ruptures every symbolic capture, including the Scripture itself, which is structured parallactically — its contradictions and fractures are not flaws but the very marks of the Word's excess over words. The answer he proposes is not atheism or liberal theology but a "religion without religion": a community practice grounded in belonging before belief, in which theological doubt is welcomed as the natural aftermath of genuine encounter rather than as a threat, and in which the "miracle" of transformed subjectivity — not supernatural suspension of natural law — constitutes the core Christian truth-claim. The book concludes with a practical ecclesiology of "theodrama" and "transformance art," experimental gathering-spaces that refuse pastoral hierarchy and propositional authority in order to hold open the space of the Event.
Distinctive contribution
What distinguishes The Fidelity of Betrayal within a Lacanian-inflected theological corpus is its sustained application of the logic of das Ding, the Real, and fetishistic disavowal to the internal structure of Christian practice — not merely as a theoretical overlay but as a diagnostic and constructive theological program. Whereas Žižek's theological interventions (e.g., The Puppet and the Dwarf, The Fragile Absolute) deploy Lacan to read Christianity from the outside as a symptomatic ideological formation, Rollins inhabits the theological tradition from within and uses the same conceptual apparatus to distinguish authentic faith (fidelity to the Event/Real) from ideological religion (fetishistic attachment to belief-as-object). The result is a book that operates simultaneously as Lacanian critique of religion and as a constructive theology of the church — a rare double register that neither Žižek nor orthodox Lacanian analysts attempt.
A second distinctive contribution is the book's elaboration of "fidelity through betrayal" as a formal structural principle rather than a mere rhetorical paradox. By running the figures of Judas, Abraham, Jacob, and Moses through the same dialectical template — each exemplifies genuine fidelity precisely where they appear to betray their tradition — Rollins produces a rigorous theological account of why the subject supposed to know (the theological master, the doctrinal system, the biblical text as propositional object) must be traversed for faith to be real. This is effectively a translation of the Lacanian "traversal of the fantasy" into ecclesiological and scriptural hermeneutics, and no other text in the corpus accomplishes this with comparable theological depth and narrative richness. The additional move of reversing the church's conventional "believe → behave → belong" order into "belong → behave → believe" further concretizes the Lacanian insight that the subject is constituted in the symbolic order before it takes up any propositional stance — a point Rollins develops without ever naming Lacan, making the book a de facto application of Lacanian subject-theory to community formation.
Main themes
- Fidelity through betrayal as the paradoxical structure of genuine faith
- The Real/Event as irreducible to symbolic or propositional capture
- Das Ding and the parallactical structure of Scripture
- Fetishistic disavowal: how religious belief functions as ideological fantasy
- Truth as transformative Event rather than propositional fact
- The subject's constitution through belonging before belief (Lacanian subject-formation as ecclesiology)
- Traversal of the theological 'subject supposed to know'
- Religion without religion: Christianity as self-negating system
- The Name of God and the limits of theological naming (Master Signifier)
- Theodrama and transformance art as post-ideological communal practice
Chapter outline
- Prologue: The Caretaker's Trial
- Introduction: What Would Judas Do?
- ONE: The Betrayer, the Betrayed, or the Beloved?
- TWO: Abraham as the Father of Faith(ful Betrayal)
- THREE: The Biblical 'wHole'
- FOUR: The Name of God
- FIVE: Eclipsing God
- SIX: Beyond God
- SEVEN: The Intervention of God?
- EIGHT: The Miracle of Christian Faith
- NINE: Forging Faith Communities With/out God
- Conclusion: Crossing Out God for the Sake of God
Chapter summaries
Prologue: The Caretaker's Trial
The book opens with an extended parable about a small religious community whose priest orders the handover of a political dissident to secular authorities to protect the town — a decision the caretaker resists, thereby protecting the man at personal cost. The parable stages the book's central question without naming it: when does obedience to a religious institution become a betrayal of what that institution is supposed to embody, and when does apparent disobedience constitute the deeper fidelity? The caretaker's defiance of the priest's order is presented as morally correct even though it violates the community's institutional authority, anticipating the argument that the deepest faithfulness to a tradition may require acting against that tradition's explicit directives.
The parable functions as an overture in miniature: it embeds the Judas/Abraham dialectic that the subsequent chapters will develop, and it establishes Rollins's narrative-theological method — working through stories, parables, and fictional scenarios rather than purely discursive argument. The community's inability to recognize that their religious obedience has become a betrayal of their own deepest values prefigures the book's critique of institutional Christianity as a system that can function as what Rollins (following Žižek) will call a fetishistic fantasy.
Key concepts: Fidelity Through Betrayal, The Act, Ideology, Religion Without Religion Notable examples: The caretaker parable
Introduction: What Would Judas Do?
The introduction poses the book's governing question by asking what it would mean to take Judas — Christianity's arch-betrayer — as a model of faith rather than infamy. Rollins introduces the Möbius-strip logic that will run through the entire book: the positions of faithful servant and betrayer are not stable opposites but fold into each other. He invokes Lacan's formulation that 'a letter always reaches its destination' to frame his own writing as a kind of self-address, a letter sent to himself across the book's argument. The introduction also introduces the concept of 'carrying the cross' not as self-sacrifice but as the willingness to sacrifice one's Christianity itself — to be 'the most faithful of betrayers.'
The introduction crystallizes the book's rhetorical and theological wager: that the reader who finds the idea of Judas as a model scandalous is precisely the reader who has not yet understood the paradox of Christian fidelity. Rollins frames the entire project as an exploration of what it means to put 'our religion to death so that a religion without religion can spring forth,' a phrase that simultaneously echoes Derrida's 'religion without religion' and Bonhoeffer's 'religionless Christianity.'
Key concepts: Fidelity Through Betrayal, Religion Without Religion, The Act, Master Signifier Notable examples: Judas as model of faith; Lacan's letter formula
ONE: The Betrayer, the Betrayed, or the Beloved?
Chapter One conducts a sustained multi-perspectival reading of the Judas narrative, cycling through four distinct interpretive positions: Judas as demonic betrayer (the traditional reading), Judas as himself betrayed by Jesus (who knew his fate from the beginning and yet called him), Judas as misguided zealot attempting to force a political confrontation, and finally Judas as commanded by Jesus to perform the betrayal. Rollins mines the textual ambiguities — the absence of motivation in Mark, the satanic possession in Luke and John, Matthew's portrayal of a remorseful suicide — to show that the text itself refuses a single stable reading. The invented 'Gospel of Peter' fragment, in which Judas receives a prophetic vision of the entire Passion including his own damnation and yet chooses to proceed, dramatizes the possibility that the betrayal was an act of self-sacrificial love rather than treachery.
The chapter's argumentative core is the demonstration that the phrase 'the betrayal of Judas' is irreducibly ambiguous: it can name both Judas's betrayal of Jesus and Jesus's betrayal of Judas. This grammatical undecidability is not a mere rhetorical trick but a structural point: within the Gospel narratives, betrayal and fidelity are not cleanly separable. The chapter concludes with the call for 'the most faithful of betrayers' — those who betray their Christianity not from unbelief but from the deepest belief, crucifying the religion for the sake of what the religion points toward. Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ is invoked as a cinematic exploration of the 'commanded betrayal' interpretation.
Key concepts: Fidelity Through Betrayal, The Act, Dialectics, Contradiction Notable examples: Gospel of Mark (no motive for Judas); Gospel of Matthew (remorseful suicide); Gospel of John (demonic possession); Martin Scorsese, The Last Temptation of Christ; Invented 'Gospel of Peter' fragment
TWO: Abraham as the Father of Faith(ful Betrayal)
Chapter Two extends the Judas dialectic to Abraham, arguing that the two figures — conventionally poles apart as betrayer and father of faith — are structurally parallel: both are divinely chosen for a murderous task involving an intimate, both renounce their victim, and in both cases the motive remains opaque. The conventional reading of the Akedah (binding of Isaac) celebrates Abraham's suspension of the ethical for the religious, but Rollins draws out the analogy with Judas to suggest that what distinguishes them is not the nature of the act but the received interpretation of the motive. If Judas had not committed suicide before the resurrection he might have received Jesus back just as Abraham received Isaac back.
The chapter then broadens the argument to show that the Judeo-Christian tradition is saturated with narratives in which fidelity to God is enacted through wrestling with God: Abraham bargaining over Sodom, Jacob physically fighting the divine stranger at Jabbok and being renamed 'Israel' (one who wrestles with God), Moses arguing with God, and finally Eve and Adam eating the forbidden fruit — where the serpent's revelation (that the fruit brings knowledge and godlikeness) is presented as truthful, making the Eden story itself a site of divine antagonism. The chapter argues that these are not embarrassments to be explained away but constitutive features of Judeo-Christian fidelity: the tradition itself canonizes the wrestling match with God as the paradigmatic form of genuine faith.
Key concepts: Fidelity Through Betrayal, The Act, Dialectics, Contradiction, Desire, Lack Notable examples: Abraham and Isaac (Akedah); Jacob wrestling at Jabbok; Abraham bargaining over Sodom; Eden: serpent, Eve, and the tree of knowledge
THREE: The Biblical 'wHole'
Chapter Three addresses the question of biblical authority by arguing that the fractures, contradictions, and ideological conflicts within Scripture are not evidence against its divine character but are rather the structural marks of the divine Word's irreducibility to any single textual capture. Against both secular biblical criticism (which treats tensions as signs of merely human composition) and modern inerrancy movements (which attempt to harmonize them rationally), Rollins proposes a third position aligned with pre-modern approaches: the text's antagonisms are to be inhabited rather than resolved.
The philosophical vehicle for this argument is the concept of 'second naïveté' (developed from Ricoeur): a post-critical return to devotional engagement that brackets academic debates in order to encounter the 'primordial source' — what Rollins describes as the Event or the Word that dwells within but exceeds the words. This is connected to the concept of the 'biblical parallax': just as light appears as wave or particle depending on the observer's position, the divine source of Scripture never presents itself directly but only through mutually exclusive manifestations that together testify to an inaccessible core. Rollins draws on the Žižekian/Lacanian notion of parallax (explicitly citing The Parallax View) to argue that the 'true' description of God always lies just beyond the horizon of any single reading, and that the biblical wHole — the wound or gap in the text — is not the absence of God but the very trace of God's presence. The eschatological kingdom is reconceived not as a future arrival but as a spectral 'void within,' already present in the form of an irreducible gap that ruptures the text, the beloved, and the world.
Key concepts: Real, Das Ding, Gap, Truth, Extimacy, Dialectics Notable examples: Wave/particle duality of light (parallax); Paul on the kingdom as 'now and not yet'; Jewish Midrash tradition; Ricoeur's second naïveté
FOUR: The Name of God
Part Two opens with a genealogy of the Western theological tradition's attempt to name God, tracing a line from apocryphal legend (Lilith and Adam's secret pact in Eden) through the Kabbalistic tradition of divine naming, the Egyptian myth of Isis and Ra, Moses at the burning bush, Augustine's identification of 'I AM' with Greek philosophical Being, Duns Scotus's doctrine of the univocity of being, and finally Descartes' 'I think therefore I am' as the philosophical consolidation of a tradition in which God is rendered as an object of rational contemplation. Each of these stations in the history of naming represents a different modality of the same fundamental move: reducing the divine to a being among beings, however supreme, whose essence can be grasped and articulated in language.
The chapter's argument is that the desire to name God — to possess the master signifier that would unlock divine power — is a constitutive temptation of the religious imagination, one that Scripture itself stages and critiques. The Lilith legend dramatizes the danger of naming through the fantasy of a secret name whose possession confers absolute power; the Isis/Ra myth shows this operating in Egyptian cosmology; the burning bush narrative shows Moses attempting to extract a name that will function as a magical weapon, only to receive a response ('I shall be there howsoever I shall be there') that refuses naming while enacting presence. Augustine and Scotus represent the theological institutionalization of this refusal's failure — the permanent identification of God with the highest conceivable being, the onto-theological God that Rollins (following Heidegger and Derrida implicitly) will spend the next two chapters dismantling.
Key concepts: Master Signifier, Das Ding, Knowledge, Subject Supposed to Know, Name of the Father, Truth Notable examples: Lilith legend (Midrash); Kabbalistic naming tradition; Isis and Ra (Egyptian myth); Moses and the burning bush (Exodus); Augustine's identification of 'I AM' with Greek Being; Duns Scotus's univocity of being; Descartes, Cogito ergo sum
FIVE: Eclipsing God
Chapter Five develops the critique of onto-theological truth-claims by showing what happens when Christian truth is treated as a set of propositional, empirically assessable facts: it creates an epistemological distance between the believer and their faith, hands authority over to academic specialists (philosophers, historians, sociologists, psychologists), makes faith perpetually vulnerable to a corrosive form of doubt, severs the intrinsic link between knowing God and living a transformed life, and — most damingly — allows belief to function as an ideological crutch that protects the believer from existential engagement rather than demanding it. Rollins draws on Nietzsche's parable of the madman and the death of God to show that this reduction of Christian truth to Cartesian factual claims is what Nietzsche was attacking: a God who provides a matrix of cosmic meaning and thereby drains life of its fragility and urgency.
The chapter also introduces Bonhoeffer's concept of 'religionless Christianity' as an earlier attempt to diagnose the same pathology: a Christianity aimed at responding to felt needs (guilt, meaning, comfort) rather than one that encounters people as strong, intelligent adults who do not need God as a crutch. Rollins argues that the popular debates between Dawkins/Dennett/Harris and their religious apologists are equally complicit in treating Christian truth as a set of assertoric claims about the world — both sides are asking the wrong question. The right question is not 'Is Christianity true?' but 'What kind of truth does Christianity claim?' This reframing — moving from propositional to eventive truth — is the pivot on which the entire book turns.
Key concepts: Truth, Ideology, Fetishistic Disavowal, Subject Supposed to Know, Knowledge, The big Other Notable examples: Nietzsche's madman parable (Thus Spoke Zarathustra); Bonhoeffer's religionless Christianity; Achilles on mortality (Troy, dir. Petersen); Dawkins, Dennett, Harris debate
SIX: Beyond God
Chapter Six arrives at what Rollins considers the positive counter-tradition within Scripture and theology: a mode of relating to God as an Event rather than a being, as a presence that is received without being conceived. The chapter opens with Pascal's critique of Descartes and Hobbes's deflation of the concept of infinity ('to say God is infinite is to say nothing about God but something about our own limits'), then turns to the alternative reading of Moses's burning bush encounter: if 'ehyeh 'asher 'ehyeh' is read as a verb rather than a noun, God's 'name' becomes a refusal to name — 'I shall be there howsoever I shall be there' — making God the name we give to that which exceeds all names.
From this pivot, Rollins develops an account of Christian truth as analogous to life itself: we never perceive life directly (neither our own nor others'), we only encounter its manifestations, and yet life is undeniably present. The truth of faith operates the same way — it is an 'incoming' that transforms the subject's entire mode of being in the world without adding any new object to experience. Revelation is reconceived as structurally constituted by three features: epistemological incomprehension, experiential bedazzlement, and existential transformation. The paradigm case is Paul's Damascus conversion. Matthew's genealogy of Jesus is read as a formal enactment of this logic: Jesus is inscribed within Jewish tradition through an unbroken lineage from Abraham, and then the genealogy ruptures itself by making Jesus's conception miraculous — he is simultaneously the fulfillment and the impossible break within the tradition, the parallax point that cannot be absorbed into either continuity or discontinuity. This is what makes Christianity structurally 'ir/religious': a religion that is constituted by a wound within religion.
Key concepts: Real, Das Ding, Truth, Tuché, Extimacy, Gap, Sublimation, Revelation as rupture Notable examples: Pascal's Pensées (disproportion in man); Hobbes on divine infinity; Moses burning bush re-read as verb; Paul's Damascus conversion; Matthew's genealogy of Jesus
SEVEN: The Intervention of God?
Part Three opens the question of what it means to believe in a God who 'intervenes' when the propositional framework has been dismantled. Rollins introduces a third modality of doubt that goes beyond both atheism and deism: doubting the existence of God while retaining the certainty of the intervention. This is illustrated by the Gospel of John's account of the man born blind, who says to the Pharisees, 'Whether he is a sinner or not, I don't know. One thing I do know: I was blind but now I see' — affirming the happening absolutely while remaining agnostic about its source. This inversion (event primary, theology secondary) constitutes, for Rollins, the properly Christian relationship to doubt: doubt is welcomed as the natural aftermath of the miracle, not as its enemy.
The chapter also extends the argument about Christianity's 'ir/religious' structure by exploring the tension between the faith of Christ (the pre-dogmatic living source, the faith Jesus himself practiced) and faith in Christ (the doctrinal affirmation developed in his aftermath). A comic anecdote about a debate between the Pope and a chief rabbi — in which both parties interpret the same hand signals through entirely different frameworks and both conclude they have won — illustrates the irreducible particularity of the 'constrictive' site through which the universal is accessed. Christianity is not a universal worldview that competes with others; it is a particular wound that opens onto the universal precisely through its particularity. The event contained in the affirmation of God is more important than the belief in God.
Key concepts: The Act, Tuché, Real, Religion Without Religion, Fetishistic Disavowal, Desire, The big Other Notable examples: Man born blind (Gospel of John 9:25); Pope/rabbi debate anecdote; Karl Barth and the serpent anecdote
EIGHT: The Miracle of Christian Faith
Chapter Eight develops the account of the Christian 'miracle' as an earth-shattering transformation of subjectivity that operates at a level 'indubitable' to the one who undergoes it, while remaining open to legitimate intellectual doubt about its source and nature. The miracle is explicitly distinguished from the popular notion of miracle as supernatural suspension of natural law — not because physical healings are denied but because reducing miracle to that level misses what is most essential. The Christian miracle is a rebirth, a metanoia, in which 'everything changes and yet nothing in the physical world is altered': a counter-experience that transforms all one's relationships with objects in the world without itself being an object.
Rollins argues that this account reconfigures the conventional church order of belief → behavior → belonging, inverting it to belonging → behavior → belief. Drawing on a broadly Hebraic model of communal practice, he argues that authentic faith communities should begin with unconditional belonging (analogous to an infant's unconditional acceptance into a family), move through shared ritual and behavior, and arrive at belief only as a tertiary and always revisable theoretical reflection on an already-embedded existence. Pascal's wager is recruited not as an argument for the existence of God but as a pragmatic claim that entering the communal practice is the proper site for the miracle — the wager is about belonging, not about intellectual assent. This reversal is simultaneously a Lacanian point: the subject is always already constituted within the symbolic order before it takes up any propositional stance.
Key concepts: Truth, The Act, Subjectivity, Sublimation, Demand, Identification, Fantasy, Subject Notable examples: Saul's Damascus conversion (Acts); Pascal's Wager (Pensées); Infant in the family analogy; Hebraic model of communal belonging
NINE: Forging Faith Communities With/out God
The final substantive chapter translates the book's theoretical argument into a practical ecclesiology. Rollins argues that religious belief functions not as an inner truth that counteracts worldly behavior but as a fantasy that enables and sustains precisely the behavior it ostensibly opposes — the businessman parable makes this vivid: a man whose 'faith' allows him to participate comfortably in a corrupt financial system loses his beliefs through a preacher's prayer, and only then, stripped of the ideological cushion, is he forced to confront what he is doing and act justly. This is fetishistic disavowal made concrete: 'I know very well that my work is corrupt, but my faith allows me to bracket that.' The loss of belief, paradoxically, is what produces authentic faithfulness.
From this, Rollins develops the concept of 'religion without religion' as an anti-system: a Christianity that, instead of imposing a positive content, systematically seeks out those excluded from whatever system is currently in power. The Christian 'worldview' is constitutionally unable to take power because it is defined by identification with the powerless — a prejudice toward the excluded and marginalized that means every time a Christian system is created, the true Christian is the one who sides with those outside it. The chapter concludes with detailed practical proposals for 'transformance art' and 'theodrama' — experimental, anarchic gathering spaces that employ music, poetry, theatre, ritual, and collective reflection to affirm the miracle without reducing it to propositional content, that refuse pastoral hierarchy, and that celebrate belonging across difference. These spaces are explicitly designed to 'make sense to nobody' — to rupture rather than comfort — as the only form of communal practice adequate to a truth that cannot be objectified.
Key concepts: Fetishistic Disavowal, Ideology, Religion Without Religion, The Act, Subject, Fantasy, Sublimation, Desire Notable examples: The preacher and the businessman parable; Mustard seed parable (subversive reading); Nazi ideology as ideological system (endnote); Theodrama and transformance art communities
Conclusion: Crossing Out God for the Sake of God
The conclusion synthesizes the book's argument in the formula of its title: the authentic Christian gesture is to 'cross out God' — to betray the ideological, onto-theological, propositional God — precisely for the sake of the God encountered as Event and living transformation. This is not atheism but a theological move from within Christianity that Christianity itself demands. The conclusion reiterates the paradox of the Möbius strip: Jesus and Judas, fidelity and betrayal, are not opposites but the two faces of a single surface. The book's final appeal is for a church that understands itself as constituted by this wound — not a church that provides answers, but one that cherishes the transformative mystery, holds the gap open, and forms communities of belonging that can live in the aftermath of the miracle without reducing it to a system.
Key concepts: Fidelity Through Betrayal, Religion Without Religion, Real, Das Ding, Truth, Gap, Extimacy Notable examples: Crossing out God formula; Möbius strip as structural metaphor
Main interlocutors
- Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
- Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View
- Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf
- Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
- Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
- Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death
- Jacques Derrida
- Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
- Blaise Pascal, Pensées
- René Descartes, Meditations
- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
- Paul Ricoeur (hermeneutics of second naïveté)
- Augustine, Confessions
- Duns Scotus, Ordinatio
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- Jacques Lacan, Seminar II
- Karl Barth
- Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
Position in the corpus
The Fidelity of Betrayal occupies an unusual position in the Lacanian-theological corpus as a text that is ostensibly a work of popular constructive theology but which deploys — often without explicit citation — the full conceptual apparatus of Lacanian-Žižekian theory: the Real as irreducible to symbolization, das Ding as the Thing beyond naming, fetishistic disavowal as the structure of ideological religion, the traversal of fantasy as the condition of authentic faith, and the subject's constitution within the symbolic order prior to any propositional stance. It is best read alongside Žižek's The Puppet and the Dwarf and The Fragile Absolute, to which it is in many ways a response and corrective — accepting Žižek's Lacanian diagnosis of religion while rejecting his conclusion that authentic Christianity must be translated entirely into secular-materialist terms. It also shares significant ground with John Caputo's Derridean theology (especially The Weakness of God) and should be read in conjunction with Rollins's earlier How (Not) to Speak of God, which provides the liturgical and communal praxis that Fidelity theorizes.\n\nFor readers working through the Lacanian corpus, The Fidelity of Betrayal is most productively read after Lacan's own Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, on das Ding and sublimation) and Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology (on ideology, fetishism, and the Real), as it provides a worked theological application of those frameworks that neither Lacan nor Žižek themselves undertake. It is a secondary-tier text that will be of particular value to scholars interested in the intersection of Lacanian theory with Christian theology, post-secular philosophy of religion, and emerging church discourse. Readers seeking a more rigorous psychoanalytic engagement should proceed to Lacan's Seminar XI or Žižek's The Parallax View, both of which Rollins draws on implicitly throughout.