Monotheistic Violence or Zizek's Religious Temptation

Because of this I see the entire separation between tolerant 'authentic' monotheism and its violent excess as repeating the fundamental ideological gesture of claiming distance from the text. Perhaps we should supplement Zizek's thesis that being oblivious to this distance is a precondition of political activity, and extend it to religious activity as well. By claiming the excess of violence in (pseudo) monotheistic religion is proper only to its tacit polytheistic underside masks the inherent violence of any true monotheism, which consists in closing the separation between its singular discourse and the other's expression, where the latter is reduced to the former. Concretely to follow with our example, the violence advanced by Christian monotheism does not proceed from accepting the other Gods as merely 'false'; but on reducing them to being a pathological expression of some failure to abide to the norm of the monotheistic discourse (the terrorist’s proclamation of the sacred duty of the 'sons of Ala' is but the delusional influence of the corruption of the community of Christian values in sin, it's the devil's work, failure to recognize the true grace of the Lord in the community of Christian brotherhood, etc).

Monotheism bears this necessary violence intrinsically to its very discourse; it already prescribes the legitimate suppression of acts which do not comply to the normal integration to the religious community. Zizek's fault repeats the precise ideological gesture marked by monotheism- he dismisses examples of violence in self-proclaimed monotheisms as pathological examples of a quieter, apprehensive 'true' monotheism. The attack on the concept of fundamentalism must thus avoid this reference to true monotheism as a potential aspiration (unsurprisingly, Zizek himself finds in so-called true monotheists like the Amish a generally agreeable archetype which he jokingly suggests should increase in numbers).