Specters of Lost Causes: Caputo’s Theology through the Žižekian Lens of Fidelity and Haunting

This article argues that Slavoj Žižek’s notion of the “lost cause” and John D. Caputo’s theology of the event can be brought into a mutually illuminating dialogue that yields a distinctive “theology of insistence and interruption.” I reconstruct Žižek’s account of the lost cause as fidelity to a traumatic Real that exceeds empirical success or failure and propose three criteria—namely rupture, universality-claim, and spectral persistence—for identifying such causes. I then illustrate these criteria through brief readings of the Umbrella Movement and 2019 Hong Kong protests, Occupy Wall Street, and the 2011 mobilizations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, showing how each functions as a “lost cause” whose truth remains unfinished.

In the second part, I read Caputo’s event-theology as a hauntological thinking of divine insistence, in which “God” names an undeconstructible call that never becomes a metaphysical presence yet demands concrete, non-sovereign responses. Bringing Žižek and Caputo together, I argue that Žižek’s emphasis on trauma and fidelity sharpens the political edge of Caputo’s spectral hermeneutics, while Caputo’s insistence on weakness and hospitality constrains Žižek’s militant negativity. The result is a postsecular, theopolitical framework for thinking how faithfulness to “lost causes” can animate emancipatory projects without collapsing into nostalgic myth or quietist resignation.