"What matters is not so much that Žižek is endorsing a demythologized, disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end (despite what he sometimes claims) a ...heterodox version of Christian belief."--John Milbank"To put it even more bluntly, my claim is that it is Milbank who is effectively guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank."--Slavoj ŽižekIn this corner, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a militant atheist who represents the critical-materialist stance against religion's illusions; in the other corner, "Radical Orthodox" theologian John Milbank, an influential and provocative thinker who argues that theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics, and ethics can stand. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Žižek and Milbank go head to head for three rounds, employing an impressive arsenal of moves to advance their positions and press their respective advantages. By the closing bell, they have not only proven themselves worthy adversaries, they have shown that faith and reason are not simply and intractably opposed. Žižek has long been interested in the emancipatory potential offered by Christian theology. And Milbank, seeing global capitalism as the new century's greatest ethical challenge, has pushed his own ontology in more political and materialist directions. Their debate in The Monstrosity of Christ concerns the future of religion, secularity, and political hope in light of a monsterful event--God becoming human. For the first time since Žižek's turn toward theology, we have a true debate between an atheist and a theologian about the very meaning of theology, Christ, the Church, the Holy Ghost, Universality, and the foundations of logic. The result goes far beyond the popularized atheist/theist point/counterpoint of recent books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others. Žižek begins, and Milbank answers, countering dialectics with "paradox." The debate centers on the nature of and relation between paradox and parallax, between analogy and dialectics, between transcendent glory and liberation. Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher and cultural critic. He has published over thirty books, including Looking Awry, The Puppet and the Dwarf, and The Parallax View (these three published by the MIT Press). John Milbank is an influential Christian theologian and the author of Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason and other books. Creston Davis, who conceived of this encounter, studied under both Žižek and Milbank.
Marx's critique of political economy describes the expanded reproduction of the capital as the basic reality of our societies, and it may seem that Marx ignores two main externalities of the social ...reproduction of the capital, the domain of symbolic fictions and nature, the presupposed habitat of every social activity.
This impression is wrong. marx's capital discovers fiction in the very heart of the circulation of capital: what he calls "commodity fetishism" is a symbolic fiction which is not just an ideology . it structures the very social reality of the capitalist process. Plus ecology was in the very center of Marx's preoccupation in the last decade of his life: he clearly saw how the expanded capitalist production leads to a rift between society and nature, a rift which threatens the very survival of human species. For Marx already, socialism was eco´-socialism.
The coronavirus epidemic is not just a biological phenomenon which affects humans: it is also a moment of a profound global and ecological crisis that includes many human and nonhuman actors. To ...confront the crisis, a radical philosophical change is needed, which penetrates to natural, economic, and cultural processes. The amassing of dictatorial powers of state apparatuses evoked by the pandemic highlights their basic impotence and the fact that the system as we know it cannot continue in its existing liberal-permissive form. While the final outcome is uncertain what is most probable is that a new barbarian capitalism will prevail: many old and weak will be sacrificed and let to die, workers will have to accept much lower standards of living, digital control of our lives will remain a permanent feature, and class distinctions will become much more than now a matter of life and death.
There are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, not as problems of inequality, exploitation, injustice; wherein, the proposed remedy tolerance, not emancipation, political ...struggle, even armed struggle. The immediate answer is the liberal multiculturalist's basic ideological operation: the culturalization of politics. Here, Zizek discusses tolerance as an ideological category.
In this contribution, Slavoj Žižek takes the occasion of Marx’s bicentenary for reflecting on the prospects of radical change today. First, it is shown that under Stalinism, Lenin’s works were quoted ...out of context in an arbitrary way in order to legitimise arbitrary political measures. Marxism thereby became an ideology that justified brutal subjective interventions. Second, this contribution poses the question of the revolutionary subject and democracy today. It stresses the role of both contingency and strategy in revolutions. In political assemblages taking place on public squares, the inert mass of ordinary people is transubstantiated into a politically engaged united force. The basic political problem today is how to best reconfigure democracy. Third, this contribution analyses the “interesting times” we live in. These are times that feature multiple crises, right-wing populism à la Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, the lower classes’ opposition to immigration, and the refugee crisis. Questions about human rights and their violation and about radical change need to be asked in this context.
The French and Dutch no to the project of a European constitution was a clear-cut case of what in "French theory" is referred to as a floating signifier: a no of confused, inconsistent, ...overdetermined meanings, a kind of container in which the defense of workers' rights coexists with racism, in which the blind reaction to a perceived threat and fear of change coexist with vague Utopian hopes.
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