"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.
Offers an account of Christian identity as failure
Everyone agrees that theology has failed; but the question of how to understand and respond to this failure is complex and contested. Against both ...the radical orthodox attempt to return to a time before the theology's failure and the deconstructive theological attempt to open theology up to the hope of a future beyond failure, Rose proposes an account of Christian identity as constituted by, not despite, failure. Understanding failure as central to theology opens up new possibilities for confronting Christianity's violent and kyriarchal history and abandoning the attempt to discover a pure Christ outside of the grotesque materiality of the church.
The Christian mystical tradition begins with Dionysius the Areopagite's uncomfortable but productive conjunction of Christian theology and Neoplatonism. The tensions generated by this are central to Dionysius's legacy, visible not only in subsequent theological thought but also in much twentieth century continental philosophy as it seeks to disentangle itself from its Christian ancestry. A Theology of Failure shows how the work of Slavoj Žižek represents an attempt to repeat the original move of Christian mystical theology, bringing together the themes of language, desire, and transcendence not with Neoplatonism but with a materialist account of the world. Tracing these themes through the work of Dionysius and Derrida and through contemporary debates about the gift, violence, and revolution, this book offers a critical theological engagement with Žižek's account of social and political transformation, showing how Žižek's work makes possible a materialist reading of apophatic theology and Christian identity. The first major reckoning of Zizek's relation to Christian theology.Rose builds upon Zizek's work, while remaining deeply critical at key moments.
This study reviews how Thai and Chinese journalists talk about power and truth in relationship to their Fourth Estate role through examining twenty qualitative interviews. Adding to a previous study ...similarly looking at US and UK journalists it finds that, like their western counterparts, truth is heavily fetishized, being an ideal that journalists admittedly can never reach. However power relations are discussed quite differently, showing how the divergent power structures of the four countries create very different discourses of the power of journalists which are not fetishized to the same extent. This article thus finds that there are limitations to the universality of Žižek’s concept of ideology as fetishistic disavowal (that is, being able to actively admit the limitations of one’s profession as long as one still performs it) in the realm of comparative journalism.
Today, we face a climate emergency that threatens the future of all life on earth. We live in societies scarred by deep and longstanding inequalities in power and wealth, and further fractured along ...lines of class, race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. In this turbulent context we must reflect as a community of critical researchers as to what role can we play in bringing about more just societies. Much of the critical accounting community is now invested in exploring how accounting itself might bring about change through “emancipatory” accounting ideas and technologies. A practice that is stimulating great interest within this project is counter accounting. Giving balance to a literature that has focused on articulating the emancipatory potential of counter accounting, in this paper I examine its emancipatory limits. Drawing on Žižek’s theory of ideology, I put forward a critique of the potential for counter accounting to affect transformative change. I argue that its reliance on an epistemological awakening as a catalyst for progressive change is based on a formulation of ideology critique and its effects that cannot be maintained.
How to understand apocalyptic in the current COVID-19 pandemic? This is the question as well as the significance of the problem to be answered. Is it based on Jürgen Moltmann’s theological opinion ...through his “adventus” and emphasizes divine transcendence, or based on Slavoj Žižek’s opinion, which is “Christian materialism,” which rejects divine transcendence? By using a comparative-analytical method and qualitative research, this paper aims to find meaning that is found through the encounter between Moltmann’s idea of adventus and Zižek’s suggestion to build a new community through “resistance.” The result is that the COVID-19 pandemic is a resistant apocalyptic narrative about “What is to Come” as an adventus that exceeds the normal and surprising, as well as resistance to finding a new cosmic community model in an effort to live a new life in the new normal era. The order of discussion is as follows. First, Moltmann's apocalyptic thinking will be presented. Second, Žižek’s apocalyptic thinking will be presented. Third, the meeting points and relevance for apocalyptic resistance will be presented in the context of the current pandemic.
In this article, we integrate Nietzsche’s visions of self-overcoming with a Žižekian toolbox to explore how ‘market-based progress’ is upheld through a fabric of ideological fantasies. Through an ...analysis of Huel, a nutritionally complete British food brand aligned with progressive and techno-utopian discourses, we reveal a fantasmatic structure centred on pragmatism, the search for unassailable truth and continuance of a prehistoric legacy. These fantasies function as illusory support for acceptance that humanity’s great overcoming is singularly achieved through market logic and ethos. Here, a fetishistic inversion centres on subjects believing that the detached spectatorialism of consumption is closer to the act of the Nietzschean ‘Overhuman’ than it is to its inverse, the ‘last human’. This article provides the parameters for how ideological fantasy insulates the market from its material deadlocks and concludes with a conceptualization of the post-sovereign consumer’s subjectification along the fantastical contours of market-based progress.
Este artigo objetiva analisar os personagens Isaías Caminha e Gonzaga de Sá, ambos protagonistas dos romances Recordações do Escrivão Isaías Caminha (1998) e Vida e morte de M. J. Gonzaga de Sá ...(1997), do escritor pré-modernista Lima Barreto, pelo viés do Materialismo Lacaniano proposto pelo filósofo e crítico esloveno Slavoj Žižek. Inicialmente, apresentamos o autor e uma breve visão do movimento literário ao qual ele está vinculado. Por ser uma corrente relativamente nova no Brasil, destacamos que o Materialismo Lacaniano, antes ligado à filosofia política, avança gradativamente e atinge a área dos estudos culturais, por meio da proposta de ler textos literários a partir da aplicação dos conceitos de Lacan propostos por Žižek. A proposta deste crítico é intervir no discurso político por acreditar que isso pode afetar as ideias das pessoas e ajudar a transformar a realidade. Nessa perspectiva, o objetivo deste artigo é aplicar os conceitos de Real, Simbólico e Imaginário, em uma breve análise dos dois personagens (Isaías Caminha e Gonzaga de Sá) para explicar a forma como esses conceitos propõem um direcionamento sobre a possível relação existente entre o que Žižek afirma sobre as questões da atualidade e o que pode ser aplicado à realidade dos romances em estudo. Nossas pesquisas atestam a atualidade das obras de Lima Barreto, uma vez que seus personagens representam o ser humano como um organismo social condicionado às concepções históricas e literárias, e isso permite nossa análise à luz de uma teoria contemporânea.
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