Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist

by Slavoj Žižek

If we want to be true atheists, do we have to begin with a religious edifice and undermine it from within?

Slavoj Žižek has long been a commentator on, and critic of, Christian theology. His preoccupation with Badiou's concept of 'the event' alongside the Pauline thought of the New Testament has led to a decidedly theological turn in his thinking. Drawing on traditions and subjects as broad as Buddhist thought, dialectical materialism, political subjectivity, quantum physics, AI and chatbots, this book articulates Žižek's idea of a religious life for the first time.

Christian Atheism is a unique insight into Žižek's theological project and the first book-length exploration of his religious thinking. In his own words, "to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian experience." Crucial to his whole conception of 'experience' is not some kind of spiritual revelation but rather the logic of materialistic thought. This affirmation of Christian theology whilst simultaneously deconstructing it is a familiar Žižekian move, but one that holds deep-seated political, philosophical and, in the end, personal import for him.

Here is Žižek’s most extensive treatment of theology and religion to date.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Theology, Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction, Theory, Christianity

310 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2024

About the author

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovene sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic.

He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992).

Since 2005, Žižek has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Žižek is well known for his use of the works of 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.

In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País he jokingly described himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist". In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he described himself as a "Marxist" and a "Communist."

Reviews

[Elliot · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have very little interest at this point in Zizek’s writings or projects. Nowadays I only find Zizek worthwhile as someone to use for immaculate conception as Deleuze puts it, on using philosophers for our own gain and creating a child/monster.

Some of what’s really phenomenal in here and deserving of 5 stars: Zizek’s immanent critique of religion and that critique’s relation to psychoanalysis. Some genuinely great insights into psychoanalytic understandings of religious belief. Also, Zizek displays more clarity here on his interpretation of Hegel and Lacan than many other works I’ve read- some truly great commentary on what it means to move from epistemological lack to ontological lack/gap/cut. On this point there is a truly great chapter on quantum mechanics and what it means for materialism/philosophy/religion. It’s actually quite impressive how Zizek handles it.


With that being said 3 stars overall because there is so much 1 star level garbage throughout. One ultimately has to sift through a significant amount of said garbage to produce the aforementioned monster child. The one star bits are mostly Zizek’s most recent Compact articles repurposed- garbage stuff on IdPol, “wokeness,” trans stuff, Law and Order, etc. If you’ve read any of it previously, you know it’s bad.

I’d have a hard time recommending this to anyone who isn’t already familiar with Zizek and the wider world of theory he represents- if that is you then this one is definitely worth a skim for the gems in between. (Definitely check out chapter 3 on quantum mechanics)

[Seppe · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There was only one Christian, and he died on the cross"
- One of Nietzsches aphorisms, is fully backed up by Žižek. Not only God the Son died on the cross, also the Father, the Holy Spirit is a Spook living through the followers. The point is made that the kernel of atheism is present in and throughout Christianity. "The only way towards atheism is through Christianity" Z proclaims, heavily inspired by Paulinic teachings and Hegels interpretation of the Trinity.
You'd be disapointed if you expect a thorough examination of theology, rather Z gives a hotchpotch of his formed ideas on theology using provocative language.
Published as recent as 2024, contemporary events in geopolitics are discussed, quantum mechanics, anti-semitism and trans-rights. An interesting read, especially the claim that politics are inherently theological. Faith is interwoven in the most everyday things. The gap between 'knowing' and 'believing' is worthwhile to explore.

[Solomon Holmes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zizek being Zizek volume #???

[Bücherangelegenheiten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slavoj Žižek schreibt auch mit Christlicher Atheismus wieder genau das Buch, von dem er selbst sagt, dass er es immer schreibt. Und doch fühlt es sich erneut notwendig an. Wie so oft behandelt Žižek alles und nichts zugleich. Politik, Psychoanalyse, Theologie, Popkultur, Quantentheorie und Philosophie werden in einem atemlosen Wechsel miteinander verknüpft. Im Unterschied zu vielen seiner anderen Bücher steht hier jedoch das Christentum klar im Zentrum. Allerdings nicht als religiöses Bekenntnis, sondern als theoretisches Sprengmaterial.

Žižek interessiert sich nicht für den Glauben an Gott im klassischen Sinne. Im Gegenteil. Sein Christentum ist radikal atheistisch gedacht. Die entscheidende Geste des Christentums liegt für ihn nicht in der Erlösung, sondern im Tod Gottes selbst. Gott stirbt am Kreuz und mit ihm jede metaphysische Absicherung. Was bleibt, ist Verantwortung, Gemeinschaft und ein radikaler Materialismus ohne tröstende Hintertüren.

Wie gewohnt verbindet Žižek dabei Lacan, Hegel und Marx mit Filmbeispielen, politischen Analysen und überraschenden Gedankensprüngen. Er springt von Paulus zu Hitchcock, von der Dreifaltigkeit zur modernen Ideologie, von Theologie zur aktuellen Weltpolitik. Das Lesen kann dabei anstrengend sein. Man verliert zwischendurch den Faden, man fragt sich, wohin das alles führt. Doch genau darin liegt Žižeks Methode. Am Ende fügen sich die Gedanken zu einem Bild zusammen, das provoziert und überzeugt.

Christlicher Atheismus ist kein systematisches theologisches Buch und auch keine klassische Religionskritik. Es ist ein typischer Žižek. Laut, widersprüchlich, brillant und manchmal bewusst überfordernd. Wer klare Argumentationslinien sucht, wird irritiert sein. Wer sich jedoch auf diesen rasenden Denkstil einlässt, wird belohnt mit einer radikalen Neuinterpretation des Christentums als politischer und ethischer Herausforderung.

Dieses Buch zeigt erneut, warum Žižek einzigartig ist. Kaum jemand sonst schafft es, Theologie, Psychoanalyse, Politik und Popkultur so miteinander zu verschränken, dass daraus mehr entsteht als bloße Provokation. Christlicher Atheismus ist kein leichtes Buch, aber ein lohnendes. Ein Buch, das den Glauben nicht rettet, sondern ihn bis zum Ende denkt.

[Ben Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's always difficult to review any book by Zizek having got to the end not sure if I read one book or six, but I'll try.

The titled idea of Christian Atheism was the most intriguing part to me and what it means for Christianity. For Zizek Christianity as a revolutionary/emancipatory practice hinges on the death of Jesus. Most Christians would say something similar with the addition of Jesus' resurrection, which I think is a key distinction.

How I have come to understand Christian Atheism is that Chrstianity takes on its universalist revolutionary character through the transition from an exclusive group organized by a mutual relation to God (big Other), to a group united through a shared relationship to the Holy Spirit that is part of them. This transition can only happen by the big Other destabilizing its established position through death (Jesus' crucifixion). This leaves us with a Holy Spirit community that is truly universal, with true commonality, that can then achieve truly emacipatory, revolutionary ends: "not just a group of individuals pursuing their particular interests but a group of comrades acting on behalf of a Cause."

Chrstian Atheism helps place Christian theology back in its radical place. Definitely worth a read.

[Silvester Borsboom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dikwijls bijzonder grappig en inzichtelijk, maar ook absurd chaotisch en slordig. Kortom: Zizek. De religieuze dimensie stond minder centraal dan gehoopt. Veel verder dan het telkens herhalen van de welbekende Hegeliaanse opvatting van de kruisdood als het sterven van de God "aan gene zijde" (waarbij Zizek een wel heel seculiere interpretatie aanhangt van de Heilige Geest als de in absolute vrijheid samenkomende geloofsgemeenschap die, bevrijd van door God opgelegde wetten, haar eigen morele koers moet bepalen) komt het wat dat betreft niet. Wel veel boeiende analyses van Oekraïne, cultuuroorlogen enz.

[Lander Demonie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some takes are interesting, some are more of the same.
Still recomendable.

[elo kaalep]

krt sen mingi filosoofia ju

[Lowell AfdahlRice · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always enjoy Zizek's writing style and most the time am engaged with the content. With this, my 36th book that I have read from Zizek, I was put off by the bricolage of content expecting a more philosophical approach on "Christian Atheism".

[Radu-andrei Oarcea · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Christian Atheists Inc."

“The only way to be an atheist is through Christianity” is the crux of his newfound identity. "This big Other can be called natural necessity, evolution, or whatever. We, humans, are nonetheless reduced to a position within the harmonious whole of evolution,... , but the difficult thing to accept is again that there is no big Other, no point of reference which guarantees meaning”. Christianity, in essence, is atheistic and at least, one of the possible paths to reach it, is through Christianity. Talk about thesis, antithesis, synthesis, about the destruction of subjective sovereignty!

Žižek's paradoxical ontology is concerned with the constitutive gap and inconsistency, a way of thinking through what remains when the need for an ultimate foundation disappears. Drawing from Hegel’s ontological indeterminacy (1) and Lacan’s subjective incompleteness (2), Žižek sets abound in talks of contradiction, antagonism, negativity, self-relating negativity, and non-identity. The subject is thus deprived of the supposed guarantee of meaning and remains marked by non-identity, while the Symbolic is unable to close upon itself as a perfectly coherent totality, and the Real emerges through the antagonism by which this impossibility becomes manifest. Žižek therefore gives the Real an ontological function precisely by locating it within the fissure of the structure, making rupture internal rather than external to the Symbolic order. The Real is the antagonism, lack and excess through which the Symbolic internal impossibility becomes visible; it names the point at which the Symbolic encounters its formal limit.

This dialectical movement ultimately destroys the illusion of subjective sovereignty and turns Christianity itself into a conceptual mechanism through which the subject encounters its own constitutive incompleteness. It forces the subject to confront the absence of any external point of reference capable of guaranteeing its identity, meaning or coherence. Even God, when pushed to the limit of Žižek’s dialectical reasoning, ceases to function as an ultimate foundation and is instead interpreted through the internal fracture of the structure itself. This negative movement is what allows Žižek to retain Christianity as a philosophical structure while emptying it of transcendence. Slavoj Žižek, the Golden Goose of the atheist world, crossing the lake of Christianity without a single drop of faith to drench his feathers!

It is particularly curious that such an astute theoretician as Žižek does not seem to recognise that, when Christians speak of a personal relationship with God, the reality to which they refer cannot be reduced to the Lacanian Real, nor treated as a mere copy (mimēma) or an external likeness (homoiōma), and is therefore not simply subjected to the incompleteness of the Symbolic. Man is not a portrait of God, but a living image in which the Archetype is communicated through participation (methexis), rather than through reproduction. Man is, from the very act of creation, the eikōn of God, his identity as being grounded ontologically in the constitutive relation between image and Archetype (Archetypon). Again, the human subject is not thereby reduced to a negative ontology founded upon an alleged lack or incompleteness within the Symbolic.

Alain Badiou is another actor in this atheistic piece, a communist and markedly heterodox Marxist philosopher, in search of a kind of anti-teleological gnosis, which combines humanism with hollowed out theological precepts, a "history without history". His ontology and theory of the Event also depend upon rupture, although he locates that rupture in a fundamentally different relation than that of Žižek’s; between being, history and the emergence of the new.

Being, in itself, is neither substance nor God, neither the One nor a Totality. For something to exist, it must be situated within multiplicity, since mathematics provides the true ontology of being. For Badiou, rare Events demand a disciplined fidelity from the subject, while any transcendent guarantee of Truth must be rejected. There is no Truth beyond the conditions that shape reality in a materialist way as modes of operation for art, economics, politics, science. Rather than seeing truth as relative to its historical period, Badiou argues that an event enables a "truth procedure" that is universal and eternal, radical "events" that break with the past, in specific, punctual moments. History is not a seamless, continuous development, with an "end goal", but a series of disjointed, transformative events that cannot be predicted by preceding circumstances.

Žižek continually inoculates himself against doubt with the conviction that “beautiful” Hegelian dialectics and Marxism is his destiny and the answer for everyone. This mythical revelatory dogmatic view, combining the Hegelian dialectic as the most elaborate sophistry in the philosophy of history, which coerces religion in a sort of hardboiled fiction, together with the "merry revelation" of Marxist atheism and Comtean ultimate Humanist religion, is the stuff of nightmares. Hence the awkward stories about Indian pariahs and caretakers, as true “materialists” who just can’t stop being the odd ones, wanting to do the odd job! Žižek is both excited and repulsed by the real events, in such a way that he cannot help but end up as the worst of misanthropists and pessimists.

Badiou proposes an ethical framework based on moving retrospectively through historical Events, by way of deciding to give into it intentionally, and attributing meaning, through the subject's faithful action to the event or revolutionary action, rather than just following historical trends. This is how the new and the meaningful is inscribed in History, and one fundamental such Event is the Revelation. For him there is no true ontological meaning in the Revelation, no sacredness; he doesn't believe in the scriptural or historical truth of Revelation such an Event would need in order to break this historical accumulation of preconceived notions and events that make up the History of the Church. This for him is fiction, like everything else in History! He clearly distinguishes between the existing situation that hints to the Lacanian symbolic order, and The Event, the latter interrupting the former without being reducible to it. The Event is only important retroactively and because it serves us with a programme for the betterment of humankind, something akin to Saint Paul's Church of the Spirit, where hierarchical differences are abolished.

His philosophy emphasizes the ruptures and the potential for new, universal ideas to emerge regardless of the historical context. Badiou's communist glosolalia, however, would hardly survive an encounter with the “Apostle of the Gentiles”; for Saint Paul views prophecy as the truest form of service for the betterment of others. What Badiou fundamentally misses about the real person's life, and by implication its spiritual significance, is the fact that all of it is happening between these all too exciting and "important" Events, as he sees them. A human life is all about the slow, steady and faithful grinding, a seemingly un-important in-between. It is in this seemingly insignificant Saturday, between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, that things actually concern us.

Badiou and Žižek both radicalize Christianity by reading it without a transcendent theological foundation, but they do so through fundamentally different conceptions of the Real and its relation to ontology. Badiou grounds ontology in the mathematical structure of being-as-multiplicity and understands the Event as an irruption that cannot be derived from that ontology. Žižek, by contrast, treats the Real less as an ontologically separate domain than as the constitutive inconsistency or negativity internal to the Symbolic itself.

Disregarding the Christian notion of seeing evil as a break from Divine grace, Žižek shrewdly conjures G.K. Chesterton, making him the apologetic parrot, but he does so in a seemingly lighthearted, almost condescending manner. When talking about the lack of virtuality of God, Chesterton was refusing to reduce God to a mere object of interpretation. This is not an argument meant to quench Žižek's paradoxical thirst for negative ontology. His "atheistic" Christianity is based on Hegel's dialectical reasoning and Lacan's identity "indeterminacy", so everything works against its completeness, more so, it presupposes a negative God, an absence, the Void. There are more dignified ways of talking about this in what is called the apophatic theology, the negative theology, found in the Eastern Church. The qualities that partake of the Divine nature are left in the night of semiology and are best kept that way. It speaks instead of what God is not, rather than defining an attribute of God. Or one might formulate the problem in a more Thomist way - with a modern phenomenological twist - as a question of indeterminacy introduced by sin. Surely not a godlike quality! Surely not a theory of the "Void"! Why would you think of God as evil?

God’s will is always for good, and because of this essential aspect of the Christian dogma, the subject’s freedom to act, what follows, for good and for evil, is man's role in Creation. Between man’s ineffectual liberty and eternal freedom, grace is present in each contradictory moment of human action. The beauty of Divine Creation lies in the fact that it allows otherwise destructive forces to unearth an abundance of possibilities, a tapestry that includes us, and that which mirrors the tangled mess in our hearts.

Žižek was right in implying that Chesterton put great efforts in trying to lessen the indeterminacies, and thus to convey the delicate superiority, found in Christian thought, and the incommensurable weight that comes with such boisterous self-proclaimed burdens. But Zizek cannot participate in these tribulations, he merely dismisses those aspects of Christianity that are not sufficiently researched or thought of. Just like Protestants, too obtuse and viscerally adverse to the idea of penitence, what it actually implies on a day to day basis, who would rather knife a cathedral's door in frustration than acknowledge it; Žižek can't ''penetrate'' Christianity because he doesn't understand Theosis; they all fail to recognize that deeds can and should become sources of good when they proceed from Divine grace; not through it alone, but by participation, end up in the same ontological pocket, thus making one's life Apostolic and naturally saintly. Christian life is not exhausted by intellectual assent but fulfilled through participation in Divine life.

Žižek jokingly mentioned that with Catholicism one can commit sins but be pardoned by confessing to a priest, with Protestantism one can commit sins but be pardoned by feeling a little bit guilty at the end of the day. The joke being that in the second case the feeling of guilt enhances the enjoyment of committing a sin, so in his view, the Protestants incorporated this as a Freudian element. This lacklustre excitement is the crux of his, by implication, inhuman Christianity. Poor man; for some, cats are dogs and dogs are cats, for some are bound to wander the Earth forever, and Žižek is something lesser.

These thinkers reject transcendence, but they also reproduce theological structures after removing the theological referent that gave those structures their original meaning. The result is theoretical frameworks that appear emancipatory but are, in fact, remarkably restrictive architectures of subject, history and truth. What else to do other than joke and obfuscate us of the real dangers of Christianity, enticing us while rationalizing every step of the process, but without any hope of consummation, becoming just some other Hegelian theoretician that wants to confabulate reality into conflicting logical entities, destroy them, then “reintegrate” them.



1. Ontological indeterminacy

Bestimmungslosigkeit, in its absolute immediacy, is Lacking any specific content, predicate, or internal differentiation, pure being is completely indeterminate and thus identical to pure nothing in their lack of determination; driving the dynamic self-development, of becoming, of reality through dialectical negation; so to determine something is to negate it, setting a limit introduces difference, movement to essence.

2. Subjective incompleteness

Human subjectivity is inherently incomplete because entering language creates an unbridgeable gap in the psyche. This structural lack (e.g. a system where words constantly stand in for missing things) drives all desire and operates across three overlapping registers known as the Three Orders: the Imaginary (the realm of images and ego; focused on appearance, perception, and a deceptive sense of wholeness; masks internal division with fantasies of duality, harmony, and mirror-image reflection), the Symbolic (the realm of language and law; no single word or signifier can fully express who we are, splitting the subject and permanently locking in incompleteness) and the Real (beyond symbolization; resisting meaning that shatter our organized realities; source of disruption that punctures both Imaginary illusions and Symbolic frameworks).

a) The birth of desire: Because language and society cannot completely define or satisfy a person, a permanent void remains at the center of the self.

b) The object-cause of desire: People chase temporary substitutes (objet petit a) expecting completion, but these objects only highlight the ongoing structural lack.

[Aljoša Toplak · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than about one thing, this is a series of Žižek's analyses of the current state of the world, but I'd like to highlight one quote:

"The conclusion that imposes itself is not that every ethical stance need some fi ure of the big Other to rely on but, on the contrary, that a truly radical ethical position emerges when the subject is deprived of the support in a big Other, so that it has to make a decision in the abyss of its freedom. Such a decision stands for the moment when ethics gets political, for the moment of the political suspension of the ethical : the subject has to make a decision which cannot be fully grounded in any kind of “higher” neutral principles (“don’t do to others what you wouldn’t like them to do to you,” etc.), it has to make a decision about how to apply these principles, a decision which always gives them a particular spin."

What a delightful way to bring ethics back to Earth and our immediate connections with beings; it's not that if God is dead, everything is permitted, but that we're now fully responsible for our actions. Even if life is a contingent and meaningless sequence of events, even if we're grounded in some completely arbitrary facticity of our lives -- e. g. we have two legs rather than three and we're a white man from Slovenia instead of a black woman from Sudan etc. -- we can still cultivate the wisdom to make decisions that will not only be smart, but also grounded in recognizing and accepting the world of another.

Žižek also gives a delightful compliment to the Enlightenment values of the West:

"At the same time, we should not be afraid to assert that the language of global emancipation has its roots in European tradition of Enlightenment. European civilization is characterized by a unique feature: permanent self-criticism is part of its identity. Yes, the liberal West is hypocritical, it applies its high standards very selectively. But hypocrisy means you violate the standards you proclaim, and in this way you open yourself up to immanent criticism – when we criticize the liberal West, we use its own standards. What Putin’s Russia is offering is a world without hypocrisy – because it is without global ethical standards, practicing just pragmatic “respect” for differences. We have seen clearly what this means when, after Taliban took over in Afghanistan, they instantly made a deal with China: China accepts the new Afghanistan while Taliban will ignore what China is doing with Uyghurs . . . – this is, in nuce, the new globalization advocated by Russia. And the only way to defend what is worth saving in our liberal tradition is to ruthlessly insist on its universality."

There's also some interesting arguments against god as an indispensable possibility:

"/.../ for a true materialist, it is only in this way that we really renounce god – by way of renouncing him not only insofar as he doesn’t really exist, but even if he is real. In short, the true formula of atheism is not “god doesn’t exist” but “god not only doesn’t exist, he is also stupid, indifferent, and maybe outright evil” – if we do not destroy the very fiction of god from within, it [will continue to hold its power over us]."

There's some answers to how to deal with global catastrophes:

"Our ultimate horizon is what Dupuy calls the dystopian “fixed point,” the zero-point of nuclear war, ecological breakdown, global economic and social chaos, etc. – even if it is indefinitely postponed, this zero-point is the virtual “attractor” towards which our reality, left to itself, tends. The way to combat the future catastrophe is through acts which interrupt our drifting towards this “fixed point.”

And an unexpected analysis of Himmler:

"Himmler goes to the end here: further in the speech, he imagines the case of an SS offi cer on the Eastern front confronting a Russian mother with a small child, both scared of him, trembling and crying. His fi rst reaction is, understandably, compassion: is really his duty as a soldier to kill these two helpless human beings? Himmler’s answer is an unconditional YES: his fi delity is only to the German people, which implies total indifference towards the suffering of the members of other races and nations. Bearing in mind the suffering the German people are exposed by the continuous bombing by the American and British planes, any compassion with the two poor Russians is nothing less than treason – an act of ignoring the suffering of one’s own people."

And as always, some pretty interesting movie analyses:

"The idea for Melancholia came to von Trier in a therapy session /.../ the psych. told him that depressive people tend to act more calmly [under the] threat of catastrophe. [This is a split in reality] – the social universe of est. customs and opinions in which we dwell – and the meaningless brutality of the Real: they cannot be thought within the same subjective space, one cannot be “normal” in both situations."

And so on, and so on ... Delightful read.

[Nik · Rating 4 out of 5]

...norec ni le berač, ki misli, da je kralj, ampak tudi kralj, ki misli, da je kralj: kajti kdor misli, da je Bog, je tudi največji norec.

[oscar · Rating 4 out of 5]

might be the zizekiest zizek

[Jared]

Hard day for woke

[Keelan]

A very powerful ending to a book that is consistently provocative and often laugh out loud funny, in a good way. Now some of the comments here are definitely right in identifying the redundancy in much of the content and the lack of focus on the titular concept. I, indeed, was hoping for a much more focused analysis on what exactly Christian atheism entails. While this does become clear enough by the end, the theme itself does not lurk strongly throughout. It is nonetheless recommendable; for it is, in fact, the home of fresh ideas.

[独活 · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a pity that such a good book cannot be published in China, a socialist materialist country, simply because it discusses Christianity, completely ignoring the fact that it is a book defending materialism. Because many book companies dare not touch topics related to religion or politics. In my company, such topics were directly rejected by the boss, and I didn't even have the opportunity to participate in the topic selection meeting.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

The content was brilliant, but the editing? Disgraceful. Does Bloomsbury assign unpaid interns to work on Zizek's text?

[Cruel Decapitator · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a pile of crap

[Leon Banik · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really enjoy reading Zizek but this one just wasnt really it. Its like listening to a broken record, with him mentioning so much stuff he has talked about already. The book makes a good point but could have been 50 pages of „Read Hegel“ „Listen to two of my talks and read sublime object of ideology“ „*actually new stuff*“.

[César Moreno · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sure

[Dennis Lundkvist · Rating 3 out of 5]

"So at the bottom of hell, Freud met the mayor of Vienna, the 'Master of Vienna', one of the most influential politicians in that part of the world at the time, a very popular populist leader notorious for his blatant anti-Semitism, idolized by young Hitler. The lesson of this encounter in hell is an anti-Jungian one: when we descend to the bottom of our Unconscious, what awaits us there is not the deepest truth about our personality but what Freud calls the fundamental Lie; we don't encounter there the pure flow of libido or its eternal archetypes freed from the oppression of paternal authority and 'binary' logic but the obverse of this authority, figures of obscene superego authority which enjoins us to enjoy and thereby sabotage our ability to enjoy much more efficiently than the patriarchal Law. Sometimes there is nothing liberating in bringing up to the daylight the obscene secrets of our unconscious - what we find there are prohibitions and injunctions much more brutal than the paternal Law." (p.248).

"In Twelve, we get a unique series of overlapping of the opposites: the poem praises the October Revolution, but it is as far as possible from the usual revolutionary pathetic, full of vulgar low-class language and course gestures. Christ at the head of the group which patrols the Petrograd hell of natural and public chaos - let us not forget that their goal is to prevent social chaos, i.e., to maintain the new law and order. This is and authentic image of the theologico-political short-circuit, an image of what Christian Atheism means as a political practice. Christ is not their leader, he is just a virtual shadow whose presence signals that the twelve are not just a group of individuals pursuing their particular interests but a group of comrades acting on behalf of a Cause. There is no promise or heavenly bliss in this image, it is just a group of comrades acting out of utter emergency, without any assurance of what the final outcome will be - maybe they will be liquidated by the enemy, or they will simply perish in the blizzard. Even if they are not aware of it, they act in their utter dedication as if Christ is at their head. Even in our "developed" West, we recently encountered such groups which were inspecting locked-down areas for the victims of the pandemic, or looking for abandoned survivors of flooding and heat waves, or - why not - patrolling an area and searching for Russian mines on the Ukranian front. And the list goes on: a group of artists engaged in a collective project, a group of programmers working on an algorithm that may help in our struggle for the environment ... Without thinking about it, they were and are just doing their duty. The subjective stance of the members of such groups was as far as possible from Politically Correct concerns and suspicions, they were totally foreign to the collective spirit that motivated the January 6 Trumpian mob which attacked the Congress building (a mob just performing a media spectacle), they left behind any traces of liberal individualism. They were in hell, with no God to protect them, and Christ was there." (p.266).

[Jessica Zu · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wonder how the academic community allow this kind of research published
1. the critique eg ‘why boddhisattva is a fake’ is based on claims ‘shamelessly copied from wikipedia’, some popular quotes from the dalai lama and d.t. suzuki’s brand of transcendental zen, and jeannie davis a buddhish psychotherapist. this sort of essay will totally fail in a college gen-ed course—but surprisingly published as ‘scholarly’ knowledge—if this is not continuing the orientalist epistemicde, I don't know what is.

2. zizek’s take on non-Christian and non-western cultures is equivalent to a chinese scholar claim old testament is pure evil because Deuteronomy (20:17) preached genocide as god’s message, new testament is pure evil because many american slavers used it to justify modern slavery, then sidestepping all extant scholarship on theology, christianity studies, citing trump or bannon to prove christianity continues to be evil corrupt and will remain evil and corrupt forever. then prove the case that the only way for human cultural salvation is to go through the glorious chinese culture.

3. i’d classify him into the camp of julius evola, rene gueon, savitri devi, etc, so epistemologically blind that they cannot even see their own raciology, sad captive minds. slaves to their own neurosis of dark triads. and of course, only people with salient dark triads would follow zizek's cultish reduction of other cultures and blind championing of the great englightenment
4. this is along the same line of Jung's narsicistic use of the east for the benefit of the west to dominate the world, Jung's comments on the translation of a The Secret of the Golden Flower, "I we should succeed in elevating another, or even a third psychic function to the dignity accorded intellect, then the West might expect to surpass the East by a very great margin. Therefore it is sad indeed when the European departs from his own nature and imitates the East or 'affects' it in any way. The possibilities open to him would be so much greater if he would remain true to himself and develop out of his own nature all that the East has brought froth from its inner being in the course of the centuries"--zizek is still narcissistically looking for some "inner being" of the West--excuse me, Pyrrho is the Greek Buddha, Aristotle talks a lot about how he was inspired by Egyptian philosophy, Ionic culture absorbed much of Lydian, Phoenician, Persian, Greek, and eastern philosophies ... which mixture is your proper pure "inner being" of the west--other than in your own delusion?

[Brian Hanson · Rating 3 out of 5]

"All chapters are interventions in an ongoing debate". In fact the 6 chapters address 6 ongoing debates, and if - like me - you haven't been a party to these debates, you may well - like me - feel a little lost. I was mostly drawn to the book by the promise of the third chapter - in which Zizek confronts quantum theory. That theory has led many to see in it a rejection of crass materialism, and an opening to a spiritual dimension. In Zizek's reading, on the contrary, it speaks of "deep atheism". The "big Other" - call it God or some higher determinant - is constantly in the author's sights, and he finds it in Derrida as much as in the church. For him quantum phenomena " bear witness to the fact that god itself ... is deceived". The mathematician/cosmologist Laplace reportedly told Napoleon that he had no need of the hypothesis of a Creator. But had he and his ilk rejected theology, or just learnt to do without it? Zizek believes the latter was the case, and that we need now not only to "prove that we don't need God to explain reality, but to prove that God cannot exist." To attempt to do this he calls in aid Bell's Theorem, the implications of which - as I understand it - have not even been agreed upon within the scientific community. The "Christian" aspect of the "Atheism" herein described is evanescent. It seems to rest on a misreading of Christ's sacrifice, wherein God Himself died on the cross, and was replaced by the Holy Spirit, which is a spirit of cooperation and fellowship opposed to the idea of a "big Other". In this way Christianity has paved the way to atheism, just as Robespierre sought to cement the atheism of the French Revolution with appeals to the Supreme Being. It's an entertaining read, sure enough, but perplexingly hard (for me) to grasp in its entirely.

[Nicholas Crawford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christian Atheism brings Zizek's thought to bear on 2023. It's an easy read. The book doesn't regurgitate old writing (short of the usual lodestones), it drills deeper into where Zizek has been to better demonstrate his ongoing points (That Buddhism's void/subjective destitution doesn't reach the radicality of psychoanalysis's. That materialism based in quantum physics supports an ontology that is non-all. The detail we get on both these topics are standout sections of the book.)

The first chapter on religion, Afro-pessimism, and materialism was also strong with some nice, meaty examples. Zizek's Christian Atheism is an application of Hegel's insights on Christianity--how there's no guarantee of a big other. I found it to be a bit of fresh air with more real-life applicability, but it's still useful to be able to connect the dots back to Hegel (for which I'd recommend Todd McGowan's chapter in Emancipation After Hegel).

The chapter on undeadedness (one of Zizek's great, eternal topics) is mostly contemporary application with some keen insight that sharpens the blade on what was developed in Hegel in a Wired Brain.

The sections on politics and a defense for psychoanalysis I think are solid. There's a bit more focus on universality, and there's a very material attention to what's needed in the world that carries forward his perspective on our times of constant crisis.

The insight here isn't stunning compared to his academic works like Sex and the Failed Absolute or Incontinence of the Void. Christian Atheism more to the scale of Hegel in a Wired Brain. And it's well worth the effort.

Yes, there's a good dozen typos in the printing too, but nothing disruptive.

[Michael Godwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christlicher Atheismus: Wie man ein wahrer Materialist wird is a bold and intellectually stimulating work that brings together many of Slavoj Žižek's longstanding interests into a single exploration of Christianity, materialism, politics, and philosophy. Characteristically provocative, Žižek challenges readers to reconsider familiar assumptions about religion, belief, and secular thought, arguing that the Christian tradition continues to hold unexpected significance for contemporary materialist philosophy.

One of the book's greatest strengths is its remarkable range. Žižek moves fluidly between theology, psychoanalysis, dialectical materialism, Buddhism, artificial intelligence, quantum physics, and contemporary political debates, weaving them into an ambitious philosophical project. While the arguments are often demanding and occasionally controversial, they reward careful reading with fresh perspectives on faith, ideology, emancipation, and the role of religion in modern society.

Overall, Christlicher Atheismus is an important contribution to contemporary Continental philosophy and theology. It will especially appeal to readers interested in critical theory, religious philosophy, political thought, and Žižek's unique interdisciplinary style. Whether one ultimately agrees with his conclusions or not, the book offers an engaging and thought-provoking exploration of questions that continue to shape philosophy, religion, and culture.

[Attasit Sittidumrong · Rating 5 out of 5]

It could be said that the book offers the Zizek's vision of political theology that sacralizes the emancipatory politics. By using Hegel's treatment of Christianity, Zizek sheds light on the paradox of God whose self-deceived existence--thanks to the death of Jesus and his crucification --renounces himself from the transcendental status. This causes a transposition of the gap from something separating human and God to the God himself. In this light, God is the one who is decieved making him incapable to be omniscience, and thus opening the space of materiality that has always already been beyond the absolute capture. To be the true Christian is to be the atheist and vice versa. This means that, for Zizek, the real absoluteness is the radical negativity that negates the absolutes itself, which inturn makes possible any emancipatory projects insofar as nothing is transcendent and the transcendent is nothing but itself.

[E H · Rating 3 out of 5]

as with much of zizeks contemporary writing, it’s mostly copied from his own, older work. however i think this book has some value in it. this book feels like a less approchable/more concise sex and the failed absolute. for a reader of philosophy who already knows much of marx, hegel and the likes it’s a fairly good explanation on all things zizek: his incomplete ontology, theology, psychoanalytics, social critique etc. the only book i think that specific genre of reader would enjoy more would be the sublime object of ideology.
overall it’s an easier to read work of zizek which you wont miss out on by not reading.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intriguing as always. I always thought Zizek is more of a social commentator with philosophical bent, and this book is no exception. While the discussion centers on the idea of the modern form of atheism having to go through Christianity first in order to be 'genuine atheism', and the idea of Jesus' death as also God the Father's death so that the Holy Spirit can represent a community of atheist believers, I find the discussion non-systematic and a bit meandering. It is by no means an exposition of a materialist way of life inspired by psychoanalysis. I think this topic is promising and could be explored further.

[Updesh Sharma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some segments are easy to read , some are impenetrable but overall a new thesis which could be developed further. Even though I am a Fan of Žižek's work I highly disagree with him on TERFism and his critque of "Wokeism" . Yet he is according to me an ally :

Trans ideology is here right: there is no “natural” correlation between psychic sexual desires and the biologically-determined bodily reality. What it misses is the fact that sexuality as such is “trans” – in what precise sense? The most consistent definition of trans-sexuality is that a subject goes beyond its biologically-determined sexual identity: if you are biologically a man, you are “trans” if you do not subjectively assume this identity but search for a different identity. Cis-men are thus in some sense ontologically lazy: they just passively assume what they are biologically. Lacan’s counter-point is that even cis- men or women are also trans: they have to work hard, to go through a process full of traumatic cuts, to arrive at their sexual identity which appears to be just something biologically given

[Miha Ceglar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit of a hard nut to crack for me, it is nevertheless a fascinating endeavor for a materialist critique of religion. The editing is a bit off, as there are many ideas that do not seem to flow seamlessly through chapters, but Žižek's style is engaging, as are his insights. A lot of quantum physics—be warned.