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El dolor de Dios
En El dolor de Dios. Inversiones del Apocalipsis, el brillante teórico marxista Slavoj �i�ek y el teólogo radical Boris Gunjevi? no nos ofrecen un texto religioso, sino una investigación crítica, una obra de fe no en Dios, sino en la inteligencia humana. Con su fervor contagioso y su talento para las conexiones inusitadas, �i�ek pone a prueba el supuesto ateísmo de Occidente y se plantea la desconcertante posibilidad de la existencia de un Dios todopoderoso que sufre y reza. Recogiendo el guante lanzado por �i�ek, Gunjevi? hace un llamamiento revolucionario a la creación de una teología capaz de acabar con la astuta «esclavización del deseo» impuesta por el capitalismo. Valiéndose de ejemplos elocuentes y empleando una lógica penetrante, �i�ek y Gunjevi? convocan a pensadores que van desde San Agustín hasta Lacan, y abordan cuestiones que abarcan desde la ética cristiana frente a la ética «pagana» hasta la «lucha de clases» en el Corán y el papel de los sexos en el Islam. Examinan y diseccionan la fe hoy, y sacuden los cimientos de las tradiciones monoteístas.
254 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2008
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About the author
Slavoj Žižek
631 books7,650 followersSlavoj 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."
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."
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September 17, 2021
Stuck Between Terrorism and Neurosis
Slavoj Žižek is a well-known Marxist philosopher, that is to say, a dialectical materialist. He is also a Christian theologian with a particular interest in what Christians call The Spirit, a decidedly immaterial entity. One might think these two aspects of Žižek’s thought are an unusual, on the face of it contradictory, combination. But consider this:
Contradiction is the essence of Christianity: the last shall be first; blessed are the poor and the meek; a God without power; Father, why have you forsaken me?; a call to all the world for redemption that cannot be understood by the world. And these are only contradictions in the originary messages of Christianity. As has been noted by modern theologians, the early Christian community expected the imminent return of Jesus as the triumphant Christ; what they got instead was the Church and its consistently corrupt, self-serving, and decidedly un-Christian members. So who better than a master dialectician to assess the state of Christianity than a Marxist philosopher who happens to be a believer?
This book is a follow-on from a debate that Žižek had with the English theologian, John Milbank of Radical Orthodoxy fame. This debate is documented in their joint publication of The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic in 2009. Žižek feels that although that debate ended, it wasn’t finished. Apparently Milbank just wanted to leave the field, believing that both had reached the stage of simply repeating their positions and more or less talking past each other.
What interests me in God in Pain, however, is not any additional debating points presented by Žižek, but his acute theological understanding of modern society, particularly his diagnosis of the source of the global factionalism that ostensibly involves all the major world religions. While I think he ignores the pivotal (and destructive) role of the Christian idea of Faith in his discussion, an idea that has penetrated other religions so deeply that we now consider Faith and Religion as synonymous, his recognition of the political import of religious tradition, either active or unconscious, is important.
This statement , I think, sums Žižek ‘s position reasonably well: “… [I]t is not only that every politics is grounded in a ‘theological’ view of reality, it is also that every theology is inherently political, an ideology of new collective space (like the communities of believers in early Christianity, or the umma in early Islam).” In other words, theology is unavoidable as the dominant source of what goes on in the world, even of relatively few are aware of it.
Žižek begins his own political theology not with references to classical or contemporary theological works, but by using a central insight of the influential French psychiatrist and polymath, Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s fundamental thesis, in brief, is that the denial of the existence of God does not make all behaviour allowable but quite the opposite:
In short: “The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn’t know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God… If God doesn’t exist, then ‘everything is prohibited’ means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment.”
This inversion also hold for those who hold themselves to be true believers: “‘if God exists, then everything is permitted’—is this not the most succinct definition of the religious fundamentalist’s predicament? For him, God fully exists, he perceives himself as his instrument, which is why he can do whatever he wants, his acts are redeemed in advance, since they express the divine will .” Thus Augustine’s Amor et quod vis fac, ‘Love and then do whatever you want to.’ And Luther’s rabid hatred of the Epistle of James, which suggested that ethical actions were at least as important as faith for salvation. Or for that matter the “righteousness through faith” claimed by Paul in the epistle to the Romans.
The difficulty in trusting in the divine will, of course, is often obvious to everyone but the believer. As Žižek notes, “the ambiguity persists since there is no guarantee, external to your belief, of what God really wants you to do—in the absence of any ethical standards external to your belief in and love for God, the danger is always lurking that you will use your love of God as a legitimization for the most horrible deeds.” Such danger is not only in the personal extremes but also exists in the institutional mainstream. For example:
So, this presents the apparent alternatives which are presented to the contemporary thinking person. Either we become neurotic atheists all the while denying the unconscious constraints imposed on us. Or we become fundamentalist terrorists who seek to impose our interpretation of the divine on all and sundry with no real concern about human well-being. In political terms, think of the Left-wing judgmental, politically correct, no-harassment-here, identity police who actually carry around an enormous degree of cultural guilt which they would like the rest of us to share; and the smug, know-nothing Right-wing evangelicals who destroy democratic politics through their single-issue focus and their immunity to factual argument. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.
How does one avoid these extremes with both intellectual and spiritual integrity intact? What’s important here as well is that Žižek has something equally significant to say to the ‘middle-ground’ who wish a pox on the houses of both Left and Right-wing extremism. These folk frequently have given up on politics all together as irredeemably evil, or at least not worth the effort of even voting. This he considers a sort of modern gnosticism. Žižek puts gnosticism in an interesting light: “I have used here the term “gnosticism” in its precise meaning, as the rejection of a key feature of the Jewish-Christian universe: the externality of truth.”
This externality of truth is central to Žižek’s call to not just the extremes but the modal political population. He realises that neither Christianity nor any other religion can provide a fixed moral code of behaviour. But he also knows that morality is not a strictly private matter. We are individuals but we are also in each other’s pockets. Religious belief is a provocation and spur to ethics but ethics is external to religion itself. So, for Žižek (as well as for me) sacred scriptures, doctrines, and religious commentaries are a kind of theological poetry. So, for example, “… the [Christ] Event is a pure-empty-sign, and we have to work to generate its meaning.” And we create this meaning cooperatively in community. This means practicing political love (agapé) in the working out of moral and legal standards of behaviour.
This externality of truth does not imply that truth exists abstractly, known only to God or his official mediators perhaps; nor does it reject the possibility that what is considered truth changes and evolves from time to time, or even from situation to situation: “…[W]hat “Revelation”[that is to say ‘gold-standard’ truth] means is that God took upon himself the risk of putting everything at stake, of fully ‘engaging himself existentially’ by way, as it were, of stepping into his own picture, becoming part of creation, exposing himself to the utter contingency of existence.” That contingency of existence is us as we find our way along the road of moral, scientific, and even literary truth. God allows us to learn, even to learn what learning means.
For me this implies Hope in God, and Faith in each other, not the other way round. God’s faith in the human species, to join with it in an enterprise of learning, is the infinite miracle of grace. The meaning of the gospels, therefore, is not contained in dogmatic statements or creeds but in the activity of the community as it goes about learning: “… it is up to them [the audience/hearers of the word/congregation] to act like the Holy Spirit, practicing agape.”
Žižek is, I think, appropriately vague about what agapé is. After all we are also learning how agapé works in practice and are quite rightly experimenting more or less continuously with what politics should look like. But I lose him abruptly when he identifies the motivation necessary to adopt it: “Agape is what remains after we assume the consequences of the failure of eros.” That is, true political love is what’s left over after we’ve exhausted every other option. The problem, of course, is that humanity has shown a remarkably consistent tolerance for failure. It seems unlikely that agapé has any chance of large-scale adoption short of the threat of immediate extinction; and perhaps not even then.
So I have to conclude that Žižek’s redirection of Faith towards Man from God is God whistling in the dark. I can certainly maintain some sort of Hope - in Man as well as God perhaps. But I think Faith, if Žižek’s theology is correct, is not a virtue even God can afford to have. Quite apart from the likelihood of continuing human obduracy, the central problem with Žižek’s conception is that the agapé relationship, even if it were mutual, is not transitive. That is, if A exhibits agapaic love towards B, and B a similar love toward C, these relations say nothing about what A’s relation to C might be.
The implications of this are profound. First this intransitivity puts a limit on the size of the community involved. The limit is essentially the number of others that an individual can be expected to love in the appropriate manner. There is an implied intimacy which suggests that this number is rather few, say less than 20. Yet even if it were in the hundreds, the organisation that could feasibly be sustained is obviously rather small. This is precisely the problem faced by many business start-ups, for example. There seem to be definite ‘break-points’ - 7, 20, 50, 200 - at which the character of the organisation changes dramatically (or if one prefers, The Spirit gets harder to find) because intimate relationships cannot be maintained as the enterprise grows.
There is a further consequence, even in relatively small-scale communities. Relational intimacy is not free. It requires effort to maintain as every married person understands. One cannot afford to spread one’s love, even agapé, around indiscriminately. Moreover, communities cohere as much around difference as they do around similarity. Thus Christianity has traditionally defined itself as not-Jewish even during the period of gospel-writing. Modern businesses typical stress their differences from the competition as a tool of internal solidarity. The Marines are not soldiers. Canadians are not Americans, etc. Even communities built on love can simultaneously hate.
Therefore, while I find Žižek’s analysis stimulating and at times inspired, his prescription, if I understand it at all, is of questionable worth and passé despite his novel terminology. His agapé, for example, sounds very much like the epsilon-relation proposed over a century ago by the American Pragmatist, Josiah Royce. Royce too had the dream of creating increasingly inclusive communities founded on the Christian idea of love. For the reasons I outlined above, among others, his dream failed despite some really determined efforts. Agapé, it seems, resists institutionalisation. So while I continue to try to avoid both terrorism and neurosis, I’m at a loss to suggest what a political process might look like that reconciles the two.
Slavoj Žižek is a well-known Marxist philosopher, that is to say, a dialectical materialist. He is also a Christian theologian with a particular interest in what Christians call The Spirit, a decidedly immaterial entity. One might think these two aspects of Žižek’s thought are an unusual, on the face of it contradictory, combination. But consider this:
Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
- 1 John 4:8
Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.
- Matthew 10:34
Contradiction is the essence of Christianity: the last shall be first; blessed are the poor and the meek; a God without power; Father, why have you forsaken me?; a call to all the world for redemption that cannot be understood by the world. And these are only contradictions in the originary messages of Christianity. As has been noted by modern theologians, the early Christian community expected the imminent return of Jesus as the triumphant Christ; what they got instead was the Church and its consistently corrupt, self-serving, and decidedly un-Christian members. So who better than a master dialectician to assess the state of Christianity than a Marxist philosopher who happens to be a believer?
This book is a follow-on from a debate that Žižek had with the English theologian, John Milbank of Radical Orthodoxy fame. This debate is documented in their joint publication of The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic in 2009. Žižek feels that although that debate ended, it wasn’t finished. Apparently Milbank just wanted to leave the field, believing that both had reached the stage of simply repeating their positions and more or less talking past each other.
What interests me in God in Pain, however, is not any additional debating points presented by Žižek, but his acute theological understanding of modern society, particularly his diagnosis of the source of the global factionalism that ostensibly involves all the major world religions. While I think he ignores the pivotal (and destructive) role of the Christian idea of Faith in his discussion, an idea that has penetrated other religions so deeply that we now consider Faith and Religion as synonymous, his recognition of the political import of religious tradition, either active or unconscious, is important.
This statement , I think, sums Žižek ‘s position reasonably well: “… [I]t is not only that every politics is grounded in a ‘theological’ view of reality, it is also that every theology is inherently political, an ideology of new collective space (like the communities of believers in early Christianity, or the umma in early Islam).” In other words, theology is unavoidable as the dominant source of what goes on in the world, even of relatively few are aware of it.
Žižek begins his own political theology not with references to classical or contemporary theological works, but by using a central insight of the influential French psychiatrist and polymath, Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s fundamental thesis, in brief, is that the denial of the existence of God does not make all behaviour allowable but quite the opposite:
1. The true formula of atheism is not ‘God is dead’ but rather that ‘God is unconscious.’ A dead God, like a dead father, would, from a theoretical perspective, impose profound inhibitions on human behaviour. An unconscious God would be merely an absent father whose prohibitions could be broken with impunity.
2. Psychiatric analysts know from experience that if God doesn’t exist consciously or otherwise for an individual, then nothing at all is permitted any longer. Neurotics prove this every day.
In short: “The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn’t know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God… If God doesn’t exist, then ‘everything is prohibited’ means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment.”
This inversion also hold for those who hold themselves to be true believers: “‘if God exists, then everything is permitted’—is this not the most succinct definition of the religious fundamentalist’s predicament? For him, God fully exists, he perceives himself as his instrument, which is why he can do whatever he wants, his acts are redeemed in advance, since they express the divine will .” Thus Augustine’s Amor et quod vis fac, ‘Love and then do whatever you want to.’ And Luther’s rabid hatred of the Epistle of James, which suggested that ethical actions were at least as important as faith for salvation. Or for that matter the “righteousness through faith” claimed by Paul in the epistle to the Romans.
The difficulty in trusting in the divine will, of course, is often obvious to everyone but the believer. As Žižek notes, “the ambiguity persists since there is no guarantee, external to your belief, of what God really wants you to do—in the absence of any ethical standards external to your belief in and love for God, the danger is always lurking that you will use your love of God as a legitimization for the most horrible deeds.” Such danger is not only in the personal extremes but also exists in the institutional mainstream. For example:
“The well-documented story of how the Catholic Church as an institution protects pedophiliacs in its own ranks is another good example of how, if God exists, then everything is permitted (to those who legitimize themselves as his servants). What makes this protective attitude towards pedophiliacs so disgusting is that it is not practiced by tolerant hedonists, but—to add insult to injury—by the very institution which poses as the moral guardian of society.”
So, this presents the apparent alternatives which are presented to the contemporary thinking person. Either we become neurotic atheists all the while denying the unconscious constraints imposed on us. Or we become fundamentalist terrorists who seek to impose our interpretation of the divine on all and sundry with no real concern about human well-being. In political terms, think of the Left-wing judgmental, politically correct, no-harassment-here, identity police who actually carry around an enormous degree of cultural guilt which they would like the rest of us to share; and the smug, know-nothing Right-wing evangelicals who destroy democratic politics through their single-issue focus and their immunity to factual argument. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.
How does one avoid these extremes with both intellectual and spiritual integrity intact? What’s important here as well is that Žižek has something equally significant to say to the ‘middle-ground’ who wish a pox on the houses of both Left and Right-wing extremism. These folk frequently have given up on politics all together as irredeemably evil, or at least not worth the effort of even voting. This he considers a sort of modern gnosticism. Žižek puts gnosticism in an interesting light: “I have used here the term “gnosticism” in its precise meaning, as the rejection of a key feature of the Jewish-Christian universe: the externality of truth.”
This externality of truth is central to Žižek’s call to not just the extremes but the modal political population. He realises that neither Christianity nor any other religion can provide a fixed moral code of behaviour. But he also knows that morality is not a strictly private matter. We are individuals but we are also in each other’s pockets. Religious belief is a provocation and spur to ethics but ethics is external to religion itself. So, for Žižek (as well as for me) sacred scriptures, doctrines, and religious commentaries are a kind of theological poetry. So, for example, “… the [Christ] Event is a pure-empty-sign, and we have to work to generate its meaning.” And we create this meaning cooperatively in community. This means practicing political love (agapé) in the working out of moral and legal standards of behaviour.
This externality of truth does not imply that truth exists abstractly, known only to God or his official mediators perhaps; nor does it reject the possibility that what is considered truth changes and evolves from time to time, or even from situation to situation: “…[W]hat “Revelation”[that is to say ‘gold-standard’ truth] means is that God took upon himself the risk of putting everything at stake, of fully ‘engaging himself existentially’ by way, as it were, of stepping into his own picture, becoming part of creation, exposing himself to the utter contingency of existence.” That contingency of existence is us as we find our way along the road of moral, scientific, and even literary truth. God allows us to learn, even to learn what learning means.
For me this implies Hope in God, and Faith in each other, not the other way round. God’s faith in the human species, to join with it in an enterprise of learning, is the infinite miracle of grace. The meaning of the gospels, therefore, is not contained in dogmatic statements or creeds but in the activity of the community as it goes about learning: “… it is up to them [the audience/hearers of the word/congregation] to act like the Holy Spirit, practicing agape.”
Žižek is, I think, appropriately vague about what agapé is. After all we are also learning how agapé works in practice and are quite rightly experimenting more or less continuously with what politics should look like. But I lose him abruptly when he identifies the motivation necessary to adopt it: “Agape is what remains after we assume the consequences of the failure of eros.” That is, true political love is what’s left over after we’ve exhausted every other option. The problem, of course, is that humanity has shown a remarkably consistent tolerance for failure. It seems unlikely that agapé has any chance of large-scale adoption short of the threat of immediate extinction; and perhaps not even then.
So I have to conclude that Žižek’s redirection of Faith towards Man from God is God whistling in the dark. I can certainly maintain some sort of Hope - in Man as well as God perhaps. But I think Faith, if Žižek’s theology is correct, is not a virtue even God can afford to have. Quite apart from the likelihood of continuing human obduracy, the central problem with Žižek’s conception is that the agapé relationship, even if it were mutual, is not transitive. That is, if A exhibits agapaic love towards B, and B a similar love toward C, these relations say nothing about what A’s relation to C might be.
The implications of this are profound. First this intransitivity puts a limit on the size of the community involved. The limit is essentially the number of others that an individual can be expected to love in the appropriate manner. There is an implied intimacy which suggests that this number is rather few, say less than 20. Yet even if it were in the hundreds, the organisation that could feasibly be sustained is obviously rather small. This is precisely the problem faced by many business start-ups, for example. There seem to be definite ‘break-points’ - 7, 20, 50, 200 - at which the character of the organisation changes dramatically (or if one prefers, The Spirit gets harder to find) because intimate relationships cannot be maintained as the enterprise grows.
There is a further consequence, even in relatively small-scale communities. Relational intimacy is not free. It requires effort to maintain as every married person understands. One cannot afford to spread one’s love, even agapé, around indiscriminately. Moreover, communities cohere as much around difference as they do around similarity. Thus Christianity has traditionally defined itself as not-Jewish even during the period of gospel-writing. Modern businesses typical stress their differences from the competition as a tool of internal solidarity. The Marines are not soldiers. Canadians are not Americans, etc. Even communities built on love can simultaneously hate.
Therefore, while I find Žižek’s analysis stimulating and at times inspired, his prescription, if I understand it at all, is of questionable worth and passé despite his novel terminology. His agapé, for example, sounds very much like the epsilon-relation proposed over a century ago by the American Pragmatist, Josiah Royce. Royce too had the dream of creating increasingly inclusive communities founded on the Christian idea of love. For the reasons I outlined above, among others, his dream failed despite some really determined efforts. Agapé, it seems, resists institutionalisation. So while I continue to try to avoid both terrorism and neurosis, I’m at a loss to suggest what a political process might look like that reconciles the two.
October 29, 2013
For the poor, those with no financial or military means, all they have is their discipline, their capacity to act together. This discipline is already a form of organization. - Zizek
The above citation is quoted in God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse. It is quoted from a previous text. It isn't a response or rebuttal. The situation becomes clear, Slavoj Žižek and Boris Gunjevic haven't brought swords, they've come to riff. The text isn't structured as a debate but a call and response of ideas, each assertion elicits a germ which blossoms under the counterpart. The Gunjevic sections often left me clueless, he employs an obscure and specialized vocabulary and I often I felt the parsing wasn't worth the effort. His reading of Augustine's City of God was noteworthy.
Zizek was his usual astonishing self. His rumination on Christ as atheist was remarkable and his essay on Derrida and animals has kept me thinking all afternoon.
The above citation is quoted in God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse. It is quoted from a previous text. It isn't a response or rebuttal. The situation becomes clear, Slavoj Žižek and Boris Gunjevic haven't brought swords, they've come to riff. The text isn't structured as a debate but a call and response of ideas, each assertion elicits a germ which blossoms under the counterpart. The Gunjevic sections often left me clueless, he employs an obscure and specialized vocabulary and I often I felt the parsing wasn't worth the effort. His reading of Augustine's City of God was noteworthy.
Zizek was his usual astonishing self. His rumination on Christ as atheist was remarkable and his essay on Derrida and animals has kept me thinking all afternoon.
February 11, 2013
Reading involves a great deal of trust. With the first paragraph the reader is trusting that the author is going to offer a narrative, argument, or grand point to make. In other words the reader is trusting that the author is offering a valid and coherent intervention into an ongoing discourse and that the reader is not wasting his or her time to entertain a series of ramblings. A book of two authors increases that level of trust.
This book required a great deal of trust for a reader such as myself as I missed the “narrative” or the point that I believe the authors were trying to make until I finished the book and took some time to reflect. It is very easy to arrive at the conclusion that the book is simply a collection of essays written by each author that are somewhat connected, tangentially at best. Yet after finishing the work I see a conversation occurring.
Zizek is an atheist, albeit one who does not seem to be against the idea of religion. Gunjevic is a priest espousing the tenets of “Radical Orthodoxy” (which I would argue are steeped in modernism) albeit one who has a sense of respect for other faith traditions. In this work Zizek seems to be arguing that humanity is naturally moral and religion has the propensity to cause more harm than good. Gunjevic is responding that religion, specifically Christianity, offers something greater than what humanity can offer because of its grounding in the divine. For the sake of brevity I will not offer specific examples for this review.
What I found refreshing was the lack of polemics in both authors’ approach. Many popular atheists, in my experience, seem to have a chip on their shoulder and are bent on attacking not religion but a straw man version of Christianity. Christian “apologists” also seem to have a chip on their shoulder standing on the superiority of “divine” or hidden knowledge that either you get or you don’t. Both offer little to a greater discourse that needs much by way of example as to have a positive discussion (hence the “spiritual but not religious” folks wanting to stay out of the whole argument and ending up nowhere).
The seemingly lack of narrative comes from the indirect way each author is addressing the other. We do not find a point for point response and rebuttal in this work which means the reader has to connect the dots. It is a conceptual debate of ideas not of rhetoric and polemics. While overall I would say Zizek offers stronger essays, there is a sense of satisfaction in closing the book and then realizing that both authors were actually speaking to each other. It is refreshing to engage in this kind of debate, or perhaps better put – dialogue.
This book does take a good deal of trust to read, but after reading I found that the trust was not misplaced.
This book required a great deal of trust for a reader such as myself as I missed the “narrative” or the point that I believe the authors were trying to make until I finished the book and took some time to reflect. It is very easy to arrive at the conclusion that the book is simply a collection of essays written by each author that are somewhat connected, tangentially at best. Yet after finishing the work I see a conversation occurring.
Zizek is an atheist, albeit one who does not seem to be against the idea of religion. Gunjevic is a priest espousing the tenets of “Radical Orthodoxy” (which I would argue are steeped in modernism) albeit one who has a sense of respect for other faith traditions. In this work Zizek seems to be arguing that humanity is naturally moral and religion has the propensity to cause more harm than good. Gunjevic is responding that religion, specifically Christianity, offers something greater than what humanity can offer because of its grounding in the divine. For the sake of brevity I will not offer specific examples for this review.
What I found refreshing was the lack of polemics in both authors’ approach. Many popular atheists, in my experience, seem to have a chip on their shoulder and are bent on attacking not religion but a straw man version of Christianity. Christian “apologists” also seem to have a chip on their shoulder standing on the superiority of “divine” or hidden knowledge that either you get or you don’t. Both offer little to a greater discourse that needs much by way of example as to have a positive discussion (hence the “spiritual but not religious” folks wanting to stay out of the whole argument and ending up nowhere).
The seemingly lack of narrative comes from the indirect way each author is addressing the other. We do not find a point for point response and rebuttal in this work which means the reader has to connect the dots. It is a conceptual debate of ideas not of rhetoric and polemics. While overall I would say Zizek offers stronger essays, there is a sense of satisfaction in closing the book and then realizing that both authors were actually speaking to each other. It is refreshing to engage in this kind of debate, or perhaps better put – dialogue.
This book does take a good deal of trust to read, but after reading I found that the trust was not misplaced.
July 29, 2018
The Post-modern God
08 October 2013
One day while I was on Goodreads I noticed that one of my Goodread's friends had finished reading this book and the title instantly caught me. Being a Christian a book with the title 'God in Pain' was going to attract my attention, and not only that, but it also introduced me to a new author, Slavoj Zizek, that I had never heard of before. Having had a diet of Chomsky and other authors, and finding that they tend to repeat themselves after a while, I became interested in seeing what Zizek had to say, especially since he was a left wing philosopher who writes about Christianity.
I must say that I am glad that I turned to Zizek because while he can be difficult to follow at times, namely when he refers to the writings of Lacan and other authors, I found that I actually have become influenced by his thinking. Further, the fact that he says that he is an Atheist, yet seems to be one of the most Christian writers that I have read to date, further added to my appeal to him. The reason that I say that is because he writes about God from a Christological stand point, and does nothing to attempt to undermine the reality of the incarnation. In fact it appears that the whole concept of the incarnation, and of the crucifixion, fascinates him.
My pastor said recently that the writers of the New Atheism are actually dwelling in the past, and writers such as Zizek go to prove this. I feel frustrated that the city ministry here in Melbourne (and in Adelaide) are still trying to fight against the New Atheism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins, when the intellectuals of our society have moved beyond it, and moved beyond it in a way that actually works to the advantages of Christianity. The reason I say that is because the new norm among intellectuals is a broad idea we know as post-modernism. Okay, I like the term Post-modernism, but unfortunately it is a term that seems to be a catch all phrase to try to bring a new style of thinking together. From my standpoint, Post-modernism is trying to bring together Relativism (there is no objective truth), Desconstructionalism (the book is not defined by the world but the book defines the world), and Post-structualism (go figure). Simply put, these three ideas (and others) really have little in common, though can and do merge and influence each other.
God in Pain is actually written by two authors, though I found the writings of Zizek to be much better than the writings of Gunjevic. Gunjevic is actually a post-modern Lutheran theologian, and his final chapter where is examines the gospel of Mark is probably one of the most Christian readings of the Gospel I have ever encountered. In fact I would almost suspect to find similar commentaries on the gospel sitting on the shelf of your average pastor. Yet despite Gujevic opening up Mark to help us understand the structure, he in turn is deconstructing it for us, though he still falls back to the context of the world in which it was written. This is not surprising, because the parable of the sower, the parable that he claims the entire gospel revolves around, would make no sense unless we understood the nature of the poor peasant farmer in 1st century Palestine.
The concept of God in Pain really comes down to the concept of the crucifixion. In a sense Zizek sees it as a cosmic joke that God pretty much empties himself of his glory so that he can die. In fact he says that for that period (three days) in which Christ was dead means that Christianity is a religion whose focal point is a period when God did not exist. As such he turns the whole concept of Atheism on its head by saying that Christianity is in fact a Atheistic religion because at that time, when God was dead, there was no God. Thus the cry of the New Atheists that there is no God makes no sense because they are simply blind to the fact of what it really means that there is no God.
The whole idea of the incarnation is the idea that God is in pain and that he willingly takes upon that pain to redeem the world. He describes this inversion like a a king coming to his coronation and everybody anticipating this glorious person to walking in through the doors, and instead in crawls a cripple. This, Zizek says, is the picture of Christ (and in a way Gunjevich agrees). It is an inversion of what one would expect from a worldly king and a worldly messiah (and this is nothing new where theology is concerned). Christ did not appear in the centre of power (being Jerusalem, or even Rome) but on the fringes, in the outskirts of Palestine. Christ did not draw the wealthy, the influential, and the powerful around him, but rather the poor and the marginalised. The picture is the same picture that is created in my mind when I watch 'The Last Temptation of Christ' where Christ's followers, nay Christ's army, is composed of beggars, lepers, and cripples.
My final thoughts on this book (and I could go on) is how Zizek talks about the three branches of the church: the Orthodox, Catholicism, and Protestantism. We see three branches with three different concepts. The Orthodox church is built around the community, and focuses on the community. The Catholic church is built around the fact that the priests hold all of the power in a hierarchical and structural way. It is still the case that the lay people are not allowed to read the Bible and cannot understand the Bible when it is read out in mass. Thus the focal point of Catholicism is the hierarchy.
Protestantism focuses on the self because what Luther said was that we are all responsible for our own faith and for our own salvation. Thus Luther wrestled Christianity from the hands of the hierarchy, gave it to the individual, and told the individual 'believe what you will because salvation does not come through the community nor does it come through the hierarchy'. Thus the foundations of capitalism, the enlightment, modernism, and finally post-modernism, have been laid. These days we see the church riling against that individualism, however without that individualism they would not exist. They also rile against post-modernism without realising that they are probably the most post-modern of the religions simply because they let their world be defined by their interpretation of the Bible.
08 October 2013
One day while I was on Goodreads I noticed that one of my Goodread's friends had finished reading this book and the title instantly caught me. Being a Christian a book with the title 'God in Pain' was going to attract my attention, and not only that, but it also introduced me to a new author, Slavoj Zizek, that I had never heard of before. Having had a diet of Chomsky and other authors, and finding that they tend to repeat themselves after a while, I became interested in seeing what Zizek had to say, especially since he was a left wing philosopher who writes about Christianity.
I must say that I am glad that I turned to Zizek because while he can be difficult to follow at times, namely when he refers to the writings of Lacan and other authors, I found that I actually have become influenced by his thinking. Further, the fact that he says that he is an Atheist, yet seems to be one of the most Christian writers that I have read to date, further added to my appeal to him. The reason that I say that is because he writes about God from a Christological stand point, and does nothing to attempt to undermine the reality of the incarnation. In fact it appears that the whole concept of the incarnation, and of the crucifixion, fascinates him.
My pastor said recently that the writers of the New Atheism are actually dwelling in the past, and writers such as Zizek go to prove this. I feel frustrated that the city ministry here in Melbourne (and in Adelaide) are still trying to fight against the New Atheism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins, when the intellectuals of our society have moved beyond it, and moved beyond it in a way that actually works to the advantages of Christianity. The reason I say that is because the new norm among intellectuals is a broad idea we know as post-modernism. Okay, I like the term Post-modernism, but unfortunately it is a term that seems to be a catch all phrase to try to bring a new style of thinking together. From my standpoint, Post-modernism is trying to bring together Relativism (there is no objective truth), Desconstructionalism (the book is not defined by the world but the book defines the world), and Post-structualism (go figure). Simply put, these three ideas (and others) really have little in common, though can and do merge and influence each other.
God in Pain is actually written by two authors, though I found the writings of Zizek to be much better than the writings of Gunjevic. Gunjevic is actually a post-modern Lutheran theologian, and his final chapter where is examines the gospel of Mark is probably one of the most Christian readings of the Gospel I have ever encountered. In fact I would almost suspect to find similar commentaries on the gospel sitting on the shelf of your average pastor. Yet despite Gujevic opening up Mark to help us understand the structure, he in turn is deconstructing it for us, though he still falls back to the context of the world in which it was written. This is not surprising, because the parable of the sower, the parable that he claims the entire gospel revolves around, would make no sense unless we understood the nature of the poor peasant farmer in 1st century Palestine.
The concept of God in Pain really comes down to the concept of the crucifixion. In a sense Zizek sees it as a cosmic joke that God pretty much empties himself of his glory so that he can die. In fact he says that for that period (three days) in which Christ was dead means that Christianity is a religion whose focal point is a period when God did not exist. As such he turns the whole concept of Atheism on its head by saying that Christianity is in fact a Atheistic religion because at that time, when God was dead, there was no God. Thus the cry of the New Atheists that there is no God makes no sense because they are simply blind to the fact of what it really means that there is no God.
The whole idea of the incarnation is the idea that God is in pain and that he willingly takes upon that pain to redeem the world. He describes this inversion like a a king coming to his coronation and everybody anticipating this glorious person to walking in through the doors, and instead in crawls a cripple. This, Zizek says, is the picture of Christ (and in a way Gunjevich agrees). It is an inversion of what one would expect from a worldly king and a worldly messiah (and this is nothing new where theology is concerned). Christ did not appear in the centre of power (being Jerusalem, or even Rome) but on the fringes, in the outskirts of Palestine. Christ did not draw the wealthy, the influential, and the powerful around him, but rather the poor and the marginalised. The picture is the same picture that is created in my mind when I watch 'The Last Temptation of Christ' where Christ's followers, nay Christ's army, is composed of beggars, lepers, and cripples.
My final thoughts on this book (and I could go on) is how Zizek talks about the three branches of the church: the Orthodox, Catholicism, and Protestantism. We see three branches with three different concepts. The Orthodox church is built around the community, and focuses on the community. The Catholic church is built around the fact that the priests hold all of the power in a hierarchical and structural way. It is still the case that the lay people are not allowed to read the Bible and cannot understand the Bible when it is read out in mass. Thus the focal point of Catholicism is the hierarchy.
Protestantism focuses on the self because what Luther said was that we are all responsible for our own faith and for our own salvation. Thus Luther wrestled Christianity from the hands of the hierarchy, gave it to the individual, and told the individual 'believe what you will because salvation does not come through the community nor does it come through the hierarchy'. Thus the foundations of capitalism, the enlightment, modernism, and finally post-modernism, have been laid. These days we see the church riling against that individualism, however without that individualism they would not exist. They also rile against post-modernism without realising that they are probably the most post-modern of the religions simply because they let their world be defined by their interpretation of the Bible.
September 13, 2021
3.5 stars
Read
May 20, 2017An interesting collection of theological-political essays, an exchange of pieces between Slavoj Zizek and Boris Gunjevic. It is most certainly an 'exchange' more so than a debate, but the contours of their differences serve a good deal of interest. More importantly is what they have in common -- an interest in marshaling the reserves of potential within the core of Christian thought for a renewed emancipatory politics. This is recommended for both theists and atheists alike. Seasoned readers of Zizek, of course, will find all of their favorite cut-n-pastes.
August 29, 2015
In general, Gunjevic is the gun and Zizek is the cannoli. All that said, Gunjevic really brings it in the final chapter. Zizek's chapters are probably the most approachable Zizek I've ever encountered. This book is a worthwhile investment.
July 16, 2015
Eight relatively focused essays. Of them, I'd say five are disposable, and three are stand-out. Zizek's attempts to nourish the notion of a god in pain in "Only a Suffering God can Save Us" is probably the most well known of his essays on Christianity, but as is a lot of his stuff, it's not so much persuasive as thought-provoking. In "The Animal Gaze of the Other" he really did out do himself. I love Levinas, but Zizek really turns Levinas inside out in an effort to look for the ethical foundation of L's theory. Much to my chagrin, he doesn't find it.
Gunjevic writes well, but always seems a step behind his own argument, like he's engaged in some sort of disjointed spiritual revelation. "Every Book is Like a Fortress" is really well done, in my opinion, and holds together a really nice and accessible argument about the Abrahamic religions. Meanwhile, his other essays all seem to point at things instead of examining them, with the exception of the first one, "Babylonian Virtues--Minority Report," which fell flat for me.
Gunjevic writes well, but always seems a step behind his own argument, like he's engaged in some sort of disjointed spiritual revelation. "Every Book is Like a Fortress" is really well done, in my opinion, and holds together a really nice and accessible argument about the Abrahamic religions. Meanwhile, his other essays all seem to point at things instead of examining them, with the exception of the first one, "Babylonian Virtues--Minority Report," which fell flat for me.
February 19, 2021
Decidí leerme este libro ahora por si me servía para mis escritos del siguiente fanzine, y a pesar de haber sacado reflexiones interesantes creo que me falta bastante base teológica y filosófica como para enfrentarme a un texto como este. Es la primera vez que leo a Žižek y sus ensayos me gustaron bastante; el análisis teológico de El Señor de los Anillos y Narnia me hizo mucha gracia, y la parte sobre el ojo y la mirada despersonalizada me pareció loquísima. Me gustaría leerle más, quizá esta vez con obras más conocidas o centrales. De Gunjevic me gustó el ensayo sobre la lectura del Corán.
May 14, 2020
Slavoj Žižek
“If, once upon a time, we publicly pretended to believe while privately we were skeptics or even engaged in obscene mocking of our public beliefs, today we publicly tend to profess our skeptical, hedonistic, relaxed attitude while privately we remain haunted by beliefs and severe prohibitions”
“The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn’t know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God”
“If God doesn’t exist, then everything is prohibited” means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment.”
“Dostoyevsky provided the most radical version of the “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted” idea in “Bobok,” his weirdest short story, which even today continues to perplex its interpreters.”
“So he attends the funeral of a distant relative; remaining in the cemetery, he unexpectedly overhears the cynical, frivolous conversations of the dead:”
“He discovers from these exchanges that human consciousness goes on for some time after the death of the physical body, lasting until total decomposition, which the deceased characters associate with the awful gurgling onomatopoeia, “bobok.” One of them comments:”
“I propose to spend these two months as agreeably as possible, and so to arrange everything on a new basis”
“The dead, realizing their complete freedom from earthly conditions, decide to entertain themselves by telling tales of their existence during their lives”
“let us spend these two months in shameless truthfulness! Let us strip and be naked”
“The terrible stench that Ivan Ivanovich smells is not the smell of the decaying corpses, but a moral stench. Then Ivan Ivanovich suddenly sneezes, and the dead fall silent; the spell is lost, we are back into ordinary reality:”
“Mikhail Bakhtin saw in “Bobok” the quintessence of Dostoevsky’s art, a microcosm of his entire creative output which renders its central motif: the idea that “everything is permitted” if there is no God and no immortality of the soul”
“In the carnivalesque underworld of life “between the two deaths,” all rules and responsibilities are suspended.”
“The undead can now cast aside all shame, act insanely, and laugh at honesty and justice”
“The ethical horror of this vision is that it displays the limit of the “truth and reconciliation” idea: What if we have a perpetrator for whom the public confession of his crimes not only does not give rise to any ethical catharsis in him, but even generates an additional obscene pleasure?”
“The deceased in Dostoyevsky’s story are fully aware that they are dead—it is this awareness that allows them to cast away all shame. So what is the secret that the deceased carefully conceal from every mortal? In “Bobok,” we do not hear any of the shameless truths—the specters of the dead withdraw at the very point at which they should finally “deliver their goods” to the listener and tell their dirty secrets”
“What if, in “Bobok” also, the entire spectacle of the corpses promising to spill their dirtiest secrets is staged only to attract and impress poor Ivan Ivanovich? In other words, what if the spectacle of the “shameless truthfulness” of the living corpses is only a fantasy of the listener—and of a religious listener, at that?”
“the scene Dostoyevsky paints is not that of a godless universe”
“What the talking corpses experience is life after (biological) death, which is in itself a proof of God’s existence—God is there, keeping them alive after death, which is why they can say everything.”
“stages it to illustrate the terrifying godless universe in which “everything is permitted.”
“So what is the compulsion that pushes the corpses to engage in the obscene sincerity of “saying it all”? The Lacanian answer is clear: superego—not as an ethical agency, but as the obscene injunction to enjoy”
“If, however, what the obscene undead hide from the narrator is the compulsive nature of their obscene enjoyment, and if we are dealing with a religious fantasy, then there is one more conclusion to be made: that the “undead” are under the compulsive spell of an evil God.”
“Therein resides Dostoyevsky’s ultimate lie: what he presents as a terrifying fantasy of a godless universe is effectively a Gnostic fantasy of an evil obscene God.”
“Kierkegaard was right when he pointed out that the central opposition of Western spirituality is “Socrates versus Christ”: the inner journey of remembrance versus rebirth through the shock of the external encounter.”
“Within the Jewish-Christian universe, God himself is the ultimate harasser, the intruder who is brutally disturbing the harmony of our lives.”
“And does the space in which the (un)dead can talk without moral constraints, as imagined by Dostoyevsky, not prefigure this Gnostic-cyberspace dream? Therein resides the attraction of cybersex: since we are dealing only with virtual partners, there is no harassment”
“This proposal perfectly exemplifies how the Politically Correct anti-harassment stance realizes Kierkegaard’s old insight that the only good neighbor is a dead neighbor. A dead neighbor—a corpse—is the ideal sexual partner for a “tolerant” subject trying to avoid any harassment”
“The ideological space of such “tolerance” is delineated by two poles: ethics and jurisprudence”
“The old syntagm “theologico-political” acquires new relevance here: it is not only that every politics is grounded in a “theological” view of reality, it is also that every theology is inherently political, an ideology of new collective space (like the communities of believers in early Christianity, or the umma in early Islam). Paraphrasing Kierkegaard, we can say that what we need today is a theologico-political suspension of the ethical.”
“In today’s proliferation of new forms of spirituality, it is often difficult to recognize the authentic traces of a Christianity which remains faithful to its own theologico-political core.”
“The message of Christianity is, on the contrary, one of an infinite joy beneath the deceptive surface of guilt and renunciation”
“Is not Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings the ultimate proof of this paradox? Only a devout Christian could have imagined such a magnificent pagan universe, thereby confirming that paganism is the ultimate Christian dream.”
“You want to enjoy the pagan dream of pleasurable life without paying the price of melancholic sadness for it? Choose Christianity”
“Wagner overcomes his own (“pagan” Feuerbachian) ideology of the love of the (hetero)sexual couple as the paradigm of love: Brunhilde’s last transformation is the transformation from eros to agape, from erotic love to political love.”
“Agape is what remains after we assume the consequences of the failure of eros.”
“There is no guarantee of redemption-through-love: redemption is merely given as possible”
“divine act rather stands for the openness of a New Beginning, and it falls to humanity to live up to it, to decide its meaning, to make something of it”
“As with Predestination, which condemns us to frantic activity, the Event is a pure-empty-sign, and we have to work to generate its meaning”
“Therein resides the terrible risk of revelation: what “Revelation” means is that God took upon himself the risk of putting everything at stake, of fully “engaging himself existentially” by way, as it were, of stepping into his own picture, becoming part of creation, exposing himself to the utter contingency of existence”
“This is why enemy propaganda against radical emancipatory politics is by definition cynical—not in the simple sense of not believing its own words, but at a much more basic level: it is cynical precisely insofar as it does believe its own words, since its message is a resigned conviction that the world we live in, if not the best of all possible worlds, is the least bad one, so that any radical change can only make it worse.”
Boris Gunjević
“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy My brothers. And you will know My name is the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon thee.”
“This very border area, this realm “in between,” is a manifestation of the coordinate system I am setting up between two stories. The first concerns Lenin’s speech to the All-Russia Congress of Transport Workers in 1921, the second Boccaccio’s commentary on a dream about Dante”
“Lenin had spotted a placard displaying the slogan: “The reign of the workers and peasants will last for ever”
“Following the final and decisive battle, he explained, there would no longer be a division between workers and peasants, since all classes would have by then been abolished”
“As long as there were classes, there would be revolution.”
“First, Lenin failed to take in the more dangerous message on the placard”
“That the kingdom of workers and peasants will have no end, that their reign will be eternal, does not spring from the ontology of materialism espousing the eternal nature of matter. No, it is a clear theological formulation as described and invoked by the existence of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, one of the most important Christian documents ever written”
“The message on the placard makes it clear that the workers had indeed taken the Revolution the wrong way. In that, Lenin was right. He did not, however, fully understand what was wrong with their understanding”
“It was necessary to place the philosophy of revolution in the service of a proletariat that did not understand it”
“The crushing of the uprising was nothing more than a party crackdown on those to be eliminated at all costs—those who thought differently from Lenin himself”
“In other words, Lukács is alerting us to the ontological superiority of the proletariat over the intellectuals, who remain at the ontic level of revolution, although one might have the opposite impression.”
“Those workers who participate directly from start to finish in the process of production—with the help of genuine companionship, and living, as Lukács says, in a “spiritual community”—are the only ones able to fulfill the mission of mobilizing revolutionary forces in a process unmarred by intrigue, social climbing, or bureaucracy.”
“In his speech explaining to the transport workers what they ought to be thinking and doing, Lenin does quite the opposite”
“Leon Trotsky saw this very early on, in an entirely different context concerning the everyday life of the proletariat”
“Trotsky argues that the worker is trapped between vodka, the church, and the cinema”
“Trotsky says that the cinema quashes every desire for religion, that it is the best way to counter tavern and church. He suggests that the cinema should be secured as an instrument for control of the working class”
“Lenin espouses a certain form of pedagogy that invariably fails and abolishes itself chiefly because it does not succeed in instilling any sort of virtue”
“Trotsky ascribes all this to vodka and the church.”
“Revolutionary discourse presupposes a sacrifice—and if we see this as a virtue in Lenin’s revolutionary context then it is always about sacrificing others in the name of a third party—so no wonder “professional revolutionaries” resemble frustrated hedonistic nihilists”
“Revolution without virtue is necessarily caught between a violent orgiastic lunacy and a bureaucratized statist autism.”
“Trotsky seems to have been right when he said that man does not live by politics alone, clearly alluding to the story of the temptation of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel, as man does not live by bread alone but by every word that issues from the mouth of God”
“Lenin was displaying his own ignorance of the elemental religious references informing their perceptions and forming their habitus”
“The first reading is possible with the help of Martin Luther’s key—the distinction between the theology of the cross and the theology of glory”
“Tragedy begins softly, imperceptibly, and almost “at random,” like a marvelous promise; yet it ends tragically, in violence”
“Comedy, conversely, begins with a cruel reality and yet ends up happier and more joyous than it began.”
“while theology, like comedy, begins with a cruel act of incarnation”
“revolution the situation is reversed: it begins with revolutionary fervor and a joyous vision of universal transformation”
Žižek
“If there is no God, everything is permitted”
“All that then separates us from this ultimate moral vacuum are temporary and non-obligatory “pacts among wolves,” self-imposed limitations accepted in the interests of one’s own survival and well-being which can be violated at any moment”
“Even if there is no God, not everything is permitted”
“nothing is more oppressive and regulated than being a simple hedonist”
“that today it is rather to those who refer to God in a brutally direct way, perceiving themselves as instruments of God’s will, that everything is permitted”
“on a mission from God, one is allowed to kill thousands of innocents”
“difficult for the majority to overcome their revulsion at the torture and killing of another human being.”
“a larger “sacred” Cause is needed”
“The majority of people need to be anaesthetized against their elementary sensitivity to the other’s suffering”
“religion makes some otherwise bad people do some good things”
“while without religion good people would continue doing good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things”
“Stalinist Communists do not perceive themselves as hedonist individualists abandoned to their freedom; no, they perceive themselves as instruments of historical progress, of a necessity which pushes humanity towards the “higher” stage of Communism—and it is this reference to their own Absolute (and to their privileged relationship to it) which permits them to do whatever they want (or consider necessary)”
“they had just been deprived of the historical legitimization of their crimes by the Communist historical Absolute”
“Stalinism adds another perverse twist to this logic:”
“in order to justify their ruthless exercise of power and violence, the Stalinists not only had to elevate their own role into an instrument of the Absolute, they also had to demonize their opponents, to portray them as corruption and decadence personified”
“For the Nazis, every phenomenon of depravity was immediately elevated into a symbol of Jewish degeneration”
“precise strategic function: it justified the Nazis in doing whatever they wanted, since, against such an enemy, in what is now a permanent emergency state, everything is permitted”
“God, after all, is love, he is present when there is love between his followers”
“is that if you really love God you will want what he wants”
“your love for God, if true, guarantees that in whatever you want to do you will follow the highest ethical standards”
“My fiancée is never late for an appointment, because when she is late, she is no longer my fiancée”
“if you love God, you can do whatever you want, because when you do something evil, this is in itself a proof that you do not really love God”
“danger is always lurking that you will use your love of God as a legitimization for the most horrible deeds.”
“Christ has misjudged human nature: the vast majority of humanity cannot handle the freedom he has given them; in giving humans freedom to choose, Christ has excluded the majority of humanity from redemption and doomed it to suffer.”
“who alone can provide the tools to end all human suffering and unite everyone under the banner of the Church”
“The multitude should be guided by those few who are strong enough to take on the burden of freedom—only in this way will all humankind be able to live and die happily in ignorance”
“Dostoyevsky himself could not come up with a straight answer on the matter.”
“everyone is responsible for their neighbor’s sins”
“Is this not Dostoyevsky’s version of “If there is no God, then everything is prohibited”
“If the gift of Christ is to make us radically free, then this freedom also brings with it the heavy burden of total responsibility.”
“Be careful that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am he!’ and will lead many astray. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, don’t be troubled. For those must happen, but”
“the end is not yet. . . . Then if anyone tells you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or, ‘Look, there!’ don’t believe it. For there will arise false Christs and false prophets, and they will show signs and wonders, that they may lead astray, if possible, even the chosen ones. But you watch”
“Their message is: yes, of course, there will be a catastrophe, but watch patiently, don’t believe in it, don’t get caught in precipitous extrapolations, don’t give yourself up to the properly perverse pleasure of thinking “This is it!” in all its diverse forms (global warming will drown us all in a decade, biogenetics will mean the end of being-human, et cetera, et cetera).”
“Far from luring us into a perverse self-destructive rapture, adopting the properly apocalyptic stance is—today more than ever—the only way to keep a cool head.”
“If, once upon a time, we publicly pretended to believe while privately we were skeptics or even engaged in obscene mocking of our public beliefs, today we publicly tend to profess our skeptical, hedonistic, relaxed attitude while privately we remain haunted by beliefs and severe prohibitions”
“The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn’t know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God”
“If God doesn’t exist, then everything is prohibited” means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment.”
“Dostoyevsky provided the most radical version of the “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted” idea in “Bobok,” his weirdest short story, which even today continues to perplex its interpreters.”
“So he attends the funeral of a distant relative; remaining in the cemetery, he unexpectedly overhears the cynical, frivolous conversations of the dead:”
“He discovers from these exchanges that human consciousness goes on for some time after the death of the physical body, lasting until total decomposition, which the deceased characters associate with the awful gurgling onomatopoeia, “bobok.” One of them comments:”
“I propose to spend these two months as agreeably as possible, and so to arrange everything on a new basis”
“The dead, realizing their complete freedom from earthly conditions, decide to entertain themselves by telling tales of their existence during their lives”
“let us spend these two months in shameless truthfulness! Let us strip and be naked”
“The terrible stench that Ivan Ivanovich smells is not the smell of the decaying corpses, but a moral stench. Then Ivan Ivanovich suddenly sneezes, and the dead fall silent; the spell is lost, we are back into ordinary reality:”
“Mikhail Bakhtin saw in “Bobok” the quintessence of Dostoevsky’s art, a microcosm of his entire creative output which renders its central motif: the idea that “everything is permitted” if there is no God and no immortality of the soul”
“In the carnivalesque underworld of life “between the two deaths,” all rules and responsibilities are suspended.”
“The undead can now cast aside all shame, act insanely, and laugh at honesty and justice”
“The ethical horror of this vision is that it displays the limit of the “truth and reconciliation” idea: What if we have a perpetrator for whom the public confession of his crimes not only does not give rise to any ethical catharsis in him, but even generates an additional obscene pleasure?”
“The deceased in Dostoyevsky’s story are fully aware that they are dead—it is this awareness that allows them to cast away all shame. So what is the secret that the deceased carefully conceal from every mortal? In “Bobok,” we do not hear any of the shameless truths—the specters of the dead withdraw at the very point at which they should finally “deliver their goods” to the listener and tell their dirty secrets”
“What if, in “Bobok” also, the entire spectacle of the corpses promising to spill their dirtiest secrets is staged only to attract and impress poor Ivan Ivanovich? In other words, what if the spectacle of the “shameless truthfulness” of the living corpses is only a fantasy of the listener—and of a religious listener, at that?”
“the scene Dostoyevsky paints is not that of a godless universe”
“What the talking corpses experience is life after (biological) death, which is in itself a proof of God’s existence—God is there, keeping them alive after death, which is why they can say everything.”
“stages it to illustrate the terrifying godless universe in which “everything is permitted.”
“So what is the compulsion that pushes the corpses to engage in the obscene sincerity of “saying it all”? The Lacanian answer is clear: superego—not as an ethical agency, but as the obscene injunction to enjoy”
“If, however, what the obscene undead hide from the narrator is the compulsive nature of their obscene enjoyment, and if we are dealing with a religious fantasy, then there is one more conclusion to be made: that the “undead” are under the compulsive spell of an evil God.”
“Therein resides Dostoyevsky’s ultimate lie: what he presents as a terrifying fantasy of a godless universe is effectively a Gnostic fantasy of an evil obscene God.”
“Kierkegaard was right when he pointed out that the central opposition of Western spirituality is “Socrates versus Christ”: the inner journey of remembrance versus rebirth through the shock of the external encounter.”
“Within the Jewish-Christian universe, God himself is the ultimate harasser, the intruder who is brutally disturbing the harmony of our lives.”
“And does the space in which the (un)dead can talk without moral constraints, as imagined by Dostoyevsky, not prefigure this Gnostic-cyberspace dream? Therein resides the attraction of cybersex: since we are dealing only with virtual partners, there is no harassment”
“This proposal perfectly exemplifies how the Politically Correct anti-harassment stance realizes Kierkegaard’s old insight that the only good neighbor is a dead neighbor. A dead neighbor—a corpse—is the ideal sexual partner for a “tolerant” subject trying to avoid any harassment”
“The ideological space of such “tolerance” is delineated by two poles: ethics and jurisprudence”
“The old syntagm “theologico-political” acquires new relevance here: it is not only that every politics is grounded in a “theological” view of reality, it is also that every theology is inherently political, an ideology of new collective space (like the communities of believers in early Christianity, or the umma in early Islam). Paraphrasing Kierkegaard, we can say that what we need today is a theologico-political suspension of the ethical.”
“In today’s proliferation of new forms of spirituality, it is often difficult to recognize the authentic traces of a Christianity which remains faithful to its own theologico-political core.”
“The message of Christianity is, on the contrary, one of an infinite joy beneath the deceptive surface of guilt and renunciation”
“Is not Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings the ultimate proof of this paradox? Only a devout Christian could have imagined such a magnificent pagan universe, thereby confirming that paganism is the ultimate Christian dream.”
“You want to enjoy the pagan dream of pleasurable life without paying the price of melancholic sadness for it? Choose Christianity”
“Wagner overcomes his own (“pagan” Feuerbachian) ideology of the love of the (hetero)sexual couple as the paradigm of love: Brunhilde’s last transformation is the transformation from eros to agape, from erotic love to political love.”
“Agape is what remains after we assume the consequences of the failure of eros.”
“There is no guarantee of redemption-through-love: redemption is merely given as possible”
“divine act rather stands for the openness of a New Beginning, and it falls to humanity to live up to it, to decide its meaning, to make something of it”
“As with Predestination, which condemns us to frantic activity, the Event is a pure-empty-sign, and we have to work to generate its meaning”
“Therein resides the terrible risk of revelation: what “Revelation” means is that God took upon himself the risk of putting everything at stake, of fully “engaging himself existentially” by way, as it were, of stepping into his own picture, becoming part of creation, exposing himself to the utter contingency of existence”
“This is why enemy propaganda against radical emancipatory politics is by definition cynical—not in the simple sense of not believing its own words, but at a much more basic level: it is cynical precisely insofar as it does believe its own words, since its message is a resigned conviction that the world we live in, if not the best of all possible worlds, is the least bad one, so that any radical change can only make it worse.”
Boris Gunjević
“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy My brothers. And you will know My name is the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon thee.”
“This very border area, this realm “in between,” is a manifestation of the coordinate system I am setting up between two stories. The first concerns Lenin’s speech to the All-Russia Congress of Transport Workers in 1921, the second Boccaccio’s commentary on a dream about Dante”
“Lenin had spotted a placard displaying the slogan: “The reign of the workers and peasants will last for ever”
“Following the final and decisive battle, he explained, there would no longer be a division between workers and peasants, since all classes would have by then been abolished”
“As long as there were classes, there would be revolution.”
“First, Lenin failed to take in the more dangerous message on the placard”
“That the kingdom of workers and peasants will have no end, that their reign will be eternal, does not spring from the ontology of materialism espousing the eternal nature of matter. No, it is a clear theological formulation as described and invoked by the existence of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, one of the most important Christian documents ever written”
“The message on the placard makes it clear that the workers had indeed taken the Revolution the wrong way. In that, Lenin was right. He did not, however, fully understand what was wrong with their understanding”
“It was necessary to place the philosophy of revolution in the service of a proletariat that did not understand it”
“The crushing of the uprising was nothing more than a party crackdown on those to be eliminated at all costs—those who thought differently from Lenin himself”
“In other words, Lukács is alerting us to the ontological superiority of the proletariat over the intellectuals, who remain at the ontic level of revolution, although one might have the opposite impression.”
“Those workers who participate directly from start to finish in the process of production—with the help of genuine companionship, and living, as Lukács says, in a “spiritual community”—are the only ones able to fulfill the mission of mobilizing revolutionary forces in a process unmarred by intrigue, social climbing, or bureaucracy.”
“In his speech explaining to the transport workers what they ought to be thinking and doing, Lenin does quite the opposite”
“Leon Trotsky saw this very early on, in an entirely different context concerning the everyday life of the proletariat”
“Trotsky argues that the worker is trapped between vodka, the church, and the cinema”
“Trotsky says that the cinema quashes every desire for religion, that it is the best way to counter tavern and church. He suggests that the cinema should be secured as an instrument for control of the working class”
“Lenin espouses a certain form of pedagogy that invariably fails and abolishes itself chiefly because it does not succeed in instilling any sort of virtue”
“Trotsky ascribes all this to vodka and the church.”
“Revolutionary discourse presupposes a sacrifice—and if we see this as a virtue in Lenin’s revolutionary context then it is always about sacrificing others in the name of a third party—so no wonder “professional revolutionaries” resemble frustrated hedonistic nihilists”
“Revolution without virtue is necessarily caught between a violent orgiastic lunacy and a bureaucratized statist autism.”
“Trotsky seems to have been right when he said that man does not live by politics alone, clearly alluding to the story of the temptation of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel, as man does not live by bread alone but by every word that issues from the mouth of God”
“Lenin was displaying his own ignorance of the elemental religious references informing their perceptions and forming their habitus”
“The first reading is possible with the help of Martin Luther’s key—the distinction between the theology of the cross and the theology of glory”
“Tragedy begins softly, imperceptibly, and almost “at random,” like a marvelous promise; yet it ends tragically, in violence”
“Comedy, conversely, begins with a cruel reality and yet ends up happier and more joyous than it began.”
“while theology, like comedy, begins with a cruel act of incarnation”
“revolution the situation is reversed: it begins with revolutionary fervor and a joyous vision of universal transformation”
Žižek
“If there is no God, everything is permitted”
“All that then separates us from this ultimate moral vacuum are temporary and non-obligatory “pacts among wolves,” self-imposed limitations accepted in the interests of one’s own survival and well-being which can be violated at any moment”
“Even if there is no God, not everything is permitted”
“nothing is more oppressive and regulated than being a simple hedonist”
“that today it is rather to those who refer to God in a brutally direct way, perceiving themselves as instruments of God’s will, that everything is permitted”
“on a mission from God, one is allowed to kill thousands of innocents”
“difficult for the majority to overcome their revulsion at the torture and killing of another human being.”
“a larger “sacred” Cause is needed”
“The majority of people need to be anaesthetized against their elementary sensitivity to the other’s suffering”
“religion makes some otherwise bad people do some good things”
“while without religion good people would continue doing good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things”
“Stalinist Communists do not perceive themselves as hedonist individualists abandoned to their freedom; no, they perceive themselves as instruments of historical progress, of a necessity which pushes humanity towards the “higher” stage of Communism—and it is this reference to their own Absolute (and to their privileged relationship to it) which permits them to do whatever they want (or consider necessary)”
“they had just been deprived of the historical legitimization of their crimes by the Communist historical Absolute”
“Stalinism adds another perverse twist to this logic:”
“in order to justify their ruthless exercise of power and violence, the Stalinists not only had to elevate their own role into an instrument of the Absolute, they also had to demonize their opponents, to portray them as corruption and decadence personified”
“For the Nazis, every phenomenon of depravity was immediately elevated into a symbol of Jewish degeneration”
“precise strategic function: it justified the Nazis in doing whatever they wanted, since, against such an enemy, in what is now a permanent emergency state, everything is permitted”
“God, after all, is love, he is present when there is love between his followers”
“is that if you really love God you will want what he wants”
“your love for God, if true, guarantees that in whatever you want to do you will follow the highest ethical standards”
“My fiancée is never late for an appointment, because when she is late, she is no longer my fiancée”
“if you love God, you can do whatever you want, because when you do something evil, this is in itself a proof that you do not really love God”
“danger is always lurking that you will use your love of God as a legitimization for the most horrible deeds.”
“Christ has misjudged human nature: the vast majority of humanity cannot handle the freedom he has given them; in giving humans freedom to choose, Christ has excluded the majority of humanity from redemption and doomed it to suffer.”
“who alone can provide the tools to end all human suffering and unite everyone under the banner of the Church”
“The multitude should be guided by those few who are strong enough to take on the burden of freedom—only in this way will all humankind be able to live and die happily in ignorance”
“Dostoyevsky himself could not come up with a straight answer on the matter.”
“everyone is responsible for their neighbor’s sins”
“Is this not Dostoyevsky’s version of “If there is no God, then everything is prohibited”
“If the gift of Christ is to make us radically free, then this freedom also brings with it the heavy burden of total responsibility.”
“Be careful that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am he!’ and will lead many astray. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, don’t be troubled. For those must happen, but”
“the end is not yet. . . . Then if anyone tells you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or, ‘Look, there!’ don’t believe it. For there will arise false Christs and false prophets, and they will show signs and wonders, that they may lead astray, if possible, even the chosen ones. But you watch”
“Their message is: yes, of course, there will be a catastrophe, but watch patiently, don’t believe in it, don’t get caught in precipitous extrapolations, don’t give yourself up to the properly perverse pleasure of thinking “This is it!” in all its diverse forms (global warming will drown us all in a decade, biogenetics will mean the end of being-human, et cetera, et cetera).”
“Far from luring us into a perverse self-destructive rapture, adopting the properly apocalyptic stance is—today more than ever—the only way to keep a cool head.”
December 16, 2012
This is a book about the missing great narrative. Sound familiar? It should be because it is the story of our times.
The book is structured by chapters (which are only seemingly disorganized sunjects) which are divided between Zizek and Gunjevik each having their own chapter one after the other. Zizek begins the book in the first chapter. Then Gunjevik gets the second on and on and on all the way to the end. This creates the feeling of a hopeful synthesis about to emerge.
Gunjevik would have certainly approved of this structural design because he gave a couple of examples of how it was done in early religious history. That is the point of the book. To give a new beginning to a falling civilization.
Well a synthesis does emerge but one I dissaprove of. Gunjevik attempts to show us how to re-introduce ourselves to some sought of safe religioun which forms unity amongst the differnet western nations, races, and religiouns. He uses the Radical Orthodoxy religioun (an academia invented religioun from England) as a potential example. He shows us bad examples such as John Walker (remember him? the american who helped plan a terror attack.) who became a convert to Islam by way of MTV. He claims that we need to learn these religiouns without reading into them the wrong things. In other words, he wants you to be religious but not dangerous. Sounds good right?
Zizak plays the psychologist micro-manager in this book. His role is to also make sure that religoun stays non-threatening. His anecdotes are revealing about his true intent. He wants people to believe in God but only if they simply "believe they believe". In other words, he does not want the religious man or woman to "know" there is a God. Because knowing leads to Martydom etc. Get the point?
Whatever happened to God being the great opium of the masses, huh Mr. Zizak?
Now that philosophy does not have religioun to kick around anymore it has killed itself off by doubting its own instrument of reason. The symbiotic relationship between philosophy and religioun has to be reintegrated to keep Western civilization afloat. That is the basic goal of this book. To keep civilization.
In these changing times the elite need to reinvent the great narrative. With the failure of capitalism (and the church of consumerism) I am becoming more appreciative of how much Capital has become our God. It is too bad that neither Zizak or Gunjevik mention this in the book. But then again these are not to their making because they are only snippets of things they have said in the past. So other than assuming that they gave the "Okay" for the book, it becomes hard to criticize them directly because they are not the authors of the book. I am looking forward to seeing how the future plays out.
I gave this book one star because I disagree with the possiblity of the success of these ideas. I believe it is a dangerous book which gives us insight into the direction which the elite are leading us. I certainly don't think the "multitudes" are that ignorant. And I believe the elite are going to learn this the hard way. Sadly, the people are going to have to pay the price.
With that off my chest and conscience, it is a good book if you want to understand the limitations that a society meets when taking on the most massive change possible for its survival.
The book is structured by chapters (which are only seemingly disorganized sunjects) which are divided between Zizek and Gunjevik each having their own chapter one after the other. Zizek begins the book in the first chapter. Then Gunjevik gets the second on and on and on all the way to the end. This creates the feeling of a hopeful synthesis about to emerge.
Gunjevik would have certainly approved of this structural design because he gave a couple of examples of how it was done in early religious history. That is the point of the book. To give a new beginning to a falling civilization.
Well a synthesis does emerge but one I dissaprove of. Gunjevik attempts to show us how to re-introduce ourselves to some sought of safe religioun which forms unity amongst the differnet western nations, races, and religiouns. He uses the Radical Orthodoxy religioun (an academia invented religioun from England) as a potential example. He shows us bad examples such as John Walker (remember him? the american who helped plan a terror attack.) who became a convert to Islam by way of MTV. He claims that we need to learn these religiouns without reading into them the wrong things. In other words, he wants you to be religious but not dangerous. Sounds good right?
Zizak plays the psychologist micro-manager in this book. His role is to also make sure that religoun stays non-threatening. His anecdotes are revealing about his true intent. He wants people to believe in God but only if they simply "believe they believe". In other words, he does not want the religious man or woman to "know" there is a God. Because knowing leads to Martydom etc. Get the point?
Whatever happened to God being the great opium of the masses, huh Mr. Zizak?
Now that philosophy does not have religioun to kick around anymore it has killed itself off by doubting its own instrument of reason. The symbiotic relationship between philosophy and religioun has to be reintegrated to keep Western civilization afloat. That is the basic goal of this book. To keep civilization.
In these changing times the elite need to reinvent the great narrative. With the failure of capitalism (and the church of consumerism) I am becoming more appreciative of how much Capital has become our God. It is too bad that neither Zizak or Gunjevik mention this in the book. But then again these are not to their making because they are only snippets of things they have said in the past. So other than assuming that they gave the "Okay" for the book, it becomes hard to criticize them directly because they are not the authors of the book. I am looking forward to seeing how the future plays out.
I gave this book one star because I disagree with the possiblity of the success of these ideas. I believe it is a dangerous book which gives us insight into the direction which the elite are leading us. I certainly don't think the "multitudes" are that ignorant. And I believe the elite are going to learn this the hard way. Sadly, the people are going to have to pay the price.
With that off my chest and conscience, it is a good book if you want to understand the limitations that a society meets when taking on the most massive change possible for its survival.
July 8, 2012
Mind = blown. This book contains essays by Zizek, who goes from crazy high philosophy to Johnny Cash lyrics in the space of a page, using theology to enhance the materialist perspective, while Gunjevic uses the materialist perspective to enhance theology. There are so many brilliant insights in this book, many of them Hegelian reversals. Atheists as true Christians and Christians as true atheists... how did he do that? There's some heady stuff in here, to be sure, but it's an intellectual feast for believers and non-believers alike.
June 30, 2013
Brilliant, just as I expected from Zizek. Gunjevic also had some great things to say, especially the anticapitalist reading of Augustine's City of God. Though ultimately in the back and forth of dialogue I found myself more compelled by Zizek's theses, such as his comparisons of Christianity to Islam, as well as the theodicy of a suffering God being the only one who can save us. I close very few books excited to re-read them, and this was definitely one of them.
October 3, 2014
Allow me a moment of Philistinism while I begin my review of this highly theoretical work with a superficial observation: the cover design is very amusing. It purports to give us "95 reasons" why God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse is an interesting book, while allowing us to see five of them; each one referencing real arguments from the two authors. The "95 reasons" reference is clearly an allusion to the "95 theses" which Luther nailed to the church door in Wittenberg, marking the beginnings of the protestant reformation.
Radical theorists like Zizek and Gunjevic have been hard at work on their own theoretical reformation of sorts; deconstructing and reworking popular conceptions of religiosity and belief to demonstrate, through a Marxian-Psychoanalytic prism, a new mode of life. Zizek and Gunjevic are not debating here, nor are they even really directly conversing. They are more like two rappers spitting on the same track. Psychoanalysis (Compton) and Radical Theology (Long Beach) together, now you know you in trouble. Ain't nothin' but a G thang, baby.
Zizek here performs his usual iconoclastics. He says that the popular notion that we in the west live in an "atheistic" or "post-belief" society is basically horseshit. We believe more than ever; indeed, we are more puritanical than ever in the "religious" prohibitions we set for ourselves. The pseudo-hedonistic, tolerant, liberal, capitalist, undogmatic, choice-positive society we live in constrains us perhaps even more than an overtly totalitarian one does. When Big Brother is actually pressing down on us and demanding our conformity, we can publicly voice our belief in the party doctrines while secretly harboring dissenting views. In our society, we are encouraged to keep an open mind, to experiment with different lifestyles and so on, while in secret we long to grasp a deeper sense of unchanging truth, but are not quite able to do so. Turning around Dostoyevsky's sentiment, "If there is no God, everything is permitted", Zizek says, "If there IS a God, everything is permitted". True belief allows us to live as ruthless libertines, comfortable in the knowledge that we are doing God's will.
This is just a small part of Zizek's first essay, but it's par for the course. Later on, he says (as the book cover shows), "an apocalyptic stance is 'the only way to keep a cool head.'" What he seems to mean here is that from a revolutionary Christian perspective, the "apocalypse", taken here to mean all of the disasters of capitalist civilization set to befall us (environmental catastrophe, global warfare, economic crisis, etc), is inevitable; the best we can do is delay this inevitability - hopefully permanently (although if a catastrophe has a chance of happening, it will happen, given enough time).
We should be aware of this inevitability, then, and try our best to grapple with it. But at the same time, we can't get carried off by hysterical proclamations of every traumatic global event as "the event" that will "end life as we know it." Zizek refers to Mark's Gospel to illustrate this point. Jesus tells his followers, asking him what signs they should look for in anticipating his return, to watch, but not to let themselves be deceived by the various false prophets coming in his name.
We can apply this, of course, to the old Marxist-Leninist revolutionary dogma: it is folly for a Communist to treat every economic or political disturbance as the death throes of capitalism, and spring into fervorous action. Such a rush to make the apocalypse happen based on a dogma risks self-annihilation. We should rather wait patiently in the comfortable knowledge that the sky is, indeed, going to fall.
One might expect Boris Gunjevic to be overshadowed by his more internationally-famous interlocutor, but he is every bit as clever and subversive as Zizek is here; although Gunjevic is looking backward, at early Christian thinkers like Augustine, to articulate a new mode of life outside of "Empire" in the ubiquitous Negri-Hardt conception, in contrast to Zizek's method of turning conventions on their head. One of the highlights of the book is Gunjevic's treatment of Augustine's City of God through the prism of Negri and Hardt's Empire. To imagine a mode of life outside of Empire, Gunjevic argues that we must practice the brand of asceticism articulated by Augustine and lived out by St. Francis of Assisi, by renouncing the thirst for glory and "redirect[ing] desire towards eternal plenitude" (p.101).
Of particular interest also are both men's chapters on Islam. Zizek offers the interesting observation that Islam sets itself apart from the genealogical approach of Judeo-Christianity, in which the "family" of Abraham>Isaac>Jacob>>>Moses, etc, is a stand-in for God-the-father's unfolding design, in which God-the-father is "killed" in the event of the crucifixion, subsequently leaving the promise of the Holy Spirit as a stand-in for the paternal absence. Mohammed, though descended from Ishmael (Zizek brilliantly analyzes the Abraham-Sarah-Hagar-Ishmael story in this context), is an orphan: there is no place for a holy family in Islam; God is apart from the Abrahamic family, always in the realm of the impossible, and he intervenes only in cases where familial ties are absent, as when he sustains Hagar and Ishmael after their exile. Then Zizek goes on to provide a fascinating analysis of the Islamic stance towards women. Try this on for size, from pages 125-126:
"What if, consequently, the ultimate function of the veil is precisely
to sustain the illusion that there is something, the substantial
Thing, behind the veil? If, following Nietzsche's equation of truth
and woman, we transpose the feminine veil into the veil which conceals
the ultimate Truth, the true stakes of the Muslim veil become even
clearer. Woman is a threat because she stands for the 'undecidability'
of truth, for a succession of veils beneath which there is no ultimate
hidden core; by veiling her, we create the illusion that there is,
beneath the veil, the feminine Truth-the horrible truth of the feminine
as lie and deception, of course. Therein resides the concealed scandal
of Islam: only a woman, the very embodiment of the indiscernibility of
truth and lie, can guarantee Truth. For this reason, she has to
remain veiled."
This comes after his analysis of the Koranic story of Muhammad's confirmation of the validity of his revelations through Khadija, his first wife.
Zizek and Gunjevic bring a heavy arsenal of theoretical firepower to the Abrahamic religious tradition. Recommended reading for anyone interested in this peculiar brand of religious deconstructivism.
Radical theorists like Zizek and Gunjevic have been hard at work on their own theoretical reformation of sorts; deconstructing and reworking popular conceptions of religiosity and belief to demonstrate, through a Marxian-Psychoanalytic prism, a new mode of life. Zizek and Gunjevic are not debating here, nor are they even really directly conversing. They are more like two rappers spitting on the same track. Psychoanalysis (Compton) and Radical Theology (Long Beach) together, now you know you in trouble. Ain't nothin' but a G thang, baby.
Zizek here performs his usual iconoclastics. He says that the popular notion that we in the west live in an "atheistic" or "post-belief" society is basically horseshit. We believe more than ever; indeed, we are more puritanical than ever in the "religious" prohibitions we set for ourselves. The pseudo-hedonistic, tolerant, liberal, capitalist, undogmatic, choice-positive society we live in constrains us perhaps even more than an overtly totalitarian one does. When Big Brother is actually pressing down on us and demanding our conformity, we can publicly voice our belief in the party doctrines while secretly harboring dissenting views. In our society, we are encouraged to keep an open mind, to experiment with different lifestyles and so on, while in secret we long to grasp a deeper sense of unchanging truth, but are not quite able to do so. Turning around Dostoyevsky's sentiment, "If there is no God, everything is permitted", Zizek says, "If there IS a God, everything is permitted". True belief allows us to live as ruthless libertines, comfortable in the knowledge that we are doing God's will.
This is just a small part of Zizek's first essay, but it's par for the course. Later on, he says (as the book cover shows), "an apocalyptic stance is 'the only way to keep a cool head.'" What he seems to mean here is that from a revolutionary Christian perspective, the "apocalypse", taken here to mean all of the disasters of capitalist civilization set to befall us (environmental catastrophe, global warfare, economic crisis, etc), is inevitable; the best we can do is delay this inevitability - hopefully permanently (although if a catastrophe has a chance of happening, it will happen, given enough time).
We should be aware of this inevitability, then, and try our best to grapple with it. But at the same time, we can't get carried off by hysterical proclamations of every traumatic global event as "the event" that will "end life as we know it." Zizek refers to Mark's Gospel to illustrate this point. Jesus tells his followers, asking him what signs they should look for in anticipating his return, to watch, but not to let themselves be deceived by the various false prophets coming in his name.
We can apply this, of course, to the old Marxist-Leninist revolutionary dogma: it is folly for a Communist to treat every economic or political disturbance as the death throes of capitalism, and spring into fervorous action. Such a rush to make the apocalypse happen based on a dogma risks self-annihilation. We should rather wait patiently in the comfortable knowledge that the sky is, indeed, going to fall.
One might expect Boris Gunjevic to be overshadowed by his more internationally-famous interlocutor, but he is every bit as clever and subversive as Zizek is here; although Gunjevic is looking backward, at early Christian thinkers like Augustine, to articulate a new mode of life outside of "Empire" in the ubiquitous Negri-Hardt conception, in contrast to Zizek's method of turning conventions on their head. One of the highlights of the book is Gunjevic's treatment of Augustine's City of God through the prism of Negri and Hardt's Empire. To imagine a mode of life outside of Empire, Gunjevic argues that we must practice the brand of asceticism articulated by Augustine and lived out by St. Francis of Assisi, by renouncing the thirst for glory and "redirect[ing] desire towards eternal plenitude" (p.101).
Of particular interest also are both men's chapters on Islam. Zizek offers the interesting observation that Islam sets itself apart from the genealogical approach of Judeo-Christianity, in which the "family" of Abraham>Isaac>Jacob>>>Moses, etc, is a stand-in for God-the-father's unfolding design, in which God-the-father is "killed" in the event of the crucifixion, subsequently leaving the promise of the Holy Spirit as a stand-in for the paternal absence. Mohammed, though descended from Ishmael (Zizek brilliantly analyzes the Abraham-Sarah-Hagar-Ishmael story in this context), is an orphan: there is no place for a holy family in Islam; God is apart from the Abrahamic family, always in the realm of the impossible, and he intervenes only in cases where familial ties are absent, as when he sustains Hagar and Ishmael after their exile. Then Zizek goes on to provide a fascinating analysis of the Islamic stance towards women. Try this on for size, from pages 125-126:
"What if, consequently, the ultimate function of the veil is precisely
to sustain the illusion that there is something, the substantial
Thing, behind the veil? If, following Nietzsche's equation of truth
and woman, we transpose the feminine veil into the veil which conceals
the ultimate Truth, the true stakes of the Muslim veil become even
clearer. Woman is a threat because she stands for the 'undecidability'
of truth, for a succession of veils beneath which there is no ultimate
hidden core; by veiling her, we create the illusion that there is,
beneath the veil, the feminine Truth-the horrible truth of the feminine
as lie and deception, of course. Therein resides the concealed scandal
of Islam: only a woman, the very embodiment of the indiscernibility of
truth and lie, can guarantee Truth. For this reason, she has to
remain veiled."
This comes after his analysis of the Koranic story of Muhammad's confirmation of the validity of his revelations through Khadija, his first wife.
Zizek and Gunjevic bring a heavy arsenal of theoretical firepower to the Abrahamic religious tradition. Recommended reading for anyone interested in this peculiar brand of religious deconstructivism.
January 12, 2023
While Zizek's progress through Christianity, Islam and Judaism reveals the deconstruction of the rules ordered in religion and the attitudes of the religious with the help of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Dante, Dostoevsky, on the other hand, discusses and critiques capitalism through this tremendous book in which he presents.
The fact that he revealed his limiting dynamics by dealing with both religious and atheists about subconscious influences was the most enjoyable part of the book to read. He continues this examination by considering the beliefs of both opposite views. What faith will an atheist person have! you can say it, but the subconscious doesn't say it. Zizek also wrote this book in the language of the subconscious.
By considering the phenomenon of violence that arose in Judaism in certain periods of history, Christianity in certain periods, and Islam in a certain period, including today, which gained legitimacy thanks to religion, he begins to think about the concept of God, who is frightened by his name and causes suffering, as a sufferer.
Let me end the review by asking; What would happen if God was also suffering the suffering caused to people by the religions that have legalized this environment of violence and war?
The fact that he revealed his limiting dynamics by dealing with both religious and atheists about subconscious influences was the most enjoyable part of the book to read. He continues this examination by considering the beliefs of both opposite views. What faith will an atheist person have! you can say it, but the subconscious doesn't say it. Zizek also wrote this book in the language of the subconscious.
By considering the phenomenon of violence that arose in Judaism in certain periods of history, Christianity in certain periods, and Islam in a certain period, including today, which gained legitimacy thanks to religion, he begins to think about the concept of God, who is frightened by his name and causes suffering, as a sufferer.
Let me end the review by asking; What would happen if God was also suffering the suffering caused to people by the religions that have legalized this environment of violence and war?
January 15, 2026
Zizek, filósofo marxista, y Gunjevic, teólogo radical luterano, realizan una serie de reflexiones acerca del Apocalipsis, la Revolución, los textos religiosos, la Otredad...
A lo largo del libro he tenido cierta sensación de tener pocos conocimientos para leer este libro, lo que hace que en cierta medida no haya disfrutado y obtenido de este tanto como me tiene que ofrecer. Además, he visto poca cohesión entre los capítulos del libro.
Gran parte del argumentario, especialmente el de Zizek, requiere de unos conocimientos previos extrañamente específicos. Aun así, una experiencia bastante positiva.
Remarco especialmente los capítulos dedicados a la Ortodoxia Radical (la cual debo investigar mas a fondo), y los dedicados a la lectura materialista del Evangelio de Marcos y a la sufista/mística del Corán.
A lo largo del libro he tenido cierta sensación de tener pocos conocimientos para leer este libro, lo que hace que en cierta medida no haya disfrutado y obtenido de este tanto como me tiene que ofrecer. Además, he visto poca cohesión entre los capítulos del libro.
Gran parte del argumentario, especialmente el de Zizek, requiere de unos conocimientos previos extrañamente específicos. Aun así, una experiencia bastante positiva.
Remarco especialmente los capítulos dedicados a la Ortodoxia Radical (la cual debo investigar mas a fondo), y los dedicados a la lectura materialista del Evangelio de Marcos y a la sufista/mística del Corán.
March 1, 2017
Sou meio ruim de fazer qualquer resenha de livro de Filosofia. Até a emissão de opinião para mim é complicada porque, bem, não é meu forte mesmo. O Sofrimento de Deus se enquadra aqui.
É basicamente um livro que envolve Filosofia e Religião em proporções similares ao apresentar o papel de Deus e das organizações que estão ao redor e o representa aqui na Terra, bem como as teorias que sustentam seu reinado. A qualidade desse tipo de livro, pra mim, está ligada a quantidade de anotações que faço e da necessidade de confrontar com coisas que já conheço (ou que marco para pesquisar depois) e O Sofrimento de Deus se sai bem.
É como um pingue-pongue que envolve de um lado o marxista-lacaniano Slavoj Zizek e do outro o teólogo Boris Gunjevic, onde cada um deles dá sua visão das três religiões do Livro: cristianismo, judaísmo e islamismo. De certa forma é uma versão mais ampla de A Monstruosidade de Cristo, do mesmo Zizek, mas dessa vez em dobradinha com o teólogo anglicano John Milbank.
Antes de tudo nunca é demais lembrar que Zizek é muito mais um agitador intelectual que propriamente um filósofo, por sua obra ter bem menos consistência do que é esperado de um corpo filosófico. Suas ideias às vezes são contraditórias, mas possuem uma capacidade retratar a modernidade de forma delirante. Apesar de chutar o formalismo lógico fundamental da Filosofia a cada página, curto o autor com essas ressalvas, por fazer as vezes de um intelectual público, uma figura tão importante que os melhores filósofos acadêmicos.
Aqui Zizek utiliza a religião para expor o que ele classifica como uma inversão do papel das proibições na modernidade: se anteriormente o proibido era mais gostoso, um choque para o nosso consciente a todo momento, por abarcar praticamente tudo que era bom ao nosso redor; hoje todos os hedonistas guardam o proibido no inconsciente e não mais os prazeres de outrora. Nessa inversão está, de certa forma, um esvaziamento das ferramentas da religião cristã como guia da moral de uma época em que o ser humano parecia desconhecer seu próprio papel no mundo.
Há também discussões sobre o papel de ficção totalizante das grandes religiões, ao servirem como uma causa em que tudo permite. Nessa natureza não se diferencia de outras “causas”, como o Socialismo.
A grande maioria das pessoas é espontaneamente moral: torturar ou matar outro ser humano é profundamente traumático para elas. Então, para que elas o façam, é preciso uma Causa “sagrada” maior, uma Causa que faça qualquer preocupação individual mínima em relação à matança parecer trivial. A religião e o pertencimento étnico são perfeitamente compatíveis com esse papel. É claro que existem casos de ateus patológicos capazes de cometer assassinatos em massa por puro prazer, matando por matar, mas eles são raras exceções. [pag 43]
Esse mesmo tom é levado para análises com o Islamismo e Judaísmo, intercalando política (principalmente a complexidade do Império Romano) e a natureza teocrática da Israel bíblica.
Em contraste ao judaísmo e ao islã, em que o sacrifício do filho é evitado no último momento (o anjo intervêm para impedir que Abraão mate Isaac), apenas o cristianismo opta pelo sacrifício efetivo (morte) do filho. É por isso que o islã, embora reconheça a Bíblia como texto sagrado, tem de negar esse fato – no islã, Jesus não morreu de fato na cruz. Como lemos no Alcorão (4, 157), disseram os judeus, em formidável infâmia: “‘Por certo, matamos o Messias, Jesus, Filho de Maria, Mensageiro de Alá’. Ora, eles não o mataram nem o crucificaram, mas isso lhes foi simulado”. Existe no islã, efetivamente, uma lógica antissacrificial consistente: na versão alcorânica do sacrifício de Isaac, a decisão de Abraão de matar o próprio filho é tida não como a indicação final de sua disposição para cumprir com a vontade de Deus. [pag 105]
A natureza do sofrimento de Deus, e nesse ponto os dois autores concordam, é justamente uma forma de adentrar a desgraça que o mundo é, uma imundície dominada pelo Mal, onde o Bem é uma exceção que nunca cessa de lutar.
Esse é o sentido não apenas da religião, mas da própria Filosofia: esse tatear no escuro em busca de sentido, dando significado ao sombrio, tentando nomear nosso instinto de auto-destruição.
É basicamente um livro que envolve Filosofia e Religião em proporções similares ao apresentar o papel de Deus e das organizações que estão ao redor e o representa aqui na Terra, bem como as teorias que sustentam seu reinado. A qualidade desse tipo de livro, pra mim, está ligada a quantidade de anotações que faço e da necessidade de confrontar com coisas que já conheço (ou que marco para pesquisar depois) e O Sofrimento de Deus se sai bem.
É como um pingue-pongue que envolve de um lado o marxista-lacaniano Slavoj Zizek e do outro o teólogo Boris Gunjevic, onde cada um deles dá sua visão das três religiões do Livro: cristianismo, judaísmo e islamismo. De certa forma é uma versão mais ampla de A Monstruosidade de Cristo, do mesmo Zizek, mas dessa vez em dobradinha com o teólogo anglicano John Milbank.
Antes de tudo nunca é demais lembrar que Zizek é muito mais um agitador intelectual que propriamente um filósofo, por sua obra ter bem menos consistência do que é esperado de um corpo filosófico. Suas ideias às vezes são contraditórias, mas possuem uma capacidade retratar a modernidade de forma delirante. Apesar de chutar o formalismo lógico fundamental da Filosofia a cada página, curto o autor com essas ressalvas, por fazer as vezes de um intelectual público, uma figura tão importante que os melhores filósofos acadêmicos.
Aqui Zizek utiliza a religião para expor o que ele classifica como uma inversão do papel das proibições na modernidade: se anteriormente o proibido era mais gostoso, um choque para o nosso consciente a todo momento, por abarcar praticamente tudo que era bom ao nosso redor; hoje todos os hedonistas guardam o proibido no inconsciente e não mais os prazeres de outrora. Nessa inversão está, de certa forma, um esvaziamento das ferramentas da religião cristã como guia da moral de uma época em que o ser humano parecia desconhecer seu próprio papel no mundo.
Há também discussões sobre o papel de ficção totalizante das grandes religiões, ao servirem como uma causa em que tudo permite. Nessa natureza não se diferencia de outras “causas”, como o Socialismo.
A grande maioria das pessoas é espontaneamente moral: torturar ou matar outro ser humano é profundamente traumático para elas. Então, para que elas o façam, é preciso uma Causa “sagrada” maior, uma Causa que faça qualquer preocupação individual mínima em relação à matança parecer trivial. A religião e o pertencimento étnico são perfeitamente compatíveis com esse papel. É claro que existem casos de ateus patológicos capazes de cometer assassinatos em massa por puro prazer, matando por matar, mas eles são raras exceções. [pag 43]
Esse mesmo tom é levado para análises com o Islamismo e Judaísmo, intercalando política (principalmente a complexidade do Império Romano) e a natureza teocrática da Israel bíblica.
Em contraste ao judaísmo e ao islã, em que o sacrifício do filho é evitado no último momento (o anjo intervêm para impedir que Abraão mate Isaac), apenas o cristianismo opta pelo sacrifício efetivo (morte) do filho. É por isso que o islã, embora reconheça a Bíblia como texto sagrado, tem de negar esse fato – no islã, Jesus não morreu de fato na cruz. Como lemos no Alcorão (4, 157), disseram os judeus, em formidável infâmia: “‘Por certo, matamos o Messias, Jesus, Filho de Maria, Mensageiro de Alá’. Ora, eles não o mataram nem o crucificaram, mas isso lhes foi simulado”. Existe no islã, efetivamente, uma lógica antissacrificial consistente: na versão alcorânica do sacrifício de Isaac, a decisão de Abraão de matar o próprio filho é tida não como a indicação final de sua disposição para cumprir com a vontade de Deus. [pag 105]
A natureza do sofrimento de Deus, e nesse ponto os dois autores concordam, é justamente uma forma de adentrar a desgraça que o mundo é, uma imundície dominada pelo Mal, onde o Bem é uma exceção que nunca cessa de lutar.
Esse é o sentido não apenas da religião, mas da própria Filosofia: esse tatear no escuro em busca de sentido, dando significado ao sombrio, tentando nomear nosso instinto de auto-destruição.
April 29, 2019
Epey ağır geldi, sağlam prerequisite isteyen bir eser. Ama anlayabildiğim kısımlarda büyülendim. Tamamını anlasam zevkten dört köşe olurdum ama dediğim gibi çok çok sağlam bir altyapı gerektiriyor. Ama pişman da değilim, insan ne kadar eksik olduğunu görme şansı buluyor ve öğrenmenin aslında yaşı olmadığını, hayatın tamamının bir öğrenme sürecini olduğunu bir kez daha idrak ediyor.
February 5, 2022
Las partes de Gunjevic tremendas. Bebiendo de Bloch y Benjamin pero trasladándolo al cristianismo, trata de hacer una teología de la revolución muy interesante. Las de Zizek pues bueno, repitiendo sus cuatro ideas base hasta la saciedad.
October 8, 2019
Un diálogo con un cura protestante sobre la necesidad de unión de la izquierda y el legado cristiano. Droga pura.
June 21, 2022
Solo me he leído el capítulo I y para lo que suele ser este hombre que parece que escribe en modo lluvia de ideas he de decir que en esta ocasión se entiende bastante bien y que es muy útil
June 18, 2016
I was watching an interview Zizek gave in Croatian a couple weekends ago and a couple of things struck me as interesting.
First, that he was speaking in a very academic and high-level, dare I say it, Serbo-Croatian that I understood more completely than almost any discussion I've ever had with more than a few of my relatives. His reference to pop culture was occasional and sparse. It was here a colorful element of the discussion rather than the meat and bones of it, and seemed in this way more noticeable and potent than many other interviews and more than a few of his books. He was here making very interesting points and striking concepts, and towards the end of the interview mentioned well it was all good and fine he'd become popular for psychoanalyzing Batman and pop culture and so on and so on (or, "i tako dalje i tako dalje") he would much rather be known for and hoped he could meaningfully contribute to philosophy and critical theory, which he felt was at a point of one epoch ending and a new beginning and he was quite excited about it.
Whether he's decided he's going to unilaterally focus on critical theory and less on The Dark Knight or my suspicion that speaking in Serbo-Croatian lent in him a confidence you wouldn't see in English, in God In Pain I found more of what I enjoyed from that interview, and here it is interesting because I think the book was originally published in Croatia and translated after the fact for an English edition. Using a framework of philosophy and Abrahamic religion, Zizek writes a series of very admirable religious homilies -- For a Theologico-Political Suspension of the Ethical, Christianity Against the Sacred, Only A Suffering God Can Save Us, and The Animal Gaze of the Other -- that analyze the 21st century in that context, and are also self-reflexive and inverted. That is to say, religions and their philosophies are also discussed in their own context and in what it is about them that has sustained them to the modern era.
Zizek's chapters are alternated with chapters with intersecting topics written by Zagreb priest Boris Gunjevic, who is as strong and captivating an author as Zizek, and to be utterly biased towards my own heritage, I think (and he himself accredits) his acuity from his unique vantage point on religion, society, and thought from the viewpoint of the Balkans. The Mystagogy of Revolution, Babylonian Virtues - Minority Report, Every Book is Like a Fortress - Flesh Became Word, The Thrilling Romance of Radical Orthodoxy - Spiritual Exercises, and Pray and Watch - the Messianic Subversion were all wonderful reads and aside from being utterly lost about halfway through the chapter regarding Radical Orthodoxy, these were all as wonderful to read as any of Zizek's contributions, and the last chapter has me now somewhat hellbent on wanting to read the Gospel of Mark.
Strongest points here: the quite literal literary analysis of Islam, Zizek's discussion of the 'Other' in the context of religion (resonated quite well with my strong Catholic upbringing), and as I mentioned before the last chapter includes the Gospel of Mark and also a Mobius strip on the same page so that was quite good value for dollar to take the time to read and consider. For anyone unsure, this is, like the back of the book says, "a work of faith not in God but in the human intellect".
First, that he was speaking in a very academic and high-level, dare I say it, Serbo-Croatian that I understood more completely than almost any discussion I've ever had with more than a few of my relatives. His reference to pop culture was occasional and sparse. It was here a colorful element of the discussion rather than the meat and bones of it, and seemed in this way more noticeable and potent than many other interviews and more than a few of his books. He was here making very interesting points and striking concepts, and towards the end of the interview mentioned well it was all good and fine he'd become popular for psychoanalyzing Batman and pop culture and so on and so on (or, "i tako dalje i tako dalje") he would much rather be known for and hoped he could meaningfully contribute to philosophy and critical theory, which he felt was at a point of one epoch ending and a new beginning and he was quite excited about it.
Whether he's decided he's going to unilaterally focus on critical theory and less on The Dark Knight or my suspicion that speaking in Serbo-Croatian lent in him a confidence you wouldn't see in English, in God In Pain I found more of what I enjoyed from that interview, and here it is interesting because I think the book was originally published in Croatia and translated after the fact for an English edition. Using a framework of philosophy and Abrahamic religion, Zizek writes a series of very admirable religious homilies -- For a Theologico-Political Suspension of the Ethical, Christianity Against the Sacred, Only A Suffering God Can Save Us, and The Animal Gaze of the Other -- that analyze the 21st century in that context, and are also self-reflexive and inverted. That is to say, religions and their philosophies are also discussed in their own context and in what it is about them that has sustained them to the modern era.
Zizek's chapters are alternated with chapters with intersecting topics written by Zagreb priest Boris Gunjevic, who is as strong and captivating an author as Zizek, and to be utterly biased towards my own heritage, I think (and he himself accredits) his acuity from his unique vantage point on religion, society, and thought from the viewpoint of the Balkans. The Mystagogy of Revolution, Babylonian Virtues - Minority Report, Every Book is Like a Fortress - Flesh Became Word, The Thrilling Romance of Radical Orthodoxy - Spiritual Exercises, and Pray and Watch - the Messianic Subversion were all wonderful reads and aside from being utterly lost about halfway through the chapter regarding Radical Orthodoxy, these were all as wonderful to read as any of Zizek's contributions, and the last chapter has me now somewhat hellbent on wanting to read the Gospel of Mark.
Strongest points here: the quite literal literary analysis of Islam, Zizek's discussion of the 'Other' in the context of religion (resonated quite well with my strong Catholic upbringing), and as I mentioned before the last chapter includes the Gospel of Mark and also a Mobius strip on the same page so that was quite good value for dollar to take the time to read and consider. For anyone unsure, this is, like the back of the book says, "a work of faith not in God but in the human intellect".
June 15, 2015
Despite the utter incomprehensibility of both debaters (posing as co-authors) I’m reluctantly awarding a marginal victory to Slovenia in this one. On the other hand the book is a marvelous demonstration of why cultural critics shouldn’t dabble in theology and theologians would be better of resisting the temptation to opine on the secular matters of the cultural domain.
Be that as it may, at least Zizek has enough sense of humor not to take himself too seriously and to maintain his favorite ‘split screen’ by simultaneously espousing the message and its subtext while his inadvertent tailspins into recursive logical abyss leave the rest of us entertained. Gunjevic, sadly, keeps muddling through Aristotle, Aquinas and Augustine eventually settling on a steady pace of mind numbing humorless analysis of a subject that he seems to have forgotten to define.
BUT about 30-40 pages of the book were actually immensely enjoyable, with Zizek engaging in some genuinely thought-provoking intellectual acrobatics. I particularly liked his treatment of Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant as a dialectical triad of Christian thought. Framing Christianity’s evolution as a Universal-Particular-Singular, reinforced by Slavic-Latin-German ethnic identities was pretty damn clever. In another chapter Zizek goes off on the structure of belief with his classic and well-known examples of Christmas, Niels Bohr and the ending of ‘Life is Beautiful’ – basically the analysis of belief as strictly conditioned on the belief of the ‘other’ internal or external which in itself brings to mind Rene Girard’s mimetic desire but without the subject. And finally Zizek’s metaphor of ideology as an unknown known was absolutely brilliant.
I wish I could save you the trouble of suffering through the book by pointing out the worthwhile pages, but my Sunday afternoon bloody mary awaits... Cheers!
Be that as it may, at least Zizek has enough sense of humor not to take himself too seriously and to maintain his favorite ‘split screen’ by simultaneously espousing the message and its subtext while his inadvertent tailspins into recursive logical abyss leave the rest of us entertained. Gunjevic, sadly, keeps muddling through Aristotle, Aquinas and Augustine eventually settling on a steady pace of mind numbing humorless analysis of a subject that he seems to have forgotten to define.
BUT about 30-40 pages of the book were actually immensely enjoyable, with Zizek engaging in some genuinely thought-provoking intellectual acrobatics. I particularly liked his treatment of Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant as a dialectical triad of Christian thought. Framing Christianity’s evolution as a Universal-Particular-Singular, reinforced by Slavic-Latin-German ethnic identities was pretty damn clever. In another chapter Zizek goes off on the structure of belief with his classic and well-known examples of Christmas, Niels Bohr and the ending of ‘Life is Beautiful’ – basically the analysis of belief as strictly conditioned on the belief of the ‘other’ internal or external which in itself brings to mind Rene Girard’s mimetic desire but without the subject. And finally Zizek’s metaphor of ideology as an unknown known was absolutely brilliant.
I wish I could save you the trouble of suffering through the book by pointing out the worthwhile pages, but my Sunday afternoon bloody mary awaits... Cheers!
March 20, 2016
Incredibly interesting, yet sometimes overly wordy in an abusive way. This book brings forth many interesting concepts that are at least, in my case, helping to think about life, philosophy, and the message of Christ in a different way. Zizek breaks things down into bite-size pieces before coming in with the big reveal. Though an atheist himself, Zizek recognizes the power of the revolutionary message of Christ to produce social change in the world today, while Gunjevic helps to strengthen and solidify Zizek's points from the perspective of Christianity.
November 15, 2014
If there is one interesting this exchange between Žižek and Gunjević does it recasts the structure of religion as a fundamental way to fracture the ideological constraints of today, sans a guarantee of a beyond by living in serfdom. Especially interesting is that Jesus is recast as a subversive entity in stark contrast to his implementation by the Right Wing as a figurehead of oppression.
February 5, 2013
some disjointedness here. I did not see how the articles by Gunjevic matched up with those of Zizek. Many of the Zizek essays seemed recycled, but I really liked with Gunjevic did with Zizek, and he helped me to become a better reader of him. G. has an agenda in his reading, to be sure, but it's a plausible one and a helpful Christian response to the rock star of critical theory.
September 20, 2013
I enjoyed much of it, some of it was to heavy theoretically for me, while other parts seemed relatively too light. It was almost to mixed in content to be enjoyed, but I am convinced of two things by it: (1) Theology is the new site for revolutionary thought, and (2) I could write in this manner, and in this stream of thought
August 19, 2014
I bought this for the Zizek stuff and enjoyed it because of the Gunjevic essays. Admittedly, Zizek's chapters weren't too repetitious- perhaps because I haven't read lots of his theological stuff- but the Gunjevic work really introduced me to a whole other way of approaching theology from a much more political angle.
January 22, 2015
Žižek Mostly good , at times - utterly brilliant.
Gunjević had interesting ideas at times, clearly clever and well read yet stuck in the idea that the gods are real. His avoidance of nihilism by tadaa God was paradoxically empty at times
Gunjević had interesting ideas at times, clearly clever and well read yet stuck in the idea that the gods are real. His avoidance of nihilism by tadaa God was paradoxically empty at times
February 6, 2016
Five stars to Zizek's contributions. It would feel like Peter Rollins has spent his entire career aping these essays if his books on the subject hadn't come first. Even so, Zizek says what Rollins says in a far more engaging and streamlined way.
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