This article retrieves Freud’s Paul as a forgotten predecessor and untapped critic of the “return to Paul” in contemporary political theology and continental philosophy. Given that Sigmund Freud published Moses and Monotheism in 1939 having barely escaped from Vienna, the text’s reception has justly been dominated by the question of Freud’s identification with Moses and the relationship between psychoanalysis and Judaism. However, I argue that this narrow focus has obscured the more fundamental problem of the connection between religion and Freud’s (...) enigmatic notion of “historical truth,” which he works out not through Moses but through Saint Paul. To do so, I first show how Freud’s genealogy of monotheism is modeled on the pathogenesis of hysterical symptoms. I then trace how Freud deepens his investigation into the etiology of symptom-formation until he arrives at the notion of historical truth and the archaic heritage that transmits it. Lastly, I demonstrate that Freud presents himself less as a Pauline figure than he does Paul as a proto-analyst. Through this staging, I contend that Freud parochializes the claims of Christianity as symptomatic of a more archaic historical truth that psychoanalysis alone is able to access. Freud’s Paul demonstrates that it is not a question of whether but how ostensibly modern secular discourses inherit the theological traditions in which they are imbedded. Reading Freud as a philosopher of religion ultimately offers an indictment of any philosophy or emancipatory politics naively modeled on theological universalism. (shrink)

The martyr is a potent symbol of sacrifice in Western cultural discourse. Understanding martyrdom as sacrifice, however, blunts the potency of the martyr's action. It obscures the violence by which the martyr's death becomes, paradoxically, a means to define institutional life. In this article, I propose an analogous relationship between the early Christian martyr and Giorgio Agamben's enigmatic homo sacer. Like homo sacer, the Christian martyr provides an “other” against which to organize institutional life. Read as a sacrifice, the martyr (...) also exemplifies the threat of biopolitics that Agamben describes, where mere existence can be isolated from political life and made subject to sovereign violence. Distinguishing the martyr from their institutional appropriation is a step toward exposing the modes of violence inherent in sovereign power. It provides the possibility of reconceptualizing the martyr as an autonomous figure of resistance, not as homo sacer but as homo profanus. (shrink)

V pričujočem tekstu trdimo, da je univerzalizacija simptoma najbolj vidna na področju politike. Simptom omogoča kontingentnosti, da zajame subjekta à deux, hkrati pa omogoči razkritje njegove razorožujoče ranljivosti. V sedanji konjunkturi se pokaže, da je razmerje med realnim užitka in označevalno strukturo antagonistično, še zlasti zato, ker tako razmerje razkriva subjektovo dvoumnost pri soočenju s problemom svobode z vidika simptoma. Četudi Lacan le redko uporablja ta izraz, svoboda preveva njegove seminarje, natančneje pa je locirana v problematiko psihoanalitičnega dejanja, se pravi, (...) subjekti si le redko želijo osvoboditi se spon njihovega simptoma tako, da se z njim soočijo oziroma da z njim odločno rokujejo. Po drugi strani pa subjekt in dejanje, četudi med seboj prepletena, nista nikdar zares povezana kot eno, ne da bi to vključevalo neogibno spregledanje. Če je mogoče politično dejanje obravnavati kot nedoločno, to velja tudi za političnega subjekta. Tu lahko pokažemo, da za razcepljenega subjekta bližina želje določa dejanje, ki terja pripoznanje, še več, preseženje subjektovega simptoma. Nenavadna, a neogibna iluzija kaže, da je pogoj za to, da subjekt ostane v polju politike, nekakšen notranji glas ali zvestoba fantazmi oziroma vznik folie à deux. V tej konstelaciji ostaja subjektov gon k politiki nekaj izmikajočega se in hkrati neodpravljivega, ker je prav ta gon tisti, ki – prek političnega dejanja – ohranja živo željo po emancipaciji, ki jo implicira simptom. Vzpostavitev povezave med političnim dejanjem in pripoznanjem simptoma zahteva od subjekta, da nosi posledice te identifikacije. Resnično nor pojav pri tem pa nastopi, ko subjekt prepozna sebe edino prek neogibnosti političnega dejanja in njegovega posledičnega spodleta. Simptom je na ta način sicer potrjen, čeprav ni osvoboditev od sintoma nikdar popolnoma dosežena. (shrink)

Four concepts of politics follow from an attempt to view the established order, its structural workings: actions and inactions, as more or less authentic politics by starting from Slavoj Žižek’s theory of authentic Political Act. In short Žižek’s theory is viewed from a slightly different angle in an attempt to approach more general theory of politics. When analysing political antagonisms, Žižek has suggested looking for the third term. Viewing an antagonism from both of its viewpoints suggest, however, that instead of (...) one position more, two conceptual positions more may be formulated. These two positions are proposed to be viewed as acts of both corresponding sides. What is called ‘Politics of revolution’ in the proposed schema suggests ‘prefer not to politics’ and what is called ‘Politics of maintenance’ suggests ‘prefer to politics’. Furthermore, a proposal to conceptually divide the politics of the established order in two is made in order to clarify the relation of found objects to their origins. Thus two respective conservatisms are identified: conservatism of ‘relics old particular all’ and conservatism of ‘relics of objects which might have saved the world’. In this context any re-Acts of these relics would fit the category of ‘Politics of maintenance’ and repressing these relics would fit the category of active maintenance through ‘prefer to politics’. Another conclusion is that in analysing the political antagonism of two, one could look for, not only for the third but for the fourth term as well. (shrink)

The focus of this paper lies in the unconscious solidification of capitalist ideology through Lacanian understanding of subjectivity. The analysis intervenes in the ideological fantasy and its inherent antagonisms in order to analyse the way capitalist ideology strives to fill or repress these ruptures in the socio-symbolic edifice. It points to the mode of proliferation of certain objects, which the fantasy puts in the position where they can function as objects of desire, covering the cracks in the socio-symbolic order by (...) filling their own lack. Furthermore, I focus on the establishment and signification of meaning within the capitalist matrix as well as its dialectical overlap with the objects proliferated by the socio-economic system in question. Such simultaneous fusion of lack and excess creates ideological enjoyment and solidifies capitalist ideology in the subject’s fantasy construction. Here lies the strength of capitalist ideology and its appropriation of even some social phenomena into consumerist categories. It is therefore vital to understand how ideology manages to fix its core of enjoyment through a dialectical overlap of meaning and objects to produce a totalized experience of reality. In itself, this already points to the much neglected Lacanian discourse of the Capitalist, revealing how the daily reality of subjects is driven by unconscious fantasy in its dogmatic ideological circle. It also hints to the homology between Lacan's surplus- jouissance and Marx's surplus-value. (shrink)

The film A Serious Man cinematically deconstructs the life of a mid-twentieth century, mid-western American physics professor named Larry Gopnik. As it happens, Larry is up for tenure with a wife who is about to leave him, an unemployed brother who sleeps on his couch, and two self-obsessed teenage children. The film presents a Job-like theodicy in which the mysteries of quantum physics are haunted both by questions of good and evil as well as the spectre of an un-named God, (...) reverently referred to as Hashem. The following paper examines the broader set of philosophical, theological and ethical concerns which arise from the film’s themes, using it to illustrate those concerns. Just as Newtonian physics underwrote Kant’s evocation of the image of starry skies above and moral law within, quantum physics underwrites a new set of ethical anxieties, which the film narrates as a key facet of contemporary western culture’s postmodern re-enchantment. Although some, such as Slavoj Zizek, see this as a positively charged opportunity to rethink metaphysics and ethics, the film leaves the audience with more sinister conclusions. (shrink)

I suggest in this article that there are several aspects of the Lacanian Real that so-called Lacanian literature has not adequately addressed, or barely did so. In this pursuit, I present a deconstructing reading of a number of Lacanian texts. My deconstructive reading suggests that three key features characterize the literature on the Real. First, there always is resistance that is involved in thinking about, and in experiencing the effects of, the Real. Second, the Real is most characteristically thought of (...) in negative terms. Third, the Real is more or less thought of as a limit that cannot be transgressed. A deconstruction of these features leads to two arguments. First, I propose that the deployment of the Real as khôra within a discourse is an originary performativity which speaks of retroactively positing of a have-always-been-there Real. Second, I argue that the Real is the impossible–possible event which is at the heart of ‘saying the Real’. The deconstruction thus leads to a reconfiguration of the Real as a ‘ saying the Real (as khôra)’ qua event (in the sense of Derrida) in the discourse. (shrink)

An analysis of theological and philosophical understandings of debt and its role in contemporary capitalism. Max Weber’s account of the rise of capitalism focused on his concept of a Protestant ethic, valuing diligence in earning and saving money but restraint in spending it. However, such individual restraint is foreign to contemporary understandings of finance, which treat ever-increasing consumption and debt as natural, almost essential, for maintaining the economic cycle of buying and selling. In The Debt of the Living, Elettra Stimilli (...) returns to this idea of restraint as ascesis, by analyzing theological and philosophical understandings of debt drawn from a range of figures, including Saint Paul, Schmitt and Agamben, Benjamin and Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, and Foucault. Central to this analysis is the logic of “profit for profit’s sake”—an aspect of Weber’s work that Stimilli believes has been given insufficient attention. Following Foucault, she identifies this as the original mechanism of a capitalist dispositif that feeds not on a goal-directed rationality, but on the self-determining character of human agency. Ascesis is fundamental not because it is characterized by renunciation, but because the self-discipline it imposes converts the properly human quality of action without a predetermined goal into a lack, a fault, or a state of guilt: a debt that cannot be settled. Stimilli argues that this lack, which is impossible to fill, should be seen as the basis of the economy of hedonism and consumption that has governed global economies in recent years and as the premise of the current economy of debt. Elettra Stimilli is research fellow of theoretical philosophy at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. Arianna Bove is the translator of many books, including Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin, by Antonio Negri. (shrink)

The Psychosis of Race offers a unique and detailed account of the psychoanalytic significance of race, and the ongoing impact of racism in contemporary society. Moving beyond the well-trodden assertion that race is a social construction, and working against demands that simply call for more representational equality, The Psychosis of Race explores how the delusions, anxieties, and paranoia that frame our race relations can afford new insights into how we see, think, and understand race's pervasive appeal. With examples drawn from (...) politics and popular culture--such as Candyman, Get Out, and the music of Kendrick Lamar--critical attention is given to introducing as well as explicating on several key concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis and the study of psychosis, including foreclosure, phallus, the Name-of-the-Father, sinthome, and the objet petit a. By elaborating a cultural mode to psychosis and its understanding, an original and critical exposition of the effects of racialization, as well as our ability to discern the very limits of our capacity to think through, or even beyond, the idea of race, is provided. The Psychosis of Race speaks to an emerging area in the study of psychoanalysis and race, and will appeal to scholars and academics across the fields of psychology, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, and the arts and humanities. (shrink)

At the intersection of “the theological” and “the political,” the situatedness of the sovereign dictates the task and method of political theology. It is the sovereign, in particular, positioned between “the theological” and “the political,” that is responsible for existentializing what is theologized and what is politicized through the power of sovereignty. Through this sovereignty, the sovereign creates, defines, and oversees all the existential dimensions of a theological-political environment, especially with respect to exclusiveness and inclusiveness, marginalization and belongingness, and what (...) is accomplished by the state of exception. To understand the nuances of what a sovereign is and how sovereignty operates, as the one that develops the state of exception through an act of exception, this essay will examine the explicit and implicit political theologies articulated by Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, in an effort to construct Slavoj Žižek’s political theology from Schmitt’s sentiment about “the one who decides on the exception” and Agamben’s conceptualization of “ zoē ” and “ bios. ” From Schmitt and Agamben, Žižek’s political theology makes use of the dialectic and references to notions of symptom and trauma, which ultimately culminates in a religious-oriented understanding of the sovereign's act of exception as the “theologico-political suspension of the ethical.”. (shrink)

This thesis offers a systematic analysis of the ideological structure in the Islamic Republic of Iran through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalytic critique of ideology. The Lacanian emphasis on the libidinal constitution of ideology changes the object of analysis from social reality in its empirical aspects to the unconscious or disavowed conditions sustaining social reality in the Islamic Republic. The overall analysis of this thesis is divided into three interrelated research domains: the first domain of political subjectivity examines how subjectivity (...) in Iran is embedded in the ideological order, as well as how that order was constructed through the 1979 Islamic revolution by tapping into the unconscious agency of political subjectivity; the second theologico-political domain inquires into the form of ideology materialised in the socio-political framework of the Islamic Republic and analyses its libidinal sustainability; the third domain explores the political economy in Iran by conflating its historical and ontological inquiry. The analysis of the three domains helps me to discern the inherent contradictions of the ideological structure in contemporary Iran and the peculiar way these contradictions are mediated. Their mediation conversely ensures the reproduction of ideology on an unconscious level. This thesis therefore explores how ideology in the Islamic Republic of Iran enables a consistent experience of social reality and how subjectivity sustains the ideological order through libidinal investments. (shrink)

This article aims to present a Žižekian reading of the British author David Herbert Lawrence. The contemporary continental philosopher has tackled each of the British author’s reoccurring themes individually and thus may be used as a keystone for a valid literary interpretatio n. The paper begins by shedding light on the representation of Western ideology, moves further into the comprehension of the impacts of modern cultural capital and the limitations of industrialization. While at the same time the dissertation targets another (...) component of the romantic poet’s many writings which are characterized by the regeneration of the subject’s carnal presence as a defense mechanism against the prevalent culture of de-humanization. The argument at hand is that the reconstruction of the bodily image rendered through Lawrence’s erotic literature is not one that portrays promiscuity, but rather demonstrates a transgression of the Lacanian symbolic and the attainment of a partial rendition of a Hegelian totality. Lawrence’s six novels and set of poems are thoroughly analyzed from a strictly Žižekian p erspective to demonstrate that th e two authors share thematic representations, a common worldview and propose a manifestation of how literary analyses may be conveyed using Žižek as a philosophical lens for literary interpretation. (shrink)

Originally presented at Monash University, the two lectures offer a very accessible introduction to a number of the major aspects of the work of John D. Caputo, perhaps/probably the most original and consequential postmodern philosopher of religion. The first lecture contextualizes the place of Caputo’s thinking, contrasts his contribution to Mark C. Taylor’s “a/theology”, and examines Caputo’s postmodern figuration of the “Kingdom of God”. The second lecture focuses on Caputo’s philosophico-theological rendering of four key Derridean themes: justice, forgiveness, the gift, (...) and hospitality. Throughout the text, certain critical issues are raised, though the overall appraisal is one of affirmation and admiration. (shrink)

His Paulskirche speech on October 14, 2001, marked Habermas’s turn to public criticism of the unilateral politics of global hegemony as he promoted a globaldomestic and human rights policy. Two years later he joined ranks with Jacques Derrida against the eight “new” Europeans who lent signatures to the second Gulf War. Lest we misjudge the joint letter by Habermas and Derrida as peculiarly Eurocentric and even oblivious to the worldwide nature of the antiwar protest on February 15, 2003, we must (...) read their new alliance in the context of its emergence: Derrida and Habermas introduce a corrective that neither invokes the geographical heart of Europe nor the cosmopolitan westernization of the world. In this essay, first, I revisit the imaginary conversation between Habermas and Derrida from 1995. Second, I highlight the persisting differences in their post-2001 thinking, pairing up key political concepts that illustrate how each thinker hopes for that which is to come after the death of God. Third, I press ahead to a new critical theory that articulates postsecular hope after the death of God. (shrink)

This article intent to bring some notes to understand the role of religion in the work of Slavoj Žižek. Is quite clear that religion is a big problem that Žižek faces in some of his book and to us is quite clear that his concern about this theme is extremely important to his view on politics and psychoanalysis. This article points out some insights about the main themes that Žižek works in his book about religion. We have no intent to (...) encompass all the repercussion of Žižek’s thought about religion, but we believe that this article opens a good aproximation to the theme of religion in Zizek’s work. Keywords: Christianism, Religion, Atheism, Death of God. (shrink)

The central strength of the Hegelian dialectical tradition is that reason is not divorced from its own internal limits in the name of a reason free from ideological mediation and constraint. This article holds onto this insight in the examination of the recent returns to religious categories in political philosophy and political theory. In this respect the article follows a two-fold logic. In the spirit of Hegel and Marx, it seeks to recover what is 'rational in religion'; and, at the (...) same time, examines the continuing entanglements of politics with religious categories. That this is an atheistic and materialist project is not in a sense strange or anomalous. On the contrary, it is precisely the 'secularisation' of Judeo-Christian categories in Kant, Hegel and Marx's respective theorisation of history, that provides the dialectic ground of the atheistic recovery and invocation of Judeo-Christian thought in recent political philosophy. Consequently the discussion of religion, or 'religion beyond religion', here, has very little to do with the spread of obscurantism and anti-rationalism in the global upsurge of reactionary Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms, neo-Pagan mysticisms, and other retreats from the real, or with the left-liberal denunciation of religion in the recent writings of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Rather, 'religion' here, in its Judeo-Christian legacy, is that which embodies the memory or prospect of a universal emancipatory politics. (shrink)

This article rethinks the future of continental philosophy of religion through a central, annotative reading of Gianni Vattimo’s Not Being God. The reading develops from Agamben on citation and Žižek on the short-circuit into a new reading strategy of annotation as a development of weak thought. It argues for what is termed the flânerie of the weak thought of annotation, rethinking the future of continental philosophy of religion as para-thought. The future envisioned is a future that flâneurs, annotates and is (...) para- to both the religious and laicity and their associated strong claims and metaphysics. For Vattimo, weak thought helps us see that if we read Nietzsche as an announcement and not a claim, hermeneutics teaches us we cannot conceive ultimate objective truths. Therefore, after Heidegger, we reach the end of metaphysics and the age of weak thought, where we respond only to appeals and announcements. (shrink)

Since his rising interest in Christianity, Slavoj Žižek has discussed many other religions. This article examines his engagement with Buddhism, which he often uses as a stand in for “Oriental spirituality.” For Žižek, Buddhist traditions lack several key features that make Christianity the best prospect for religious political organization. By examining the reasons behind his rejection of Buddhism through his defence of the Subject and the state of Fallenness, the argument will be presented that Žižek's at times negative position on (...) Buddhism can be explained through his commitment to a Lacanian reading of the Cartesian subject. This allegiance means that for Žižek there can never be a harmonious state for the subject, and accepting this provides the subject with a “divine” freedom. This article will also discuss ways in which Žižek's particularism can be overcome without losing the “apocalyptic fervor” of Christian Communist politics. (shrink)

This essay review discusses criticall the book the universal excemption of Slavoj Zizek. Just after finishing my two recent books: Tracing Spikes in Fear and Narcissism in Western Democracies Since 9/11 and The Challenges of Democracy in the War on Terror. While in the first work I traced back the limitations of Psychoanalysis as well as its complicities to legitimate the advance and expansion of capitalism, the latter focused on the role of torture –as a lesser evil- of contemporary government (...) in their war on terror. One of my arguments sounded polemically as though not only terrorism is the organization of labor by other means but psychoanalysis organized a specific ethics, which extracting its nature from ancient Greek philosophy, ascribed to the theory of scarcity which is the touchstone of capitalism. Secondly but most important, Occident carefully developed a doctrine of security, which the part may be sacrificed at the moment the body is in danger. Let me put the medical metaphor of cancer. While the medical gaze is programmed to look and eradicate the pathology, the illness, cancer derives from an anomaly of cell growth. Once some organs are affected, the medical gaze does not hesitate in extirpating the affected organ. The same allegory can be applied to the war on terror and the serious risks of ghettoization the Muslim community daily faces. (shrink)

This article considers the functionality, method and import of the critical theorist Slavoj Žižek’s engagement with theology against the wider intellectual backdrop of the relationship between an idea and its cultural context. I propose that his engagement can be better understood and interpreted with reference to how Christian theology has historically come to understand its own cultural context. When Žižek’s appropriation of theology is read alongside theology’s appropriation of classical philosophy in the patristic period, a distinctly speculative understanding of theology (...) as an idea developing through a dialectical process of determinate negation in its various contexts. (shrink)

The Emerging Church is one of the more interesting new movements in the religious landscape of the United States today. The Emerging Church has come out of US Evangelicalism, which has found itself in crisis, with a diminishing number of young people remaining in the church and a general popular impression of being intolerant, judgmental, and right-wing. Many in the Emerging Church are attempting to construct a vision of Christianity that addresses these problems. However, the Emerging Church is not a (...) monolith; it includes a variety of perspectives and positions. What I will argue in this article is that there is, among several different perspectives within the movement, a critique of the US political and economic system that provides an interesting and new way of thinking about the relationship between Christianity, politics, economics, and identity that may serve to create a challenge to the hegemonic system of the United States. For the purposes of this article I use three examples to illustrate my point: Shane Claibourne’s “New Monasticism”/”red Letter Christians” movement; Brian McLaren’s recent work, Why did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha and Mohammed Cross The Road; and Peter Rollins as a self-proclaimed inheritor of the radical tradition. I will show that the Emerging Church thinkers, by challenging the theological constructions of US Evangelicalism, are likewise providing fodder, to varying degrees, for a critique of the US political and economic system. Whether this will coalesce into a real significant challenge or will ultimately be reabsorbed by the status quo and/or marginalized remains to be seen. (shrink)

"Roger Garaudy was for many years at the centre of the French Communist Party but was eventually expelled for his liberal views. In the Seventies he developed a project to bring Marxism and Christianity together, to include all humanity in a project to set all people free. What emerges from Garaudy's project is a very modern Marxism, with its emphasis on the individual, its ecological politics, and in its insistence on religion as central to human emancipation. Although Garaudy himself became (...) frustrated by the West and converted to Islam in 1982, ending his life discredited in the West, it is certainly possible that Garaudy's project represents a good, perhaps even the best, starting point for Marxism in today's world"--. (shrink)

In light of the general lack of awareness of the long history of Western-Marxist fascination with the Bible, this article offers a synopsis of part of that history. After showing how the Bible was an important element in the work of Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, it the offers a critique of the current engagements with it by Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Terry Eagleton and Giorgio Agamben. The third section deals with the most significant element of the religious (...) Left in recent years, namely liberation theology. It closes with some comments concerning the growth of Marxist biblical studies and some suggestions for the way Marxism might reconnect with a non-reified biblical tradition. (shrink)

This article examines the resources offered by various forms of critical cultural theory for the study of religion. It then briefly explores the turn to religion by a range of recent cultural theorists.

In the appendix of his latest book, Incontinence of the Void, Žižek presents an account of how, according to his dialectical materialism, love can overcome death. This article situates Žižek ’s argument in the context of his ontology and his theory of the subject to explicate how Žižek arrives at this position: one that appears, on the surface, to be inconsistent with a staunch materialist and atheistic stance. Building on Žižek ’s references to Kierkegaard in this appendix, I will furthermore (...) argue that the figure of the Knight of Faith from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling can be as another instantiation of the revolutionary subject of the act. This figure can be said to participate in a type of love that overcomes death insofar as its attachment to objects of desire embodies the acephalous, undead drive that is not reducible to ontic or symbolic structures of reality. (shrink)

Much has been written about Žižek’s critique of ideology and its theoretical boundaries. Beyond the critical aspect of Žižekian philosophy, the desert of Žižekian politics lies in the way subjectivity persists even at the end of great revolutionary mobilizations. In this essay, I deal with the implications of a Žižekian politics based on the theory of subjectivity and the problem of the “morning after”. His rejection of the main currents of leftism opens up the discussion whether Žižekian politics is a (...) call for pragmatism or as a provocation to revolution. To address this issue, this essay proceeds in two ways. First, we study how Vladimir Lenin and Deng Xiaoping gives us two lessons in socialist pragmatism; the lessons we draw from Lenin and Deng allow us to study the problematic faced by the post-revolutionary politics: the need to arrive at a concrete plan to govern the nation and resuscitate the economy. Second, from what we learn as the audacity of Lenin’s strategic retreats and the missed political opportunities in Deng’s economic reforms, I argue that in a politics of militancy, collectivism is complemented by the rigorous study of our present situation. Militancy is an attitude of guarded optimism that complements communist optimism with a critical edge and a level-headed approach to dealing with political problems. (shrink)

The book is an attempt to explore the affinities between contemporary critical theories and modernist and postmodernist American poetry. The analysis focuses on poststructuralist theories, notorious for their tendency to destabilize generic boundaries between literary, philosophical and critical discourses. The main argument and the structure of the book derive from Jacques Derrida’s essay “Che cos’è la poesia” [What is poetry?] in which the philosopher postulates the impossibility of defining poetry by comparing a poem to a hedgehog – prickly, solitary, untamed, (...) fragile and protective, rolling itself up into a ball at the first sign of danger or when in the hands of the reader-intruder. The metaphor captures thus the fragility of the relationship between poetry and the world. The book examines this relationship as exemplified by the erinaceous poetics of high modernists and their postmodernist followers In the study I employ also other oststructuralist theories, such as the notion of the text and the pleasure of the text formulated by Roland Barthes, the heories of metaphor as seen by Paul Ricoeur or Paul de Man, and gender-sensitive theories of Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray. (shrink)

The relationship between pleasure and asceticism has been at the core of debates on western subjectivity at least since Nietzsche. Addressing this theme, this article explores the emergence of ‘non-authoritarian’ health campaigns, which do not propagate abstention from harmful substances but intend to foster a ‘well-balanced subject’ straddling pleasure and asceticism. The article seeks to develop the Foucauldian analytical framework by foregrounding a strategy of subjectivation that integrates desire, pleasure and enjoyment into health promotion. The point of departure is the (...) overwhelming emphasis in the governmentality literature on ‘prudence’, ‘self-responsibility’ or ‘risk calculation’, such that pleasure and desire remain largely absent from the framework. Some insights from Žižek’s work are introduced to help us obtain a firmer grasp on the problematic of ‘the well-balanced subject’. The article argues that, in order to analyse the transformation of interpellation in recent health promotion, we must recognize the mechanism of self-distance or dis-identification as an integral part of the procedure of subjectification. (shrink)

The history of the Nicaraguan Revolution has received considerable analytical attention. Typically, the successful overthrow of the Somoza regime in the late 1970s is associated with the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, a Marxist/socialist inspired vanguard group. While the role Christians played in the revolution is often acknowledged as a significant one, in part because many Sandinista cadres were Christian revolutionaries, little attention has been paid to the degree to which Sandinismo, as a unique perspective on socialism, shares elective affinities (...) with liberation theology, a prophetic expression of Christianity. This manuscript sets out to explore the relationship between liberation theology and Sandinismo-as-socialism. It starts by considering the perspective of Christian revolutionaries on this relationship. It then identifies the electives affinities between the aforementioned cultural frameworks, and it evaluates the Nicaraguan Revolution in light of these elective affinities. The latter evaluation includes exploring the connection between Saint Paul and what it means to be a Sandinista revolutionary. (shrink)

“Laughing at Finitude” interprets Slavoj Žižek’s intellectual project as responding to a challenge left by Being and Time. Setting out from discussions of Heidegger’s book in The Parallax View and The Ticklish Subject, the essay exfoliates Žižek’s response to the Heideggerian version of a “philosophy of finitude”—both finding the central insight of Žižek’s work in Heidegger’s radical proposal for “anticipatory resoluteness” and developing Žižek’s critique of Being and Time as indicating Heidegger’s retreat from that proposal within the very book where (...) it appears. Žižek reads Being and Time’s existential thematic as proposing a radical subjectivism and, unlike other Heidegger-critics, praises this aspect of the project. Indeed, Žižek claims that the weakness of Being and Time as a whole is that it is insufficiently radical in its subjectivism. For him, Heidegger is a thinker of ambiguous value, one who develops a program from whose own demands he hides. “Laughing at Finitude” both articulates this accusation of self-deception in Heidegger and examines the imperatives necessary to avoid it, for a dialectical shift from the “tragic” voice in existential treatments of finitude and for a revolutionary collectivist re-conception of social “Mitsein.” It suggests, in the process, Žižek’s own intellectual itinerary. (shrink)

The central strength of the Hegelian dialectical tradition is that reason is not divorced from its own internal limits in the name of a reason free from ideological mediation and constraint. This article holds onto this insight in the examination of the recent returns to religious categories in political philosophy and political theory. In this it follows a twofold logic. In the spirit of Hegel and Marx it seeks to recover what is ‘rational in religion’; at the same time, it (...) examines the continuing entanglements of politics with religious categories. That this is an atheistic and materialist project is not in a sense strange or anomalous. On the contrary, it is precisely the ‘secularisation’ of Judeo-Christian categories in Kant, Hegel and Marx's respective theorisations of history that provides the dialectical ground for the atheistic recovery and invocation of Judeo-Christian thought in recent political philosophy. Consequently, this discussion of religion, or ‘religion beyond religion’, has very little to do with the spread of obscurantism and anti-rationalism in the global upsurge of reactionary Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms, neo-pagan mysticisms, and other retreats from the real, or with the left-liberal denunciation of religion in the recent writings of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Rather, ‘religion’ here, in its Judeo-Christian legacy, is that which embodies the memory or prospect of a universal emancipatory politics. (shrink)

In contrast to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s classic warning, postmodern society in the United States seems increasingly influenced by metanarratives—religious metanarratives. This article examines the implications of this religious resurgence for educational researchers. It offers a competing analysis of the postmodern that draws on Harold Bloom, Slavoj ŽiŽek and others to identify the gnostic elements in contemporary religiosity, both in Europe and the United States. This competing reading of postmodern religiosity suggests a reframing of Lyotard’s paralogy—research that searches for instabilities in the (...) framework of knowledge. Drawing examples from recent educational research, I will argue for ways in which researchers can better engage religion in their work. (shrink)