This session features a conversation between prominent radical theologian Thomas Altizer and well-known cultural critic Slavoj Žižek on the continuing and changing currency of the “death of God” idea within theology, religious studies, philosophy, the arts, and the trajectory of global culture in general. How has the notion of the death of God evolved as the secularization thesis has declined? Has the phrase become passé or is it alive, current, and still significant? Must we understand this phrase in new senses in the present globalizing world? What are the most important resources and thinkers for contending with its meaning? Around the core exchange of the two panelists, some thirty or more scholars, junior and senior, who have been closely engaged with the death of God idea have been invited to participate actively from the audience, with the intent to catalyze a lively, multifaceted conversation on these issues.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find a recording of Altizer from this event.
Four of the world’s leading public intellectuals came together on Thursday, October 22 in the historic Great Hall at Cooper Union to discuss “Rethinking Secularism.” In an electrifying symposium convened by the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, the Social Science Research Council and the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University, Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West gave powerful accounts of religion in the public sphere.
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Is there anything for political progressives in the Christian message? Slavoj Žižek recognizes the potential of Christianity to embody moral and political revolt. John Milbank believes theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics and ethics can stand. They have co-authored The Monstrosity of Christ and tonight discuss Christian theology’s emancipatory potential. Chair: Giles Fraser, vicar of Putney.
In this corner, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who represents the critical-materialist stance against religion’s illusions; in the other corner, “radical orthodox” theologian John Milbank, an influential and provocative thinker who argues that theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics, and ethics can stand. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Žižek and Milbank go head to head for three rounds, employing an impressive arsenal of moves to advance their positions and press their respective advantages. By the closing bell, they have proven themselves worthy adversaries–and have also shown that faith and reason are not simply and intractably opposed.
Slavoj Žižek has been called an “academic rock star.” As public visibility of the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst increases, so too does the depth of his engagement with Christian theology. Žižek’s recent work includes extended treatments of key Christian thinkers from Paul, Pascal, and Kierkegaard to G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, while Christology and other theological themes have provided crucial points of reference. Žižek has even said that “to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian experience.”
But Žižek’s work on Christianity often overwhelms students of theology. To be sure, Žižek’s style of argumentation is unusual and his concepts are complex. But the more basic problem is that his work on Christianity is a further development of a broader intellectual project established in many volumes produced in the course of the 1990s. This book will bring students of theology up to speed on this broader intellectual project, with an eye toward what brings Žižek to an explicit engagement with Christianity and how both his earlier and more recent works are relevant for theological reflection.
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In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus 19:18 and then elaborated in Christian teachings, to love one’s neighbor as oneself. “Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it,” he proposed, “as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment.” After the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, Stalinism, and Yugoslavia, Leviticus 19:18 seems even less conceivable—but all the more urgent now—than Freud imagined.
In The Neighbor, three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how this problem of neighbor-love opens questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and that suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays explore today’s central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political. In “Towards a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” Kenneth Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt’s political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neighbor based in psychoanalysis. In “Miracles Happen,” Eric L. Santner extends the book’s exploration of neighbor-love through a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Slavoj Žižek’s “Neighbors and Other Monsters” reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporary ethical thought.
A rich and suggestive account of the interplay between love and hate, self and other, personal and political, The Neighbor will prove to be a touchstone across the humanities and a crucial text for understanding the persistence of political theology in secular modernity.
The essays in Theology and the Political—written by some of the world’s foremost theologians, philosophers, and literary critics—analyze the ethics and consequences of human action. They explore the spiritual dimensions of ontology, considering the relationship between ontology and the political in light of the thought of figures ranging from Plato to Marx, Levinas to Derrida, and Augustine to Lacan. Together, the contributors challenge the belief that meaningful action is simply the successful assertion of will, that politics is ultimately reducible to “might makes right.” From a variety of perspectives, they suggest that grounding human action and politics in materialist critique offers revolutionary possibilities that transcend the nihilism inherent in both contemporary liberal democratic theory and neoconservative ideology.
Contributors: Anthony Baker, Daniel M. Bell Jr., Phillip Blond, Simon Critchley, Conor Cunningham, Creston Davis, William Desmond, Hent de Vries, Terry Eagleton, Rocco Gangle, Philip Goodchild, Karl Hefty, Eleanor Kaufman, Tom McCarthy, John Milbank, Antonio Negri, Catherine Pickstock, Patrick Aaron Riches, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Regina Mara Schwartz, Kenneth Surin, Graham Ward, Rowan Williams, Slavoj Žižek
“From now on, even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”
Saint Paul’s militant declaration from Corinthians asserts for the first time in human history the revolutionary logic of a radical break with the past — with it, the age of Cosmic Balance and similar pagan babble is over. What does it mean to return to this stance today?
One of the most deplorable aspects of our postmodern era is the re-emergence of the “sacred” in all its different guises, from New Age paganism to the emerging religious sensitivity within deconstructionism itself. How is a Marxist to counter this massive onslaught of obscurantism? The wager of Žižek’s The Fragile Absolute is that Christianity and Marxism should fight together against the onslaught of new spiritualism. The subversive core of the Christian legacy is much too precious to be left to the fundamentalists. Here is a fitting contribution from a Marxist to the2000th anniversary of one who was well aware that to practice love in our world is to bring in the sword and fire.
