Category Archives: Philosophers - Page 2

The Need for True Fundamentalists

Posted by on September 9, 2008 6 comments

Today we hear about nothing more than the “collision of civilizations,” the notion that the primary site of global conflict in our world is between two powers, the liberal cosmopolitan power of global capitalism and the backlash against that from traditional societies, largely in the Middle East, fundamentalism. The conflict seems to be, as Žižek notes, between “anaemic liberals” and “impassioned fundamentalists.” All it takes is a little perusing on YouTube to find countless examples of these sort of frightening, bizarre, passionate fundamentalists. So it seems that the conflict in our world comes down to a conflict between the Western liberal notion of the secular, and the theocratic ambitions of fanatically devoted fundamentalists.

However, this way of reading the matter is deceptive. The truth of the matter is that there are precious few true fundamentalists around these days. Or at the very least, the people we tend to nominate as such, are in fact not authentic fundamentalists at all. If fundamentalism is understood as “the strict maintenance of the ancient or fundamental doctrines of any religion or ideology” (Oxford English Dictionary) then those whom we consider fundamentalists today, be they Muslim or Christian are not truly fundentalists at all. The key mark of true fundmentalism, is as Žižek notes “the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found thier way to truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them?”

Yet it is manifestly the case that today’s fundamentalists, whether they are maniacal street preachers or suicide bombers, are deeply and viscerally threatened by the reality of the non-believing world. The seeming totalization of religion in the life of today’s fundamentalist is only apparent. Their zeal masks a deep insecurity about their own convictions; that is why they are desperate to defend them with violence, be it rhetorical or physical. Again, to quote Žižek, “In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful Other, they are fighting their own temptation. These so-called Christian or Muslim fundamentalists are a disgrace to true fundamentalism.” Žižek’s description seems a particularly apt way of describing how so many ultra-conservative Christian’s are obsessed with the public ridicule and degradation of homosexuals. Their trenchant condemnation of homosexual behavior masks a perverse voyeuristic fascination with the phenomenon.

Herein lies the fascination of pseudo-fundamentalism, their very passionate intensity “bears witness to a lack of true conviction. Deep in themselves, terrorist fundamentalists also lack true conviction–their violent outbursts are proof of it. How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be, if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a low-circulation Danish newspaper.” And here is the crux of the matter, the issue is not that the rest of the world thinks fundamentalists are inferior and stupid, “but rather that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior.” “The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite fact that fundamentalists are already like us, that secretly they have already intenalised our standards and measure themselves by them.”

The problem today is not that we have too many fundamentalists, but that we have far too few. What passes for fundamentalism these days is nothing like true, authentic fundamentalism, the radical and passionate commitment to a particular cause, theology, or way of life. If we were true fundamentalists, the kind whose beliefs are “fundamentalistic” precisely because they are not a reaction to the world around us, things would be far more interesting indeed. Ironically what the church needs today is a call, not to become less fundamentalistic, but to discover, perhaps for the first time what an authentically fundamentalist notion of Christian identity would look like. When the term is understood rightly, we come to see that what we truly need in today’s church are more fundamentalists, not less.

The Dark Side of the Sexual Revolution

Posted by on September 8, 2008 4 comments

“Here is the dark side of 1960s ‘sexual liberation’: the full commodification of sexuality. . . . sex is an absolute necessity, to renounce it is to wither away, so love cannot flourish without sex; simultaneously, however, love is impossible precisely because of sex; sex which ‘proliferates as the epitome of late capitalism’s dominance, has permanently stained human relationships as inevitable reproductions of the dehumanizing nature of liberal society; it has essentially, ruined love.’”

– Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflection (New York: Verso, 2008), 35-36.

Žižek on Violence

Posted by on September 6, 2008 11 comments

I’m currently reading Savoj Žižek’s latest book, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. The book it vintage Žižek, going off on somewhat related tangents frequently that are always thought-provoking and often entertaining. What is helpful about the book is the way in which it rightly complexifies talk of violence and peace. Žižek delineates three forms that violence takes, one which we are familiar with, and two which tend to happen below the surface of our perceptions about society. The first form of violence that Žižek describes is what we commonly think of as violence: the event of one person perpetrating harm on another. This Žižek calls “subjective violence.” It is clear and visible and it is always perpetrated by a guilty subject. The central thing to note about how we perceive this form of violence is that it is always an interruption into a prior background of tranquility and peace. First things are in a state of peace and then that peace is disrupted by an act of violence.

It is precisely this notion of fundamentally construing violence as an interruption into a peaceful natural state that Žižek seeks to problematize. He does this by delineating two other forms of violence which he refers to as “objective violence.” Objective violence is different from subjective violence in that objective violence is the violence that always-already exists and sustains the social fabric that subjective violence interrupts. The “natural” state of things into which subjective violence irrupts is not a state of peace, but one of violence. This violence is objective. It is happening at all levels of society and it invisible to those on the advantaged side of it. Thus all forms of subjective violence, which arise in response to the objective violence that sustains society are perceived by those in power to be irrational acts of senseless barbarism.

To clarify this a bit, Žižek further distinguishes two types of objective violence, “systemic violence” and “symbolic violence.” Systemic violence is “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.” It is what other thinkers have referred to as “structural evil.” Žižek’s point is that the systems which govern our economic and political lives, which seemingly guarantee the “normal” state of society, do so precisely by perpetrating vast swathes of systemic violence on large groups of people. It is an unseen violence, one that is part of the air we breath and the food we eat and the stuff we buy.

Symbolic violence is related to, and participates in systemic violence, but it refers more specifically to the violence of language. The patterns of social life that are encoded within our language are violent insofar as they presuppose and reify relations of domination. Any revolutionary knows that the first step towards revolution is the discovery of a new mode of language that names things differently. This practice of naming, when done in such a way as to dominate and control is a central form of violence operating at all levels of discourse in our world. Žižek takes this a bit further and argues that language as such manifests an inherent form of violence on which these sort of explicit manifestations of symbolic violence are based and from which they flow.

Whether or not Žižek is correct about everything he seeks to say about these three modes of violence, it is certainly the case that if we construe violence as simply visible acts of harm perpetrated by agents, we have a woefully naive notion of violence. What is helpful about Žižek’s account is that he complexifies violence in a way that helps us to eye with suspicion any sort of self-righteous liberal pacifism that assumes we can “reject violence” simply by not punching or shooting someone else. For Christian pacifists, this sort of reflection is absolutely essential. Nothing is more dangerous to the Christian witness for peace than the assumption that we are not implicated in the violence of our world, and that is an assumption that is all to easy to make. For Žižek of course, it seems to be an open question whether there can be any real occurrence of true peace in a world so ubiquitously determined by violence. That is certainly something to talk about in another post. However, the main point I’ve enjoyed having Žižek remind me of thus far is the importance of understanding the depths and vicissitudes of violence that shape and enable our own lives. I’m only able to type this post on this iMac because Bill Gates has taken vast amounts of money, resources, and indeed, lives to make it possible (for more on this buy the book and read Žižek’s discussion of Bill Gate’s and his philanthropy). Any notion that I can somehow “withdraw” from the systemic violence that enables my life is absurd and I need to recognize the absurdity of any pacifism that would seem to say that I can so withdraw.

For those of us that would call ourselves Christian pacifists we must allow these sorts of “thick” descriptions of violence to arrest us, to interrupt us, and to reshape our notions of what the peace of Christ must look like if it is to be received and manifested in our lives. I think the practice of any truly Christian pacifism must look far less like a position or perspective on war (after all, a pacifism that just tells us not to kill is pretty damn minimalistic!) and the threat of subjective violence and far more like a way of reshaping our lives that make the deconstruction of relations of domination possible. What this means is endlessly complex and difficult, requiring extensive patience and intensive conversation.

This seems profoundly unsatisfying perhaps. However, I suggest that it is  the first step we must all take in our attempts to learn what it might mean to try to live towards truthful nonviolence. The hallmark of what Žižek calls “liberal-humanitarian discourse on violence” is its contrived urgency. There is always some allegedly concrete and specific catasrophe that needs to be addressed and fixed now. The problem is never allowed to be something as radically extensive as “Maybe our whole form of life is wrong and has to be radically transfigured starting with me.” The first step in being nonviolent is to reject the sort of contrived urgency which distracts us with “concrete” problems as if they were aberrations that came out of nowhere. Rather we must learn to see them as the inevitable outcome of the systemic violence that sustains our way of life, and by doing so we can begin to learn what any sort of truly nonviolent life might look like and how we must reshape our lives in living towards that vision.

The Meaning of Life is…Jazz?

Posted by on September 5, 2008 2 comments

Philosophers today are, by and large, not too bold. The same is only more true for theologians, that’s why when quite literally any sort of theological writing that is bold comes across the radar everybody is all in a tizzy. Terry Eagleton is fairly bold as philosophers go. This is seen in his willingness to write a book detailing what he thinks is the meaning of life. His conclusion however, is not that original. Rather it is simply good Christian theological thinking that he likely learned from Herbert McCabe. Ultimately the meaning of life is love, defined in a very particular, very Christian way.

“Take, as an image of the good life, a jazz group. A jazz group which is improvising obviously differs from a symphony orchestra, since to a large extent each member is free to express herself as she likes. But she does so with a receptive sensitivity to the self-expressive performaces of the other musicians. The complex harmony they fashion comes not from a collective score, but from the free musical expression of each member acting asthe basis for the free expression of the others. As each player grows more musically eloquent, the others draw inspiration from this and are spurred to greater heights.  There is no conflict here betwee freedom and the ‘good of the whole’, yet the image is the reverse of totalitarian. Though each performer contributes to ‘the greater good of the whole’, she does so not by some grim-lipped self-sacrifice but simply by expressing herself. There is self-realization, but only through a loss of self in the music as a whole. There is achievement, but it is not a question of self-aggrandizing success. Instead, the acheivement–the music itself–acts as a medium of relationship among the performers. There is pleasure to be reaped from this artistry, and–since there is a free fulfillment or realization of powers–there is also happiness in the sense of flourishing. Because this flourishing is reciprocal, we can even speak, remotely and analogically, of a kind of love. One could do worse, surely, than propose such a situation as the meaning of life–both in the sense that it is what makes life meaningful, and –more contoversially–in the sense that when we act in this way, we realize our natures at their finest.” (p. 172-73)

A bit whimsical perhaps, but quite insightful. What Eagleton sees is that the meaning of life must, in some sense come from outside of life. Music, as in this example always exists in some sense over-against us even as we participate in it. It is, in some sense greater than we who, empirically seem to bring it into existence. And so it is for the Christian experience of life’s meaningfulness, as Eagleton also hints at:

“Is jazz, then, the meaning of life? Not exactly. The goal would be to construct this kind of community on a wider scale, which is a problem of politics. It is, to be sure, a utopian aspiration, but it is none the worse for that. The point of such aspirations is to indicate a direction, however lamentably we are bound to fall short of the goal. What we need is a form of life which is completely pointless, just as the jazz performance is pointless. Rather than serve some utilitarian purpose or earnest metaphysical end, it is a delight in itself. It needs no justification beyond its own existence. In this sense, the meaning of life is interestingly close to meaninglessness. Religious believers who find this version of the meaning of life a little too laid-back for comfort should remind themselves that God, too, is his own end, ground, origin, reason, and self-delight, and that only by living in this way can human being be said to share in his life.” (p. 174)

Whether or not this is truly the fullest expression of the meaning of human life, it certainly gets at something quite important. It also strikes a chord quite similar to the thought of Robert Jenson, particularly in this quote, which R.O. Flyer recently posted from Story and Promise which perhaps makes the Christian articulation of the meaning of life most explicit:

“Play is meaningful action that does not need to seek its meaning in some achievement exterior to itself. It is what we do because we do not have to. It is action to which the future opens as gift rather than as burden. The life of the Trinity is sheer play. As play with the Trinity, liturgy is anticipation of life in the Fulfillment–-the closest we get to freedom. It must be admitted that liturgy-as-play is a rather rare occurrence in America’s recognized churches.” (p. 184)

If Žižek Became a Christian…?

Posted by on February 28, 2008 9 comments

I’ve often wondered what kind of Christian Slovoj Žižek would be if he converted.  Would he likely be a Roman Catholic?  Protestant?  Eastern Orthodox?  I’d say his theology lends itself to a particularly protestant flavor, sometimes reading almost just like Eberhard Jüngel or Jürgen Moltmann.  His notion of the crucifixion as the end of any sort of abstract transcendence or God as a guarantor of meaning has a particularly Lutheran-theology-of-the-cross ring to it.  However, Žižek’s socialist politics would certainly be at home among the radical Catholicism of someone like Herbert McCabe, so perhaps he could at least conceivably become a Catholic.  Of course we would be hard pressed to ignore both his slavic roots and his very Eastern Orthodox-worthy beard, which indicate he would be quite at home among the Orthodox.  But, what think you?  If Žižek were to really take the plunge and become a Christian, what branch of Christianity do you think he’d likely wind up in?

Žižek on Reflexive Racism

Posted by on February 22, 2008 1 comment

In The Fragile Abolute, Slavoj Žižek opens his book with a discussion about how to best encapsulate the “gist of an epoch.”  He argues that to understand the cultural-political reality of a particular time and place we must look, not so much at the explicit features that define the “social and ideological edifices” of that cultural formation, but rather for the “disavowed ghosts that haunt it”.  The example of this he turns to is the “Balkan ghost”, the way in which the people of the former Yugoslavia are seen from the perspective of the rest of Europe.  For all the various countries in Europe, ”the Balkans” constitute the “barbarian Other”, encoding an ideological antagonism into the fabric of European consciousness which embodies a particularly modern form of racism.

The ghost of “the Balkans” ultimately has nothing to do with geography, but rather with a sort of “imaginary cartography” which reflexively attributes to the people of the Balkans a “terrain of ethnic horrors and intolerance, of primitive irrational warring passions, to be opposed to the post-nation-state-liberal-democratic process of solving conflicts through rational negotiation, compromise and mutual respect.”  This what Žižek calls “reflexive racism” in which racism is actually “attributed to the Other, while we occupy the convenient position of a neutral benevolent observer, righteously dismayed at the horrors going on ‘down there’.”

Thus, as the benevolent liberal observers, the European consciousness feels no dissonance in attributing things to “them” that are obviously racist, while simultaneously attributing racism to the Other.  What Žižek observes about this dynamic is the way in which it moves the locus of social conflict in the world from class struggles to the “multiculturalist problematic of the ‘intolerance of Otherness’”.  Žižek argues, by contrast that the answer to the problem of ethnic hatred is not through its “immediate counterpart, ethnic tolerance“; rather, “what we need is even more hatred, but proper political hatred: hatred directed at the common political enemy.”  For Žižek, of course, this “common political enemy” is capitalism.  However, one wonders how such greater hatred can avoid being sublimated into the machinations of the ubiquitous order of global capitalism.  Regardless, however, the call for greater hatred, rather than bourgeois exhortations to tolerance and liberal sentimentality is at least interesting, something the platitudes of liberalism definitely are not.

Metz, Žižek, and the Politics of Apocalyptic History

Posted by on February 20, 2008 8 comments

One of the interesting elements of Johann Baptist Metz’s political theology are the multiple interstices between it and the theological-philosophical expostulations of Slavoj Žižek.  One of the essential points of continuity is the way in which both of the, drawing on Frankfurt School Marxist critical theorists, try to take seriously the realities of how modern capitalism has shaped history.  Both attempt to work out a form of critical social theory (and, at least for Metz, a praxis) that takes the situation of modern suffering and nihilism seriously.  A key convergence between these two thinkers on this point lies in how both reject theoretical strategies to fashion conceptual systems that provide guarantees of meaning and existential closure in light of the modern history of human suffering and death.  Žižek and Metz both insist in their distinctive ways that a theological reading of the modern age does not provide a seamless integration or sublimation of the history of human suffering into a divine history of salvation, but rather requires our reading of historical human suffering to become more radically historical and open-ended. 

God, for Žižek is not a guarantor of meaning, rather history emphatically manifests the absence of God.  For Žižek Jesus’ cry of dereliction on the cross manifests precisely the way in which humanity endures the complete annihilation of divine transcendence.  For Žižek God is not a guarantor of historical meaning beyond the absence of God in history, rather God is the event of that absence within which humans must labor and strive, in the face of the death of transcendence to realize the future of hope.  For Žižek it will not do for us to hope in God, rather we must realize that God hopes in us. 

Metz’s reading of the history of modernity ensconces a similarly stark frame of reference.  Like Žižek, Metz is against any tidy narrative of salvation history which renders intelligible and understandable the history of human suffering.  The history of human suffering is precisely a nonidentity for which no “explanation” can be given without betraying the distinctive character of that history of suffering.  Metz resists any theodicy which proffers simple closure in the face of the reality of radical evil.  Rather, for Metz it is precisely within the context of the inexplicable reality of radical evil that theology, prayer, and hope in the apocalyptic future of God in Christ must take shape.  For Metz, the Christian theologian must point to the radical openness of the future in light of God’s past of interrupting the world in Christ.  For the Christian theologian, the agenda is not to find a way to give the world’s history of suffering some sort of “meaning”, but rather to point to the radically new transformation that is hoped for in Christ’s apocalyptic invasion of the world.  By construing history apocalyptically, the theologian testifies to the world as a history which is held open for the redemption of the hopes of those who have died stripped of any hope whatsoever.

Both Žižek and Metz struggle to come to grips with the reality of the history of human suffering and the demonstrable absence of God in that history.  However, in Žižek’s “theology”, we are thrust ever and always onto the plane of immanence in which the being of God is identified with God’s absence into which we must radiate presence, grasping and fashioning for ourselves any redemptive future that may be.  We are left stumbling about in an ontology of the void.  For Metz, however, while not falling into a scholasticism which would seek to dissolve the ambiguity and dissonance of history, calls attention to the apocalyptic hope of God’s interruption of the world in Christ which functions as the church’s “dangerous memory.”  Metz constructs no fictive guarantees of meaning or closure, but points instead to the radical possibility of transformation in Christ which is rendered imaginable through the remembrance of Christ.  In contrast to Žižek, Metz, while fully recognizing the godforsakenness of the world, provides us with a way in which to go on living in the world of godforsakenness in hope.  For Metz, it is the apocalypse of God in Christ that alone promises a future in which we can hope for a resumption of life beyond the rupture of history, even as we stare the maw of that history directly in the face.

If you want to read a good post…

Posted by on January 6, 2008 1 comment

You should definitely check out Christian’s latest blog entry.  It is a probing discussion of how socio-linguistic boundaries between the church and the world make it possible (or not) for Christian and non-Christians to work together in building a more just world.  Through an examination of the socialist politics of Eugene McCarraher and Slovoj Zizek, Christian poses a difficult question:

“Therefore, I’m wondering what sort of world McCarrher (a Christian believer) and Zizek (not a Christian believer) could work together to build, being that for McCarraher a true political economy would require the worship of the triune God, whilst for Zizek it would not.”

Radical Trinitarianism: §5.1: Transcendence & Divine Non-competitiveness

Posted by on September 16, 2007 4 comments

We come now to an examination of an all-important issue in Christian theology, that of the issue of divine transcendence.  Central to the Christian faith is the confession that God is the “creator of heaven and earth”; all that is exists simply and entirely because of God.  The Jewish and Christian confession that the God of Israel created the world is the theological revolution that forever dispensed with the idolatrous mythologies of the ancient world.  The confession of God as creator, and thus completely transcendent over all created things was and remains a theological revolution.  In all times and places a theology of immanent and instrumentally mediated divinity remains the center of idolatry.  This is perhaps even truer in our age of global capitalism in which the immanent flow of capital is effectively seen to function as the mode of divine action in the world. 

This is seen, for example in Slavoj Zizek’s Marxist diagnosis of global capitalism.  Globalization is yet another religion of immanence in which the Hegelian movement of geist has become equated with the economic flow of capital.  Thus, in the wake of September 11, when America was confronted with a great ideological disaster, when we tasted the khora of our western ideology of free enterprise, what were we encouraged to do?  What any good religious person should do, attend the sacred liturgy, of course!  This is to say, Americans were sent by the highest priests and patriarchs of their land into the liturgical processions of the shopping mall and Wall Street.  The theological perspective inherent in a culture which, in the face of tragedy encourages its citizens to shop is a theology of immanence from beginning to end.

The point of all this is simply to underscore the way in which theologies of immanence tend toward the most rampant forms of idolatry.  At the heart of the evangelical allegiance to capitalism lies the negation of the confession that God the Father almighty is the creator of all things.  For if God is outside of created being, as creator he is not a “thing” among other things (Or as Robert Jenson would say, some sort of “analogously thingy thing”).  He is not simply a more powerful agent that exists on the same plane with other created agents which they may come into competition with.  The God who is both Father and Creator cannot be sublimated into any theological construction of immanence.

However, this notion of divine transcendence means anything but the absence of God.  The fact that God is not a competitive agent alongside created persons in no way implies his absence from the world.  On the contrary it is the very condition of his presence in everything.  Because God is not related univocally to creatures as a being among beings, he is able to be present to all creation precisely in his non-competitive transcendent relationality.  The God who is the Creator cannot be spoken of except as Father.  God is not an immanent agent alongside other agents, rather he is the reason that there are any such things as agents in the first place.  It is precisely because of God’s radical and uncreated freedom that he is always-already God-for-us and God-with-us: Immanuel.

The transcendence of God means that his being is not an instantiation of a wider category of “being” to which God and creatures belong.  Rather, God is radically other than created being.  God’s being is ineffable and inexhaustible.  It cannot be analogized or univocalized with human be-ing because it always-already transcends it.  However, the fact of this radical otherness between God and creation is not the occasion for divine absence, but the condition of God’s intimate and redemptive presence in the world.  This is so because God’s being as transcendent is non-competitive.  God’s will and action do not inhibit human freedom and action precisely because it is God’s will and action that freely create and sustain all created being.  God, as the “wholly other” does not compete with created being in any way as he is the ground of all being and overabundantly and inexhaustibly exceeds any limit or interval that created being might seek to impose on God. 

This is simply one way of talking about the reality of the resurrection.  In the resurrection we see that the “unholy distance” of sin which is transposed into the divine life cannot sublimate or condition the inexhaustible riches of the infinite Triune being.  Triune life, being overabundantly transcendent is free, in Jesus to allow all manner of interruption and disruption into the life of God, precisely because God’s being cannot be delimited or overcome by creaturely being.  Because God’s being is infinitely transcendent, and therefore non-competitive, any attempt to introduce competition and strife into the life of God, as we see on Good Friday is always-already overcome by the overabundant resumption of life that is instantiated in the light of Easter.

In contrast to common instincts among many Christians, the reality of the transcendence of God does not put God at a distance from the life of the world.  Rather it is because of the divine Triune non-competitiveness that in Christ God makes his own life the Heart of the world (Balthasar).  The confession of God’s transcendence is not a confession of his distance but rather of the irreducibility of the divine being that we experience in God’s coming to us in Christ.  Thus, God’s transcendence is a reality that is known only in covenant.  In God’s redemptive act of uniting himself to humanity in Christ we have to do with the God who is “the Mystery of the world” (Jüngel).  In God’s act of bringing us into covenant communion with himself, we meet the transcendent Creator in whom sheer and infinite distance becomes the occasion for the fire of the divine love, who is the Holy Spirit to bring us into non-competitive union with the God who loves in freedom.

It is only in communion with the transcendent Triune Lord that we are free.  In contrast to the theologies of immanence, particularly the modern narrative of global capitalism which lives off of a theology of freedom as participation in the immanent flow of capital, we are given a share in the non-competitive symphony of the God who is freedom.  God’s transcendent being, his inalienable, inexhaustible difference is the occasion neither for divine absence nor divine oppression, but liberation and life.  Only the transcendent Triune Lord can bring freedom.  Because only in the One who is beyond all strife and competition can our own inherent antagonism and violence be overcome and purged by the fire of the Holy Spirit into a crucible of infinite love.  

Capitalism & The Idolization of Indulgence

Posted by on June 15, 2007 Comments Off

In light of the recent discussion of sexual fulfillment and personal wholeness, I think this quote by Eagleton might be of some interest to people.  It shows well how it is capitalism which trains us to identify our own fulfillment with the satiation of any appetite we have.

Old-style puritanical capitalism forbade us to enjoy ourselves, since once we had acquired a taste for the stuff we would probably never see the inside of the workplace again… A more canny, consumerist kind of capitalism, however, persuades us to indulge our senses and gratify ourselves as shamelessly as possible.  In that way we will not only consume more goods; we will also identify our own fulfillment with the survival of the system.  Anyone who fails to wallow orgasmically in sensual delight will be visited late at night by a terrifying thug known as the superego, whose penalty for such non-enjoyment is atrocious guilt.  But since this ruffian also tortures us for having a good time, one might as well take the ha’pence with the kicks and enjoy oneself anyway.

So there is nothing inherently subversive about pleasure.  On the contrary, as Karl Marx recognized, it is a thoroughly aristocratic creed.

Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 5-6.

More Eagleton on Postmodern Culture

Posted by on June 4, 2007 Comments Off

Thinkers like Foucault and Derrida chafe against these equivalences, even if they assert them as unavoidable.  They would like a world made entirely out of differences.  Indeed, like their great mentor Nietzsche, they think the world is made entirely out of differences, but that we need to fashion identities in order to get by…It is a mistake, however, to believe that norms are always restrictive.  In fact it is a crass Romantic delusion.  It is normative in our kind of society that people do not throw themselves with a hoarse cry on total strangers and amputate their legs.  It is conventional that child murderers are punished, that working men and women may withdraw their labour, and that ambulences speeding to a traffic accident should not be impeded just for the hell of it.  Anyone who feels oppressed by all this must be seriously oversensitive.  Only an intellectual who has overdosed on abstraction could be dim enough to imagine that whatever bends a norm is politically radical.

Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 14-15.

Terry Eagleton on "The Cult of the Will"

Posted by on June 1, 2007 7 comments

In this remorselessly up-beat climate, feeling negative becomes a thought-crime, and satire a form of political treason. Everyone is urged to feel good about themselves, whereas the problem is that some of them don’t feel anything like bad enough. Evangelical Christians avow their faith in Jesus, a failed inmate of early-Palestinian death row, by maintaining a manic grin even when being carted off to prison for fraud or paedophilia. With its impious denial of limit, its bull-headed buoyancy and crazed idealism, this infinite will represents the kind of hubris which would have made the ancient Greeks shiver and glance fearfully at the sky. It is, indeed, at the skies that some of the will’s champions glance fearfully these days, searching for signs of nemesis.

Those who support the American imperium do not have to respond to such comments. They can simply dismiss them as ‘anti-American’. This is a marvellously convenient tactic. All criticisms of the United States spring from a pathological aversion to Sesame Street and baconburgers. They are expressions of smouldering envy on the part of less fortunate civilizations, not reasoned criticisms. There is, it would seem, no reason why this tactic should not be extended. All criticisms of North Korea’s odious repression of human rights are merely diseased symptoms of anti-Koreanism. Those who rail against the execution-happy autocracy in China are simply being odiously Eurocentric.

Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 188.

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