A book review wot I wrote

Ages ago, I wrote a review of Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher's book 'Žižek and Politics: A Critical Introduction'. The review has finally been published in Political Theology, and you can read it here.

Nature isn't natural

People who care about environmental issues often talk in terms of harmony and balance, as though there's a basic stability in nature which bad, unnatural humans are messing with. If we weren't here, then the great circle of life would go on circling, ecosystems would carry on self-regulating, and everything would be ok. The problem is, argues Žižek, that nature isn't really like that. The universe as a whole runs on catastrophes: things stabilise for a while and then bang! the universe starts; bang! an asteroid crashed into Earth and the dinosaurs die; bang! an ice age. Even the ordinary run of things is far from harmonious if you're one of the seals that a polar bear needs to eat to take its place in the great circle of life. This doesn't mean that dramatic climate change isn't bad - it's pretty terrible if you think that human life and civilisation is worth preserving - or even that there's nothing we can do to stop it; what it does mean is that we need to stop pretending that living peaceably with the world around us is somehow natural.

On going public

Oh yes. I've written a review of The Monstrosity of Christ, which is a theological rap battle between Slavoj Žižek, the twitchy Slovenian philosopher, and John Milbank, theologian of the 'Big Society'. It's my first ever piece of academic work to be published. Check it out here in the latest (theological) issue of the International Journal of Žižek studies, and let me know what you think. It's hopefully not totally obtuse, and, I flatter myself, a lot easier to read than Monstrosity itself.

Next on the to do list: grow a beard for extra gravitas, and acquire a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches.

Human rights and the ten commandments

In his book, The Fragile Absolute: or, Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for?, Slavoj Žižek argues that human rights are, essentially, 'rights to violate the ten commandments.' The right to privacy is the right to commit adultery in secret, where no one can see or judge (I guess you could also argue that it's the right to all the other sins that can be committed in the comfort of your own home). The right to pursue happiness and accumulate property is the right to steal (because, pace, Marx, property is theft, and most wealth is accumulated by exploiting other people). Freedom of expression is the right to bear false witness (and is interestingly at odds with the right to privacy, as the recent hoo-haa over Max Mosley's shenanigans illustrated). The right to carry weapons is (duh) the right to commit murder. It's not, says Žižek, that human rights actually encourage people to violate the Ten Commandments, more that they open up a space for people to do so without interference from the state.

You may have noticed already, but some of those rights are quite US specific, which makes it interesting: how many of the people passionately attached to their right to bear arms are also the people who think that the US should be founded on the basis of the Ten Commandments? But it also raises interesting questions about the role of the law: how do you decide whether it's more important to stop people doing bad things than it is to allow them the freedom to make their own mistakes?

Žižek says that the tension between human rights and the ten commandments is rooted in a more fundamental tension between the ten commandments and the injunction to love our neighbour. The ten commandments are all about the rules we have to follow to be acceptable to God and to one another, but loving our neighbour means that we have to love the people around us whether they follow the rules or not, in all their bad, offensive and or disgusting strangeness and sinfulness. 'Love your neighbour' means 'love your neighbour', even if they're an adulterer or a murderer or they covet your ass.

Joseph Butler on human nature

Joseph Butler was an 18th century Anglican bishop, who was, pleasingly, born in Wantage. He's not very famous these days, but apparently was quite important at the time, and influenced lots of people, including David Hume (philosopher man) and Adam Smith (capitalism's-his-fault-man). He's mostly known for his sermons, including the Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (which we shall, for pleasingness's sake, imagine to be a chapel full to the brim with different sorts of roll: bread, sausage, jam etc), and a book called Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed. He's not quite so boring as the titles of his books make him sound.

In the first of his fifteen sermons, Joe addresses Romans 12:4-5, which goes a little something like this:

For as we have many members in one body, and all members
have not the same office: so we, being many, are one body in
Christ, and every one members of one another.

He takes this to be referring not so much specifically to the relationship between individuals and the Church as to the relationship between individuals and human nature and human society in general. He thinks that what's good for the individual is the same as what's good for society, and that we're naturally disposed to doing good. Obviously, people are naturally disposed both to looking after themselves and to benevolence towards others, and these two instincts are complementary: self-love encourages us to behave well towards society, and vice versa. Various other human traits encourage us to love ourselves and to love others: our desire to be liked and respected by other people, our natural indignation when people behave badly and get away with it, our conscience, our desire to avoid disgrace, and our attraction to other people, as evidenced by the fact that even something as insignificant as being born in the same place or gone to the same school can form the basis of friendships even years after those things took place.

But don't we also have tendencies towards things that are bad for us and bad for society? Not exactly, says Butler. Sure, in pursuing our own satisfaction we may injure other people, but just as there is no such thing as self-hatred, neither does anyone really wish other people ill. No one really loves injustice, treachery, ingratitude etc. for themselves; only for the good things they can obtain for us. Sure, some people don't really like other people; some people don't even like themselves, but they're a minority and an aberration. Sure, sometimes people want things that aren't good for them or for society, but that's because they haven't thought carefully enough about what they want, and get carried away in the heat of the moment. We are naturally inclined towards what is best for us.

Quite apart from the pretty dodgy exegesis there, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that this is a rather optimistic account of human nature, and a rather glib dismissal of sin. It reminds me of a story that Žižek recounts, of a farmer "to whom an angel appeared and told him: 'I will grant you a wish, whatever you want - only, beware, I will do twice as much to your neighbour!' The farmer replied, with an evil smile: 'Take one of my eyes!'"

Meet Slavoj Žižek

I've mentioned him before, but I think it's time for a proper introduction. Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian academic, who writes about politics, culture, film, psychoanalysis, and pretty much everything else you can think of. He's probably most influenced by three thinkers: Hegel (a German philosopher), Marx (mostly Karl, with a good sprinkling of Groucho) and Lacan (a psychoanalyst who radically re-interpreted Freud by taking his ideas to be all about language), though he also loves Alfred Hitchcock and G K Chesterton and talks a lot about popular culture more generally. He's pretty important in certain areas of the arts - he's been called an intellectual 'rock star' (by, I'd guess, people who aren't really that into rock music), and 'the most dangerous philosopher in the West'. Weirdly, though, (is it weird? It's hard to tell from within the funny old world of academia) most people still haven't heard of him.

Žižek was born in Yugoslavia when it was still a 'Communist' country. He got a PhD in philosophy from the University of Ljubljana, and a second PhD in psychoanalysis from the University of Paris. He was a big name in Yugoslavian intellectual circles in the 70s, but got kicked out of his university job for not being Marxist enough, and in the 80s he moved to Paris, only to return in the early 90s when Yugoslavia got broken up into different countries to run against the socialist party's presidential nominees. He started publishing books in English in the late 80s, and since then has written stupidly lots - roughly 200,000 words every two years - as well as starring in several films: 'The Pervert's Guide to Cinema', 'Žižek!' and 'Examined Life'.

People seem to either love him or hate him: plenty of Eastern Europeans think he betrayed Communism/Yugoslavia; academics sometimes get sniffy because the more he writes the less he sticks to the 'rules' of academic writing (things like using proper references, structuring your book around a main argument, being boring); he often seems to say things just because they're controversial or will make people cross with him, and he has a funny habit of making similar arguments in several books by basically cutting and pasting whole sections of text. Also, he's increasingly communist, increasingly angry about capitalism, and often quite violent in his rhetoric.

On the plus side, he's fun to read: he'll move suddenly from talking about 19th century philosophy to analysing jokes to talking about that time Mel Gibson got arrested and started ranting about the Jews to discussing the psychoanalytical significance of Alien. He's original and engaging; passionate and inspiring; and he has a wonderful ability to make you feel like another world is possible.

Now, Žižek's not a (conventional) theologian, but there's a crucial shift in his work around the time he starts reading Schelling, who's a theological but not a very orthodox thinker. Around that time, Žižek's political philosophy moves, roughly, from advocating some form of radical democracy to wanting something more like a revolution and an authoritarian government, but he also turns more and more to theology to articulate his ideas: he writes books with names like 'The Fragile Absolute: or why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for?' and 'The Puppet and the Dwarf: the perverse core of Christianity', and he recently wrote a book with John Milbank, one of the big names in contemporary theology. He is, roughly, a 'Christian atheist', arguing that you can only be an atheist by being a Christian first, and that the way to be faithful to Jesus is to stop believing in God. Theologians get quite excited by the fact that a non-theologian is talking about incarnation and sin and Jesus, but they're not always sure Žižek is an ally or an enemy of theology. Žižek's mostly read by academics, but is starting to influence little bits of the non-academic-churchosphere, leading to some more debates about whether he's a friend or a foe.

So, readers: meet Žižek. I think you'll find we've all got lots to talk about.

Photo credit: brechtjekeulen on Flickr

Žižek on violence

Slavoj Žižek isn't exactly a theologian (or is he?): he's a Slovenian philosopher and critical theorist, a Marxist, a Lacanian (Lacan was a psychoanalyst), and an atheist Christian. He recently wrote a book with John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ, which was basically a big argument about whether atheism or orthodox Christianity is more, well, orthodoxly Christian. Žižek has been referred to as 'the most dangerous political philosopher in the West' and 'an academic rock star'; despite which, most people have never heard of him.

Anyway, he's written a book called Violence, about pacifism. No, not really, it's about violence. Violence is a hot topic in theology and philosophy these days, partly because of the horrendous violence of the 20th century, which rather dented people's hopes that science and enlightenment would make the world a better and more peaceful place.

Žižek argues that there are three different sorts of violence. Subjective violence is the violence we all recognise as violence: the sort of violence where Bob hits Bill. We all know who did it and who it was done to. But Žižek argues that this sort of violence all too often distracts us from two other sorts of violence which are actually more fundamental. These others are 'symbolic' violence and 'systemic' violence.

Symbolic violence is the sort of violence embedded in our language: the way we speak about other people which treats them as less important, less fully human; the sort of language which is a way of exercising power over people, of maintaining unjust relationships, of forcing our way of seeing things onto other people. Words and concepts like 'bitch', 'chav', 'Paki', 'old biddy', 'retard.'

Systemic violence is the sort of violence that's built into our social, political and economic systems, which means that simply as a result of our society functioning smoothly, people suffer. We get cheap clothes; children have to sew them for us. We get electricity, drive our cars to work, fly to Europe for a holiday; people in the Third World die when global warming causes flooding.

It's all too easy, Žižek says, to focus on the subjective violence: it's easier to spot, and is more obviously a disruption of the normal functioning of the world. But if we want to seriously engage with questions of violence, and to understand why 'irrational' acts of violence like terrorism take place, we have to engage with violence in all of its forms. We have to get political.

Photo credit: Lorcan Otway on Flickr

Jokes with Slavoj

There's an old Jewish joke, loved by Derrida, about a group of Jews in a synagogue, publicly admitting their nullity in the eyes of God. First, a rabbi stands up and says: "O God, I know I am worthless, I am nothing!" After he has finished, a rich businessman stands up and says, beating himself on the chest: "O God, I am also worthless, obsessed with material wealth, I am nothing!" After this spectacle, a poor ordinary Jew also stands up and also proclaims: "O God, I am nothing..." The rich businessman kicks the rabbi and whispers in his ear with scorn: "What insolence! Who is that guy who dares to claim that he is nothing too!"

Slavoj Zizek in The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox and Dialectic