[Scrap] Soul of the party - Slavoj Žižek

Soul of the party - Slavoj Žižek
Published 01 April 2010 NEWSTATESMAN(http://www.newstatesman.com/print/201004010014)


* Fyodor Dostoevsky was aware of how God gives us freedom and responsibility -- he is not a benevolent master steering us to safety, but one who reminds us that we are wholly unto ourselves.

* The Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durutti said: "The only church that illuminates is a burning church." He was right, though not in the anti-clerical sense his remark was intended to have. Religion only arrives at its truth through its self-cancellation.

* It is only against this background that we can formulate the gap that separates oriental wisdom from Christian emancipatory logic. The oriental logic accepts the primordial void or chaos as the ultimate reality and, paradoxically, for this very reason, prefers organic social order with each element in its proper place. At the very core of Christianity, there is a vastly different project: that of a destructive negativity, which does not end in a chaotic void but reverts (and organises itself) into a new order, imposing it on to reality.

* For this reason, Christianity is anti-wisdom: wisdom tells us that our efforts are in vain, that everything ends in chaos, while Christianity madly insists on the impossible. Love, especially a Christian one, is definitely not wise. This is why Paul said: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise" ("Sapientiam sapientum perdam," as his saying is usually known in Latin). We should take the term "wisdom" literally here: it is wisdom (in the sense of "realistic" acceptance of the way things are) that Paul is challenging, not knowledge as such.

* It was St Paul who provided a surprisingly relevant definition of the emancipatory struggle: "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against leaders, against authorities, against the world rulers [kosmokratoras] of this darkness, against the spiritual wickedness in the heavens" (Ephesians 6:12). Or, translated into today's language: "Our struggle is not against concrete, corrupted individuals, but against those in power in general, against their authority, against the global order and the ideological mystification that sustains it."

* One should resolutely reject the liberal-victimist ideology that reduces politics to avoiding the worst, to renouncing all positive projects and pursuing the least bad option. As Arthur Feldmann, a Viennese-Jewish writer, bitterly noted, the price we usually pay for survival is our life.