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 the work on Christianity is a further development of a broader intellectual project established in many thick 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 him to an explicit engagement with Christianity and how both his earlier and more recent works are relevant for theological reflection.
Table of Contents:
The Approach of This Book
Hegel
Lacan
Marx
Chapter 1: Ideology Critique
Ideology in Practice
The Challenge of Cynicism
Ideology and the big Other
The Stumbling Block of the Real
Keeping Enjoyment at Bay
Liberal Democracy and Nationalism
Chapter 2: Subjectivity and Ethics
The Real as Sexual Difference
The “Vanishing Mediator”
Fantasy and the Big Other
Diagnosing Ethics
The Cure
Chapter 3: The Christian Experience
Prefiguring the Theological Turn
A Politics of Truth
The Reign of Perversion
Job and Judaism
Cross and Collective
Love Beyond the Law
Chapter 4: Dialectical Materialism, or The Philosophy of Freedom
What is Dialectical Materialism?
Self-Consciousness as Short Circuit
The Anti-Adaptive Animal
Theological Materialism
The Politics of Refusal, or, Waiting on the Holy Spirit
Chapter 5: Theological Responses
An Inventory of Theological Themes
Responses from Radical Orthodoxy
Other Theological Responses
Žižek’s “Method of Correlation”
Žižek and Tradition
Religionless Christianity and the Death of God
Adam Kotsko is Visiting Assistant Professorof Religions at Kalamazoo College (USA). His current research interests include 20th century European philosophy and early Christian thought.
