http://www.versobooks.com/books/tuvwxyz/xyz-titles/zizek_fragile_absolute.shtml
“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 Zizek’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 the 2000th anniversary of one who was well aware that to practice love in our world is to bring in the sword and fire.
“The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged from Europe in some decades.” — Terry Eagleton
Slavoj Zizek is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana. His books include For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, Mapping Ideology, The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Indivisible Remainder: Essays on Schelling and Related Matters, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), The Plague of Fantasies, and The Ticklish Subject. He is the editor of Verso’s Wo Es War Series.
Publication: April 2000
188 pages
Paper
ISBN-13: 978 1 85984 326 0
US$18.95 / £12.99 / CAN$23.50
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