The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?
One of the signal features of our era is the re-emergence of the 'sacred' in all its different guises, from New Age paganism to the emerging religious sensitivity within cultural and political theory.
The wager of Zizek's The Fragile Absolute – published here with a new preface by the author – is that Christianity and Marxism can fight together against the contemporary onslought of vapid spiritualism. The revolutionary core of the Christian legacy is too precious to be left to the fundamentalists.
Paperback, 157 pages
ISBN: 9781844673025
January 2009
$22.95 / £12.99
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Part of the The Essential Žižek series
Reviews
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Righteously to battle the tsunami of postmodern spiritual mush, Zizek attempts a reconciliation between Marxism and Christianity, eccentrically (against Nietzsche) trying to recuperate St Paul for the radical Christian.
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Zizek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation.
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This is a subtle argument ... Zizek applies it with a broad brush to both contemporary society and popular culture.
Discussions
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Communism, Christianity and Capitalism.
Zizek often speaks of giving to the Devil what belongs to the Devil when it comes to Capitalism. I hold that even the Devil was surprised with the victory of Capitalism over 20th centaury Communism.Was Communism not exactly the great effort of the Devil to sell us Heaven without Emancipation?The Devil must have been terribly surprised to see that Capital was worshiped rather than his fake Heaven, 20th centaury communism. It is also then not surprising that for Christians (the emancipated) the final frontier, the final enemy is surprisingly enough not the Devil but Capital, money. Remember what Jesus said: You cannot have two masters; otherwise you will hate the one and love the other, you cannot serve Mammon and God.But hating money is still a sign of divided interests, still hating the one and loving the other.
So… there will be no blood for Capitalism, the fight does not exist for Christians; they are emancipated even from this! They are already socialists and where they go, goes socialism. Like Jesus said to the emancipated: Don’t look around to see and find the Kingdom of God, it is close to you, even in you.
For those who wish to see rioting revolutionaries as a means to the end of Capitalism, Christianity would be of little interest because even with regards to the fight against Capitalism, Christianity is totally subversive; there will be no blood! I mean the man died! He bled! It is done.
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