The puppet and the dwarf : the perverse core of Christianity /

By:

Zizek, Slavoj

Material type: Text

TextSeries: Short circuitsPublication details: Cambridge, Mass. ; London : MIT, 2003.Description: 190p. ; 21cmISBN:

0262740257 (pbk).

Subject(s):

DDC classification:

202 ZIZ

Holdings
Item type	Current library	Call number	Copy number	Status	Date due	Barcode
Standard Loan	LSAD Library Main Collection	202 ZIZ (Browse shelf(Opens below))	1	Available		39002000383290

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

One of our most daring intellectuals offers a Lacanian interpretation of religion, finding that early Christianity was the first revolutionary collective.

Slavoj Zizek has been called "an academic rock star" and "the wild man of theory"; his writing mixes astonishing erudition and references to pop culture in order to dissect current intellectual pieties. In The Puppet and the Dwarf he offers a close reading of today's religious constellation from the viewpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis. He critically confronts both predominant versions of today's spirituality-New Age gnosticism and deconstructionist-Levinasian Judaism-and then tries to redeem the "materialist" kernel of Christianity. His reading of Christianity is explicitly political, discerning in the Pauline community of believers the first version of a revolutionary collective. Since today even advocates of Enlightenment like Jurgen Habermas acknowledge that a religious vision is needed to ground our ethical and political stance in a "postsecular" age, this book-with a stance that is clearly materialist and at the same time indebted to the core of the Christian legacy-is certain to stir controversy.

Includes 16 pages of notes on the text.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

Series Foreword (p. vii)
Introduction: The Puppet Called Theology (p. 2)
1 When East Meets West (p. 12)
2 The "Thrilling Romance of Orthodoxy" (p. 34)
3 The Swerve of the Real (p. 58)
4 From Law to Love . . . and Back (p. 92)
5 Subtraction, Jewish and Christian (p. 122)
Appendix: Ideology Today (p. 144)
Notes (p. 173)

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Slavoj Zizek, a philosopher and cultural critic, is Senior Researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. He is the author of more than thirty books, including Looking Awry- An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture , The Puppet and the Dwarf- The Perverse Core of Christianity , The Parallax View , T he Monstrosity of Christ- Paradox or Dialectic (with John Milbank), and Zizek's Jokes (Did you hear the one about Hegel and negation?) , these five published by the MIT Press.