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  • Published: 29 August 2003
  • ISBN: 9780262740258
  • Imprint: MIT Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 196
  • RRP: $80.00
Categories:

The Puppet and the Dwarf

The Perverse Core of Christianity



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

Slavoj Žižek 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.

  • Published: 29 August 2003
  • ISBN: 9780262740258
  • Imprint: MIT Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 196
  • RRP: $80.00
Categories:

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