Ideology and the ‘Liberation of Theology’: The Role of Critique in Juan Luis Segundo and Slavoj Žižek

The turn to religion within critical theory has brought the critique of ideology back into theological view. This essay examines the relation of theology to ideology in the liberation theology of Juan Luis Segundo. Segundo's key contribution is his use of the concept of ideology as an efficacious force in theological work in service to poor communities. I argue that the critical and political force of Segundo's theology is dulled by this neutral use of ideology critique. This may be ameliorated by consulting Slavoj ?i?ek's negative use of Christianity as ideology critique. Without endorsing ?i?ek over Segundo, I propose that ?i?ek's critical use of political theology can help liberation theology reengage the role of negativity and critique in the immanent relation of theory and praxis.     

Emancipation as a Matter of Style

Abstract

This article will focus upon the relationship between humour, politics and theology. More precisely, it will inquire whether there is some kind of correlation between style of humour and political standpoint in two contemporary Marxist authors that also have an interest in theology, the British literary critic Terry Eagleton and the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj ?i?ek. If Eagleton’s style is characterized by the strategic use of wit, influenced by the late Dominican friar and philosopher Herbert McCabe, ?i?ek’s use of humour in his philosophy is more about the telling of jokes that supposedly illustrate a political predicament, thus creating a humorous disidentification on behalf of the reader with her or his circumstances. The article ends with the suggestion that there is indeed a relationship between humour, politics and eschatology in Eagleton and ?i?ek, but that their different senses of humour also correspond to differing political agendas. But one should beware of generalizing this insight, as all authors might not be as stylistically gifted as those two.     

HISTORY,THEORETICISM, AND THE LIMITS OF “THE POSTSECULAR”1

In this collection of critical essays, Dominick LaCapra, with characteristic verve, takes on a variety of authors who have addressed issues relating to intellectual history, history generally, violence, trauma, and the relation between the human and the animal. LaCapra offers two types of criticism—of historians for ignoring or misappropriating theory, and of theorists for engaging in “theoreticism,” a theorizing that rides roughshod over historical specificity and context. The present essay focuses on LaCapra's discussion of the theoreticism of the critical theorists Giorgio Agamben, Eric L. Santner, and Slavoj ?i?ek, and in particular on their and LaCapra's attempts to engage with the “issue of the postsecular.” Although Agamben, Santner, and ?i?ek highlight some important and provocative issues, this brand of critical theory provides too limited a base for coming to an understanding of current debates over the relation between religion and secular perspectives. Instead, one must approach “postsecularity” with attentiveness to the larger “secularization debate,” and to the way the term postsecular is used by such writers as Jürgen Habermas and John Milbank. LaCapra rightly draws attention to the recent emergence of a discourse of “the postsecular.” Both the term and the concept now cry out for a deeper, more critical, and more historical examination than has so far been attempted.     

Eine Frage der Politik: Wissenschaft und Ideologie im 21. Jahrhundert

A Political Matter: Science and Ideology in the 21^st Century . In the last two decades, history of science and science studies have been quite reluctant to adopt the notion of ideology when analyzing the dynamics of science. This may be an effect of the decreasing popularity of neo‐marxist approaches within this disciplinary field; but it is also due to the fact that alternative approaches have been developed, for example Michel Foucault's notion of problematization, Roland Barthes' semiotic mythology, Bruno Latour's re‐interpretation of the ontological difference between fact and fetish in science, or Donna Haraway's semi‐fictional re‐narrations of the techno‐scientific world. This contribution undertakes to sketch the impact of two strands of 19^th century immanentism on the authors named above, and on their use of concepts related to the notion of ideology, namely fetish, fetishism, myth and mythology respectively. It is argued that in some respect, Marx' concept of commodity fetishism is worth being re‐examined, since it articulates a dialectical relation of ‘reality’ and ‘seeming’, and its impact on Barthes' mythology is deeper than it might appear at first glance.     

The Shock of the Real: The Neoliberal Neurosis in the Life and Times of Jeffrey Sachs

This paper draws on Slavoj ?i?ek's critique of ideology in seeking to account for the persistence and transformability of the neoliberal project. Against understandings of neoliberalism as a utopian representation projected onto an external reality, I argue that neoliberal ideology operates as a social fantasy, which structures reality itself against the traumatic Real of Capital. The evolution of the neoliberal project should be understood, not as the meticulous manipulation of social reality, but as a series of increasingly desperate attempts to hold the very fabric of reality together. Reconceptualizing neoliberalization as a form of obsessional neurosis can help to explain the relentless persistence of “zombie neoliberalism” and its paradoxical trajectory towards increasingly intensive forms of social engineering. This argument is developed through a critical engagement with the work of the economist Jeffrey Sachs. From shock therapy to the Millennium Villages Project, Sachs's trajectory embodies the characteristics of the neoliberal neurosis. The paper aims to undermine the apparently monolithic power of neoliberalism, by challenging dominant critical representations of the neoliberal project in terms of a hyper‐rational governmentality. It also aims to subvert the attempts by Jeffrey Sachs and other neoliberals to reposition themselves as opponents of the Washington Consensus, and as spokesmen of the Occupy movement. The chosen method of attack is more satirical than polemical. Neurotic neoliberals such as Sachs have successfully appropriated ethical objections to neoliberalism in the name of “globalization with a human face”. In the present conjuncture, an immanent critique that reveals the internal incoherence of neoliberal ideology, and the hapless floundering of its proponents, is perhaps more effective than a repetition of familiar forms of moral condemnation. An alternative subtitle for this paper might therefore be “Towards a satirical materialism”.     

Alister E. McGrath,A Scientific Theology

Abstract

One of the more interesting points of contention between Slavoj ?i?ek and John Milbank in their recent debate, The Monstrosity of Christ, is over the nature and status of belief in the supernatural. For ?i?ek belief in the supernatural is an ultimate symptom of capitalist domination; for Milbank it is a sign of the reality of the elusive promise of a world whose beneficence exceeds both the imagination and the administrative powers of empire and capital. I contend that even without Milbank's orthodox perspective, ?i?ek's reduction of magic to fantasy obscures the black magic of capitalism itself and so arbitrarily and unnecessarily forecloses on modes of resistance that are allied to liturgical, theurgical, and spiritual practices.     

Capital Shares: The Way Back into the With of Christianity

Abstract

In the ten years since the publication of Michael Hardt's and Antonio Negri's Empire, the relationship between Christianity and global capital has received increasing theological attention among the adherents, critics, sympathizersssa, and apostates of Radical Orthodoxy. At stake in this conversation is the possibility that Christianity might provide a universal ontology sufficient to ground a counter-hegemonic, specifically socialist, praxis. One question that many of these authors rarely address, however, is the extent to which Christian universalism has been responsible for the emergence of global capital in the first place. This article will address this profound split at the heart of a tradition; that is, Christianity's culpability for and resistance to global capital. To this end, "Capital Shares" sketches the aporia of Christianity's relation to Empire and then appeals to Jean-Luc Nancy's "deconstruction of Christianity"; in particular, his attempt to find "a source of Christianity, more original than Christianity itself, that might provoke another possibility to arise."     

‘Between my Brow and the Stars ...’: Linkages Between the Categories of Subject,Space, and Time in Jan Zahradníček’s Verse of the Second Half of the 1930s

The study enquires how the functional relationship between the broader framework of Czech poet Jan Zahradní?ek’s vision of the world and the narrower, governing principle shaped by his declared adoption of a fixed, ideologically unambiguous (confessional) model for viewing life and the world is realized. The present author’s deliberation is based on an analysis of the categories of lyrical subject, space and time as rendered artistically in two collections of verse by Jan Zahradní?ek: ?íznivé léto (Thirsty Summer, 1935) and Pozdravení slunci (A Salute to the Sun, 1937). It is found that, rather than speaking of the mutually contingent effect of these two planes of reality, it would be better to think in terms of a colliding of fragments, each of which represents a part of its own reality — poetic truth and truth sprung from an ideology. The literary text becomes a specific locus that makes this intersection possible, and it expresses an entirely new form of reality. Motivated on the one hand by the experience of creative freedom and on the other by having voluntarily accepted certain external ideological considerations which perforce refine poetic freedom, or poetic output, with regard to the appreciation of its meaning, thereby giving it added force and depth, the poet fashions — with various degrees of success — the sundry fragments of this and that layer of reality into a two-way correlation that is reinforced by the dominant effect of the aesthetic function. He thus creates a specific, imaginary whole that opens man up to the world and adumbrates for the reader the idea of unity in diversity. However, at the same time he does not veil the sense of disillusionment that lies at the root of all modern poetry, arising from the notion that neither life, nor the world can be integrated into some ideal, harmonious form.     

2. BOOTSTRAPPING,SELF‐BINDING,AND OTHER METAPHORS OF ANTIFOUNDATIONALISM

In Images of History, Richard Eldridge deploys the metaphor of “bootstrapping” to describe the possibility of a mutually constitutive interaction of historical understanding and reflection on political ideals outside of and beyond the notion of a completed theory or teleological development. Although “bootstrapping” does considerable work in the book, it remains relatively unthematized in itself. This article explores the concept of bootstrapping in both Eldridge's book and in a number of disciplines. In doing so, it aims to make three critical observations. First, while Eldridge rightly seeks to energize our sense of historical openness, the argument is usefully enriched by the adjacent field of political theory, where “boot‐strapping” is often paired with “self‐binding” to describe how self‐creating processes might be arrested and stabilized. Second, Eldridge's use focuses on individual dispositions, but the concept of “bootstrapping” points to the need to pursue understanding of collective processes of self‐institution. Third, when extended to the natural world, “bootstrapping” calls for scrutiny of the relationship between human self‐creation and nature as a site of emergence and self‐organizing phenomena.     

Illusions of a Future: Ishiguro,Liberalism, Political Theology

ABSTRACT

This article explores the fate of political theology in Kazuo Ishiguro's speculative fiction Never Let Me Go (2005) and, by implication, in contemporary fiction more broadly. To pursue a reading of Christianity that extends from Hegel through Lacan to ?i?ek, the article argues that political theology’s future may perversely lie in a materialism emptied of all transcendental guarantees: political theology is the historically privileged master fantasy or illusion which reveals the fantastic or illusory status of our entire relation to the real in (neo-)liberal modernity. In conclusion, the article argues that Ishiguro’s fiction may thus be read less as a melancholic dystopian study in total ideological capture or surrender than as the representation of a state of immanent freedom beyond the power relations of (neo-)liberal subjectivity.