“Tell me how you classify and I’ll tell you who you are.”
- Roland Barthes

Zizek´s theopolitical imagination

"In mid-April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV, films, and novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. These people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dreaming. Here, we don’t need a prohibition because the ruling system has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism."

(...)

"Communism failed absolutely, but the problems of the commons are here. They are telling you we are not American here. But the conservatives fundamentalists who claim they really are American have to be reminded of something: What is Christianity? It’s the holy spirit. What is the holy spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other, and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense, the holy spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street, there are pagans who are worshipping blasphemous idols. So all we need is patience."

Slavoj Zizek´s Wall Street speech in transcript

Agamben on secularization

"In this sense, secularization operates in the conceptual system of modernity as a signature that refers back to theology. Just as, according to canon law, the secularized priest had to wear a sign of the religious order he had once belonged to, so does the secularized concept exhibit like a signature its past belonging to the theological sphere. The way in which the reference operated by the theological signaure is understood is decisive at every turn. Thus, secularization can also be understood [...] as a specific performance of Christian faith that, for the first time, opens the world to man in its worldliness and historicity. The theological signature operates here as a sort of trompe l'oeil in which the very secularization of the world becomes the mark that identifies it as belonging to a divine oikonomia."

Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford University Press, 2011), 4

Rowan Williams om moral och transcendens

Can we make sense of morality without a religious notion of a transcendent or supernatural being?
I think that, to make sense of unconditional rights or claims, we need to be clear that there is such a thing as universal human nature and that it has some intrinsic dignity or worth. To try and ground this independently of the idea of a transcendent source of value seems to me not finally feasible. People do, of course, make such claims, and do so in good faith, but I don't see how you can define a universally shared, equal, independent-of-local-culture-and-habit conception of human flourishing without something more than a pragmatic or immanent basis.
In other words, I think morality ultimately needs a notion of the sacred - and for the Christian that means understanding all human beings without exception as the objects of an equal, unswerving, unconditional love.

Läs resten av intervjun med Rowan Williams här!

Krossad vetenskapsoptimism

John Gray sågar Pinkers vetenskapsoptimism i The Prospect magazine.

"Pinker’s attempt to ground the hope of peace in science is profoundly instructive, for it testifies to our enduring need for faith. We don’t need science to tell us that humans are violent animals. History and contemporary experience provide more than sufficient evidence. For liberal humanists, the role of science is, in effect, to explain away this evidence. They look to science to show that, over the long run, violence will decline—hence the panoply of statistics and graphs and the resolute avoidance of inconvenient facts. The result is no more credible than the efforts of Marxists to show the scientific necessity of socialism, or free-market economists to demonstrate the permanence of what was until quite recently hailed as the Long Boom. The Long Peace is another such delusion, and just as ephemeral."

Skall människan förstås som frukt eller äpple?

”The problem with particular laws for particular ethnic/religious groups is that not all people experience themselves as belonging to a particular ethnic/religious community – so apart from people belonging to groups, there should be “universal” individuals who just belong to the state law. Apart from apples, pears, and grapes, there should be a place for fruits as such.”

Slavoj Zizek  - Multiculturalism, the Reality of an Illusion 

...
För ett "människan som äpple"-perspektiv. Se Arne Rasmussons artikel Människan i allmänhet finns inte.

"Atheism has become Pepsi to the Coke of religion"

Luke Bretherton skriver om den nya humanismens och ateismens religiösa ambitioner:

The sense in which religion and by implication atheism was simply a passing stage on the way to a new rationalistic outlook freed from religious baggage seems to have dissipated. Instead, a new confessional atheism has emerged, one ready to hawk its wares in the religious marketplace and compete for the souls of children.

Rather than a critique of religion from which the religious can learn, we find a "wannabe civil religion" that depends for its appeal on the continuance of the very thing it claims to replace. It has become an alternative rather than a critique.

Rather than a prophetic witness, disabusing humans of our illusions and idolatries, atheism has become Pepsi to the Coke of religion. To paraphrase the New Testament: what does it profit atheism to gain the whole world and lose its own soul?