On a few occasions now, Anthony Paul Smith has poked fun at my celebration of the Enlightenment. For instance, in response to one of my posts today he writes,
Never have you whined about how “Christo-fascism” (and I can take that about as seriously as I take Islamo-fascism) is destroying your hope for a society perfectly ordered along purely rational lines, just like Iceland.
I take it that in this remark he is disparaging my occasional defense of rationalists and my assertion that Deleuze can be thought as a sort of hyper-rationalist. I think he comes by his misunderstandings in an honest way. Or, at least, I hope he does.
In friendship and gratitude for his patience in continuing to engage with me in dialogue which I do often find productive, I thus try to clarify my positions. In his preface to Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes,
…we can now raise the question of the utilization of the history of philosophy. It seems to us that the history of philosophy should play a role roughly analogous to that of collage in painting. The history of philosophy is the reproduction of philosophy itself. In the history of philosophy, a commentary should act as a veritable double and bear the maximal modification appropriate to a double. (One imagines a philosophically bearded Hegel, a philosophically clean-shaven Marx, in the same way as a moustached Mona Lisa.) It should be possible to recount a real book of past philosophy as if it were an imaginary and feigned book. Borges, we know, excelled in recounting imaginary books. But he goes further when he considers a real book, such as Don Quixote, as though it were an imaginary book, itself reproduced by an imaginary author, Pierre Menard, who in turn he considers to be real. In this case, the most exact, the most strict repetition has as its correlate the maximum of difference (‘The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer…’). Commentaries in the history of philosophy should represent a kind of slow motion, a congelation or immobilisation of the text: not only of the text to which they relate, but also of the text in which they are inserted– so much so that they have a double existence and a corresponding ideal: the pure repetition of the former text and the present text in one another. (xxi-xxii)
Deleuze gives us little indication as to just why one would engage in this practice of reading and writing. Perhaps this is to maintain maximal openness, to avoid artificially limiting the reasons that one might engage in history. But perhaps the most interesting line in this passage comes at the end, when Deleuze alludes to the text in which these texts are inserted. This could be taken literally to refer to the commentary itself and the way the commentary comes to double the text it comments upon. But it also could be taken more broadly to refer to the field of discourses, of texts, we live in in the present as our ecospace. What does Rousseau, for instance, become when plugged into our time and space, our discourses?
Read on
It was Lacan, of course, who was the master of the sort of dada-esque reading Deleuze describes. What double could be more uncanny than Lacan’s return to Freud? We can imagine someone ridiculing the young Lacan for his interest in Freud, expressing incredulity at why anyone would be interested in reading such an absurd biological determinist. Yet in Lacan’s engagement with Freud, in his return to Freud, we get a double that produces a maximal difference. Freud is inserted into the texts defining Lacan’s contemporary field: He is painted with Saussure, Jacobson, Levi-Strauss, cybernetics, existential and Heideggerian phenomenology, Foucault, Deleuze, knot theory, set theory, topology and a host of other things. He is read in dialogue with Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Wittgenstein, Russell, Quine, and numerous others. Most importantly, Lacan reads Freud in much the same way an analyst listens to an analysand: He takes some small, offhand remark, such as Freud’s inversion of ego-ideal and ideal-ego in “On Narcissism”, or Freud’s observation in The Interpretation of Dreams that the wish behind the butcher’s wife’s dream is that she did not have a wish, and turns it into the key of Freud’s thought. That is, he reads Freud first in terms of Freud’s practice (the case study and interpretive writings, which focus on language and symptoms), but also in terms of the gaps, omissions, idiosyncracies of Freud’s writings, discovering, therein, a logic… Just as the symptom contains a logic while appearing completely random and meaningless. In repeating Freud, in maintaining allegence to Freud, Lacan thus produces an entirely different Freud. Lacan’s reading of Freud meets all the requirements of Deleuze’s “monstrous offspring”.
A genuine repetition, then, is never a repetition of the same. To repeat Hume, for instance, is not to revert back to early positivism or a psychology of association. What such a repetition would be would be a repetition of a certain project of immanent critique. Hume’s model of critique is simple. Reflect on the nature of understanding and determine its nature. Hume begins by distinguishing impressions from ideas (memories, traces). He then examines the manner in which these ideas are connected: The three principles of association: resemblance, contiguity in time and space, and cause and effect. It then becomes a question of taking the concepts of metaphysics one by one and determining 1) whether a mind structured in this way can know the things that metaphysics claims to know (can it be traced back to impressions, and 2) determining what immanent processes of thought lead to these concepts (for instance, cause and effect is traced back to custom/habit, and thereby loses its claim to necessity).
To repeat Hume today is not simply to take up this psychology. What would it mean to repeat Hume today given our anthropology, sociology, cybernetics, ecology, systems theory, linguistics, neurology, and so on? What becomes of Hume after Freud? After Lacan? What is immanent critique when our text is factored into these discussions? In short, what is an appropriative reading of a text from the history of philosophy? What does it mean to make it our own? How does it resonate with our time? How does it remain timely? And how does it address us? The text changes our relation to our time but our time also changes our relation to it.
I hesitate in suggesting this example as it will irritate some unnecessarily, but do so out of friendship to Anthony, Bishop Spong of the Episcopal church, who married my parents, perhaps engages in such a creative repetition with regard to the Bible. Spong’s relationship to science and how he reads the Bible is especially clear in this regard, as he squarely accepts the science of today and its implication with regard to miracles and creation, while nonetheless still asking how Scripture addresses us today. I only offer this as an example, although when I read Spong’s twelve points I find I disagree with none of them, wondering how we differ from one another and what God is for him. I am sure that Anthony is likely to disagree that it is a good or desirable example and will propose that there are better ones. This is fine. He knows I’m not a “Spongian” because he’s heard other claims I’ve made about religion. The question here is one of time and repetition and what it means to be addressed by history in our time.
Larval Subjects . 
April 11, 2007 at 11:09 am
I’ll be back in a bit to comment when I have less work. Though I agree with a few of them, Spong’s points are mostly stupidly thin and whack. Christianity doesn’t believe in a theistic god anyway! The point is that his statement in number two, undermines his statement in number one. Jesus and the Trinity make the God of Christianity not the God discussed in debates over theism/atheism. I quote Rowan Williams on this “It is in this sense that large numbers of theologians would say that classical Trinitarian orthodoxy is not a form of theism”.
April 11, 2007 at 1:27 pm
The post isn’t really about Spong, the validity of Spong’s theology, or anything to do with debates between atheism and theism. In other words, I have no dog in this fight one way or another. I do admire the way he squarely accepts what has emerged over the course of history and tries to rethink his beliefs in light of this, rather than engaging in the silliness that occurs here in the states such as trying to form new sciences like “creation science” and “intelligent design”.
April 11, 2007 at 1:44 pm
I know, I know. I was just responding off the top of my head more to the linked article than to the post.
You must think that I try to drag everything back to atheism versus theism! I really don’t – I just think that beliefs (which include theological ones) cannot be divorced from understanding concrete socio-political associations.
As I said, I don’t have much time to respond right now. Two things though – Christianity is all about non-identical repitition and has been since medieval times. Two, I think that the creation science thing has a lot to do with modern notions about certain modes of knowledge being the only legtimate ones. I have always thought basically Dawkins and Intelligent Design sing from the same hymn sheet with regard to this.
Stop distracting me!
April 12, 2007 at 12:18 pm
dr. Sinthome, just to show your frequent interlocutor Anthony that I DO read him, and hear him, which is a courtesy he has never extended to me, because he believes that only American culture should be discussed, I will refer to one of the comments in the theology discussion, which was about the connection between politics and Christianity.
It is my lifelong knowledge that the attitudes of the Christian Orthodox Church (to which Serbia belongs together with Russia and Greece) enabled the successes of Communism in that part of the world. Partly due to that Church’s traditional separation from the business of the state, and partly because Orthodoxy is a way of living (”the body of Christ”) rather than an institution (as both Catholicism and Protestantism frequently are, in the West), intimately linked with everyday living pracices that is, the Church is inclined towards anarchism, and concepts of communality which in a sense devalorize duty, honor, guilt, responsibility and -most importantly – punishment, while taking a much more exuberant attitude towards corporeal jouissance, for example, and all sorts of celebration. You might be able to experience a distant echo of this in American-Mediterranean communities, where that stereotype ”jois d’vivre” applies.
It is this psychological and sociological mindframe that allowed Communism to grow (both to positve and negative outcomes), rather than the struggle of the proletariat and the class consciousness, all these constructs of Marxian theory.
If Anthony is arguing for such a pivotal role of theology, I would agree with him. Like many of Deleuze’s rational or rationalist or atheist concepts, his Spinozist idea of a dead and indifferent God does not find a fertile ground in PRAXIS.
It is also noteworthy that psychoanalysis enjoyed (and still enjoys) popularity in Serbian Communism as well as its aftermath, the current neoliberal disorder, also, because of the link between Lacan’s theory and Christianity. In fact I am just reading a book from a Serbian Lacanist who is using the terms of Greek Orthodoxy routinely to show how they’re linked with Lacan’s theory.
April 12, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Another thing that should interest you, but to understand it, dr. Sinthome, you have to give up on Zizek as a conveyor of Balkan culture, is that if Spinoza had been a believer, his pantheistic God would have been quite like the God of Russian Orthodoxy!
April 13, 2007 at 11:07 am
“dr. Sinthome, just to show your frequent interlocutor Anthony that I DO read him, and hear him, which is a courtesy he has never extended to me, because he believes that only American culture should be discussed,”
Wait, what? No, discuss other cultures all day. By all means, I’m just not going to pretend that I should talk about cultures, histories, peoples, etc I know nothing about. In this case that happens to be a culture, history, people, etc you know a lot about. Let’s not pretend that you’ve extended anything to me in the past. You’ve been making presuppositions about who I am, where I come from, and what my life is for quite a long time and used that to ‘parody’ what you perceive I am. There is plenty in my life to make fun of, but so far you’ve missed the mark.
I found the rest of your comment very interesting and from what I know of the Orthodox church I am prone to agree with what you’ve said. Granted, most of what I know is in the Russian context, but I’d be very interested to hear how Yugoslovia was influenced by this particularly and to hear if and how there is any particularity to the way Islam is practiced there. And, if this wasn’t clear in the past, I think that Clinton should be arrested on war crimes. I don’t buy into the whole Zizek-back-pocket-of-imperialism thesis, but then again I also think people can make mistakes in complex situations and still be decent human beings. They may even write interesting things outside of that particular mistake.
April 13, 2007 at 1:55 pm
I’ve been trying to tell you that this is the place where you should direct your gaze, not because I am from there, but because it is an enormously important strategic and cultural point in the Balkans – a crossroads to Russia – and having marked the beginning of the two world wars before, might very well be the neuralgic spot (culturally and politically) again.
but I’d be very interested to hear how Yugoslovia was influenced by this particularly and to hear if and how there is any particularity to the way Islam is practiced there
Like I said, it is religion, not Marxism, that is responsible for the success of Communism in Yugoslavia, as well as in Russia. Certain doctrines primarily pertaining to a vision of God as praxis, as lived through the corpus of humanity, the concrete collectiva, the body of Christ, rather than this Carhesianly-split ethereal being who judges and punishes from a spectral dimension above, as you would have it in Catholicism. There is a very good description of this in Nikos Kazantsakis’s LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. Serbia and Russia were one country until the 18th century so certain things, like this issue of religion, you can safely generalize, although the difference has always been that Serbia also inclined towards the West due to its position between superpowers, and because of that had a sort of a split identity, much more than Greece for example. I find Orthodoxy extremely interesting for the current moment because of its accent on the body, and I have seen numerous parallels with Spinoza and Deleuze respectively, which I am slowly researching.
and how there is any particularity to the way Islam is practiced there
Not that I am aware of; although you have to specify which aspect of islam. In fact, religions have coexisted over there far more peacefully than in the West. That they have taken on a fundamentalist form in war is more due to the fact that people in economic distress tend to grab on to their traditional identities (such as confession) – same way Europe was recently swept by nationalism, and I guess also same way Americans now look for an identity in fundamentalism. You have several extremist factions, most notably in Kosovo, which are more or less like the Taliban and being opportunistically used by the West to provoke conflict. The Kosovar Albanians have connections with Mr. Osama Bin Laden as well. Knowing about this can teach you a lot about what America is doing in Iraq, because it’s quite the same script. I would direct you to the documentary I published on the Parody center, the Avoidable War, for more details.
The mistake often made in the West is to interpret nationalism as a form of racism; what is not understood is that in Orthodoxy, religion is a way of life, not (only) an institutional practice. Therefore being a Serb automatically means being a Christian Orthodox. The West sees nationalism in a negative way, as territorialism and racism. But in the Balkans confession is identity. This is very different from Catholicism.
I don’t buy into the whole Zizek-back-pocket-of-imperialism thesis,
That;s because you don’t understand that Zizek was instrumental in the construction of the political program, and the execution thereof, which enabled the seccession of Slovenia from the Yugoslav federation. It is this seccession which set the religious and nationalistic passions on fire, TERRITORIALLY, the ultimate goal being to divide and conquer the entire Balkan penninsula, and then the Soviet Union, to atomize it and weaken it so that neoliberal capitalism can install its own market. What seems to you ahistorically as a variation of Lacanian psychology has a very definite, and clear, political origin and function. In this respect Zizek is a lot like Leni Riefenstahl, and I’m sure if you accused him, he would try and excuse himself in that same tone (”Well you know a man makes mistakes… it’s all in the past…”) – as if he wasn’t aware of what he was doing!
April 13, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Let’s just bracket the Zizek stuff for now. I have some issues with it, but I don’t think it would really be all that fruitful to talk about it because you have strong feelings on it whereas I don’t. I just don’t have the tools to really talk with you about it in any meaningful way. I’ve taken what you’ve said and I’ll think about it, but I don’t have all the information. Does that make sense?
If you know of some places I could read about the relationship between religions, religion and the State, and any of that I’d be interested. I’ll watch the documentary. I just assumed it was in Serbian for some reason, likely due to some ignorance on my part.
My point before was not that I think former Yugoslovia should be condemned to its fate. I just don’t like the moralizing that often goes on when LCC is around. My knowing about what caused the war when I was 11 is not going to change that it happened. I am not a powerful person, I don’t have influence over the people who control the world. I’m guessing in this way we have a lot in common, students trying to make sense out of a few things. I find Chicago politics, where I was until recently, very difficult to understand and I tried to learn about South American politics and culture because of its importance to the world. I mean, the world is a really big place, full of lots of things to know. Beautiful struggles, heartbreaks, upheaveals, all of that is important from Laos to Cuba to Serbia to everywhere. I get a bit overwhelmed by it all sometimes, don’t know what to look at, where to try and help with what I have.
April 13, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Anthony, I assume your area of expertise is theology; this is why I am mentioning the subject – not because of politics. Yugoslavia is the site of separation between the Roman Empire and Byzantium. Conflicts and encounters on that territory are about as old as Christianity itself; and they still very much inform current history…and psychology… and everything… and the world.
I don’t really know what your conflicts with LCC are, but it’s been fun nevertheless playing in that melodrama… I also enjoy usurping dr. Sinthome’s peace of mind from time to time, while dr. Jodianne Fossey is my favorite collateral damage in the war on Zizek.
April 13, 2007 at 6:45 pm
Not really, my area of interest (hardly an expert) is in religion generally, so I have some competance in theology, history, sociology, and philosophy of religion, and philosophy of nature, with some work done in ecology.
It’s really not important the conflict between LCC and I. I find her to be a supremely unhelpful and uncharitable person and she thinks I’m a Kapo. About as simple as all that, not worth repeating or going into great detail.
Could you recommend a book or an individuals’ work I should look at though? It sounds to me like Yugoslavia is a borderland in the world. These are always special sites ecologically as the earth prior to national startification resists the ‘artifical’ borders. All very interesting.
April 13, 2007 at 11:40 pm
Don’t worry, Anthony, dr. Sinthome just diagnosed us all – we’re bonkers! So since we’re all mad, you can be a kapo, I can be a prick and Le Colonel can be a malicious diva. I wonder if this is some new way to get extra clients from the dwindling circle of psychoanalysis fans…
There is of course a wealth of input on the Orthodox religion, so if you tell me which particular aspect of it is useful to you I can isolate the worthwhile books.
And a question for you – what according to you was the main philosophical point of the Great Schism?
April 14, 2007 at 12:10 am
Really? I said everyone is bonkers?
April 14, 2007 at 1:04 am
Dejan,
To be honest, I’ve never quite understood it. I know it was over the filioque clause, but the vagaries of trinitarian metaphysics is hard for me to follow. There is, of course, the question of authority and this seems to me, in my more historial materialist mood, to be the real issue. Though Papal authority is often emphasized more than it deserves, as the Catholic church has always been a bit more anarchic in micro-practices than given credit for. Ironically it wasn’t until the Second Vatican Council that this changed, the mass became uniform, etc. Ratzinger, er, I mean, Pope Benedict has said that he is against both the tridentine mass and the mass called for by the Second Vatican Council. That they are both top-down liturgies and that this is against the spirit of the church. He’s a weird guy, that Pope. I can’t really put my finger on whether or not I like him or not. Anyway, what do you think it was?
If you could suggest a book on EO and the political history of Russia/Serbia that would be very interesting or anything on the relationship between communism and the orthodox. I’m giving you the oppurtunity to form me, so take advantage of it as you will.
April 14, 2007 at 8:25 am
I have to look for the English translations, which are not so easy to track down, but I will revert on the issue in a few days. Meanwhile, a translation from an interview with the Serbian philosopher Svetislav Basara:
in your awarded book the theme is the ideology of totalitarianism, nazism, communism, globalism, especially its consequences in Russia, and reverberations in Serbia. What is your explanation of this Serbian submissiviness to Russian ideology?
It is strange only on first glance. I find many connections between the Communist doctrine and the weakened Orthodoxy. All values of Communism were borrowed from Christianity – it is unforgivable to let one live on account of the other, to have some rot in wealth, others in poverty, to work 15 hours per day…it is an essentially positive doctrine. The problem is that the Communists’ use of violence to accomplish those goals, that is to say, the absence of any scruples in the realization of that doctrine, led to Communism becoming the kingdom of unfreedom. It was an attempt to impose a course on history which it doesn’t have and never could have. Communism, nazism, and if you want, globalization as well, all these doctrines were designed to redirect the history of the world, to change God’s thought, to appropriate history, which of course never succeeded. History has its own logic and it follows its own course, as St. Augustine nicely puts it – the reasonable one is led by the hand, and the fool dragged across the ground.
(continued in next comment)
April 14, 2007 at 8:33 am
How do you experience Serbian Orthodoxy today, how do you see its power or impotence?
Serbia is an Orthodox country by virtue of its being populated by an Orthodox majority. But Orthodoxy, thanks to some politicians and people of the Church, is often turned from a religion into a national doctrine, which is not only sin in Orthodox tradition, but also the heresy of ethnophilia. This means that the kingdom of earth and heaven have been mixed and it is this confusion that constitutes all our falls in the last half of the century and longer. Not all blame should be put on Slobodan Milosevic. Misery begins in 1941, probably much earlier, and I don’t see that it’s over yet, precisely because of this mixing the holy and the profane.
Is the problem in what is often termed the system of values, because for 50 years we lived in the socialist, Titoist system of values? And today?
In Tito’s time there was a system of values much more functional than what we have today, for today we don’t reallt have one. After the fall of Communism, the system of values crumbled, because it was obviously groundless. But we did not build a new, democratic, civilian system, and this is what accounts for all the myths of the past. Christianity cannot help here, because it is not about systems of values or morals. Christianity is a question of energy – is the energy directed downwards, or upwards. If it is upwards, then we have creation, the focus of the soul on the good, which automatically produces a system of values. For the system of values is not something to make, and then behave accordingly, but we must live this system of values. It is not a set o rules that we will more or less respect, we must encourage what is good in people.
April 14, 2007 at 8:45 am
The filoloque: the way this was explained to me by Orthodox priests, but of course I am not going to adopt their opinion without consulting other opinions and researching the issue myself, is that the Catholic view was basically Carthesian, or led to a Carhesian conclusion, while Orthodoxy placed an accent on Jesus’s incarnation, his life on Earth, and in this way is much more ”Spinozist” for want of a better term. There was a crucial nuance, a shift in accent, between the terms ”Godman” and ”Mangod” (Bogocovek and Covekobog). This at least explains something you can already deduce from a casual glance at Orthodox churches in Serbia, where the ceremony is devalued in comparison to living religion – people don’t congregate in solemn silence, Sunday church is no ritual, rather attended in a chaotic fashion and the Church is completely passive when it comes to proselytising such gatherings (most priests I have known have told me that the Bible itself tells you that you can pray in the darkness of your room). The general idea is that Christ came down to Earth in order to experience all the pains and pleasures of man, instead of being a detached arbiter, punisher, and so on. This was all metaphorized in the book by Nikos Kazantcakis, The Last Temptation Of Christ, filmed by Martin Scorcese – which provoked outrage from the Catholics on the order of Salman Rus’hdie’s Satanic Verses, so you can already see there is something crucial about this issue.
April 14, 2007 at 8:59 am
I Think You’re All Lunatics , you said , dr. Sinthome, and from that moment on, I felt a blessed sense of relief, cause now I am no longer accountable for my shenanigans.
Anthony, I am not going to be your Big Other, you have dr. Sinthome for that (although be careful that he doesn’t get into your pants). My conclusion after bedding many Big Others is that ultimately, you have to rely on your own mind, and heart, for guidance (and no I don;’t think this is in stride with proper Christianity). Admittedly if we are separated by a decade in age, you still have some time to discover that for yourself.
April 14, 2007 at 9:11 am
The question here is one of time and repetition and what it means to be addressed by history in our time.
Indeed dr. Sinthome and by the same logic the Communism that is being repeated in the West through Capitalism is creating an Uncanny totalitarian double that we have not yet seen!
April 14, 2007 at 10:32 am
Anthony, this applies somewhat to your ecological issues
(the source is http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Sparta/6701/communit.html)
Theology and Church life involve a certain conception of the human being: personhood. This term, sanctified through its use in connection with the very being of God and of Christ, is rich in its implications.
The Person is otherness in communion and communion in otherness. The Person is an identity that emerges through relationship (schesis, in the terminology of the Fathers); it is an “I” that can exist only as long as it relates to a “Thou” which affirms its existence and its otherness. If we isolate the “I” from the “Thou,” we lose not only its otherness but also its very being; it simply cannot be without the other. This is what distinguishes the person from the individual.
The Orthodox understanding of the Holy Trinity is the only way to arrive at this concept of Personhood: the Father cannot be conceived for a moment without the Son and the Spirit, and the same applies to the other two Persons in their relation with the Father and with each other. At the same time each of these Persons is so unique that their hypostatic or personal properties are totally incommunicable from one Person to the Other.
Personhood is inconceivable without freedom; it is the freedom of being other. I hesitate to say “different” instead of “other” because “different” can be understood in the sense of qualities (clever, beautiful, holy, etc.), which is not what the person is about. In God all such qualities are common to the each three Persons. Person implies not simply the freedom to have different qualities but mainly the freedom simply to be yourself. This means that a person is not subject to norms and stereotypes and cannot be classified in any way; its uniqueness is absolute. This means that only a person is free in the true sense.
And yet one person is no person; freedom is not freedom from the other but freedom for the other. Freedom becomes identical with love. God is love because He is Trinity. We can love only if we are persons, allowing the other to be truly other and yet be in communion with us. If we love the other not in spite of his or her being different but because they are different from us, or rather other than ourselves, we live in freedom as love and in love as freedom.
The other is a condition of our freedom. Freedom is not from but for something other than ourselves. This makes the person ec-static, going outside and beyond the boundaries of the self. But this ecstasis is not to be understood as a movement towards the unknown and the infinite; it is a movement of affirmation of the other.
This drive of personhood towards the affirmation of the other is so strong that is not limited to the “other” that already exists but wants to affirm an “other” which is totally free grace of the person. Just as God created the world as free grace, so the person wants to create its own “other.” This is what happens with art: the artist creating a totally other identity as an act of freedom and communion. Living in the Church in communion with the other means, therefore, creating a culture. The Orthodox Church has always been culturally creative.
Finally, we must consider the ecological problem. The threat to God’s creation is due to a crisis between the human being and the otherness of the rest of creation. Man does not respect the otherness of what is not human; he tends to absorb it into himself.
This is the cause of the ecological problem. In a desperate attempt to correct this, Man may easily fall into the pagan alternative: to absorb Man into nature. We have to be very careful. Out of its tradition, Orthodoxy is called to offer the right Christian answer to the problem. Nature is the “other” that Man is called to bring into communion with himself, affirming it as “very good” through personal creativity.
This is what happens in the Eucharist where the natural elements of bread and wine are so affirmed that they acquire personal qualities — the Body and Blood of Christ — in the event of the communion of the Holy Spirit. Similarly, in a para-eucharistic way, all forms of true culture and art are ways of treating nature as otherness in communion, and these are the only healthy antidotes to the ecological illness.
We live in a time when communion with the other is becoming extremely difficult not only outside but inside the Church. Orthodoxy has the right vision of communion and otherness in its faith and in its eucharistic and ecclesial existence.
It is this that it must witness to in the midst of Western culture. But in order to be a successful witness, it must strive to apply this vision to its “way of being.” Individual Orthodox Christians may fail to do so, but the Church as a whole must not. This is why the Orthodox Church must watch carefully her own “way of being.” When the “other” is rejected on account of natural, sexual, racial, social, ethnic or even moral differences, Orthodox witness is destroyed.
April 14, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Thanks for all that.
One of my goals over the next three years is to aquire some Russian reading skills. My PhD is in part taking an in-depth look at the work of the Russian sophiologists (Solovyev, Bulgakov, and Florensky specifically, but I’m open to more) and some of their more interesting remarks on politics are not translated in English (I think much of it is in French because of the St. Sergius Insitute in Paris).
April 14, 2007 at 5:11 pm
You might also want to take a look at this: (he is a Christian anarchist)
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/104-1502844-7224753?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Nikolai+Berdyaev&Go.x=7&Go.y=7
well what you just tell me about the lack of translation is what explains how it can be that Zizek is well-known, and his Russian contemporaries (far more important and interesting) not. It’s just Anglo-Saxon bias.
April 14, 2007 at 5:30 pm
I think part of it is that Zizek actually writes in English so there is no issue about translation. Yeah, so I guess maybe it is bias in that native English speakers see very little reason to know another language, let alone well enough to read fluently in it.
April 14, 2007 at 6:27 pm
well you know what they say, the victors write history. but russian culture in general is so much more advanced, even in these bad economic conditions. i just saw a few films by aleksandr sokurov… the western avant garde (lynch etc) can piss under his window, as we say, as regards the sheer level of philosophy and poetry present in the film
April 14, 2007 at 7:39 pm
Has anyone else noticed, and Levi may be interested in this with regard to communication, that it seems there are less films from the old eastern bloc being released in the West with English subtitles than during the Cold War?
April 14, 2007 at 11:57 pm
anhony, i’ve been thinking today – after we exchanged a lumpsum of around 1000 comments on the Zack Snyder film – that it’s primarily a release of affect after the collapse of traditional societt (in a sort of populist mode) that is behind the Christian fundamentalist groups tormenting dr .Sinthome, and this took place also at the moment when Yugoslavia was broken, with people finding themselves unable to hold on to their stable, fixed, traditional roles, turning to that religious affect as a kind of an inarticulate roar against a profound sense of dislocation. In this time you would see sworn Communists suddenly convert to Orthodoxy, but it was easy to deduce from the WAY they did that the conversion was cosmetic, not religious (i.e. they would adopt the practices of fasting and interpret prayer as a masturbatory process which is supposed to cleanse you quickly of all yer sins). But the Church itself never endorsed or championed any of this, in fact the Church condemned it harshly, nor were ”proper” Orthodox believers converted into fanaticism just because of the war. So I think it is less a religious than a psychological issue. People would turn to anything, really, when worried about their survival. The Lacanian kitten’s fear should be about the religion of capitalism, which causes people to feel lost and insecure. But like the Sphynx, like Le Mort, he isn’t reacting at all to the obvious parallels between post-structural philosophy and Christianity in the Orthodox theologian’s article. I think this comes too close to compromising dr. Sinthome’s suspicions of religion as the culprit of all confusion in the world.
April 15, 2007 at 12:07 am
I’ve never suggested that religion is the source of all the confusion in the world and have often discussed the connection between capitalism and fundamentalism. For intance, I present exactly your argument about capitalism in a piece from the month of December on apocalyptic narratives. I do not believe that religion can be generalized in the way you describe, but always needs to be looked at on a case by case basis as it pertains to the locality in question.
I have to confess that I rather dislike you, Dejan. I find you vulgar, your contributions to seldom be illuminating, and do not appreciate your sense of humor (if it can be called such). I truly wish you would go elsewhere and quit littering my blog with your graffiti. Perhaps you could be so kind as to carry this discussion over to Anthony’s blog. I would ask others, out of kindness, to not feed the trolls. Their comments multiply and increase when you do.
April 15, 2007 at 8:48 am
Don’t play stupid, dr. Sinthome. I did not try to generalize anything, but you did.Just a few days ago you said that the world would be better off without religion (you fell just short of saying ”that opiate for the masses”). The political correctness of your dry academic discourse doesn’t really hide your democratic contempt for Christianity, and if you were just a little bit more vulgar, you would throw yourself at it with the vehemence of a Lacanian kitten on the hot tin roof.
As for your apocalypse article, I did not bother to read it through because I found it ridiculous (and irresponsible) that you ”forgot” to analyze the Hollywood movies you mentioned as pure and direct military propaganda – ”The Independence Day” serving as a blueprint for humanitarian bombing, ”The Day After” manipulatively displacing problems on global warming instead of the mechanisms causing it, et cetera . Like the good American Democrat that you are, you only discuss safe subjects, that is to say, those that justify your tenure. Which in turn made the article (and the accompanying psychoanalysis) completely useless.
(I didn’t expect anything else, though, from a disciple of Zizek)
But anyway I was merely telling Anthony that even as we might have been playing vaudeville on Antigram, I neither hold him in contempt nor am I disinterested in religion nor that I wish to patronize him into accepting my views; the idea was not to colonize your precious blog with my grafitti, and since you don’t consider Russian culture a productive contribution, or my attemopts to warn you about the ”aporia” of your schoolboy hero Zizek, I don’t feel obliged to come up with something new and productive either.
If ”troll” is something that disturbs the sterility of your quasi-leftist blubber, I’m only too happy to oblige!