AtD/VL-related: The Varieties of Religious Experience

[Ian Livingston]

Oh, I agree wholeheartedly with you on that, Michael. I repeatedly
find myself wanting to reach out touch Zizek vigorously with the back
of my hand, but his "gratuitous swipe," or hasty generalization at
traditional religious Jewish social referents is key to his argument
at this point, so it seemed somehow correct to keep it with the quote.
Besides, I do wonder if it fits in with P's Freud as Jew and Jung as
Nazi symp in Dr. Hilarius' rant in CoL49. Perhaps even with the
portrayals of Rachel and Esther in V.

Anyhow, I don't think it is Zizek's intention to denigrate Judaism
here; he is, I think, using his flawed understanding of Judaism to
provide a counter-perspective in his argument. He is, after all,
another twisted Freudian / Lacanian / Marxist looking for ways to
popularize disestablishmentarianism at any price. It is also
interesting that Zizek goes on to argue that all of Europe must
eventually become Jewish, though he still seems to be arguing from a
perversely anti-semitic p.o.v. founded in denial of his own
perspective. Or maybe I'm projecting something I don't know about
myself.... (Maybe one of my former Jewish girlfriends will stand
forward to accuse me....) To echo a delightful modernist designer and
thinker, "the more I know, the more I know how little I know" (Bucky
Fuller), [even about myself] (I.L.)

On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 12:15 PM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Ian Livingston wrote:
>
>
>> transform ourselves into a migrating entity floating between a
>> multitude of realities, sustained only by infinite Love. Against this
>> tradition, the Jews, in a radically anti-millenarian way, persist in
>> their fidelity to the Law; they insist on the insurmountable finitude
>> of humanity and, in consequence, on the need for a minimum of
>> 'alienation'" (255).
>
> much as I agree with a lot of what you go on to say, Ian, and as much
> as I deplore the current intransigent settlement policies of the State
> of Israel, that gratuitous swipe at the Jews just strikes me as not
> cricket.
>
> The little I've learned of Jewish philosophy and religion has still
> been enough to show me a vast panoply ranging from the Kabbalah to
> Martin Buber, and Jewish thinkers include Marx and Einstein, for
> Pete's sake,
> To think that the Jews "persist in their fidelity to the Law" is to
> laugh, considering that the Old Testament is a saga of straying and
> returning...
> that the ancillary teachings are a masterpiece of accommodating and
> interpreting, that the scholarly rabbinical tradition is one of great
> variety.
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."