Spontane Selbstentzündung durch aufgestaute Gedankenfürze

[fehlgeleitet]

Grade beschäftigt mich der Gedanke von Zizek, dass man nur durch Nachfolge Christi zum Atheisten werden könnte, also in dem man seiner Hoffnung auf Erlösung folgt, bis diese Hoffnung zerschmettert wird und man dann am Kreuz festellt, dass einen Gott verlassen habe. In dem Sinne war die Erfahrung Jesus also eine atheistische.

Wenn also die Hoffnung, die angeblich zuletzt stirbt, nur ein unnötiger Fetisch wäre, so könnte man auch ohne sie auskommen, eine ganze Gesellschaft könnte ohne sie auskommen. Wie sich das wohl auf die Politik auswirke würde, wenn man nicht mehr von Verantwortung, Auftrag, Zukunft usw reden würde? Das Aufgeben der Hoffnung würde ja nicht bedeuten, dass man mit Absicht seine lebensgrundlage zerstört, nur das man keiner Ideologie im eigentlichen Sinne folgt.

Hoffnung hilft zwar irgendwie, Teile der Wirklichkeit auszublenden, aber ich habe in letzter Zeit festgestellt, dass es teilweise recht anstrengend ist zu hoffen bzw. Visionen zu haben. Ich frage mich zur Zeit ob es auch ohne geht

[Tarvoc]

Grade beschäftigt mich der Gedanke von Zizek, dass man nur durch Nachfolge Christi zum Atheisten werden könnte, also in dem man seiner Hoffnung auf Erlösung folgt, bis diese Hoffnung zerschmettert wird und man dann am Kreuz festellt, dass einen Gott verlassen habe. In dem Sinne war die Erfahrung Jesus also eine atheistische.

Wäre er doch nur tot geblieben!

• Žižek, for one, likes to think of this [...] in terms of the potentially atheist core that would properly belong only to Christianity, insofar as the gap that in Judaism separates man from God becomes transposed, in the figure of Christ on the Cross, onto a gap internal to God Himself. The Slovenian even goes so far as to claim that on this account Christianity is the only true monotheism, which at the same time functions as a radical atheism and a thorough materialism. "This is why Christianity, precisely because of the Trinity, is the only true monotheism: the lesson of the Trinity is that God fully coincides with the gap between God and man, that God is this gap - this is Christ, not the God of beyond separated from man by gap, but the gap as such, the gap which simultaneously separates God from God and man from man." (Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, Cambridge 2003) In Christianity, there thus would be a double alienation at work, or a double kenosis, not only od man from God but also of God from Himself. Or, to use the more Baiouian-sounding formulation from The Monstrosity of Christ: "Insofar as the truly materialist axiom is the assertion of primordial multiplicity, the One which precedes this multiplicity can only be zero itself. No wonder, then, that only in Christianity - as the only truly logical monotheism - does Got himself turn momentarily into an atheist." (Žižek / Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ, Cambridge 2009)
  
  However, what (Leon) Rozitchner's reading of Augustine reveals is the extent to which the addition of the adverb "momentarily" in Žižek's last formulation might turn out to be a crucial cocession. What if this momentary atheism in fact quickly gives way once again to the ferocious superego demand of a God who, even in becoming finite and impotent, has never really or fully relinquished His power? What if the becoming-finite of God is merely the beginning of an even more terrorizing power of Christian infinity? After all, the fact that God appears as finite should by no means come as a surprise, nor is it necessarily a radical atheist core hidden within the mystical shell of institutionalized religiosity. Žižek reads the self-alienation of God from Himself as a moment of radical doubt and impenetrability. [...] In our very failure, we identify with the divine failure, with Christ's confrontation with the 'Che vuoi?', with the enigma of the Other's desire [...]. However, what if this cry is not so much the signal of God's total self-abandonment, but rather, as Rozitchner suggests, the point at which the fragile, thrown, and mortally threatened human being becomes all the more securely sutured onto religious ideology, precisely, by way of the gap of finitude? Finally, what if it is not so much God the Father who stumbles upon the limit of his omnipotence in Christianity, but Christ who, through his exclamation of doubt on the Cross, assures that impotence serves ideologically to close the gap inherent in God. [...]
  
  We may well be far removed from the imaginary representation of religion based in oceanic feelings of divine bliss and awe-inspiring power. Yet, on the other hand, as Augustine's Confessions show in excruciating detail long before Kant, humiliation and pain may also come to function as the affective channels for the ever more awe-inspiring inscription of God's presence qua immanent transcendence within the fragile human body. What unites me with God is the gap that separates God from Himself; but such a logic of separation, far from revealing the atheist core of monotheism, can also be seen as an ever more pernicious incorporation of the human subject into the fold of the Christian God.
  
  What most troubles Rozitchner in this post-Oedipal reconfiguration of Christian subjectivity is the difficulty of retrieving the moment of collective rebellion. In Augustine's Confessions, this difficulty becomes evident in the famous scene of the theft of pears. Here, in fact, we do have an incipient collective action - an infraction of the law in which we might read an attempted rebellion against young Augustine's father. But promptly we are transposed onto a different stage where, once again, it is the archaic scene of maternal fusion that is played out as a last imaginary resort against the threats of the outside world. [...]
  
  Augustine's fellow sinners in the theft of pears quickly vanish from the story, as do the clandestine links with the object-cause of desire that is the unnameable maternal Thing. Instead of a combat, we obtain a displacement; and instead of an act of rebellion, a guilty acquiescence to the symbolic Father-God.
  
  Imitation without identification; indifference without confrontation; fusion without conflict; shame without guilt; melodrama without tragedy: such would be the relatively stable mechanisms of psychic power with which the modern subject tries to cope with the crumbling of patriarchal and imperial power, following the model inaugurated in the new literary experiment of Augustine's Confessions: "Christianity dissolves the political failure of Jesus the rebel and converts it into the social success of Christ crucified for the Empire." (Leon Rozitchner, La Cosa y la Cruz, Buenos Aires 1997) We, therefore, should not be surprised to find that this model is proposed once again today and each time when an imperial order faces the threat of its imminent collapse.

(Bruno Bosteels, Freud and Marx in Latin America, London / Brooklyn 2012)

• The death of the Roman Empire on the cross of history, and its rebirth as the Holy Spirit
  
  Hegel once famously argued that in Christ, God himself dies on the cross, and that therefore, Christianity was essential to opening the door to the development of modern Atheism and Enlightenment. In a similar vein, albeit with different (namely, Catholic) intentions, Gilbert Keith Chesterton has argued that in Christ and his outcry – "Father, why have you forsaken me" – God himself for a brief moment is not only king of the world, but also a rebel. In his work The Puppet and the Dwarf, Slavoj Žižek takes up these two arguments to bring to light what he calls the "subversive" side of Christianity – the side of it which is, according to Žižek, capable to disturb the social order. However, Žižek's argument stays oddly confined within the framework of Christian theology. In particular, Žižek fails to apply to it the two most important theoretical resources of his own critical thought – Psychoanalysis, and Historical Materialism. Bruno Bosteels has already filled in one of these gaps by giving a critique of Žižek's argument from a psychoanalytic point of view in his book Freud and Marx in Latin America. With this brief essay, I want to fill the other gap.
  
  In the history of thought, there are rare moments when theory manages to overrun history and conceptually anticipate social realities that will come to existence only later. Christianity's belief of God's death on the cross and his subsequent rebirth in the Holy Spirit is such a moment. The death of the Roman Empire and its rebirth in the Roman Catholic Church executed in the real world what the tale of God's death and rebirth had anticipated in the realm of ideas. It is an adequate description to say that the Roman Empire took over Christianity (not the other way around) as its main ideological vehicle, and later, when it finally transubstantiated itself into the Roman Catholic Church, even as its main principle of organization, thereby ensuring its own survival apparently "for all eternity". However, it is inadequate to describe this takeover as a "corruption" of the original idea of Christianity by Roman Imperialism, like some Christian renewal movements have done in the past. On the contrary, I want to argue that being taken over by the Empire and serving as its vehicle for an ideological rebirth was what Christian theology itself anticipated all along, and that this is explicit in its own mythology of the death of Christ on the cross and his rebirth. From the very beginning, Christianity spelled out its intentions for the whole world to see. At the very moment when the old Empire was on the precipice of death, Christianity would serve as the ideological (and later organisatory) vehicle for the Empire's own rebirth, therefore serving to ensure the Empire's eternal continuation in the form of the Holy Spirit, i.e. the church. It is possible to (in a variation of Chesterton's idea) see this as an Empire rebelling against itself. However, Bruno Bosteels has already pointed out that the core phrase in Chesterton's argument is "for a moment" – God only turns into a rebel in order to bind even the rebels to his eternal rule. His rebellion is therefore just as meaningless as Louis XVI.'s gesture of taking up the blue and red cockade of the French Revolution while at the same time conspiring behind the scenes to subject France to his own rule again. A revolution that is incited by the king himself in order to ensure the restructured continuation of his own rule simply isn't a revolution proper. Žižek tries to weasel around this point by giving the (pseudo-)Hegelian argument that the Substance that has come to itself in the dialectical process is not the same Substance that started this process in the first place. [[The reason why I believe this argument to be not properly Hegelian is because it relies on a non-Hegelian understanding of identity. What it fails to see is that in the dialectical process, identity and non-identity are both sublated into the identity of both – which would be properly trinitarian in this context, but would of course also confirm the argument that the rebirth of Christ in Christianity is not truely a break of God's divine power over man.]] Interestingly enough, Žižek's argument is strangely un-Christian – to the point where it could easily be called an Arian heresy, because it essentially amounts to saying that the Holy Spirit is another God, a different and distinct entity from God the Father. No Christian, whether catholic or protestant, would ever claim something like this. To them, the Holy Spirit is the same substance as God the Father, only in the mode of a different economy. Giorgio Agamben has given a more substancial immanent critique of Christianity than Žižek by turning these two categories from head to toes. Once again, Christian theology spelled out the truth of its relation to the Roman Empire for all the world to see. Christianity had successfully taken up the task of preserving the "substance" of the Roman Empire after the transition of the economy of western civilization from antiquity to medieval feudalism – a different economy indeed, in the literal sense of the term. It wasn't a task that it took up reluctantly at some point in history, or which it was tricked into taking up. It was the historical role for which it was created, and which it had explicitly spelled out from the very beginning. Despite what some liberation theologists claim, Christianity itself was never a revolutionary movement. It was, from its very beginning, an ideological pacifier for the revolutionary movements that developed on a regular basis in the late days of the Roman Empire, collecting them and leading them in directions that allowed the Empire to integrate them seamlessly until it could find a way to transubstantiate itself so as to survive its own death. It was back then what it still is today: the opiate of the people.

(Tarvoc, unveröffentlichter Aufsatz, 2015)

[Bwana Honolulu]

"Bitte kommunistische und Kommunismus-bezogene Diskussionen nur in rot führen"?

[Tarvoc]

"Bitte kommunistische und Kommunismus-bezogene Diskussionen nur in rot führen"?

Nah, ich hab' nur die Zitate rot gefärbt. Kann's aber gerne rausnehmen. Im zweiten Teil zitiere ich mich sowieso selbst.

Hab's jetzt mit (list) eingerückt. Sieht eigentlich sogar besser aus. Um Kommunismus geht's in den Passagen eigentlich nur sekundär. Primär sind das Beiträge zur Frage nach dem "emanzipatorischen" Gehalt des Christentums.

[Tarvoc]

Die Vorstellung, man müsse zuerst Christ gewesen sein, um "wirklich" Atheist werden zu können, wurde übrigens schon von Marx kritisch auseinandergenommen, und zwar in seiner Auseinandersetzung mit Bruno Bauer in Die Heilige Familie und Zur Judenfrage.
Žižek ist hier sehr viel näher an Bauer als an Marx. Seine Argumente stellen zwar so eine Art Hegelianisierung Chestertons dar, wiederholen aber im Grunde nur Argumente, die bei Bauer schon da waren und deren Kritik sich bei Marx bereits findet.

[Bwana Honolulu]

Nah, ich hab' nur die Zitate rot gefärbt.

Um Kommunismus geht's in den Passagen eigentlich nur sekundär. Primär sind das Beiträge zur Frage nach dem "emanzipatorischen" Gehalt des Christentums.

Hatte ich gemerkt.
Aber am Ende geht es immer um Kommunismus.

Kann's aber gerne rausnehmen. Im zweiten Teil zitiere ich mich sowieso selbst.

Hat mich jetzt nicht wirklich gestört, fand's nur lustig.

Hab's jetzt mit (list) eingerückt. Sieht eigentlich sogar besser aus.

Warum nicht einfach mal quote-Code drumherumsetzen? Dafür is'er doch da...

[fehlgeleitet]

Die Vorstellung, man müsse zuerst Christ gewesen sein, um "wirklich" Atheist werden zu können, wurde übrigens schon von Marx kritisch auseinandergenommen, und zwar in seiner Auseinandersetzung mit Bruno Bauer in Die Heilige Familie und Zur Judenfrage.
Žižek ist hier sehr viel näher an Bauer als an Marx. Seine Argumente stellen zwar so eine Art Hegelianisierung Chestertons dar, wiederholen aber im Grunde nur Argumente, die bei Bauer schon da waren und deren Kritik sich bei Marx bereits findet.

toller aufsatz, beide. Ich habe eine schwäche für starke Bilder und dunklen Pathos, ich habe mich wohl mal wieder blenden lassen

ein paar kurze anmerkungen meinerseits: Zizek hat selbst der Vorstellung widersprochen, dass das Konzentrationslager ein Ort der Erleuchtung sein könne und er die mystifizierung des leidens für eine furchtbare Idee hält. Zizeks Philosophie scheint also eine Menge inkonsistenzen aufzuweisen, good 2 know.

weiterhin ist die Vorstellung von einem entfremdeten Gott eine gnostische Idee, zu der die Arianer wohl gehören und die recht frühzeitig durch die kanonisierung der Bibel aktiv aus der Kirche ausgeschlossen wurden. Die Gnosis ist ein Sammelsurium für alle möglichen verrückten Ideen, wie zb das die Schlange im Paradies Jesus ist, der will das die Menschen sich gegen Gott auflehnen, weil der Gott des alten Testaments der falsche sei oder das die Beziehung Jesus-Judas eine Liebestragödie ähnele, so ähnlich wie die zwischen Gott und Luzifer.

Eric Voegelin sah in der Moderne eine Wiederkehr der Gnosis, insbesondere in Form politischer Religion. Nach Voegelin[15] gibt es sechs Merkmale, welche die Gnosis auszeichnen:

Der Gnostiker zeigt eine Unzufriedenheit mit seiner Lage in der Welt.
Der Gnostiker glaubt, die Welt sei schlecht beschaffen, aber er glaubt nicht an die Unzulänglichkeit des Menschen.
Der Gnostiker glaubt, vom Übel der Welt erlöst werden zu können.
Der Gnostiker glaubt, die Seinsordnung könne in einem historischen Prozess verändert werden.
Der Gnostiker glaubt, die erlösende Änderung könne durch eigene Tat des Menschen erfolgen.
Der Gnostiker glaubt sich im Besitz des Wissens um die Methode dieser Änderung, erstellt von diesem Standpunkt aus Rezepte zur Selbst- und Welterlösung und verkündet prophetisch der Menschheit sein Erlösungswissen.[16]

[Tarvoc]

Hehe, ja, die Gnosis ist schon freaky. Wenn man schon meint, emanzipatorische Gehalte im Christentum suchen zu müssen, sucht man wahrscheinlich am besten da.

[Tarvoc]

Aber am Ende geht es immer um Kommunismus.

Am Ende der Geschichte, yo.

[Tarvoc]

Ich bin fast geneigt, Žižeks Credo umzukehren: Das Durchschreiten des Christentums führt nur insofern zu Atheismus und Materialismus, als man beim Durchschreiten merkt, dass das Christentum eine Sackgasse ist, und sich ergo entscheidet, einen anderen Weg einzuschlagen.