Science, Culture and Integral Yoga

We, the inhabitants of post-Enlightenment society might have thought that the current cultural horizon was exhausted by fateful struggles between modernism, postmodernism and posthumanism, but it turns out that the past will not be denied. Out of the ashes of the Book of Revelation emerges a form of faith-based politics which is, in every political sense, the ascendant historical tendency in American public life. Here, putting on the policy garments of the "culture of life" movement, there waging bitter political combat against the heresy of "same-sex marriage," now opposed to scientific claims concerning stem cell research, allying itself actively with the crusading spirit of American imperialist adventures, dominating the media with faith-based cultural perspectives, the New Protestant Ethic easily sweeps aside secular discourses in the interests of a vision of culture, society and politics which is as cosmological in its theological sweep as it is eschatological in its historical ambitions.

Understood metaphysically, it may well be that the insurgency represented by faith-based politics is the representative politicalform of what Heidegger's Nietzsche described as the age of "completed nihilism." In this interpretation, power in its mature (nihilistic) phase -- sick of itself, possessing no definitive goal, exhausted with the historical burden of remaining an active will, always sliding inexorably towards the nothingness of the will-less will -- desperately seeks out a sustaining purpose, an inspiring goal, a historical mission. Into the ethical vacuum at the disappearing center of nihilistic power flows a strong historical monism -- the New Protestant Ethic -- that will not be suppressed. To power's empty formalism, to liberal humanism's (emotionally) ineffective proceduralist ethics, to the empire's cybernetic equations written in violence and in blood across the landscape of imperial wars, the New Protestant Ethic provides a singular historical purpose -- the crusading spirit of evangelical Christianity which is reconstructionist, resurgent, and reanimated -- backed up by the semiotic purity of the foundational texts of the Old Testament. To those who would discount faith-based politics as only the most recent instance of the politics of cultural backlash, it should be noted that this fateful, and entirely original, entwinement of (fundamentalist) religion and (imperial) war technologies in the American mind may well be in the order of a great overturning. With faith-based politics, we are witness to something entirely unexpected, and for that reason, deeply ominous -- an ethical reconciliation between religion and technology in which the apocalyptic visions of the Old Testament will be future-coded in the power languages of empire politics and networked capitalism. What is now only in its preparatory rhetorical stages as the "culture of life" movement may soon emerge full-blown as the essential life-principle of American, and by imperialist extension world, culture. Arthur Kroker more »

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Friday, June 13

In Defense of Lost Causes by Zizek, book review by Terry Eagleton (Times Literary Supplement)

by Rich on June 13, 2008 11:29AM (PDT)

Slavoj Žižek is less a philosopher than a phenomenon. The son of Slovenian Communists, and the representative on earth (so to speak) of the late French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Žižek has been travelling the globe like an intellectual rock star for the past twenty years, gathering as he goes an immense fan club. He is outrageous, provocative and entertaining. ”.

He has been the subject of an art installation entitled Slavoj Žižek Does Not Exist, has starred in two films (Žižek! and The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema) and appears on one of his own dust jackets lying on Sigmund Freud’s couch beneath an image of female genitalia. His forty or so books, with titles such as The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Ticklish Subject, Enjoy Your Symptom! and Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Lacan (But Were Too Afraid To Ask Hitchcock), are dishevelled collages of ideas, ranging from Kant to computer science, St Augustine to Agatha Christie. There seems to be nothing in heaven or earth that is not grist to his intellectual mill. One digression spawns another, until the author seems as unclear as the reader about what he was supposed to be arguing. Moreover, to every reviewer’s horror, Žižek’s books are growing fatter by the year. The Parallax View, almost 400 densely printed pages on everything from biopolitics and Robert Schumann to brain science and Henry James, appeared only two years ago; In Defense of Lost Causes, a book that scoops up Lenin and Heidegger, Christ and Robespierre, Mao and ecology, is an even weightier door-stopper.

Slavoj Žižek, then, is Europe’s prime example of a postmodern philosopher. He is a cross between guru and gadfly, sage and showman. In typically postmodern style, his work leaps impudently over the frontiers between high and popular culture, swerving in the course of a paragraph from Kierkegaard to Mel Gibson. Trained as a philosopher in Ljubljana and Paris, he is a film buff, psychoanalytic theorist, amateur theologian and political analyst. He is a member of the Ljubljana Lacanian circle, as improbable an association as the Huddersfield Hegelians. When it comes to politics, he is as adept at unpacking the intricacies of Rousseau or Carl Schmitt as he is at delivering instant journalistic judgements on Parisian rioting, the war on terror, or Turkey’s relations with the European Union. He was once a politician himself back home in Slovenia, and the shadow of the Yugoslavian conflict falls over his mordant commentaries on war, racism, nationalism and ethnic strife. also included a Zizek utube video on belief in Derrida and Butler rc... more »

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