Žižek writes:
Christianity introduced into this global balanced cosmic Order a principle that is totally foreign to it, a principle which, measured by the standards of pagan cosmology, cannot but appear as a monstrous distortion: the principle according to which each individual has immediate access to universality...I can participate in this universal dimension directly irrespective of my special place within the global social order. The Fragile Absolute, p. 120
Z applies this to our thinking about human rights (so-called): a set of universal principles that all of us imagine we have access to in some way. This is Christianity's idea secularised... under the Christian way of thinking, it is that which transgresses and upsets the primordial balance of things that is holy: not the ways things are as we find them. It is not our place in the global order of things that matters but rather that which undermines said order - ie, the gospel of Christ, he who calls on us to hate our mother and father etc. A funny version of 'family values', isn't it?
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Incidentally, one of Žižek's translators is an Aussie friend here in Brisbane, Scott Stephens (he's a Uniting Church minister and a PhD student at UQ).
and a Moore Graduate I believe!
oh, it's weird all right...
What Zizek wants in the end is for an adoption of the Christian idea without the religious/institutional forms of it. This is, he says, complementary to Marxism anywasy.
Now here's a great Žižek quote!
PS for those struggling to use the correct diacritical marks above the 'z's in Žižek, do what I did - copy and paste from Ben's comment!
This may be a little off topic, but I read Žižek summarising Job in his new preface/foreword to 'For They Know Not What They Do.' He also has a right go at Buddhism in the same book- arguing that it is the religion of war.
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