So I just presented this at the Popular Culture/American Culture conference up in Niagara Falls. Dan is making me post it here, so if you don’t like you can gnaw his ear. Actually, I’m trying to work it into an article so I’d love to hear comments:
GK Chesterton has been staging something of a comeback in the last few years. While he has always been popular among Catholic thinkers who value his fresh formulations of their tradition, and also, over the past 20 years or so, with thinking Evangelicals, who have been turning to him as proof that one can keep one’s faith without losing ones mind; its only recently that his voice has been heard among the philosophers and the critical theorists, mainly through his influence on two of the most interesting representatives in these fields. One, Slavoj Zizek is a Marxist and strict Lacanian, who has annoyed his audiences by saying that he is a Christian atheist and by claiming that Lenin got it all right. The other, John Milbank, is British, a member of the Anglican church, who has become well known as the most articulate defender of a philosophical and theological movement that goes by the name Radical Orthodoxy, and emphasizes a rediscovery of patrisitic and medieval theologians while at the same time being well read in Jacque Lacan and Karl Marx. Zizek and Milbank have appeared at conferences together as well as edited volumes, and are even co-writing a book. Though they come from radically divergent points of view both Zizek and Milbank see the necessity of philosophy and theology being in close discussion with each other and both have seen Chesterton as a good way to do that. Continue reading ‘Revolution, Paradox, and the Christian Tradition: A Chestertonian Debate between John Milbank and Slavoj Zizek.’
Aron gave a great paper yesterday, and I secretly recorded it. If you use itunes, you’ll be able to see a couple pictures that I snapped of him during the presentation.
Have a nice weekend,
-dan
One of the most haunting aspects of Silence is the sense you get that Christianity meets its match in this land of “swamp.” That here we have a group of islands whose rockiness has proved inpenetrable to the truth of the cross, and the blazing sword of God’s love. Strangely enough, I just read that Lacan said the same thing about this land, but that he said it concerning psychoanalysis, that Japanese people couldn’t be psychoanalysts because of the way their writing system could be read in two completely divergent ways. That is, the on-yomi and the kun-yomi, two different ways of reading Japanese Kanji (characters imported from China–this of course isn’t even mentioning the two different syllabaries also used in everyday writing, whose doubleness perhaps images the dual readings of the kanji). In other words, you could have the very same kanji that would be pronounced completely differently depending on the mode of reading you were using. Before I knew this, but after I studied a very small amount of Japanese, a language which for English speakers is a cinch to pronounce but a bitch to read, I also droned on to my World Religion classes that the Japanese were fascinating because they could be in two places at once, they could be completely traditional and completely modern/techno/industrial/secular at the same time. In the West, I said, we felt torn between those two options, whereas the Japanese pulled it off so naturally, the way they might design a insurance building according to the ki streaming down the mountainside or start the baseball season off with a Shinto blessing. There is a certain nonchalance about everything in Japan, a confidence that anything can be Japanified, any word absorbed into the language, that they have the secret to digesting everything. Of course, this is the complaint in Silence, that Christianity has just become another variant of Japanese thought, that it was some kind of seed not mentioned in the parable of the sower, the seed that is planted but becomes genetically modified and grows into something else! Continue reading ‘Things that are Impossible in Japan’
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