Date: Sun, 1 Sep 1996 23:24:57 +0300 (EET DST)
Subject: Re: MARXISM & RELIGION


Just few remarks on Ralph's nice post...

I truly don't know liberation theology at all but I've understood that
their basic concepts are quite distinct to those of official hegemonic
catholicism. I mean, if 'God' is about to equal 'History' (etc.) then
where's the difference - except in institutions (church vs. parties)?

> The Catholics are the hands-down masters of mind control -- there
> is no competition.  Their philosopheres are not just adept at
> blowing Aquinas, they are good at everything.  They are
> intellectual masters, and they are so because they have
> internalized more than any other group of intellectuals in the
> world the alienated frame of mind which is required to function as
> a philosopher in our world.

Funny as it may be, this reminded me of good old marxist-leninists
who were closest (I believe) to jesuists...

> sum it up, I can't see how Catholicism could progress without
> advancing to Protestantism.

What do you think of this: it has been said it's exactly protestantism
that causes guilt-ridden personalities and therefore protestantism
should learn something from catholicism?

> The orientalism instituted by Hegel must be held suspect, and
> Christianity and the west should not simply be assumed to embody
> the highest form of self-consciousness.

What is this orientalism? Would you clarify?

Also this somehow reminded me of Nagarjuna - in a sense closest to him
comes no one else but Lacan... As long as we search support from some
form of "big Other" (whether God or History or whatever), we will be
unable to get rid of all pre-modern thought forms. Lacan's (as it is
interpreted by Zizek: I don't have guts to read L himself) ideas
concerning the 'ground' of our psychic process seems to echo
Magarjuna's 'emptiness' in a sense that after initial 'foreclosure' of
direct, unmediated, presymbolic and -linguistic (animal kind) access
to reality (that foreclosure meaning roughly socialisation and
learning of language) leaves 'lack' or 'crack' or somesuch at the
bottom of psyche; that whole psychic machinery in a way is to hide
this awful and frightful crack... By fantasy we imagine these ordinary
realities of ours - and in this sense our ideological constructs are
as real as reality for buddhist, who thinks it as dream or fantasy...

By the way, in his latest Schelling-book Zizek interprets Schelling of
1810-12 as dialectical materialist (!), who tried to produce a
materialist theory of the 'birth of world' (in an idealist or
spiritualist sense). Easy to read when compared to some of his earlier
books. On the other (weaker) hand, he also discovers quantum physics
and makes philosophical conclusion of it: logical impasses related to
language and 'symbolic order' are to be found at the level of quantum
universe, so basically either physical reality acts dialectically or
can be made intelligible only dialectically. So maybe lacanism is now
justified by quantum physics? Weird stuff... Enough of that.

Jukka



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