In The Puppet and the Dwarf, Žižek does Žižek. As he is wont to do.
Characteristically irritating and productive, he argues for the radical potential of Christianity while refusing almost everything usually meant by Christian apologetics. His concern is not belief, morality or the recovery of religious tradition, what is buried inside Christianity. Within, there's a rupture in law, sacrifice and authority that he thinks contemporary secular thought has failed to finish thinking through.
Moving through Saint Paul, Hegel, Lacan (duh), Judaism, psychoanalysis, political ideology and the logic of sacrifice, Žižek treats Christianity as an intellectual problem rather than an object of devotion. The book’s “perverse core” lies partly in its movement from prohibition and symbolic law toward an unsettling form of love in which the old economy of debt and sacrifice begins to collapse. As usual, film, jokes, theology and dense psychoanalytic argument occupy roughly equal ontological status.
It's compressed, combative and deliberately paradoxical. Žižek delight. Particularly useful for readers interested in political theology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegel, secularism, or why supposedly post-religious societies remain structured by religious forms they insist they have escaped.
MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2003. First edition. Paperback. Published in the Short Circuits series. ISBN 978-0-262-74025-7. Light shelf and handling wear to covers, with a few small marks; pages clean and binding sound. Very good condition.
