24,656
edits
Changes
no edit summary
The credentials of those who, even prior to its release, virulently criticize Mel Gibson's new film on the last 12 hours of Christ's life, seem impeccable: are they not fully justified in their worry that the film, made by a fanatic Catholic traditionalist with occasional anti-Semitic outbursts, may ignite anti-Semitic sentiments? More general, is <i>Passion</i> not a kind of manifesto of our own (Western, Christian) fundamentalists and anti-secularists? Is then not the duty of every Western secularist to reject it? Is such an unambiguous attack not a <i>sine qua non</i> if we want to make it clear that we are not covert racists attacking only the fundamentalism of <i>other</i> (Muslim) cultures?
The Pope's ambiguous reaction to the film is well known: immediately after seeing it, deeply moved, he muttered "It is as it was!" — and this statement was quickly withdrawn by the official Vatican speakers. A glimpse into the Pope's spontaneous reaction was thus quickly replaced by the "official" neutral stance, corrected in order not to hurt anyone. This shift is the best exemplification of what is wrong with liberal tolerance, with the Politically Correct fear that anyone's specific religious sensibility may be hurt: even if it says in the Bible that the Jewish mob demanded the death of Christ, one should not stage this scene directly, but play it down and contextualize it to make it clear that Jews are collectively not to be blamed for the Crucifixion... The problem of such a stance is that, in this way, the aggressive religious passion is merely repressed: it remains there, smoldering beneath the surface and, finding no release, gets stronger and stronger.<br><br>
In November 2002, George Bush came under attack by the right wing members of his own party for what was perceived as too soft a stance on Islam: he was reproached for repeating the mantra that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, this great and tolerant religion. As a column in <i>The Wall Street Journal</i> put it, the true enemy of the United States is not terrorism, but militant Islam. Consequently, one should gather the courage and proclaim the politically incorrect (but, nonetheless, obvious) fact that there is a deep strain of violence and intolerance in Islam — that, to put it bluntly, something in Islam resists the acceptance of the liberal-capitalist world order. It is here that a truly radical analysis should break with the standard liberal attitude: no, one should NOT defend Bush here - his attitude is ultimately no better than that of Cohen, Buchanan, Pat Robertson and other anti-Islamists — both sides of this coin are equally wrong. It is against this background that one should approach Oriana Fallaci's <i>The Rage and the Pride</i>, this passionate defense of the West against the Muslim threat, this open assertion of the superiority of the West, this denigration of Islam not even as a different culture, but as barbarism (entailing that we are not even dealing with a clash of civilizations, but with a clash of our civilization and Muslim barbarism). The book is <i>stricto sensu</i> the obverse of Politically Correct tolerance: its lively passion is the truth of lifeless PC tolerance.<br><br>
Instead of trying to redeem the pure ethical core of a religion against it political instrumentalizations, one should thus ruthlessly criticize this very core — in ALL religions. Today, when religions themselves (from the New Age spirituality to the cheap spiritualist hedonism of Dalai Lama) are more than ready to serve the postmodern pleasure-seeking, it is paradoxically only a consequent materialism which is able to sustain a truly ascetic militant ethical stance.
==Source==* [[Passion In The Era of Decaffeinated Belief]] <http://www.lacan.com/passionf.htm>
[[Category:Articles by Slavoj Žižek]]
[[Category:Works]]
[[Category:ZizekSlavoj Žižek]]
[[Category:Essays]]
