Slavoj Žižek and Christianity
Slavoj Žižek’s critical engagement with Christian theology goes much further than his seminal The Fragile Absolute (2000), or his The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003), or even his discussion with noted theologian John Milbank in The Monstrosity of Christ (2009). His reading of Christianity, utilising his signature elements of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian philosophy with modern philosophical currents, can be seen as a genuinely original contribution to the philosophy of religion. This book focuses on these aspects of Žižek’s thought with either philosophy and cultural theory, or Christian theology, serving as starting points of enquiry.
Written by a panel of international contributors, each chapter teases out various strands of Žižek’s thought concerning Christianity and religion and brings them into a wider conversation about the nature of faith. These essays show that far from being an outright rejection of Christian thought and intellectual heritage, Žižek’s work could be seen as a perverse affirmation thereof. Thus, what he has to say should be of direct interest to Christian theology itself.
Touching on thinkers such as Badiou, Lacan, Chesterton and Schelling, this collection is a dynamic reading and re-reading of Žižek’s relationship to Christianity. As such, scholars of theology, the philosophy of religion and Žižek more generally will all find this book to be of great interest.
Sotiris Mitralexis is Seeger Fellow at Princeton University, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the City University of Istanbul (İstanbul Şehir Üniversitesi) and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Winchester. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity and a Visiting Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He received a doctorate in philosophy from the Freie Universität Berlin, a doctorate in theology from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and a degree in classics from the University of Athens. His publications include Ever-Moving Repose: A Contemporary Reading of Maximus the Confessor’s Theory of Time.
Dionysios Skliris is a Teaching Fellow at the Faculty of Theology, University of Athens. He received a doctorate from the Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines of the University of Paris (Sorbonne – Paris IV). He studied classics and theology at the University of Athens and completed a Master’s degree in Late Antique Philosophy at the University of London (King’s College) as well as a Master’s degree in Byzantine Literature at the University of Paris (Sorbonne – Paris IV).