On Belief (Thinking in Action) [Hardcover]

Slavoj Zizek (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 26, 2001 | ISBN-10: 0415255317 | ISBN-13: 978-0415255318 | Edition: 1

What is the basis of belief in an era when globalization, multiculturalism and big business are the new religion? Slavoj Zizek, renowned philosopher and irrepressible cultural critic takes on all comers in this compelling and breathless new book.
From 'cyberspace reason' to the paradox that is 'Western Buddhism', On Belief gets behind the contours of the way we normally think about belief, in particular Judaism and Christianity. Holding up the so-called authenticity of religious belief to critical light, Zizek draws on psychoanalysis, film and philosophy to reveal in startling fashion that nothing could be worse for believers than their beliefs turning out to be true.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'An honest and admirable meditation on what belief may mean today.' - Times Literary Supplement

'The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in Europe for some decades.' - - Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books

'...The content is of the highest quality and an example of the prospective revival of the encounter between philosophy and theology... I would highly recommend (both books) as stimulating and thought-provoking reformulations of religion.' - Modern Believing on On Belief and On Religion

Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (June 26, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415255317
• ISBN-13: 978-0415255318
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,412,636 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

"The most dangerous philosopher in the West," (says Adam Kirsch of The New Republic) Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce;" "Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle;" "In Defense of Lost Causes;" "Living in the End Times;" and many more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars just don't expect rigour, October 10, 2004

By 

Richard Moore (Leipzig, Germany) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: On Belief (Thinking in Action) (Paperback)

I confess from the off that I have only read the first chapter of this book. And yet, even this brief encounter was enlightening - because it confirmed what many have always thought. Zizek is a great thinker - a great associator of ideas; but he doesn't know what he's talking about. I illustrate with a single example.

Hubert L. Dreyfus has spent his career arguing that the mind cannot be reductively explained in any terms that would make it analogous to a computer program. This is because understanding is skillful, not rationalistic, and because the mind is essentially embodied. In the first chapter of this book, Zizek contemplates the possibility of our minds becoming virtual - that is, disembodied, computer programs existing only online. He discusses Dreyfus' work - and yet he fails completely to acknowledge the challenge it presents to the claims that he is considering, eventually concluding that the mind is just "software", apt to be uploaded just as soon as technology advances. Since Dreyfus' arguments against this idea could not be more explicit, this is bizarre.

Why would Zizek gloss this issue? Perhaps he doesn't understand the problem (his reading of Dreyfus is scarcely recognisable, after all). Alternatively, he might have felt Dreyfus' work insufficinetly glamorous to be worthy of development. But this is more strange still, since Zizek is primarily a Lacanian theorist and Lacan's Nom du Pere would seem to present its own challenge to the possibility of a disembodied mind.

I suggest another reading: Zizek simply doesn't pay attention to what he's reading and talking about. Anyone who has seen him lecture will have witnessed this for themselves. His work is charismatic and exciting, for sure - but far from rigorous.

Perhaps a reading of the the rest of the book would answer my questions; and I concede that such a review of an incomplete reading is impertinent, to say the least. But by the end of the first chapter (and despite having made it through several of his other books), I had run out of patience with Zizek's undisciplined stream of consciousness.

17 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars bizarre: one of the best as well as the worst, February 28, 2003

By A Customer

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This review is from: On Belief (Thinking in Action) (Paperback)

Zizek argues in this book along with Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling) that there should be a "teleological suspension of the ethical category" in favor of the religious. In Kierkegaard's book he says that Abraham is asked by God to suspend the ethical in order to kill his son Isaac. Of course God stops the killing before it takes place, but first he wants to test whether Abraham is willing to suspend the ethical in order to give primacy of place to the religious. Zizek uses this paradigm to argue that Leninists had the right to suspend the ethical in order to put their religious fervor to the test by slaughtering liberal Mensheviks, and millions of others, after the October revolution. This is a strange book played out with fantastic verve and bizarre humor. One isn't sure how seriously Zizek takes his "belief" in Leninism. This is one of the worst books on an ethical basis I've ever read, but aesthetically it's one of the best efforts in contemporary theory -- fun to read, whacky "beyond belief," and filled with a real fun for sentence making. The sentencing of the Marxists, both their own in terms of Solzhenitsyn and others, as well as the sentence that the liberal west has laid on them in order to lay them down to rest, is replayed as if it was a trauma that needs to be relived. The result is a species of madness: a great book with a seemingly bizarre ethical message: kill all liberals to prove your religious fervor for a secular religion that is widely discredited for asking for such mass murder. God never asks Abraham to go through on his killing of his son. Zizek appears to condone the killing of millions by communists in the twentieth century through using Kierkegaard's paradigm for understanding Abraham and Isaac. Zizek has a lot of fun with this comparison. I suffered, and I think most Christians would suffer because the comparison seems so grotesque and so completely out of control, but Marxists will delight in this religious rationale for their peculiarly bloody heritage.

15 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a small treasure, August 24, 2002

By 

Tron Honto - See all my reviews

This review is from: On Belief (Thinking in Action) (Paperback)

I have recently began reading Zizek after picking up this short essay that he wrote for Routledge's Thinking in Action Series. His idiosyncratic writing style has its quirks which I could imagine some people despising, but I enjoyed it myself. He has an incredible talent for looking abstruse concepts and philosophical debates in a fresh perspective that definitely could be described as 'thinking outside of the box'. He writes with a ad hoc mixture of pop culture, hitchcock, philosophy, theology, doxology, and Lacanian psychology. And his message is a powerful one--reaffirming the human and the real against what he terms 'the digital heresy'. By the end of his essay, he has you wanting to believe once again--or maybe just to admit to yourself that you've believed all along.