Žižek, the "authentic political event," and intellectual freedom

I'm leading a discussion in my intellectual freedom class next week based on THIS ARTICLE and thought I'd share it here to drum up some more ideas and discussion.

Julian Assange’s work with Wikileaks enacts the self-negation of  “spying” by undermining its principle of secrecy and making information public. This is a greater political act than simply selling secrets to an enemy, which would preserve the secrecy of the information. Do you agree with Žižek that this “spying for the people” and the bringing to light of the government’s secrets can indeed lead to creating the self-aware proletariat? The act itself of bringing information into the commons does not create a knowledgeable public. How can we encourage people to exercise their intellectual freedom, in light of people who are risking everything to make information available to them?

Žižek identifies the French Encyclopedia as the symbol of bourgeois modernity, and says that while the idea of Wikipedia is that it be the people’s encyclopedia, it is falling into the same pitfalls of power and privilege one would expect of a publication edited by mostly white North American men (see this article and this article for more about Wikipedia’s biases). He asserts that Assange’s (and Snowden’s and Pussy Riot’s) work is to stir up the hidden and suppressed information, and bring it into the commons alongside the “mainstream,” “normative” information. What are some ways you can think of to promote and support ignored and repressed information--that of the people of the margins and that which the powers seek to purposely keep from us?

Do you agree that the information commons is a “key domain of the class struggle”? Žižek points out that “The World Wide Web seems to be in its nature Communist, tending towards free flow of data” and that therefore the “business establishment” is trying to privatize and monetize that data by any means necessary--including selling individuals’ personal information. We see this playing out in the struggle for net neutrality and in Facebook’s use of its users’ information. Do you think there is significance in saying that the web is “communist” rather than “democratic” or “populist”? What would the difference be? Also, what does all of this mean in terms of the digital divide? Not everyone truly has the unfettered access to the internet that we bourgeois millennials take for granted.

BONUS: Kester Brewin's TEDx Talk on pirates and bringing information into the commons

"Pirates were not hated because they stole. Pirates were hated for refusing to pass on what they stole to the king."

Let me know if you have any thoughts on the questions I pose, or the article in general.

This is my Body: Deconstruction, Eucharist, and Community

This is the paper Joel Avery and I presented at the Homebrewed Christianity session at AAR this year. It was a great experience, and having Jack Caputo respond on the panel was such a privilege.

We're planning to do some revisions, and the goal is to get it ready for publication with the other papers from the panel and Caputo's response, but for now you can find here the paper as it was read.

Abstract: 

As Derrida returned to Plato's writings throughout his life, looking for moments of aporia in each new reading, so too Christians, returning time and again to the Eucharist, open themselves to the possibility of encountering the body of Christ in the presence of the stranger in each new gathering.

Using John Caputo’s work in What Would Jesus Deconstruct? and his interaction with Derrida in Deconstruction in a Nutshell, as well as the work of Louis-Marie Chauvet, we will show how deconstructing the Eucharist in response to the call of the nondeconstructable absent-yet-Real Presence harbored therein yields an encounter in which the Eucharist becomes a deconstructive act that calls into question and breaks down social hierarchies and individualized faith in order to reveal Christ’s broken body in the community that gathers at his table.

We discuss liturgy as a repeated yet singular event--a counterpath of life that we travel as strangers together on our way to the table, where we arrive without ever arriving, and where we see in the face of each stranger the presence of Jesus revealing itself.

We will spend the bulk of the paper demonstrating how these ideas are manifest in the work of two communities-- St. Lydia’s, an ELCA-affiliated “dinner church” in Brooklyn who ground their worship in a deconstructed liturgy centered on a shared meal, and ikonNYC, a group outside the realm of traditional church who explore and deconstruct ideas about faith.

Paper: CLICK HERE FOR PDF

The Birth of Love

This post was originally published HERE on Toy Adams's Advent Blog, Imagining Jesus.

Advent is the season of anticipating Yes. It’s the season of the breaking-in of the infinite, and the season of the eternal embrace of the natural. The season of the perhaps-possible impossible. The Event of Emmanuel—God with us, God in us, God as us.

God’s answer to the no of humanity’s un-love is the yes of childbirth, in all its pain and blood and promise. God becomes a human merely being—tasting touching hearing seeing breathing—and perhaps is always still becoming human, as we also are.

During advent, we anticipate the sun’s birthday at the start of winter. And, oh, how long the winters of our lives can be. Sometimes they last for years. And still, we wait for the promise of sun, for those leaping greenly spirits to re-emerge, to become alive again after we have died.

Perhaps this is a hope against hope, for a blue true dream of sky is not enough to assuage the acute and actual pang of sorrow and suffering. But knowing that God is merely being right alongside us—wailing in a manger, wailing on a cross—means that while the depths of human suffering are illimitable, so too are the gay great happenings. Our ears may awake to the no of all nothing, but our eyes may be opened to life and love and wings.

Idols

We are so defensive of our idols.

We handle them with kid gloves, place them gently on their altars. 

If scorned, we may hide them--under a bed, or in a closet. But we never destroy them ourselves. They are too precious to us. 

If we're lucky, someone will find them anyway, smash them on the ground.

It's painful watching your idol shatter. 

But once it's done, all you want to do is pick up a hammer. 

Practicing the Impossibility of Pacifism

Anyone who claims to be a pacifist, or at least to practice an ethic of nonviolence, has been challenged about its application. It’s not practical, people say, it’s not realistic.

The challenge is especially common during times of (imminent or ongoing) war. To combat evil or rescue the powerless non-violently is impossible.

And maybe it’s because we pacifists really are the squishy, idealistic dreamers of our caricatures, but I think there’s something deeply true and promising about the idea of impossibility.

After all, as a Christian, I am marked by a belief in the impossible—the foolishness of Jesus’s life and death and resurrection and the impossibility of meaning in the meaninglessness of life. We reach for the impossible not as a challenge to be grasped, but as a way of embracing existential uncertainty, rejecting fear, and experiencing the kenotic self-sacrifice of Christ in our own lives and communities.

Is the notion of overcoming hate with love and sorrow with joy—really, in our actual world—laughable, impossible even?

Perhaps.

But that’s what makes it worth seeking and worth practicing. Because what if?

We practice by loving our neighbors. We practice by subverting capitalism. We practice by feeding the hungry. We practice by welcoming the stranger.

And a funny thing happens when we practice a thing. After a while it becomes habit.

Erasmus, methodological belief, and intellectual hospitality

If you can get past the groan-worthy first sentence (gimme a break, it was years  ago), there's a lot of good stuff in this paper, I think. The idea of "intellectual hospitality" is something that I strive to enact when I engage with others, and I think we can learn a lot more when we are more hospitable.

Also, I just really love Erasmus. 

Abstract: With the assumption that creative interpretation of the past helps us set a trajectory for the future, I explore the life and work of Erasmus of Rotterdam and his role on the “frontier” of Reformation thought in the Western Church. I will argue that his mode of humanistic dialectic serves as an especially promising manner of education, particularly in the area of theology. Further, I investigate the concept of “intellectual hospitality,” and how people—especially students—receive and process information. I relate the practice of methodological belief (as opposed to Cartesian methodological doubt) to Erasmus’s understanding of education and Christianity, and how theological education should be approached by both students and teachers.

Paper: CLICK HERE TO VIEW 

Bibliography HERE

"Missional" Librarianship

For the last several years, many evangelical seminaries (Fuller and NTS come immediately to mind) and their professors have been pumping out books and courses related to the mission of God, the mission  of church, missional  ministry, etc. etc. The idea that instead of sitting in churches waiting for people to come in, Christians should go out into the world and engage it in love. 

While a good enough idea I guess (I won't discuss the many reasons it can be problematic here), it's been repeated ad nauseam, and so it's what I couldn't help but think of when I was listening to a lecture in the New Librarianship MOOC, and Lankes was talking about getting out from behind the reference desk and into the community.

I tweeted a paraphrase of what he said: 

I got a bit of pushback, asking for some examples of what that looks like. And I was pleased that what I came up with was basically my professional life. I'm not just  a librarian. My network is not just librarians.  I do my best to actively engage in the community I endeavor to serve--that of theologians and clergy. I try to go where the conversations are--on Twitter, at conferences--participate in them, and offer my expertise as appropriate. I try to get my name out there, not as a grab for prestige, but to help facilitate knowledge-sharing, and so that when people need help finding some information (or someone else to work out ideas with) they know who to ask and where to find me.

It's in this way I can appreciate a kind of "missional" librarianship--one that's based more on relational learning-together than a capitalistic transaction of information. I love this idea of embedded librarianship, where I can really get to know my community (and they get to know me) and we can expand intellectual horizons together.