“What is perceived here as the problem is precisely the Christian universalism: what this all-inclusive attitude (recall St. Paul’s famous “There are no men or women, no Jews and Greeks”) involves is a thorough exclusion of those who do not accept inclusion into the Christian community. In other “particularistic” religions (and even in Islam, in spite of its global expansionism), there is a place for others, they are tolerated, even if they are condescendingly looked upon. The Christian motto “All men are brothers,” however, means ALSO that “Those who are not my brothers ARE NOT MEN.” Christians usually praise themselves for overcoming the Jewish exclusivist notion of the Chosen People and encompassing all of humanity – the catch here is that, in their very insistence that they are the Chosen People with the privileged direct link to God, Jews accept the humanity of the other people who celebrate their false gods, while Christian universalism tendenti[ous]ly excludes non-believers from the very universality of humankind.”
(Slavoj Žižek, On Belief. Routledge, 2001: 143-144)
HT: Deane Galbraith
4 comments:
What work is getting done with the punctuation in “tendenti[ous]ly”? Is that an editorial [ous], or a pun that’s eluding me, or what? I can’t figure out what the word would be without the bracketed letters (“tendentily”?). I’m not questioning Žižek’s ascription of tendentiousness to Christian universalism, just trying to puzzle out the brackets.
yea it should probably read:
tendentially [sic! tendentiously?]
tendentially being Zizek's coinage..?
See:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20729191/20557629-Zizek-on-Belief
pg 144.
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