Has anyone read this book? Is it really useful for leftists to indulge in this christfaggotry?

Has anyone read this book? Is it really useful for leftists to indulge in this christfaggotry?

Right there you're off to a bad start.

That's Lacan, not Badiou


The word "really" can be used to suggest doubt besides emphasis, learn to read

That's the joke: Badiou's book is entirely Lacanian mumbo-jumbo.

No, it's for weak and cowardly people like Rebel/Nasu

I have. It is, but only if you're more familiar with the work of Badiou, as this book is in no way anything but an intervention in distancing Paul from both the established order of the time and it's erstwhile antithesis. The whole idea connects well to his theory of ontological sets and the whole truth processes idea. It is a one-hundred percent communist work, but it (like Lacan, Zizek, and their contemporaries) serves mostly as a mediation into how one should approach theory in developing an alternative to capital (one that wholly eschews ideology and the contours of the existent order, this being the more irksome point to the more orthodox/dogmatic leftists)

So what use are Paul's teachings to the socialist project, exactly?

Less his teachings, more of the reading of his character with regards to the time he lived. The point is to assert that a new subjectivity can be established outside of the present ideological construct. It's backing up the Lacanian theory of "the one is not" which negates the Big Other and the whole of ideological compulsion in favor of a new universality that is composed with respect to the ontological incompleteness of reality. This is so to say that communism is not only the only means of negating an existing material contradiction, but also the only way of rendering ourselves as Cartesian subjects ('cogito ergo sum' and all that); however, that we must beware the conditions of our revolt that might be transcendental (read: Utopian) or vulgarly materialist (think the polemics of Lenin). This ABSOLUTELY does not mean a rejection of the developments of theory of Lenin, this point need be made and exacerbated each time these philosophers positions come up! But, to an end, we've a definite foothold that we've yet to realize, and that is precisely the malaise and anxiety, both material and ideological, of the bulwark of modern capital, the downside being that to build a new universal movement that we must exorcise ourselves of the ghosts of past failures and movements (courage of hopelessness) and forge a wholly new radical movement.

Rebel unfortunatly made everything he read look bad by association. For example, Kierkegaard is very much worth reading due to his contribution to existentialism, but even I sometimes fall into the mental trap of relating him to Rebel when I see his name.

So, I remember watching a few of his videos and that he identified heavily with Kierkegaard, but what was it that he did that earned him such ire around here?

Look up Nasu of curiouscat

Well, that looks like a trip.

Maybe 50 years ago. But religion is fading away quickly under capitalism in the advanced countries. Even the so-called religious people just use it more as a cultural or political crutch rather than genuine belief.

Maybe if you're in some third-world country it could be useful for pointing out contradictions.

That narrative is bullshit though. It's the opposite, religion is actually growing. The 20th century is calling you.

Yes and more leftists should. It's insane to ignore something so crucial to so many centuries of development in our world.

Is it? All evidence points towards religious sentiment and attendence decreasing (at least in the first world). Those who may have an interest simply have less time to engage in any kind of actual religious activity, most jobs in some capacity carry home now and many families' schedules are booked every day of the week/weekend.

that's a really good book, btw


You need to realize that blaming the text for your shortcomings makes you look p. dumb.

denk u

It's endlessly fascinating to me that tankies are so anti-intellectual, when thinkers like Lukacs, Althusser, and Badiou offer some of the strongest intellectual defenses for Marxism-Leninism and Maoism on the Left. But instead they choose to fetishize their ignorance as a form of militancy.

No, I'm not a salesman in training. He is a favorite of the merchants because his job was to sell Christianity and he did it well.

The first world accounts for a minority of the world population, and first worlders are having less and less children. Meanwhile religion grows as the population of the developing world grows.

what makes you think that the people you are replying to are "tankies"?

(don't even answer)

If a poster needlessly shits on philosophy as "pointless" for the revolution, and comes at real theory from the viewpoint of vulgar materialism and Soviet pamphlets, there's a 9-out-of-10 chance they're a brainlet tankie.

(Not the person you were responding to but) not all philosophy is equal though. The works of Lucaks or Moishe Postone seems more useful to me than neo-Freudian psychology when it comes to socialist theory.
And as much as I like Zizek, for example, he is a bad Marxist in the sense that he rarely discuss the core concepts of Marx, like value, class struggle or commodities. Debord also talked about desire and ideology in capitalism without using psychanalysis, and yet he was closer to Marx.
Also, I've heard Lacan have been BTFO'd by Deleuze & Guattari, but I'm too much of a brainlet presently to confirm that myself.
But tbh, I'm personally bitter regarding one clinical psychology course I had in uni which only focused on Freud to have a present interest in Lacan when there is so much more to learn, especially less cryptic and more important things. Zizek has nice things to say with his psychoanalytic background, but I don't want to go deeper than that into the rabbithole.

I don't really disagree with anything you've said here user, my problem is more so with a certain anti-intellectualism on the Left that always gets confused with militancy, i.e. the more books you read the less committed to revolution you are.

Shut up Peter

wdhmbt?

Being a tripfagging Keynesian SuccDem with an undeserving superiority complex. Unlike others I'm glad he isn't attentionwhoring on here anymore. Tripfags were probably the biggest detriment to board quality next to Nazbols, and thankfully both problems have (mostly) been sorted out. The sooner they are forgotten the better

This is Holla Forums. The worst thing you can do is expect anyone to read.

You would enjoy Lacan then, since he basically was a psychoanalytical middle finger to the clinicians whom he referred to as "orthopedists of the unconscious"
I suppose, if you count their antiphilosophy as critique - but its basically just composed of "We're not beholden to the material binds of ideology and capital because we have some special authentic experience that distances us away from everything." I'm being terribly short about it, but the two are fucking awful.
He's far more concerned with the pathology of capitalism and a new one under communism, though I maintain he has never wavered in his statement that, like Badiou, Marx is the only one who is right about the nature of capitalism and the need for its successor

Gonna tip my fedora and say that very few non-fiction books written before the Enlightenment are worth bothering with today. What useful things they had to say have alredy been incorporated into the field, and whatever is left is spooky garbage. Fuck, a lot of the supposedly useful things are spooky garbage too, but that applies to modern philosophy too.

Holy shit can you read? The meme is about Saint Paul, a book by Badiou. It literally has a picture of the title of the book in the first panel.