The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For

From now on, even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!’ Saint Paul’s militant declaration from Corinthians asserts for the first time in human history the revolutionary logic of a radical break with the past--with it, the age of Cosmic Balance and similar pagan babble is over. What does it mean to return to this stance today? One of the most deplorable aspects of our postmodern era is the re-emergence of the “sacred” in all its different guises, from New Age paganism to the emerging religious sensitivity within deconstructionism itself. How is a Marxist to counter this massive onslaught of obscurantism? The wager of Žižek’s The Fragile Absolute is that Christianity and Marxism should fight together against the onslaught of new spiritualism. The subversive core of the Christian legacy is much too precious to be left to the fundamentalists. Here is a fitting contribution from a Marxist to the 2000th anniversary of one who was well aware that to practice love in our world is to bring in the sword and fire.