Despite the gracious and fraternal tone of A.B. Yehoshua's letter to Gideon Levy in Haaretz, the concluding paragraph has a curious effect on the letter's contents:

Please, preserve the moral authority and concern that you possessed, and your distinctive voice. We will need them again in the future, which promises further ordeals on the road to peace. In the meantime, it would be best for us all - we and the Palestinians and the rest of the world - to follow the simple moral imperative of Kantian philosophy: "Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Curious because, well, one may as well condescendingly remind an astronomer of the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, and implore them to apply it across the board. Kant was a great thinker on the limits of reason  and a compelling enough moral thinker on many fronts, but the categorical imperative is only his famous, not the most useful of his contributions. Most have heard of it, but few have heard of the Problem of the Enquiring Murderer. It goes like this: according to the Kantian imperative, we should all tell the truth all the time. So what if a murderer asks you to disclose the location of a person he wants to kill?

The imperative neglects the fact that two notions of the good can often conflict. Many of our most fiercely debated issues of the day hinge on how adamant one is about the correctness of his or her judgment regarding which of several conflicting goods is greatest. Take Iraq, for instance. It can hardly be disputed that civilian casualties and a five year occupation are bad and that it would have been good to have avoided both. And yet, the discontinued existence of Saddam Hussein's regime is a good thing, too. Tempers rise and explode over this question of conflicting goods. Kant is of no use to us in these moments...unless one hopes to lend the sheen of universality to one's own assessment of the good.

Perhaps it is to my slight advantage that I'm not familiar enough with Levy's coverage of the current conflict in Gaza to make a fair assessment of whether Yehoshua's criticisms are fair. To read only the letter, I'm led to conclude that the two have agreed on many key points in the past with regards to Israeli wrongdoing, but that now Yehoshua feels Levy has overstepped the bounds from rational critic to unfair detractor of a just war. He goes on to note several instances where Levy's omissions or judgments have undermined his once-laudable moral authority. But there is sleight of hand here. Despite the fact that many of the most honest pro-Israeli intellectuals doubt the ability of the current military campaign to effectively deter future missile strikes, Yehoshua writes:

All we are trying to do is get their leaders to stop this senseless and wicked aggression, and it is only because of the tragic and deliberate mingling between Hamas fighters and the civilian population that children, too, are unfortunately being killed.

just moments after he points out that he has asked Levy whether he

truly believe[s] that if they fire missiles the crossings will be opened, or the opposite. And whether you truly believe that it is right and just to open crossings into Israel for those who declare openly and sincerely that they want to destroy our country.

The consistency Yehoshua demands of Levy would require the realization that the tactics are either both futile or they are both justifiable. But then Yehoshua implies something of great import in the latter statement without coming right out and saying it: Hamas can't be persuaded or dealt with because it its ideology is genocidal and irrational. But if this is so, as I believe it is, then one must also accept that, unless Israel plans to oust Hamas and occupy Gaza (the America-in-Iraq model), no amount of force can be truly thought to be accomplishing forseeable objectives. It is, then, as pointless and doomed to impotence as are Hamas' rocket attacks designed to "open the crossings."

The most depressing thing about the current conflict and the coverage of it is that time and again we are offered two competing visions of the good and treated as if we must be categorical about one or the other. And always the implication from each side rings, as Yehoshua's letter does, of sanctimony and myopia. But Kant had a better lesson. His second formulation of moral law suggests that we treat each individual rational being as an end in itself, never as a mere means to an end. By adhering to this formula, one is permitted to insist on both supposedly competing visions of the good, while also insisting that no rational being be treated as merely a means to that end. One can argue for an end to dual stranglehold on Gaza by Hamas and Israel, remain opposed to Islamist fanaticism as well as colonialism, while remaining opposed to every casualty inflicted as players on each side cynically treat Israeli and Palestinian civilians as means to their supposed end.

Jeff Goldberg's insightful-as-usual op-ed the New York Times, while filled with informative anecdotal nuggets aplenty, could actually have been trimmed to consist of only the headline, "Why Israel Can't Make Peace With Hamas," and this: "A man who believes that God every now and again transforms Jews into pigs and apes might not be the most obvious candidate for peace talks."  Boiling down the entire conflict isn't this simple, but boiling down Hamas is.  Either one believes that God transforms this or that group of people into zoo rabble or one does not.  One who does cannot be credited with having the faculties necessary to carry out negotiations meaningfully.  

To go one step further, the above formulation also answers those who would have us believe that the superstitious extremism of Hamas is so much rhetorical garnish on what is actually a material struggle for justice by people who would be more moderate if only they were treated better.  Suppose it is.  In that case, what would have to be admitted is that Hamas cynically utilizes the most abhorrently racist passages available to them in order to rouse the people into a righteous anger in the hopes it will beget insurrection.  In which case could one devoted to the cause of justice for the Palestinians endorse or defend such a group?  If the choice is between column a.) cartoonish ignorance, and column b.) calculated hate-peddling, why not choose column c.) neither?  

Again, this is why the Arab-Israeli conflict is so often misconstrued by those who portray it through the lenses of tolerance or sophisticated liberal theology.  Goldberg points out that what exists in the Gaza conflict is a hotbed of envy, sectarian schism, one-upsmanship and proxy influence.  If each of these is a fire burning out of control, taking seriously God's having turned Jews into pigs is but one of many (on both sides of the divide--remember there are raving messianic Jews as well) ideas that function like the equivalent of kerosene mixed with gasoline mixed with napalm jelly.   

Talking seriously about real solutions requires people on all sides to subscribe wholeheartedly to reality.  Who among us has seen a Jew turned into a swine, a sea divided for a fleeing tribe, or believes that any similar supernatural feat designed to favor one or another ethno-religio-cultural group took place?  The first prerequisite for negotiations should be that whomever is allowed at the table answers each of these in the negative.  Neither the disqualification of the likes of Nizar Rayyan from the proceedings, nor the skepticism of his ilk, should sadden anyone.

"WE ARE HAMAS," said protestors in London on January 3rd.  Welcome to 2009, and to the thoroughly postmodern, ahistorical, depoliticized, world in which we live.  And if the reader will kindly forgive the initial barrage of academic terms, and come with me on a short journey, I'll explain why, for this avidly pro-Palestinian author and activist, spectacles like the one in the UK are both disheartening with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict but also in terms of the wider culture we live in...

First, some definitions:

POSTMODERN.  A term often deployed unspecifically, and just as often misunderstood by its adherents as by the layman.  Postmodernism was a fad in philosophy that took root roughly in the 1970s.  I know what some of you are thinking--philosophy is an ivory tower sort of thing that doesn't connect to the real world, so blaming some European intellectuals from a few decades ago for anything that's wrong in the world is nonsense.  Except that philosophy pervades every corner of your thought.  Just about all of us have willingly or unwillingly adopted certain philosophical ideas put forth by men from Socrates to Hegel, whether we know it or not.  Ideas matter because they effect how we think.  So when a group of thinkers came along and injected a dogma of anti-Western, anti-rational, relativism into the philosophy scene and it caught hold, what was in the ivory tower was sure to trickle down. 

These days the average person experiences trickle-down postmodernism in several ways, but firstly as a vague but palpable lack of conviction.  They are hesitant to make claims about the truth on their own and if they choose to do so, experience either a deep sense of guilt, criticism from their peers, or both.   This is because we are taught that our rationality, our fundamental means of knowing and solving problems--especially if it is Western--is at best flawed and at worst nothing more than a manifestation of our imperialist male-dominated past.  The average person now associates judgment about the truth of the world with arrogance.  I've got my truth, you've got yours, let's not fight.  Stop being judgmental.  That would be the mantra, and it's one of the most widely accepted perversions of liberalism that exists.  But then again, liberalism is one of those racist, sexist things that postmoderns taught us to think derisively of. 

The irony is that postmodernism, while it is officially a war against dogmas, actually produces several of its own.  The anti-dogmatists are, as a rule, dogmatically anti-Western.  They are skeptical of any truth claim if it originates from classical rationality rather than from a person of non-Western cultural persuasion.  And since just about all of the postmoderns were also self-styled leftists, the "left" now takes it's truth a la carte, from the array of non-Western opinion. 

AHISTORICAL.  Just what it sounds like.  Postmodernism helped speed this along, as it rejected "master narratives" of history.  But nobody needed Lyotard to see that as public education degenerated, and as our technological economy began rewarding those who knew how to deal with the rootless present as opposed to the rooted past, the discipline of learning any narrative of history would give way to the ability to make a Facebook profile, program your iPhone, or build a website.  The Internet is immaterial, whereas history is quite material. 

DEPOLITICIZED.  It used to be that politics was a set of values and convictions for which one fought both in the realm of ideas and in the harsher realities of the political universe.   In the West, however, where we have made our politics a mere matter of purchase power ("I shop at Bath & Body Works because they donate money to the Third World") and identity adornments, politics has virtually ceased to exist.  Even Barack Obama's victory must be attributed in part to his prodigious ability to understand this new world (which was in no small part what recommended him for the job).  Politics is today a brand, not a practice.  It's something you wear, something you use to designate yourself socially and culturally.  For most, it's not the art of the possible, even if they are marching in the streets.   After all, that'd take vision and conviction, which they've forfeited, to be respectful of everyone else's truth.   

Which leads us, finally, back to the protests in London over the attacks in Gaza.  How come, despite the fact that Hamas openly states its violent, intolerant, anti-Semitic, theocratic values, and despite having seen its brutal ways of doing business, can a mob of (mostly) well-meaning British liberals take to the streets and declare their solidarity?  It isn't (with the exception of George Galloway)  because they are actual sympathizers with Islamist killers.  How is it that those concerned with social justice could possibly contort their values so that a slogan like this can cross their lips?

Because that's what happens when you perpetually doubt your own sense of truth and instead subscribe almost unconditionally to what the non-Westerner says about "their truth."  It's what happens when you've accepted the notion that your rationality both comes from an evil place and is capable only of yielding evil conclusions.  It's what happens when you've spent more hours making pop hits, riding your white horse into Studio 54, programming your iPod, designing and navigating websites in cyberspace than you've spent reading up on the history of the conflict.  A few snippets of grotesque propaganda and a dash of worldview confirmation will do.  At that point, you've got your marching orders.  You are, after all, a person who cares about the world and about the oppressed.  In order to express this, you will, like a consumer, seek out the brand that seems, in your feeble estimation, to demarcate that identity.  Non-Western?  Check.  Claims to operate on a different regime of truth?  Appears anti-imperialist?  Check.   Draw up the banner: WE ARE HAMAS. 

After all, who would you be, beneficiary of the Western empire, to quarrel with those who suffer at the hands of the oppression your flag helped create and perpetuate?  Dare you call into question how many Palestinians have suffered at the hands of Arab oppressors like, say, the Jordanian kings who let starve and actively annihiliated thousands of Palestinian refugees?  Is it really your place, considering how brutal IDF tactics have been in the past, to entertain the notion that Hamas might be sending Palestinians to slaughter in order to obtain electoral and P.R. victories?  Or would you rather simply assert, out of guilt for past sins or out of rightful revulsion at seeing images of dead Palestinian children, that whoever is against England, the U.S. and Israel is your friend? 

You're unlikely to lose any sleep over declaring solidarity with Hamas, since you don't believe it's your place to question the legitimacy of their political goals.  You've got your truth, they've got their truth, and never the twain shall meet, much less conflict.  But this was never a principle that liberals or leftists believed in until recently.  Before postmodernism, the idea of the freedom of ideas and humanistic progress not merely allowed for, it required the intermingling of cultures and ideas, and the measuring of truths in a rigorous debate.  The goal was to eliminate the bad ideas and keep the good.  Before the banishing of truth into culturally specific enclaves, and before the death of history, the left was working toward creating a better material world.  Today, under the guise of being more accepting, it has let bad ideas not only survive, but has allowed them to thrive and proliferate.  With the material world an afterthought in the age of the Internet, George Galloway seems as good a fellow to stand beside as any, just as long as his is a brand that makes you feel good about who you are. 

The sad part, though, is that it's a good thing to want to show solidarity with the oppressed, to want to work towards a world where the crimes of our more ignorant past are corrected.  People like me, who are quite convinced that Galloway represents another, far more sinister breed than the well-meaning accidental fascist weekender-type outlined here, are in a difficult position.  Criticize Galloway and the protest, and be accused of siding with colonialists, child-murderers and labeled a treacherous bastard.   Fail to do so, and fail to defend the right of a liberal democratic state to self-defense and let thrive the growing sector of the left that openly declares support with the radical theocratic right. 

But would it really be too much to ask for some celebrities of conscience, musicians, movie stars, and leftists to take neither the side of heavy-handed Israeli retaliations, nor the side of terrorists who fire rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas of Southern Israel and use their own people as human shields?  What if instead, in a gesture of solidarity, they took the words of a bereaved Palestinian mother whose child had been killed in an Israeli strike as their slogan?  She is a female, non-Western victim of both the Israeli occupation as well as the cynical machinations of Islamic imperialists that provoked this conflict.  Her cry?  "May God exterminate Hamas!"  Whether or not one endorses her means, this formulation captures perfectly a real vision for a political project worth undertaking.  You needn't endorse Israel's means of accomplishing that task either, but at the very least it is the ultimate statement of solidarity with Palestinian victims of this war.

A fairly potent means of examining and critiquing the postcolonial West might involve asking the following simple, jargonless question: How can a woman who lives this war and has lost her own flesh and blood to an Israeli strike be able to distinguish the guilty party even through a haze of grief that few of us can imagine, while those in the West march in support of the party that she knows brought about the death of her child?

Freud once wrote that "the technique of jokes cannot be a matter of indifference from the point of view of discovering their essence." Adam Kirsch, in his takedown of Slavoj Zizek in The New Republic as "The Deadly Jester," is sternly concerned with those essences, but due to an abundance of neglect on matters of technique, not much light is shone on the work of one of the worlds most attention grabbing cultural theorists. How far can the jester go without turning a joke regarding evil into an evil in itself? Does he have a productive function--and if so, can his work be done effectively if he's demanded by his audience to stay in-bounds?

Zizek's work is undoubtedly joke-laden. His is not programmatic writing in the style of many of his leftist colleagues such as Antonio Negri, Andrew Arato, Judith Butler, Enrnesto Laclau, etc. But it is precisely for this reason that Kirsch's inference of what Zizek's programme "really" is, and his subsequent revulsion, are problematic. It's also familiar. Laclau has called Zizek a totalitarian and Butler has claimed his ideas have an affinity with the right. But Zizek is exciting precisely because his innate drive to rail against all kinds of orthodoxy inevitably makes him an enfant terrible to just about anyone and everyone depending on the topic at hand. Kirsch thinks of Zizek as the jokester who's subversively breeding degeneracy among would-be progressives. But what about technique, both of the critic and of the comedian?

First the critic: one wonders if Kirsch's three hundred and sixty degree attack on Zizek is meant to be ironic, since it is fundamentally Freudian. Less an Interpretation of the Slovenian's Dreams and more an assessment of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, the diatribe enjoys as much of the psychoanalyst's "authoritarian" posture as the subject it claims to be analyzing. However, even the more dedicated volumes that have been devoted to explicating what "Zizekian" thought consists of admit that Zizek does not offer this answer very clearly (more on this later...) It's telling that Kirsch is so ready to make that leap.

Nowhere is the problem with Kirsch's analysis more apparent than in his attacks on the recent book 'Violence.' He tells his readers that Zizek means to tell us that "resistance to the liberal-democratic order is so urgent that it justifies any degree of violence." Not so. The author is very clear. He says that his intent is to expand our conceptual understanding of violence beyond it's more obvious eruptions. He wants to explain violence not as merely the act of violence with which we're most viscerally and morally aware (what he calls 'subjective' violence), but more thoroughly--as inclusive of the network of relations and circumstances that make that violence possible (he calls this 'objective' violence). Sure Zizek quotes Lenin's directive to "Learn, learn, learn." That doesn't make him a Bolshevik.

One could, if one were so inclined, shockingly quote from 'Violence,' "while [terrorists] pursue what appear to us to be evil goals with evil means, the very form of their activity meets the highest standard of the good." There you have it ladies and gentlemen, Slavoj Zizek thinks that terrorism embodies the highest standard of the good. Fascist!! This is extremely easy to do, and it suggests the person doing so is only skimming to cherry-pick. More on "form" later, but the difference between an honest reader of Zizek and a detractor on a mission is that the reader would deal with what comes after. Namely, that this point is raised primarily to discuss what's wrong with terrorism.

Via Rousseau, Zizek wants to explain that what would appear to be at work in modern terrorism isn't a familiar egotistical evil that fails to subordinate the self to social prohibitions against mass murder, but rather amour-propre. The latter being a particularly perverse form of self-love that's more bent on destruction (blowing up the WTC) than the achievement of the supposed goal (the new Caliphate). It is the preferring oneself to others in a way that causes one to act against one's own interests. With so much terrorism wreaking pure destruction and failing to accomplish any supposed goal, one might imagine anyone interested in understanding the enemy might give more of an ear to Zizek's ideas. What drives terrorists is ressentiment and envy--a deep anger driven by their own belief in their own inferiority and envy of the enjoyment of others:

Too often the standard left (terror is the result of U.S. foreign policy and/or globalization) and standard right (terrorism is the result of fanatical Islamic imperialism) explanations don't do enough work to fully explain the phenomenon of global terror. Each side gets something important correct, yet each comes up short. Of course there is worker migration, the breakdown of rigid borders, and displacement from traditional modes of community belonging that help increase the appeal of identification with religious symbology and ideology. There is anger toward the U.S., sometimes justified--but just as often imaginary and xenophobic--that fuels extremism.

But the ideology itself also determines the character of the movement and provides the rationale for its activities. Therefore, the right is correct to say that ideology and those who act avowedly according to its goals must be held to account in very literal way. Zizek isn't offering a 'middle road' or discounting either argument. He offers a new dimension to the conversation--one that ultimately argues not for sympathy with terrorism or "tolerance" for Islam--but rather one that argues adamantly against tolerance and in favor of atheism as European legacy worth defending against Islamic radicalism! And not Stalinist atheism, either.

Elsewhere in the piece, Kirsch raises an eyebrow at Zizek's use of scare quotes, but note their use when Zizek refers to "godless" communism. Taking issue with Andre Glucksmann's use of Dostoevsky in the title of his book 'Dostoevsy in Manhattan,' he argues that Islamists and Stalinists prove the opposite of the Karamazov wisdom--if there IS a God then everything is permitted.

Zizek's answer to the problem of amour-propre-driven terror and Western liberal "tolerance"? Hold Muslims accountable for their beliefs. Treat them like adults. And defend atheism--not just closeted and outlying atheism common in the U.S.--but the the variety of godlessness that is so acceptable that it isn't an obstacle to public office that will also stave off the pursuit of anything from communist religiosity to religious extremism. Say what you will about jarring statements about the "form of the good." Nobody who has read 'Violence' can discuss it and fail to acknowledge that these are the driving themes of the book.

As for the form of the good versus the actual good. The distinction regarding form is made precisely because the form of the good and the actual good can be and often are quite different. This is a bit like the distinction in informal logic between the validity of a statement and its soundness which I've expounded in these pages before. In much the same way, Zizek's discussion of terrorism as a pathology isn't at odds with the prior statement that the form of terrorism embodies a standard of the good. It is the vocation of a philosopher to make these kinds of distinctions, which makes it all the more depressing when others then insist on making a conflation out of a distinction. When Zizek compares terrorists to Milton's sympathetic Satan ("Evil, be thou my good"), he means this only in a formal sense:

So what we have is not praise for terrorism as resistance--it is a critique of a certain perceived predicament concerning today's coordinates of freedom and political action. Terror here is referred to clearly as a "meaningless outburst." It is not lifted up as actual opposition to the system, it is only formally a kind of noble sacrifice. Its content is something entirely different, and therefore so is the actual moral truth of the act. Elsewhere in 'Violence,' he describes the opposition between "anemic liberals" and "impassioned fundamentalists. Paraphrasing Yeats' 'Second Coming,' he notes, "The best' are no longer able to fully engage, while 'the worst' engage in in racist, religious, sexist fanaticism."

When I picked up 'Welcome to the Desert of the Real' so many years ago, I gave up on reading it because I was quite certain that anyone that wanted to understand what Zizek was talking about probably needed to understand something about Lacan. What I subsequently discovered was that one does not cursorily educate oneself on Lacan, nor is it possible to do so (even after six years of immersion, it's quite hard to feel like you 'get' Lacan). This is by Lacan's design. He famously said that the way in should be difficult. It is willful obfuscation, not plain-spokenness in the vein of Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language.' Then again, Lacan wasn't teaching politics. He was the most bizarre pedagogue. One learned from him not by way of traditional study, but through experiencing him. The teacher was not to be the disseminator of knowledge so much as the figure who provoked the unquenchable desire for knowledge.

The whole Lacanian universe, no matter how much Kirsch wants to talk about supposed affinities for despots, is the fundamental passion of Zizek. His is not a conventional means of communication, it takes into account structures of desire, the unconscious, and the joke. Art is the lie that tells the truth as the theorist psychoanalytic Marxist tells the joke that drives toward something more real than the plain and didactic. Just as Lacan used his prose and speaking style to perform his philosophical position, so does Zizek use the mode of popculturemuncher provocateur and jester to hyperactively manipulate the audience's desire and toy with their own unconscious modes of enjoyment and repression. In Zizek's universe, these are not peripheral curiosities of mind, they are central to understanding poltics.

Through disparate and disjointed (often repetitive) volumes and lectures, the most unifying thread in Zizek's oeuvre is the fearlessness to say what dare not be said. To leave open the horizon for saying the unsayable and doing the unthinkable. It's inevitable that if you say that you have a fascination with the Jewish state as the living exemplar of the violence involved in all state creation, someone is going to call you a racist. So Zizek calls himself a racist first as a joke, much as a Jew who mocks himself by bestowing slurs upon himself before the anti-Semite does. Zizek and any serious reader knows the statement is anti-statist, not anti-Semitic.

But also, this is significantly a matter of style. Zizek is happy to talk about his first experiences with psychoanalysis as the patient. He did so in a debate on moral relativism with Steven Lukes which I caught a few months ago. To watch Zizek is to know immediately that this is a man with a hyperactive brain and an obsessive need to be heard. He points out that his analyst had such a hard time with him because he tends to keep speaking so that his interlocutor has little chance to become involved (proved at said debate by the amount of floor time Zizek hoarded from Mr. Lukes). This, if anything is the best critique of Zizek, and it also explains why he sees his own theories and ideas in everything, from horrible Hollywood action films to jihadism to Kindersurprise candy eggs to the Holocaust. He is obsessively incapable of seeing anything else--he can't shut it off.

In this way, the vice of Slavoj Zizek is also the virtue. An M. Night Shyamalan film you might never have bothered to watch can take on whole new life as an ingenious philosophical metaphor. One gets the sense that very often the entire universe and every historical moment is merely a prop waiting to be used to explicate some bizarre Hegelian-Lacanian constellation of ideas. More often it seems critics like Kirsch primarily take issue with the absolute lack of boundaries Zizek sets for himself in terms of what he will and will not use to demonstrate some aspect of his thought. If Zizek suggests we notice the kernel in Leninism worthy of recuperation--the willingness to make the historical rupture and assume full responsibility for our political struggle toward a better world--this does not make him nostalgic for the Soviet state.

This is politics as the art of the impossible and philosophy as the art of the asshole. Some like Kirsch will invariably insist that this means Zizek is the harbinger of the next fascist apocalypse cloaked in pop culture references and irony. But looking awry from Zizek and his work, he looks less like the Elvis of cultural theory and more like Willy Wonka. There a juvenile Socrates-cum-Johnny Rotten element to it. A gadfly who, like any great humorist, will take the joke too far--to the point of discomfort--to prove a point. A little ingenious, a little sadistic, very fallible, wildly imaginative, but ultimately well-intentioned and aware of the pitfalls that go along with the risks.

For a 20th century that saw political oppression strictly through the lens of liberalism vs. illiberalism, Zizek's 21st century vision is entirely unique. That's why it's incorrect to read him as a fascist/communist. He is opposed to different aspects of both liberalism and illiberalism. He isn't a Marxist that sees capitalism in terms of the Industrial Revolution or the digital one. He's opposed to capitalism as the political organization of enjoyment. As for what that means, this isn't the forum for exegesis. But it's far more interesting a framework--whether one adopts it or not--for imagining a left politics or why one might even be desirable in today's world.

It's not very apropos of Kirsch's erudite and well-written essay to broach the subject of Eminem. I guess it's a bit "Zizekian." But it wasn't long ago that humorless liberals and conservatives were decrying in unison the rapper's second record as an ode to wife-beating, homophobia, drug abuse, murder, and all around bad taste. They didn't appreciate the joke--not when the first track had the superstar singing about his mom 'taking it like a slut.' But oftentimes the jester is the most successful at preventing orthodoxy from becoming a regime. In the late 90's and early 2000's, it was political correctness that had sanctioned what could and could not be said to the detriment of art and politics. What was of the utmost was that somebody say anything and everything, and so that's what Eminem did.

Even though 9/11 punctured the burgeoning orthodoxy of the End of History, it inaugurated or reinvigorated many more, new and old. Clashes of Civilizations, Barbarians At the Gates, the Triumph Of Democracy, America As Great Satan, younameit. This arrived at the peak in popularity of postmodernism in continental philosophy--the academic equivalent of the cultural P.C. regime. Zizek came storming in as the one who would call most of the left's arguments against invading Iraq weak (even if he too objected and his "Borrowed Kettle" argument against the intervention was unconvincing itself). He railed against mush-headed deconstructionists, and, yes, even liberals who had resigned themselves to believing that There Is No Alternative to capitalism. This was and still is refreshing and almost always productive.

Journals like The New Republic are supposed to encourage radical thought in the secular public sphere. Slavoj Zizek is not so borderline fascist that his ideas should be thought of as outside the parameters of respectable consideration. His technique may be graceless and crass at times, and his ideas may sometimes be mistaken. But his hyperbolic humor and sweeping statements are really no more exaggerated than Kirsch calling him "deadly." Though when Zizek does it, at least it most often feels like an effort at opening up space for a new idea or a new way of thinking. Of course I'm sure Kirsch is no advocate of active--call it 'subjective' censorship--but this is 'objectively' how academics silence one another.

So is Zizek walking the walk or being a hypocrite when he writes at length about G.K. Chesterton's notion of the "thrilling romance of orthodoxy" as he does in "The Puppet and the Dwarf?" One might say this only confirms Zizek's underlying authoritarianism and/or fascism. But one might also be fascinated by the sheer audacity of a staunch historical materialist to riff off of the 20th century's most adept Christian apologist.

Being provoked to find out just how/if Zizek can pull that off--having one's desire to "Learn, learn, learn!" revved by the prospect, and enduring (enjoying?) the crass and weird moments in order to arrive at the rewarding idea is not only not Bolshevik, it often has the potential to be one of the most engaging experiences in modern political thought. That's not "Deadly," it's lively--as long as one is not indifferent to technique when analyzing the essence of that experience.

It's interesting to think that, as the balance reports are being drawn up on multiple social and political fronts this week--race, feminism, the GOP, Aniston vs. Jolie--we've reached a point where we can almost include the New Atheism in that bunch.  With the release of Bill Maher's Religulous, it looks like it may be time for the Four Horsemen (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris) to saddle up another stallion for their deserving amigo. 

Maher is politically a pretty hit-or-miss liberal, but the times he hits are almost always when he's the most trenchant about religion.  That's what makes Religulous something better than another entry into the vogue snooty political theater of the left.  Sure Maher is snooty, the message has political ramifications and it's being shown in actual theaters.  But whereas it's hardly novel to call Bush a weenie, decry the War in Iraq, or complain about the food industry, it is still relatively rare to see a well-known celebrity uncompromisingly skewer religion.  When Sarah Palin is announcing that her 2012 bid will have God's stamp of approval, one Religulous is worth 750 billion Super Size Me's and Fahrenheit 9/11's. 

Stylistically, its a familiar travelogue documentary with splashes of Bill's biography and plenty of on-site provocateuring in the mold of Borat and/or Michael Moore.  Substantively, it's a litany of layman's atheism punctuated by a materialist fire-and-brimstone rant at the end.  That it can be referred to as layman's atheism is what makes this film worthwhile.  It's always been a bogus charge that the New Atheism isn't that new.  The piling up of data from studies in genetics, neuroscience, and cosmology has in fact produced new arguments against many of the worlds most deeply cherished religious tenets.  But those arguments, even when written in eloquent and relatable popular science terms by folks like the talented Daniel Dennett, can be hard to follow.  That's where Bill Maher comes in. 

Maher isn't giving kitchen table explanations of the readiness potential in neuronal axons, nor is he explaining how Darwin's theory of natural selection works.  He's just thinking with his guts most of the time; asking obvious questions about obviously silly things.  And until our basic level of scientific literacy catches up with the times, it's important that there be somebody doing this.  Is Religulous a particularly brilliant film?  No.  Is it even above average?  Not really--not as a film it isn't.  But it's a competent, entertaining expose on matters of an above average level of urgency. 

There is one basic argument that the Horsemen and Maher have in common.  Religion, even at its most moderate, encourages smart people do discard their rational thought in favor of faith.  We entrust our leaders with firepower enough to blow up the world, hoping that they will be rational actors.  Yet we, along with our enemies who also seek this firepower, actively nurture and defend this thing which causes people to discard their rationality.  It's a sort of new take on mutually assured destruction--call it religiously assured destruction.  But whereas MAD theoretically would keep nuclear hostilities in gridlock mode, RAD has the dangerous quality of exacerbating the last several decades of nuclear tension. 

This anti-end times gospel may be old hat to some, but many still need to hear it.  Maher may sound and look like a typical fire-and-brimstone preacher in the film's last minutes when he makes this argument amidst scenes of mushroom clouds and explosions.  But that heathen sermon, if heeded, could actually save the world.  That's a lot more than you can say for the sentinels of snooty liberal political theater and their collective output combined.