Thursday, September 30, 2004
(6:11 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
"Christ and Critical Theory," with comments on political strategy
Read the First Things article that says, "The current condition of cultural theory should evoke Christian pity and concern" and that prompted an angry letter from a Gauche. Since I don't really have an axe to grind about the appropriate presentation of Badiou or the fact that Lyotard is totally out, I actually found the article marginally more interesting than a Gauche's letter indicates that it is.I actually sat down with that issue of First Things at Border's and read through it, to see what the Catholic right is up to these days, and it was truly fascinating -- the same issue that called Catholics to vote for Bush almost entirely due to the judges he would appoint and that almost entirely because those judges would likely be pro-life also contained a lengthy article about why the death penalty is necessary to build a just society. (NB: the pope is completely opposed to the death penalty and has written about it at length -- and also, please note that the abolition of the death penalty is a much more realistic short- to medium-term goal than is the abolition of abortion. I have written before on the need for the Church to adopt realistic political strategies, and this is one case where I think that the current strategy of the church causes net harm, because every effort wasted on long-shot attempts to ban abortion is effort not spent freeing people from a fundamentally unjust death penalty system.)
I'm not kidding when I said it was fascinating, because these are really smart people in general -- the author of the "Critical Theory" article cites Badiou's untranslated work in French and recommends particular books for particular questions -- but the way they think is almost completely foreign to the way I think. I can see why Alfredo Perez always highlights a new issue of First Things, even though neither of us is likely to subscribe to the print version.
