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For Slavoj Žižek, God is a concept, but a substantively empty one. He is the ghost in the literal sense, a haunting memory. However, for Žižek, “a materialist through and through,” one should pass through the sea of Christianity to the banks of materialism because, “Christianity is accessible only to a materialist approach—and vice versa: to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian experience.” 1 So what waters does he have in mind? What, for instance, does Žižek think about the central Christian doctrine of the atonement? On this topic, Žižek focuses on Paul. He sees Paul as a proto-marxist, a “radical Jew” 2 who ignores Christ as teacher and organizes the church in terms of event (crucifixion and resurrection). As such, Paul is the institutionalizer of the atonement. 3 The atonement, according to Žižek, is not the resolution of the problem of human sin. Indeed, there is really no such thing in the traditional sense. According to Žižek, evil...

How can we know what is real? In the wake of 9/11 many philosophers offered interpretations of the event from their own perspective of reality. Marxist philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, claimed that 9/11 was an event which woke America up. America, he wrote, has been awakened, like Neo in The Matrix to, using the phrase Morpheus used, “the desert of the real.” Americans, Žižek argued, were, before 9/11, like Truman in the movie, The Truman Show 1 – living in “ the late capitalist consumerist Californian paradise...in its very hyper-reality, in a way ireal, substances, deprived of the material inertia. ” 2