[...]... aufgehoben in singularity, not the other way round So what about a more Kierkegaardian betrayal—not of the individual for the sake of the universality, but of the universality itself for the sake of the singular point of exception (the “religious suspension of the ethical”)? Furthermore, what about “pure” betrayal, betrayal out of love, betrayal as the ultimate proof of love? And what about self-betrayal:... through my others, the betrayal of the beloved other is the betrayal of myself Is not such a betrayal part of every difficult ethical act of decision? One has to betray one’s innermost core; as Freud did in Moses and Monotheism, where he deprives the Jews of their founding figure Judas is the “vanishing mediator” between the original circle of the Twelve Apostles and Saint Paul, founder of the universal... repressed!” In short: you are caught naked, you are not covered by the signifier .And what if this is the fundamental message of monotheism—not the reduction of the Other to the One, but, on the contrary, the acceptance of the fact that the binary signifier is always-already missing? This imbalance between the One and its “primordially repressed” counterpart is the radical difference, in contrast to the. .. Buddhism and Christianity : Love desires personality; therefore love desires division It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces .This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; what for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea The world-soul... the philosopher of the One), radical difference is the difference of the One with regard to itself, the noncoincidence of the One with itself, with its own place.This is why Christianity, precisely because of the Trinity, is the only true monotheism: the lesson of the Trinity is that God fully coincides with the gap between God and man, that God is this gap—this is Christ, not the God of beyond separated... Spirit: The Holy Spirit is the entry of the signifier into the world This is certainly what Freud brought us under the title of death 9 the puppet called theology drive.”9 What Lacan means, at this moment of his thought, is that the Holy Spirit stands for the symbolic order as that which cancels (or, rather, suspends) the entire domain of “life”—lived experience, the libidinal flux, the wealth of emotions,... country and the entire world Instead of believing through the other, like all people of culture, they really believed in their own religion, and thus had no great sensitivity toward the cultural value of the 7 introduction monuments of other religions—to them, the Buddha statues were just fake idols, not “cultural treasures.” One commonplace about philosophers today is that their very analysis of the hypocrisy... gaze which simply lets things be, abandoning the urge to control them However, although the message of Buddhism is one of inner peace, an odd detail in the act of consecration of the Buddha’s statues throws a strange light on this peace.This act of consecration consists of painting the eyes of the Buddha.While painting these eyes, the artist cannot look the statue in the face, but works with his back... monotheism, however, really that of the multitude and its oppressive “totalization” by the (“phallic”) exclusionary One? What if, on the contrary, it is polytheism which presupposes the commonly shared (back)ground of the multitude of gods, while it is only monotheism which renders thematic the gap as such, the gap in the Absolute itself, the gap which not only separates (the one) God from Himself, but... not the difference between positive entities, but difference “as such.” Thus monotheism is the only logical theology of the Two: in contrast to the multitude which can display itself only against the background of the One, its neutral ground, like the multitude of figures against the same background (which is why Spinoza, the philosopher of the multitude, is, quite logically, also the ultimate monist, the . The Puppet and the Dwarf Short Circuits Slavoj Z ˇ izˇek, editor The Puppet and the Dwarf :The Perverse Core of Christianity, by Slavoj Z ˇ izˇek The Shortest Shadow:Nietzsche’s Philosophy of. Philosophy of the Two, by Alenka Zupanicˇicˇ The Puppet and the Dwarf The Perverse Core of Christianity Slavoj Z ˇ izˇek The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2003 Massachusetts. new: the point is, rather, to make him or her aware of another—disturbing—side of some- thing he or she knew all the time. Slavoj Z ˇ izˇek series foreword The Puppet and the Dwarf introduction The