The Puppet and the Dwarf : The Perverse Core of Christianity Paperback / softback

One of our most daring intellectuals offers a Lacanian interpretation of religion, finding that early Christianity was the first revolutionary collective. Slavoj Zizek has been called "an academic rock star" and "the wild man of theory"; his writing mixes astonishing erudition and references to pop culture in order to dissect current intellectual pieties.

In The Puppet and the Dwarf he offers a close reading of today's religious constellation from the viewpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

He critically confronts both predominant versions of today's spirituality-New Age gnosticism and deconstructionist-Levinasian Judaism-and then tries to redeem the "materialist" kernel of Christianity.

His reading of Christianity is explicitly political, discerning in the Pauline community of believers the first version of a revolutionary collective.

Since today even advocates of Enlightenment like Jurgen Habermas acknowledge that a religious vision is needed to ground our ethical and political stance in a "postsecular" age, this book-with a stance that is clearly materialist and at the same time indebted to the core of the Christian legacy-is certain to stir controversy.