Quote of the evening

'Religion is the Real as the impossible Thing beyond phenomena, the Thing that “shines through” phenomena in sublime experiences; atheism is the Real as grimace of reality, as the gap, the inconsistency, of reality. This is why the standard religious reproach to atheists (“But you cannot really understand what it is to believe!”) has to be turned around: our “natural” state is to believe; the truly difficult thing to grasp is the atheist position. Here one should move against the Derridean/Levinasian assertion of the kernel of religion as the belief in the impossible Real of a spectral Otherness that can leave its traces in our reality—the belief that this reality of ours is not the Ultimate Reality. Atheism is not the position of believing only in the positive (ontologically fully constituted, sutured, closed)reality; the most succinct rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu definition of atheism is precisely “religion without religion”—the assertion of the void of the Real deprived of any positive content, prior to any content, the assertion that any content is a semblance which fills in the void. “Religion without religion” is the place of religion deprived of its content, like Mallarme’s—this is atheism’s true formula—“nothing takes place but the place itself.” Although this may sound similar to the Derridean/Levinasian “Messianic Otherness,” it is its exact opposite: it is not “the inner messianic Truth of religion minus religion’s external institutional apparatuses” but, rather, the form of religion deprived of its content, in contrast to the Derridean/Levinasian reference to a spectral Otherness, which does not offer the form, but the empty content of religion. Not only do both religion and atheism insist on the Void, on the fact that our reality is not ultimate and closed—the experience of this Void is the original materalist experience, and religion,
unable to endure it, fills it in with religious content.'
diacritics / spring 2001 100-101 Zizek The Rhetoric of Power

Even if you don't agree with this guy, you have to marvel at his rhetoric like you would the unfathomable card tricks of a illusionist. Zizek the illusionsist...
There is a point in The Sublime Object of Ideology where he freaked me out with revelation: you do not know it but you do it. You practice Capitalism everyday. How do you rupture it? Stop practicing Capitalism...

Zizek on Job p102 The Rhetoric of Power

Against this temptation, one should precisely locate the true greatness of Job: contrary to the usual notion of Job, he is not a patient sufferer, enduring his ordeal with firm faith in God. On the contrary, he complains all the time, rejecting his fate (like Oedipus at Colonus, who is also usually misperceived as a patient victim resigned to his fate). When the three theologian friends visit him, their line of argumentation is the standard ideological sophistry (if you suffer, by definition you must have done something wrong, since God is just). However, their argumentation is not limited to the claim that Job must somehow be guilty: what is at stake at a more radical level is the meaning(lessness) of Job’s suffering. Like Oedipus at Colonus, Job insists on the utter meaninglessness of his suffering. As the title of Job 27 says: “Job Maintains His Integrity.” As such, the Book of Job provides what is perhaps the first exemplary case of the critique of ideology in human history, laying bare the basic discursive strategies of legitimizing suffering: Job’s properly ethical dignity resides in his persistent rejection of the notion that his suffering can have any meaning, either as punishment for his past sins or as a trial of his
faith, against the three theologians who bombard him with possible meanings. Surprisingly, God takes his side at the end, claiming that every word Job has spoken was true, while every word of the three theologians was false.

Job as ideology buster. And here I though ideology was a post-Cartesian/Kantian construct.