Notes

Salvageable sentences?
It is in this context that contemporary critical theorists, like Žižek and French philosopher Alain Badiou, have attempted to understand the often contradictory relationship between religion and capitalism, provoking novel interpretations of Christianity that seek to detach its transformative legacy from capitalism’s capacity to appropriate all.

Despite the recent revival of religious-theological inquiry, especially with regards to Christianity, critical theorists have failed to engage with Buddhism as a spiritual system with transformative potential.

To understand this idea of difference, it may be useful to return to one of the founders of the influential French College of Sociology and renowned philosopher and writer Georges Bataille. Bataille writes about the three different ways an individual can respond to a transgressive work of philosophy: 1) to reject it, 2) to internalize it after washing away everything that makes the work transgressive or radical, or 3) to understand and negotiate with that which makes the work different, to “[respect] the heterogeneity of [its] thought, a thought that is of and at the limit” (Noys 4).

Additionally, he argues that Buddhism ends up reproducing the problem of the “global balanced cosmic Order.”