Slovenian film critic Slavoj Zizek is pretty much the hippest academic out there today (taking over the title from Jean Baudrillard, of course). I first discovered him through college debate, where his work is among the most cited no matter the topic. Unfortunately, his books can be tough to read, because one often has to be well-versed in the works of Marx, Lacan, and Hitchcock, among others, to make sense of them. But he is very insightful with a great sense of humor to boot, and I always enjoy reading the stuff he writes in the New York Times for a wider audience.
In an Opinion piece today entitled, “How China Got Religion,” he discusses Beijing’s pronouncement in August that Buddhist monks may not reincarnate without government permission. This order was derided in the West as a laughable excess of totalitarianism, but Zizek argues that China is actually taking a page from America’s book by ‘tolerating’ a minority culture to extinction. Although the government is officially secular, Buddhists are now encouraged to practice their religion in China, only its political teeth must be de-fanged. Thus, the order aimed at preventing the emergence of a new Dalai Lama outside of China who would be both a religious and a political leader. As Zizek concludes, “Perhaps we find China’s reincarnation laws so outrageous not because they are alien to our sensibility, but because they spill the secret of what we have done for so long: respectfully tolerating what we don’t take quite seriously, and trying to contain its political consequences through the law.”