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However, are the terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the US: the absenc…

‘fundamentalism’, that psychotic-delirious-incestuous reassertion of religion as direct insight into the divine Real, with all the terrifying consequences that such a reassertion entails, and including the return with a vengeance of the obscene superego divinity demanding sacrifices

Alain Badiou has reflected that we live in a social space which is progressively experienced as ‘worldless’. In such a space, the only form protest can take is ‘meaningless’ violence. Even Nazi anti-Semitism, however ghastly it was, opened up a world: it described its present critical situation by …

The emptiness of contact thus has a propitious technical function as a test of the system itself

In the golden era of structuralism, Roman Jakobson deployed the notion of ‘phatic’ function, which he derived from Malinowski’s concept of phatic communion, the use of language to maintain a social relation through ritualised formulas such as greetings, chit-chat about the weather, and related formal niceties of social communication.