‘We tend to make an identity between fanaticism and fundamentalism’ – Alberto Toscano on Guardian Comment is Free video

Alberto Toscano talks about his new book Fanatisicm: On the Uses of an Idea for the Guardian Comment is Free site.

Watch the video here.

Toscano will be giving talks at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on the 25th and 26th August. More information is available here.

To see more Toscano on this blog, simply click here.

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Peter Tatchell : “The Pope talks, walks and dresses like a gay man”

From 2006 Peter Tatchell, activist and member of the LGBT rights groups, OutRage asked:

“The Pope talks like a gay man, walks like a gay man and dresses like a gay man. Some people might conclude he is a gay man.”

“If the Pope is gay, his hypocrisy is breath-taking. Why is he constantly bashing the gay community if he is gay? Is he using homophobia to deflect rumours about his own sexuality?”

See here for the article.

And for more on the debate see the new book from Verso, The Pope is Not Gay!.

See the Protest the Pope campaign site.

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Angelo Quattrocchi’s The Pope is Not Gay! reviewed in the Catholic Herald and online

The Catholic Herald’s review of Angelo Quattrocchi’s The Pope is Not Gay! finds it ” deeply offensive” (!) Read why here.

The Pope is Not Gay! is praised by the National Secular Society:

You might also want to read a fantastic new book called The Pope is Not Gay! by Angelo Quattrocchi. Published in time to do maximum damage to Ratzinger’s reputation as he visits the UK, it’s an irreverent history of homophobic and sexist obscurantism in the Holy Roman Church and an endoscopic examination of its greatest contemporary advocate, Pope Benedict XVI.

The full article is available here and you can also order their t-shirt in protest of the Pope – it bears the limpid legend ‘Pope-Nope’.

Clerical Whispers also covers the book:

The book has been rushed to press in time for the Pontiff’s forthcoming, state-funded visit to the UK between 16-19 September – which is costing tax payers £20 million.

In it, Quattrocchi – who worked as a scriptwriter for both the BBC and Channel 4 – pokes fun at the Pope’s penchant for ermine-lined hats, extravagant cassocks and red Prada shoes.

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Slavoj Žižek’s Living in the End Times reviewed for The Telegraph

Brian Dillon reviews Slavoj Žižek’s Living in the End Times for The Telegraph:

But it’s not merely that Žižek’s energy for self-promotion is prodigious. Rather, it’s his range that impresses – he’s equal parts forbidding theorist of the contemporary political and cultural scene, and contriver of entertainingly elaborate paradoxes. If it weren’t for the hangdog persona and residual communism, he’d be an intellectual dandy: the closest thing we have to the mock-aristocratic socialist Oscar Wilde.

Žižek, who is a professor at the University of Ljubljana, has been writing in a hectically engaging English for more than 20 years, enlivening his analysis of Marxism and psychoanalysis with sly forays into popular culture. (For example, he’s one of the smartest critics ever of Hitchcock.)

Though the writing never ceases to dazzle, Žižek reveals himself here, surprisingly, as something like an old-fashioned moralist.

Dillon praises Living in the End Times as “a thesis with vast geopolitical implications”, which “elaborates some of them with extraordinary wit and rigour.”

Read the full article here.

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