Pope Francis Gets Boost From Leading Cultural Marxist Publisher!

Virilio is a Catholic, and he takes his Catholicism seriously enough to praise John Paul II in Verso’s Books, as here in his classic Open Sky:

With cybersexuality, you no longer divorce, you disintegrate. Proprioceptive reality suddenly becomes improper; it is all done with reciprocal distancing. . . .

. . . Thanks to the force-feedback control glove (DataGlove) and, especially, to the DataSuit, everything is ruled by lightning, and the coup de foudre of disunited lovers suddenly becomes a coup de grace. From erotic entertainment we then move on to sexual diversion and shortly to a fatal divergence – that of the reactor that set off nuclear fission.

It’s a very thin line between ecstasy and distaste for, in future, it is at the speed of electromagnetic radiation that cybernetic orgasm will occur.

In effect, if distancing brings (interactive) lovers together to the point where they manage to love those far-off as they do themselves, the gap between the wedding and the divorce will have been closed off once and for all.

By way of a provisional conclusion, let us review the early ethical reactions to this telematic mutation in sexuality. In an apostolic letter published in 1994, in honour of the International Year of the Family, Pope John Paul II declared: ‘Union and procreation cannot be artificially separated without altering the intimate truth of the conjugal act itself.’

Far from chiming in as a simple rejection of contraception or the usual repetition of the indissoluble nature of the bonds of marriage, this statement points to another major question: the question of the nature of the separating artefact. What artificial construct are we in fact talking about when even bodily union is eclipsed by a virtual telesexuality that advocates the separation of bodies and no longer just divorce?

What happens not only in the future of holy matrimony, but also to divorce, when they are not literally dissolving, not the couple, but copulation?

Now that’s one helluva question! I’ve talked about it in relation to the spread of asexuality in late modern capitalist societies, especially in Japan.

Verso Books sells out to Catholicism again.

These three examples from Verso publications, and I could keep multiplying them, are part of an interesting trend. The secular academe is not as secular as the Culture Warrior Cassandras deeply believe. In fact, they believe so deeply in the power of the nonexistent “Cultural Marxism” that they de facto believe it to be more POWERFUL than God. Their lack of faith in God does not square with my experience, especially since I reverted back to Catholicism at the afore mentioned purportedly secular state university.

I would argue that against the expectations of Cultural Warriors who are welded to narratives of decline Catholicism is leading the conversation on fundamental issues after Laudato Si’. The reversal from not too long ago is quite stunning. Whereas in the 60’s and 70’s Catholicism struggled to keep up with a triumphant Marxist critique, and it had some success (as in Johann Baptist Metz’s trenchant critiques of rotten bourgeois Christianity), now it is Marxism (on permanent decline) that’s getting back to its Christian roots (See: Kolakowski’s massive and exhaustive account in The Main Currents of Marxism).

Just imagine, when Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality: On Care for Our Common Home makes its way into the state university curriculi, as I’m convinced it will, then students from non-religious backgrounds will be asking: “What is its religious stuff and how does it connection with the bits on the economy and climate change?”

The tables are turning.

Imagine there’s no Cultural Marxists . . .