A Greimas rectangle for a new New Atheism

Abstract

This paper deploys a diagrammatic tool pioneered by structuralist AJ Greimas and developed by Frederic Jameson to explicate the atheism of Slavoj Žižek. Reading the Greimas rectangle as capable of creating dynamic concepts (rather than simply mapping static structures of meaning), I show Žižek’s atheism to be an intellectual inversion of Blaise Pascal’s famous Wager. In light of contemporary criticisms of New Atheist thinkers for adopting a kind of secular fundamentalism, I argue that the Greimas rectangle can point towards novel forms of atheism that maintain open or incomplete ontologies less prone to supporting fundamentalist ideologies.