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In Defense of Lost Causes

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In Defense of Lost Causes

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Overview

The renowned philosophical sharpshooter looks for the kernel of truth in the fascist politics of the past—offering an adrenaline-fueled manifesto for universal values.

Is global emancipation a lost cause? Are universal values outdated relics of an earlier age? In fear of the horrors of totalitarianism, should we submit ourselves to a miserable third way of economic liberalism and government-as-administration?

In this combative major work, philosophical sharpshooter Slavoj Žižek takes on the reigning ideology with a plea that we should re-appropriate several “lost causes”—and look for the kernel of truth in the “totalitarian” politics of the past.

Examining Heidegger’s seduction by fascism and Foucault’s flirtation with the Iranian Revolution, he suggests that these were the “right steps in the wrong direction.” He argues that while the revolutionary terror of Robespierre, Mao, and the Bolsheviks ended in historic failure and monstrosity, this is not the whole story. There is, in fact, a redemptive moment that gets lost in the outright liberal-democratic rejection of revolutionary authoritarianism and the valorization of soft, consensual, decentralized politics.

Žižek claims that, particularly in light of the forthcoming ecological crisis, we should reinvent revolutionary terror and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the struggle for universal emancipation. We need to courageously accept the return to this Cause—even if we court the risk of a catastrophic disaster. In the words of Samuel Beckett: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786630797
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	05/16/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	544
Sales rank:	664,618
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, In Defense of Lost Causes, four volumes of the Essential Žižek, and many more.

Introduction Causa Locuta Roma Finita

Part I The State of Things

1 Happiness and Torture in the Atonal World 11

Human, all too human

The screen of civility

Gift and exchange

Ulysses' realpolitik

The atonal world

Serbsky Institute, Malibu

Poland as a symptom

Happy to torture?

2 The Family Myth of Ideology 52

"Capitalist realism"

The production of the couple in Hollywood...

... and out

The real Hollywood left

History and family in Frankenstein

A letter which did arrive at its destination

3 Radical Intellectuals, or, Why Heidegger Took the Right Step (Albeit in the Wrong Direction) in 1933 95

Hiding the tree in a forest

A domestication of Neitzsche

Michel Foucault and the Iranian Event

The trouble with Heidegger

Ontological difference

Heidegger's smoking gun?

Repetition and the New

Heidegger's to the drive

Heidegger's "divine violence"

Part II Lessons from the Past

4 Revolutionary Terror from Robespierre to Mao 157

"What do you want?"

Asserting the inhuman

Transubstantiations of Marxism

The limits of Mao' dialectics

Cultural revolution and power

5 Stalinism Revisited, or, How Stalin Saved the Humanity of Man 211

The Stalinist cultural counter-revolution

A letter which did not reach its destination (and therby perhaps saved the world)

Kremlinology

From objective to subjective guilt

Shostakovich in Casablanca

The Stalinist carnival...

... in the films of Sergei Eisenstein

The minimal difference

6 Why Populism Is (Sometimes) Good Enough in Practice, but Not in Theory 264

Good enough in practice...

... but not good enough in theory

The "determinig role of the economy": Marx with Freud

Drawing theline

The act

The Real

The vacuity of the politics of jouissance

Part III What Is to Be Done?

7 The Crisis of Determinate Negation 337

The humorous superego...

... and its politics of resistance

"Goodbye Mister Resisting Nomad"

Negri in Davos

Deleuze without Negri

Governance and movements

8 Alain Badiou, or, the Violence of Subtraction 381

Materialism, democratic and dialectial

Responses to the Event

Do we need a new world?

The lessons of the Cultural Revolution

Which subtraction?

Give the dictatorship of the proletariat a chance!

9 Unbehagan in der Natur 420

Beyond Fukuyama

From fear to trembling

Ecology against nature

The uses and misuses of Hiedegger

What is to be done?

Afterword to the Second Edition: What Is Divine About Divine Violence 463

Notes 489

Index 519

What People are Saying About This

Terry Eagleton

Outrageous, provocative and entertaining.

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Slavoj Žižek
“Žižek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation.”
—The New Yorker

“The giant of Ljubljana provides the best intellectual high science since Anti-Oedipus.”
—The Village Voice

“Žižek is a thinker who regards nothing as outside his field: the result is deeply interesting and provocative.”
—Guardian

“The most dangerous philosopher in the West.”
—Adam Kirsch, The New Republic

“Exhilarating, inspiring, thought-provoking.”
—David Schneider, Prospect

“Addictively eclectic . . . He contrives to leave the reader, as usual, both exhilarated and disoriented, standing in the middle of a scorched plain strewn with the rubble of smashed idols.”
—Steven Poole, The Guardian

“Outrageous, provocative and entertaining.”
—Terry Eagleton

“A monument to imaginative, risk-taking and rigorous scholarship.”
—Times Higher Education Supplement

“Žižek is one of the few living writers to combine theoretical rigor with compulsive readability.”
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

Zizek (international director, Birkbeck Inst. for the Humanities, Univ. of London; sociology, Univ. of Ljubljana, Slovenia; The Fragile Absolute) writes with humor and incisiveness as he addresses the limits of liberal democratic approaches to politics and the possibility of benefit in totalitarian approaches to statehood. Examining by turns errors made by Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Maximilien Robespierre, and other thinkers when faced with totalitarian missions, Zizek provides analysis by way of Jacques Lacan, literary deconstruction, and history's famously particular moments, such as the denouement of the the Cuban Missile Crisis. Scholars of political theory and modern philosophy will find much here to consider and argue for or against. In parts, the essays can also be used with upper-division undergraduate students. And because Zizek's work straddles the most contemporary 20th-century literature and history and is written with panache rather than in jargon, public libraries serving highly educated communities will want to add this as well.
—Francisca Goldsmith

Library Journal

A monument to imaginative, risk-taking and rigorous scholarship.

Times Higher Education Supplement

A wealth of political and philosophical insight.

Terry Eagleton - The Times Literary Supplement

The most dangerous philosopher in the West.

Adam Kirsch - The New Republic

Outrageous, provocative and entertaining.

Terry Eagleton

Addictively eclectic … He contrives to leave the reader, as usual, both exhilarated and disoriented, standing in the middle of a scorched plain strewn with the rubble of smashed idols.

Steven Poole - The Guardian

Exhilarating, inspiring, thought-provoking.

David Schneider - Prospect

A wealth of political and philosophical insight.— Terry Eagleton

The Times Literary Supplement

The most dangerous philosopher in the West.— Adam Kirsch

The New Republic

Addictively eclectic … He contrives to leave the reader, as usual, both exhilarated and disoriented, standing in the middle of a scorched plain strewn with the rubble of smashed idols.— Steven Poole

The Guardian

Exhilarating, inspiring, thought-provoking.— David Schneider

Prospect

Zizek is a thinker who regards nothing as outside his field: the result is deeply interesting and provocative.

Guardian

The giant of Ljubljana provides the best intellectual high science since Anti-Oedipus.

The Village Voice

Zizek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is a master of the counterintuitive observation.

New Yorker

In Defense of Lost Causes

In Defense of Lost Causes

Paperback(Reprint)

Paperback(Reprint)

Related collections and offers

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Table of Contents

What People are Saying About This

Customer Reviews

Related collections and offers

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Table of Contents

What People are Saying About This

Related Subjects

Customer Reviews