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Slavoj Žižek
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Living in the End Times Paperback – July 10, 2018

by Slavoj Zizek (Author)
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The celebrated philosopher explores the end of global capitalism at the hands of its key drivers—the ‘4 riders of the apocalypse’—in this analysis “of fierce brilliance” (Guardian).
 
There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. Slavoj Žižek has identified the 4 horsemen of this coming apocalypse: the worldwide ecological crisis; imbalances within the economic system; the biogenetic revolution; and exploding social divisions and ruptures. But if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it possible for Western society to face up to the end times?
 
In a major new analysis of our global situation, Žižek argues that our collective responses to economic Armageddon correspond to the stages of grief: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and withdrawal.

After passing through this zero-point, we can begin to perceive the crisis as a chance for a new beginning. Slavoj Žižek shows the cultural and political forms of these stages of ideological avoidance and political protest, from New Age obscurantism to violent religious fundamentalism. Concluding with a compelling argument for the return of a Marxian critique of political economy, Žižek also divines the wellsprings of a potentially communist culture—from literary utopias like Kafka’s community of mice to the collective of freak outcasts in the TV series Heroes.
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  1. Print length
    528 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Verso
  4. Publication date
    July 10, 2018
  5. Dimensions
    5.5 x 1.3 x 8.25 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    178663080X
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1786630803
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“The result is, as usual, a compendium of long passages of fierce brilliance . . . Žižek is consistently penetrating.”
—Steven Poole, Guardian

“Never ceases to dazzle.”
—Brian Dillon, Daily Telegraph

“The thinker of choice for Europe’s young intellectual vanguard . . . to witness Žižek in full flight is a wonderful and at times alarming experience, part philosophical tightrope-walk, part performance-art marathon, part intellectual roller-coaster ride.”
—Sean O'Hagan, Observer

“Wide-ranging, often revelatory, frequently bewildering.”
—Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph

“A giddying combination of exhilaration and perplexity, an addictive high-speed chase with bewildering changes in terrain that for the reader necessitate multiple gear shifts, sudden U-turns, three- and four-point turns, elegant loops and impossibly narrow angles to negotiate.”
—Irish Left Review

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

“Such passion, in a man whose work forms a shaky, cartoon rope-bridge between the minutiae of popular culture and the big abstract problems of existence, is invigorating, entertaining and expanding enquiring minds around the world.”
—Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph

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.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Verso; Reprint edition (July 10, 2018)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 528 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 178663080X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1786630803
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.3 x 8.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:

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Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek

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"The most dangerous philosopher in the West," (says Adam Kirsch of The New Republic) Slavoj Zizek 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 "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce;" "Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle;" "In Defense of Lost Causes;" "Living in the End Times;" and many more.

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4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
127 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Birte Gam-jensen
5.0 out of 5 stars All about the world of today
Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2011
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Zizek is an important and resourceful critic of our world and the way we commit politics today.
This marvelous book is firstly about the end of global capitalism but also posing the question: What if democracy is no longer a condition and a motor for the economy but an obstacle to further development of global economy? It turns out that the communism of China seems more fit to provide for the poor of the world than the capitalism of the Western world.

Zizek provides all the unpleasant truths which we have never longed to hear - such as the fact that for the past decade four million people have been killed in Congo as a result of `mafia-mining' financed by foreign companies who need the raw materials for the production of laptops and cell phones.

He also has the impertinence to imply that the motivation that caused Josef Fritzl to rape his daughter and keep her and her kids locked up for years is the same I-am-the-father-of-the-family-gene that drives captain von Trapp from Sound of Music.

Most of his theories are chocking and plausible and one can only envy the capability to elegantly include an amazing number of theorists (Marx, Hegel, Kant, Lacan), the philosophy behind the newest movies, politics and literature - and the ability to make it work simultaneously as edutainment and provocation.
15 people found this helpful
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Boris
5.0 out of 5 stars Jouissance of the Real
Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2014
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This book will titillate any eschatologically tuned mind. His take on biotech and nuclear threat evoke Stewart Baker's Skating on Stilts (is it really surprising how to people so opposed in their general views agree on something, that by all accounts can be among the greatest achievements as well as causes of ultimate downfall of this civilization?)

Žižek touches on Dupuy's "enlightened catastrophism", a schizophrenic attitude towards reality we have no choice but to adopt despite it being barely compatible with the workings of a healthy mind, if we have any hope of surviving the future cataclysmic events we have been ourselves preparing.

In general Žižek is true to form here. The pieces on "old order" vs "universality", how it is a mistake to blame capitalism for destroying the "old worlds" are priceless. There is a plenty of very disturbing jouissance to go around in this book. It is not entertaining at all. It is truly enjoyable.
6 people found this helpful
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Gustavo Sampaio
5.0 out of 5 stars Get ready for work
Reviewed in the United States on April 3, 2020
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Reading one paragraph at a time. Occasionally reading the same paragraph multiple times. Stick with it. It’s worth it.
3 people found this helpful
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Matthew Rapaport
4.0 out of 5 stars A scholarly examination of the world's present predicament from a Marxist-Hegelian point of view
Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2016
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I've watched Slavoj Zizek through several YouTube interviews, a very articulate and animated speaker who always seems to have an unusual but common sensical slant on goings on in the world. I bought this book because I thought I might find more of the same between its covers and the title was especially interesting. But how to review this book? The author has a vast background in European social and political philosophy from Marx and Hegel (on whom he particularly rests for the grand picture) to more contemporary figures like psychiatrist/philosopher Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou (a modern French Marxist) one or the other of whom is mentioned on almost every page!

This book ranges over the entirety of Earth's present social, political, and economic space. Marx and Hegel updated to the present serve as the backdrop. Of course Freud is in there too along with a few dozen other philosophers and authors both popular and literary. Zizek brings into this business not only thinkers and writing, but film, architecture, modern art, and technological transformations. War and peace, terror, contentment, and sexual mores all fall within his gaze.

Within this scope, with every political, cultural, economic event event, philosophy, and interpretation, nothing is quite as it seems. Freedom is not free, goodness is not entirely good, nor badness all bad. Every "ism" is evil and yet highlights something important about the human condition. You name it, and Zizek will find a viewpoint that stands whatever the "it" is, on its head. Much of this would be laughable, but Zizek's viewpoints (and he takes many of them, often opposed to one another for the sake of illuminating consequences actually felt by real human beings) are not easily dismissed as fantasy. Each has something to say to us. A few struck me as unfair, perhaps contrived, but that would be reading my own personal political and social biases into what I know of history and psychology. None of his varied perspectives lack force. Perhaps there is an over emphasis here or an under-emphasis there, but who is to say if it is I or he who has the greater insight into the true weight of it? It is clear that he is very well read and deeply thinks about all that he encounters.

Does he ever answer the question? Are we living in the end times? I think, if you mean the end of biological humanity as such the answer would be no (unless someone triggers a global thermonuclear war). But if you mean the end of life as it is presently known and understood, the answer is probably yes. What will it be that gets us? Economic exhaustion? Ecological (and so biological) collapse? Old fashioned war, or a new fashioned loss of the very center of our "selves" to virtual reality; "the Matrix" for real, not imposed by aliens but by our own economic elite and not even the elite as individuals but the system itself! Quite possibly it will be all or much of it together. Nor is he sanguine about what will follow. His view of history is pessimistic. Civilizations and political systems come and they go and when they go what replaces them, while perhaps different from what went before, is no less oppressive to the majority of individuals alive at the time. His is not a view of ever evolving perfection, of goodness eventually triumphing over evil, but rather more of the same, more of the mix of good and bad that makes human beings what they are now and ever will be.

In the end he reverts back to his updated Marx. The governments of Eastern Europe were evil, but what replaced them was also evil and continues to wreck its corrosive influence. Interestingly he discerns, in the political and economic patterns of the world, the further expansion and domination of capitalist-oriented systems regardless of the politics of individual nations. He in fact discerns the emergence of the "market state" from the nation state, but he never gets around to naming it. It is no doubt a mix of adaptation to the totality of the global situation, though he does loudly proclaim that for all that adaptation it is itself a part (if not the main part) of our present problem and about this he is surely correct. Oddly, for a Marxist-Hegelian, he doesn't seem to recognize its present inevitability.

This is a book of great scope. If you are interested in a dense survey of our age from the viewpoint of an updated Marxist/Hegelian "rolling on" of history written by a scholar of the highest caliber (which doesn't automatically make him right) then this is a good book for you. If you prefer a simple or unambiguous answer, then perhaps it is not.
24 people found this helpful
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Gaily
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in Canada on April 14, 2017
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Great product
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Alok
5.0 out of 5 stars All good except if you choose to order from PBC.
Reviewed in India on April 8, 2016
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Brilliant read.
Just wouldn't purchase anything from PBC Distributors. Had a terrible experience.
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Cristina
5.0 out of 5 stars El manejo de la filosofía el psicoanálisis, la sociología revelan la miseria del pensamiento político post moderno
Reviewed in Spain on July 27, 2013
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Me gusto todo el contenido. El autor tiene un manejo magistral de la realidad contemporánea y demuestra la total ausencia de la ética en el ejercicio del poder. Por esta razón estamos viviendo el fin de los tiempos. Recomendado a todos los profesores universitarios de Teoría del Estado y Gobernabilidad
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TheMrs
5.0 out of 5 stars Philosohy turned prophecy
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 14, 2011
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How does he do it? Using the Fritzl case as a cipher for the worst exigencies of paternalistic capitalism, Zizek unrolls his deftly-woven carpet in the middle of the bazaar to shock and awe us complacent consumers out of our revery. Come out of the cellar and experience reality ... The blend of psychoanalytic method, classic and post-Modern philosophy to emphasise the undoing of economy-based civilisation is a narrative in itself. And quite the most readable of his work so far.
7 people found this helpful
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yelloworange
4.0 out of 5 stars もはや時評どころではない、か？
Reviewed in Japan on September 15, 2010
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In Defense of Lost Causesぐらいから、ほぼ毎年1，2冊のペースで政治時評的な本を出し続けているジジェクの、2010年現在で最新のものです。最近の講演によれば、ここまで時評をずっと書いてきたが、今はThe Sublime Object of Ideologyや、The Ticklish Subjectのようなもっと理論的な、ヘーゲルを主題としたものを書いていて、すでに700ページを越えていてまだ終わっていない、ということです。本書もすでに400ページあって、時評だけでなく、とくにBargaining（取引）と題された章では、私のような素人では読むのが大変なマルクス論が展開されていて、このあたりが次の本への序章なのかな、と想像しています。全体はキューブラー・ロスの、人はどう死を迎えるか、という理論の、否認―怒り―取引―抑うつ―受容、の5段階が章のタイトルになっていて、各章の間に、もう少し軽い、映画や建築（横浜の大桟橋についてもちょっと触れています）などについての文章が「間奏」として挿んであります。キリスト教に関する記述が多いこともこの本の特徴なのかもしれません。終章はカフカの『歌姫ヨゼフィーネ、あるいは二十日鼠族』、サティの家具の音楽などに触れながら、このあたりの芸術が好きな人には楽しい読み物になっています。
7 people found this helpful
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