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Is global emancipation a lost cause? Are universal values outdated relics of an earlier age? In this combative major new work, philosophical sharpshooter Slavoj Zizek takes on the reigning ideology with a plea that we should re-appropriate several “lost causes,” and looks 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.”
Highlighting the revolutionary terror of Robespierre, Mao and the Bolsheviks, Zizek argues that while these struggles ended in historic failure and monstrosity, this is not the entire story. There was, 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. Zizek 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.”
Praise for In Defense of Lost Causes:
“The most dangerous philosopher in the West.” — Adam Kirsch, 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
“A wealth of political and philosophical insight.” — Terry Eagleton, The Times Literary Supplement
“Zizek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation.” — New Yorker
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 other books from Verso include Mapping Ideology, The Sublime Object of Ideology, For They Know Not What They Do, The Indivisible Remainder. Essays on Schelling and Related Matters, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, and The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Is Worth Fighting For?
Cloth: May 2008
Paper: October 2009
528 pages
Cloth
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 108 3
US$34.95 / £19.99 / CAN$38.50
Paper
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 4429 9
US$19.95 / £12.99 / CAN$31
