Zizek explores the relations between fantasy and the intensifying antagonism between the ever greater abstraction in our lives – whether through digitalization or the market – and the deluge of pseudo-concrete images which surround us. Traditional critical thought traces the connections between abstract notions and concrete social reality: but today, Zizek suggests, the correct procedure is the inverse … to work from pseudo-concrete imagery towards the abstract.

Ranging in his examples from national differences in toilet design to cybersex, and from intellectuals’ responses to the Bosnian war to Robert Schumann's music, Zizek explores the relations between fantasy and ideology, the way in which fantasy animates enjoy-ment while protecting against its excesses, the associations of the notion of fetishism with fantasized seduction, and the ways in which digitalization and cyberspace affect the status of subjectivity. To the already initiated, The Plague of Fantasies will be a welcome reminder of why they enjoy Zizek's writing so much.

Slavoj Zizek 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.

 

 

 Publication
January 2009

Series:
The Essential Zizek

272 paqes

Paper
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 303 2
US$22.95 / £12.99 /CAN$25