1300 187 187
Totalitarianism has always had a precise strategic function: to guarantee the liberal democratic hegemony by dismissing the Leftist critique of liberal democracy as the two-faced twin of Right-wing dictatorships. Instead of providing yet another systematic exposition of the history of this notion, Zizek looks at totalitarianism in a way that Wittgenstein would approve of - finding it a cobweb of family resemblances. He reveals the consensus view of totalitarianism, in which it is invariably defined in terms of four things: the holocaust as the ultimate, diabolical evil; the Stalinist gulag as the alleged truth of the socialist revolutionary project; the recent wave of ethnic and religious fundamentalisms to be fought through multiculturalist tolerance; and the deconstructionist idea that the ultimate root of totalitarianism is the ontological closure of thought. Zizek concludes that the devil lies not so much in the detail but in what enables the very designation totalitarian: the liberal-democratic consensus itself.
| Introduction: On Ideological Antioxidants | p. 1 |
| The Myth and Its Vicissitudes | p. 8 |
| Hamlet before Oedipus | |
| The birth of beauty out of the object | |
| From comedy to tragedy | |
| The myth of postmodernity | |
| 'Thrift, thrift, Horatio!' | |
| Agape-The enigma of/in the Other | |
| Hitler as Ironist? | p. 61 |
| Was the Holocaust diabolical Evil? | |
| Laugh yourself to death! | |
| The Muslim | |
| Beneath tragedy and comedy | |
| When the Party Commits Suicide | p. 88 |
| 'The Power of the Powerless' | |
| The Communist sacrifice | |
| Stalin-Abraham against Bukharin-Isaac | |
| Stalinist jouissance | |
| Lenin versus Stalin | |
| When discourse implodes | |
| Excursus: Shostakovich and the resistance to Stalinism | |
| The radical ambiguity of Stalinism | |
| Melancholy and the Act | p. 141 |
| Lack is not the same as loss | |
| 'Post-secular thought?' No, thanks! | |
| The Other: Imaginary, symbolic, and real | |
| The ethical act: Beyond the reality principle | |
| A plea for materialist creationism | |
| The Pope Versus the Dalai Lama | |
| John Woo as a critic of Levinas: The face as a fetish | |
| Are Cultural Studies Really Totalitarian? | p. 190 |
| The burning question | |
| The two Reals | |
| The 'Third Culture' as ideology | |
| The impasse of historicism-Theoretical state apparatuses | |
| Conclusion: æ...and what are the destitute (totalitarians) for in a poetic timer?' | p. 229 |
| Notes | p. 257 |
| Index | p. 273 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
ISBN: 9781844677139
ISBN-10: 1844677133
Series: Essential Zizek Ser.
Audience:
General
Format:
Paperback
Language:
English
Number Of Pages: 288
Published: 3rd August 2011
Dimensions (cm): 19.8 x 12.9
x 2.3
Weight (kg): 0.363
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