Welcome to the Desert of the Real

Resumen del libro

In the months after September 11, titles like The End of the Age of Irony abound in our media. Liberals and conservatives proclaim the end of the American holiday from history. Now the easy games are over; one should take sides.
Zizek argues that this is precisely the temptation to be resisted. In such moments of apparently clear choices, the real alternatives are most hidden. Welcome to the Desert of the Real steps back, complicating the choices imposed on us. It proposes that global capitalism is fundamentalist and that America was complicit in the rise of Muslim fundamentalism. It points to our dreaming about the catastrophe in numerous disaster movies before it happened, and explores the irony that the tragedy has been used to legitimize torture. Last but not least it analyses the fiasco of the predominant leftist response to the events.

Slavoj Zizek is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana. His books include The Sublime Object of Ideology, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, The Plague of Fantasies and The Ticklish Subject.

Biografía del autor

Slavoj x{0026} x0017D;ix{0026} x0017E;ek (Liubliana, Eslovenia, 1949) es doctor en Filosofía e investigador del Instituto de Estudios Sociales de Liubliana, y profesor visitante en la New School for Social Research de Nueva York. Ha sido invitado a impartir clases en universidades como Université Paris-VIII, SUNY Buffalo, University of Minnesota, Tulane University, New Orleans, Columbia University, New York y Princeton University.