Living in the End Times

Resumen del libro

Zizek analyzes the end of the world at the hands of the four riders of the apocalypse

There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. Slavoj Zizek has identified the four horsemen of this coming apocalypse: the worldwide ecological crisis; imbalances within the economic system; the biogenetic revolution; and exploding social divisions and ruptures.

But, he asks, 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, Zizek 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. Or, as Mao Zedong put it, There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent. Slavoj Zizek 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, Zizek 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.

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.