The Year of Dreaming Dangerously
Call it the year of dreaming dangerously: 2011 caught the world off guard with a series of shattering events. While protesters in New York, Cairo, London, and Athens took to the streets in pursuit of emancipation, obscure destructive fantasies inspired the world’s racist populists in places as far apart as Hungary and Arizona, achieving a horrific consummation in the actions of mass murderer Anders Breivik.
The subterranean work of dissatisfaction continues. Rage is building, and a new wave of revolts and disturbances will follow. Why? Because the events of 2011 augur a new political reality. These are limited, distorted—sometimes even perverted—fragments of a utopian future lying dormant in the present.
Paperback, 142 pages
ISBN: 9781781680421
October 2012
$14.95 / £7.99 / $16.00CAN
Other Editions
Ebook
ISBN: 9781781680438
October 2012
$9.99
Reviews
-
“Such passion, in a man whose work forms a bridge between the minutiae of popular culture and the big abstract problems of existence, is invigorating, entertaining and expanding inquiring minds around the world.”
-
“A great provocateur and an immensely suggestive and even dashing writer ... Žižek writes with passion and an aphoristic energy that is spellbinding.”
-
“The thinker of choice for Europe’s young intellectual vanguard.”
-
“Zizek’s ingenious handling of culture, films, philosophy, intellectual history, personal stories, daily politics, combined with a politically incorrect wit (especially in his lectures) is truly enjoyable. This at times overwhelming combination of ideas remains unmatched in the contemporary intellectual scene.”
-
“[Žižek highlights] exciting trends in class-organization, political consciousness, cooperation, and struggle … [and] frames various victories as "signs from the future" so the necessity of inner subjective engagement with social struggle becomes clear.”
-
“His ability to fuse together Martin Heidegger's 'fundamental ontology,' Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history' and Naomi Klein's 'shock doctrine' in order to undermine our liberal and tolerant democratic structures is a practice few intellectuals are capable of.”
Blog
-
What to Read on Egypt and the Arab Spring
If 2011 saw a monumental change in the governments of the Middle East, 2012 has demonstrated that revolution takes some time, that conflict is sustained and that some of the same challenges are not consigned to history.
Protests continue in Egypt’s capital Cairo, as over one hundred thousand demonstrators have recently taken to the streets and gathered once again in Tahrir Square in opposition to dictatorial decrees by President Mohammed Morsi. With only one hundred days in power, Morsi’s fledgling tenure as president has resulted in examples of sweeping authority, transferring all executive and legislative powers from the military council to his offices.
Such actions are reminiscent of the power exercised by former President Hosni Mubarak. The on-going distrust of Morsi’s presidency returns the chant of the 2011 revolution: "The people want to bring down the regime".
These are Verso’s key titles on the challenges facing Egypt and the Middle East, where uprising continues from the hopefulness of the Arab Spring to the challenges ahead.
-
'Long Live the Dialectic', Long Live the Nothing
Steven Connor, in the Times Literary Supplement, sums up the major importance of Slavoj Žižek's ''everlasting gobstopper of a book" Less Than Nothing. In a single paragraph, Connor explains Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as the 'engorgement' of Spirit through the dialectical movement of history (spirit meets its negative antagonist in the form of matter or the material world and responds by both preserving and overcoming both thesis and antithesis through the process of sublation), the principle of the postmodernist reaction to it (denouncing the Hegelian dialectic as one of several totalising conceptions of the world that it rejects) and finally Žižek's critical thrust that manages to:
both discredit postmodernist arguments in their dependence on a dishing of Hegel, and to endorse the objections to totality that are key to those postmodernist arguments.
-
Žižek is a cool guy who doesn’t look at explosions
Why? It’s ideology, stupid. After his 1,200-page Lacanese-Hegelian philosophical treatise, Žižek has returned to his other prism—popular culture. The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, Director Sophie Fiennes new film with Žižek, premiered at the 56th BFI London Film Festival next week to a packed cinema. As I watched the 90-minute cinematic remix of various twentieth-century films including Zabriski Point, The Sound of Music, They Live, The Titanic, Seconds, Taxi Driver and more, Zizek in his characteristically witty style, expliained his concept of ideology.
Discussions
Begin a discussionOther books by Slavoj Žižek
-
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality
by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, et al. -
Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?
by Slavoj Žižek -
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)
Edited by Slavoj Žižek
-
First As Tragedy, Then As Farce
by Slavoj Žižek -
For They Know Not What They Do
by Slavoj Žižek -
The Fragile Absolute
by Slavoj Žižek
-
The Idea of Communism
Edited by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek -
The Idea of Communism 2
Edited by Slavoj Žižek -
In Defense of Lost Causes
by Slavoj Žižek
-
The Indivisible Remainder
by Slavoj Žižek -
Iraq
by Slavoj Žižek -
Lacan
Edited by Slavoj Žižek
-
Less Than Nothing
by Slavoj Žižek -
Living in the End Times
by Slavoj Žižek -
Mapping Ideology
Edited by Slavoj Žižek
-
The Metastases of Enjoyment
by Slavoj Žižek -
The Plague of Fantasies
by Slavoj Žižek -
Revolution at the Gates
by V. I. Lenin
