9781844677023-living-in-the-end-times-nip

Living in the End Times

by Slavoj Žižek

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Žižek 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 Žižek 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, Žižek 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.

For this edition, Žižek has written a long afterword that leaves almost no subject untouched, from WikiLeaks to the nature of the Chinese Communist Party.

Paperback, 520 pages

ISBN: 9781844677023

April 2011

$22.95 / £12.99 / $28.50CAN

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Reviews

  • The most dangerous philosopher in the West.

    – Adam Kirsch, The New Republic

  • Fierce brilliance … scintillating.

    – Steven Poole, The Guardian

  • Žižek is to today what Jacques Derrida was to the 80s: the thinker of choice for Europe’s young intellectual vanguard.

    – The Observer

  • Such passion, in a man whose work forms a shaky, cartoon rope-bridge between the minutiae of popular culture and the big abstract problems of existence, is invigorating, entertaining and expanding enquiring minds around the world.

    – Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph

  • Žižek weaves together psychoanalytic and historical materialist theories with great panache.

    – Social Text

Blog

"Democracy must be reinvented"—Žižek on Occupy & the Arab Spring

Slavoj Zizek in an interview for Germany's Deutsche Welle television, talking about Occupy, communism and the need for a reinvention of democracy. 

By Tamar Shlaim / 04 January 2012 / 3 comments

Slavoj Žižek on the Occupy movement for Al Jazeera— videos and transcript

Slavoj Žižek has been interviewed by Al Jazeera to give his unique perspective on the tumultuous changes happening in the world financial and political systems. In an extensive conversation with Tom Ackerman, Žižek discussed the Arab Spring, London Riots and the Occupy movement, as well as the various financial and political crises across the world from Europe to India. Throughout the discussion, Žižek explored the themes of violence across the political spectrum and his irresistible desire to provoke friends and enemies alike.

Visit Al Jazeera to view the interview in situ.

 Žižek also visited St Marks bookshop to discuss his views on the Occupy Wall Street protest.

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By Kishani Widyaratna / 01 November 2011 / post comment

Shooting Žižek—and the winner is...

We're delighted to announce that the winner of the Shooting Žižek short film competition is...

Jamie Jones & Liam Saint Pierre, for The Last Capitalist. 

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By Tamar Shlaim / 31 October 2011 / post comment

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Discussions

Begin a discussion about this book

  • Zizek and the critique of political economy

    Against his friend and comrade Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek has been arguing strongly for the need for a return to Marx's critique of political economy—as borne out by his engagement with value theory and Moishe Postone's work in Living in the End Times. But what are we to make of Zizek's own understanding of value theory, when he claims that, strictly speaking from a Marxist perpective, Chavez's Venezuela is "exploiting" the US through oil rents?

    3 responses

  • Fetishization and Reification,  Human Constants or the Particular Products of Capitalism?

    Grappling with Marx's theoretical dilemma on whether class struggle is the product of capitalism, coterminus with it or its condition, Zizek suggests that this same dilemma illuminates the difference between Lukác's History and Class Consciousness and Adorno & Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, wherein he latter authors "cut [the] link" (that Lukác maintains) between fetichization and reification on one hand and captitalism on the other, considering them products of "instrumental reason" (e.g. using people as a means to an ends), "...which functions as a kind of a priori of thewhole of human history but no longer rooted in any concrete historical formations. The over-arching totality is thus no longer that of capitalism, or commodity production : capitalism itself becomes one of the manifestations of instrumental reason." (p. 204)

    This problem is resolved if we merely extend our notion of "human history" to go back to Pleistocene (hunter-gatherer) times and follow it through the agricultural revolution and the dawn of civilization, viz. citification, the creation of cities. Hunter-gatherer cultures are dominated by scarcity of the means of survival. There is a social hierarchy, but it is not based on possessions, because most daytime activity is devoted to the search for food. Once agriculture is discovered, however, a few milenia after the last glacial maximum around 12,000 years ago, there is surplus production, permitting substantial population grown and eventually leading to the establishment of cities, around six or seven thousand years ago. With surplus production comes the accumulation of wealth, the creation of classes (workers, owners, priests, etc.), the establishment of chiefdoms and then city-states, and finally conquest, as some city-states covet the resources of their neighbors, devote a certain amount of their surplus to military materiel, and gobble up their neighbors.
     
    It is an abstract nicety to call the motivations for these appropriations "instrumental reason." They could also be called greed, covetousness, or imperial arrogance. In any case, they only arise when there is surplus, and the first sustained surpluses in human history (starting at least 40,000 years ago and not 5,000 years ago) come with the invention of agriculture.

    Capitalism from this perspective is merely a concentration, institutionalization, mechanization, and acceleration of organizations based on technological advances and greatly expanded populations, to produce exponentially more surplus value and its resultant accumulation, and finally engendering the inequality and suffering that we are so familiar with, and which motivated Marx to deconstruct it.

    So Adorno & Horkheimer had the right intuition; they simply lacked the expanded perspective in pre-history to concretize it.

    0 responses

  • Mistake

    On page 247, when Prof. Zizek speaks of the architecture in communist Albania, there are two mistakes I would like to point out. First, the number of bunkers build by the regime for military purposes is 700,000 and secondly, the population of Albania (as of 2010 when the book was written) was 3.1 million people.
    - Elian Gjini

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