Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates
Liberals and conservatives proclaim the end of the American holiday from history. Now the easy games are over; one should take sides. Žižek argues 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 analyzes the fiasco of the predominant leftist response to the events.
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How to stock a protest library: with Ross Perlin's Intern Nation and Žižek's Welcome to the Desert of the Real
TIME Magazine has announced its much-anticipated person of the year, the protestor, and has included Verso's Intern Nation by Ross Perlin and Welcome to the Desert of the Real by Slavoj Žižek on their list of the movement's "canonical titles." Intern Nation is Perlin's brand-new exposé on the ballooning arena of unpaid internships, while Desert of the Real is Žižek's assessment of 9/11 and the fiasco of the predominant leftist response to the events leading up to, and after.
Other books that made TIME's list: Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and bell hooks' Ain't I a Woman.
From Tunisia to Egypt, Wisconsin, Spain and New York City, the article profiles the viral spread of international activism in the heart of empire and beyond. Add this to the growing list of insightful mainstream media pieces on the new global protest movements.
And check out TIME to read the article in full.
A Survey of Verso's Responses to 9/11
Sparing no room for nuance, the magazine covers are all reminding us that the United States—and hence the planet—is set to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, a day that not only changed the world and signaled the end of innocence and spawned a new greatest generation, but also launched a thousand new slogans with which to label that day, and inspired thousands of speeches intent on inspiring thousands more.
However, despite the horror, anger, uncertainty—and yes, for some, glee—from the damage inflicted on that momentous day, there remained, in the aftermath and up to now, a limited vocabulary within the mainstream with which to describe the events of that time and the trail of destruction that followed.
And since we aren’t anticipating a commemorative circuitous flight over the country on Air Force One with the President of the United States, we would like to offer an alternate journey—that is, a survey of Verso’s responses to 9/11:
Discussions
Begin a discussionOther books by Slavoj Žižek
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Less Than Nothing
by Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek's masterwork on the Hegelian legacy
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Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?
Undermining the liberal-democratic consensus that enables the designation of totalitarianism.by Slavoj Žižek
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Revolution at the Gates
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How to reinvent Lenin in the era of “cultural capitalism.”
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Living in the End Times
by Slavoj Žižek
Žižek analyzes the end of the world at the hands of the “four riders of the apocalypse.”
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Contingency, Hegemony, Universality
by Slavoj Žižek, Ernesto Laclau, et al.
The Hegelian legacy, Left strategy, and post-structuralism versus Lacanian psychoanalysis.
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The Idea of Communism
Edited by Slavoj Žižek, and Costas Douzinas
An all-star cast of radical intellectuals discuss the continued importance of communism.
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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)
Edited by Slavoj Žižek
Hitchcock gets onto the analyst’s couch in this extraordinary volume of case studies.
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In Defense of Lost Causes
by Slavoj Žižek
Acclaimed, adrenalin-fuelled manifesto for universal values.
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First As Tragedy, Then As Farce
by Slavoj Žižek
From the tragedy of 9/11 to the farce of the financial meltdown.
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The Plague of Fantasies
by Slavoj Žižek
The relations between fantasy and ideology, and the deluge of digital phantasms surrounding us.
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The Ticklish Subject
by Slavoj Žižek
A specter is haunting Western thought, the specter of the Cartesian subject.
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The Sublime Object of Ideology
by Slavoj Žižek
Exploring the ideologies fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society.
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The Fragile Absolute
by Slavoj Žižek
Argues that the subversive core of the Christian legacy forms the foundation of a politics of universal emancipation.
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For They Know Not What They Do
by Slavoj Žižek
The eminent philosopher explodes the roles of pleasure and desire in contemporary politics and culture.
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The Indivisible Remainder
by Slavoj Žižek
Confronts Schelling with Hegel, and illuminates popular culture and modern subjectivity.
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Virtue and Terror
by Maximilien Robespierre, and Slavoj Žižek
Robespierre’s justification of the Terror in the French Revolution.
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Lacan
Edited by Slavoj Žižek
A dazzling re-evaluation of Jacques Lacan, uncovering his hidden inspirations.
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The Metastases of Enjoyment
by Slavoj Žižek
The status of women and the role of violence in contemporary culture and politics.
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Iraq
by Slavoj Žižek
Žižek analyzes the bizarre logic used to justify the attack on Iraq.
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Mapping Ideology
Edited by Slavoj Žižek
Indispensable contemporary writing on the subject of ideology.