London Review of Books Recommends Slavoj Žižek’s ‘First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.’

LRB reviews Slavoj Žižek’s First as Tragedy, Then as Farce .

Žižek takes his title from the words of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, and uses them to characterise the two great world historical events of the first decade of the 21st century: the attacks of September 11 2001 (the ‘tragedy’) and the near-collapse of the world financial system in 2008 (the ‘farce’.)  ‘What the book offers,’ he writes in his introduction, ‘is not a neutral analysis but an engaged and extremely “partial” one – for truth is partial – accessible only when one takes sides, and no less universal for that reason.  The side taken here is, of course, that of communism.’