In Defense of Lost Causes
Buy this book:
New in paperback in October
Amazon US or Amazon UK
Powell’s Books (US)
W. W. Norton (US)
Reviews:
Terry Eagleton, Times
Brooklyn Rail
The Nation
The Guardian
“Zizek writes with humor and incisiveness as he addresses the limits of liberal democratic approaches to politics and the possibility of benefit in totalitarian approaches to statehood.” Library Journal.
“A staggeringly ambitious book, ranging — or reeling — recklessly over vast swaths of music and film, literature and psychoanalysis, history and contemporary politics.” Boston Phoenix
“Zizek’s latest book, In Defense of Lost Causes, is among his most forthrightly political interventions… He is at his best when he is provoking his readers to question the clichés that make up our worldview – particularly those that issue from the Left.” MR Zine
“Slavoj Žižek’s several dozen books have made him an international celebrity among people who care about ideas. They delve into everything from pornography and the movies of Alfred Hitchcock to the Holocaust and the psychology of belief. His brazen, freewheeling intellectual style and joke-laden writing give him a following far wider than his erudition might suggest.” San Francisco Chronicle.
Slavoj Žižek — the maverick philosopher, author of over 30 books and acclaimed as the “Elvis of cultural theory” — is today’s most controversial public intellectual. His work traverses the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory, taking in film, popular culture, literature and jokes — all to provide acute analyses of the complexities of contemporary ideology. Now, in a major new work, Žižek takes on the reigning values of postmodernism in favor of universal values, global emancipation, and other “Lost Causes.” In a bid to extract the kernel of truth from the failures of totalitarianism, IN DEFENSE OF LOST CAUSES makes a provocative case for the infamous politics of Žižek’s philosophical predecessors—from Robespierre’s revolutionary terror to Foucault’s support of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and, most controversially, Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism. Navigating this minefield with characteristic brio, Žižek touches on subjects from Alan Dershowitz and the legitimization of torture, to Tom Cruise as a figure of paternal authority, the Darwin Awards, and Michael Crichton as a purveyor of “capitalist realism.”
Žižek probes the far corners today’s intellectual milieu, from a deepened engagement with Alain Badiou, Simon Critchley, and other major thinkers on the Left; to an examination of Donald Rumsfeld and Francis Fukuyama. Arguing that liberal ideology leads to a false sense of free will, with choice as an empty gesture, Žižek calls for a leap of faith that transcends politics and embraces the possibility of a catastrophic fall: a revolutionary act that challenges the ordinary conception of history, freedom and the passage of time. Speaking to a world that is heading towards a global ecological catastrophe, Žižek reinvents the “Lost Cause” of revolutionary egalitarian terror—the only route to a radical upheaval capable of remaking our world.
Even if Great Causes are destined for resounding historical failure, IN DEFENSE OF LOST CAUSES dares us to embrace the emancipatory potential of absolute choice, and the attendant possibility of catastrophe.
