Truthout.org has reviewed Living in the End Times, calling the book a “razor-sharp analysis”:

The landscape of the world in Slavoj Žižek’s ”Living in the End Times” is dotted with incomprehensible horrors. Global ice sheets melt and various countries rush to plant their flags in order to profit from the exposed resources that lay below. TV talk shows in Indonesia feature participants in the massacre of millions of Communist sympathizers in 1966. Now respectable politicians, they proudly discuss how they were inspired by gangster movies. Local warlords and foreign armies feast on profits from coltan, diamonds, gold and copper extracted from the Congo – funding what Time Magazine called the “Deadliest War in the World,” with four million killed in the past decade. Žižek’s is not saying the end of the world is nigh … exactly. What he is saying is that there are things going on to which we are just not paying sufficient attention…

Read the full article.

As part of VPRO International’s Backlight series, broadcast in March this year, Žižek discusses many of the themes from his new book:

With thanks to Jonathan Waring, who writes about this video on his website: http://www.jonathanwaring.net

Baltimore City Paper has reviewed Living in the End Times in their latest issue, calling it “a necessary primer”:

Slavoj Žižek’s new Living in the End Times (Verso) is a necessary primer for those who would like to reboot their imaginations and, perhaps, begin to see beyond the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon to what our globalized, capitalist culture has wrought and whether there really is something, anything else over the horizon. Žižek is no Old Testament prophesying doomsayer, but rather a diagnostician of the attenuated capacities of our imagination.

“[I]t is easier,” Žižek writes, borrowing from the literary theorist Fredric Jameson, “to imagine a total catastrophe that ends all life on earth than it is to imagine real change in capitalist relations.” With a trademark mordancy, the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic from the University of Ljubljana points to the world leaders at the December 2009 global climate conference in Denmark as representative of all of us who “are unwilling and/or unable to control and regulate capital even when the survival of the human race is at stake.”

Read the full review here.

Brian Dillon reviews Living in the End Times for The Telegraph:

But it’s not merely that Žižek’s energy for self-promotion is prodigious. Rather, it’s his range that impresses – he’s equal parts forbidding theorist of the contemporary political and cultural scene, and contriver of entertainingly elaborate paradoxes. If it weren’t for the hangdog persona and residual communism, he’d be an intellectual dandy: the closest thing we have to the mock-aristocratic socialist Oscar Wilde.

Žižek, who is a professor at the University of Ljubljana, has been writing in a hectically engaging English for more than 20 years, enlivening his analysis of Marxism and psychoanalysis with sly forays into popular culture. (For example, he’s one of the smartest critics ever of Hitchcock.)

Read the full article here.

In this RSA Animate, Slavoj Zizek investigates the surprising ethical implications of charitable giving – the speech is from his keynote lecture in 2009.

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce and its follow up Living in the End Times are out now.

John McTernan reviews Slavoj’s Žižek’s Living in the End Times for the Scotsman:

Žižek’s  insight can be traced in the contours of real economic change. What then of the future? His prediction was two-fold. That western political elites will maintain a sense of permanent economic emergency —  a crisis being too good to waste. And that future is a vision of Singapore or Berlusconi. Not a pretty thought.  His answer? A 21st century communism.

That is of course a glorious, impractical dream. But the inspiring part of it is Žižek’s refusal to accept the inevitability of a settlement in which pensions, wages, working condition, welfare get systematically poorer although the country we live in gets richer. His is an argument based on a stark analysis of how deeply defeated progressives truly are today, yet he still gloriously says “No” to those who say this is inevitable. In that refusal is hope and that is the beginning of the fightback.

The full article is available for Scotsman’s subscribers here

Slavoj Žižekis interviewed by Stuart Jeffries about his new book Living in the End Times for the Guardian Comment is Free site. See the video here.

For more Žižek on the Verso UK blog, see here.

Žižek contributes to the Southbank Centre’s Literature & Spoken Word Blog:

TWO TYPES OF OFF-SHORE DRILLING

On May 11 2010, the executives of the three companies involved in the Gulf oil disaster — BP, Transocean and Halliburton — who testified before the US Senate got involved in a ridiculous game of blaming each other worthy of a Magritte painting…

Read the full post here.

Watch part 1 of Žižek with Alex Callinicos and John Holloway at Marxism 2010 here.