Series: Žižek's Essays

Against Progress invites readers to define 'progress' and stake a claim on the future. Seminal thinker Slavoj Žižek adopts an essayist approach to explore competing visions that shape human possibilities, asking whether things, which have never seemed worse, can indeed get better. What would constitute a better world? And how can we advance amidst the constant challenges posed by doomers,...

The essays in Zero Point ask how we distinguish defeat from disaster, and how we confront despair without collapsing into it—questions never more pertinent than the current moment in the wake of electoral victories for authoritarian populists and unceasing news of violent atrocities. The 'zero-point' of the title is ground level, rock bottom, the place to which one retreats and...

With an apparently contradictory and characteristically makeshift term, ‘Liberal Fascisms’, Slavoj Žižek captures the paradoxical nature of political populism. To see this phenomenon as purely liberal and dictatorially fascistic is to expose liberalism and fascism as two sides of the same coin. The concept offers a glimpse into the murky landscape of half-lies and double-truths that Žižek enters in this...

The old liberal world order is dying and yet new realities are consistently stillborn. We are, as Slavoj Žižek argues in this arresting new book, stuck in time with only the 'morbid phenomena' of Gramsci's chilling words for company: 'the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid phenomena appears'. These...