{"product_id":"did-somebody-say-totalitarianism-isbn-9781844677139","title":"Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?","description":"In some circles, a nod towards totalitarianism is enough to dismiss any critique of the status quo. Such is the insidiousness of the neo-liberal ideology, argues Slavoj Žižek. \u003ci\u003eDid Somebody Say Totalitarianism?\u003c\/i\u003e turns a specious rhetorical strategy on its head to identify a network of family resemblances between totalitarianism and modern liberal democracy. Žižek argues that totalitarianism is invariably defined in terms of four things: the Holocaust as the ultimate, diabolical evil; the Stalinist gulag as the alleged truth of the socialist revolutionary project; ethnic and religious fundamentalisms, which are to be fought through multiculturalist tolerance; and the deconstructionist idea that the ultimate root of totalitarianism is the ontological closure of thought. Žižek concludes that the devil lies not so much in the detail but in what enables the very designation totalitarian: the liberal-democratic consensus itself.“The ferociously productive Slovenian philosopher now takes up one of those heavy, predictable, unpromising topics—totalitarianism—and manages to produce a whirling carnival of political critique, cultural interpretations, and ornery bombast.”—\u003ci\u003eNew Political Science\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“As an alternative to the current post-modernist cult of cynicism and retreat into islands of privacy and nihilism ... the five essays making up \u003ci\u003eDid Somebody Say Totalitarianism?\u003c\/i\u003e insist on the social link and offer the visionary strength for resistance against all forms of totalized explanations.”—\u003ci\u003eWorld Literature Today\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This attempt to rethink the conditions of radical political action is one of a number of signs that, after the doldrums of the 1980s and 1990s, left-wing thought is beginning to revive. It will be fascinating to follow where the flood of eloquence and imagination next sweeps Slavoj Žižek.”—\u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Žižek is an entertaining writer who would command attention if he were just describing how to mix cement. He wastes no time in tilting at the taken-for-granted ... Žižek wants to find the cracks in the notion of totalitarianism and fill them with dynamite.”—\u003ci\u003eTimes Higher Education Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eSlavoj Žižek\u003c\/b\u003e is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include \u003ci\u003eLiving in the End Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eFirst as Tragedy, Then as Farce\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eIn Defense of Lost Causes\u003c\/i\u003e, four volumes of the Essential Žižek, and many more.","brand":"Verso","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302400315621,"sku":"NP9781844677139","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781844677139.jpg?v=1767725097","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/did-somebody-say-totalitarianism-isbn-9781844677139","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}