LIVING IN THE END TIMES
Slavoj Žižek 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 First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, In Defense of Lost Causes, four volumes of the Essential Žižek, and many, many more titles.
LIVING IN THE END TIMES
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
This revised, updated paperback edition published by Verso 2011
First published by Verso 2010
© Slavoj Žižek 2011
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-702-3
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Cochin by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the US by Bell & Bain
Contents
Introduction: “The Spiritual Wickedness in the Heavens”
Against the Tartar-Lovers—Legalists Versus Confucians—No Castes Without Outcasts—Legal Luck, or, the Loop of the Act—The Utopia for a Race of Devils—Coda: Multiculturalism, the Reality of an Illusion
Interlude 1. Hollywood Today: Report from an Ideological Battlefield
What Does the Joker Want?—The Sad Lesson of Remakes—Les non-dupes errent—The Price of Survival
2 Anger: The Actuality of the Theologico-Political
Thinking Backwards—“Nothing is forbidden in my faith”—“I did not come to bring peace, but a sword”—Guevara as a Reader of Rousseau—Slap Thy Neighbor!—The Subject Supposed Not to Know
Interlude 2. Reverberations of the Crisis in a Multi-Centric World
“The Jew is within you, but you, you are in the Jew”—Zionist Anti-Semitism—China, Haiti, Congo—Europe : US = Kant : Hegel?
3 Bargaining: The Return of the Critique of Political Economy
“Dare to win!”—In Defense of a Non-Marxist Marx—Why Masses Are Not Divided Into Classes—The Labor Theory of Value Revisited—From Hegel to Marx . . . and Back—Proletarians or Rentiers?
Interlude 3. The Architectural Parallax
Postmodernism and Class Struggle—The Incommensurability—The Envelope. . .—. . .of the Class Struggle—Spandrels
4 Depression: The Neuronal Trauma, or, the Rise of the Proletarian Cogito
Cogito Against Historicism—The Freudian Unconscious Versus the Cerebral Unconscious—The Libidinal Proletariat
Interlude 4. Apocalypse at the Gates
My Own Private Austria—The Ubuism of Power—Welcome to the Anthropocene—Versions of the Apocalypse
5 Acceptance: The Cause Regained
In 1968, Structures Walked the Streets: Will They Do So Again?—Signs From the Future: Kafka, Platonov, Sturgeon, Vertov, Satie—Violence Between Discipline and Obscenity—The Infinite Judgment of Democracy—The Agent
Afterword to the Paperback Edition: Welcome to Interesting Times!
Introduction: “The Spiritual Wickedness in the Heavens”