Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion

Zizek, Slavoj

ISBN 10: 1859847927 / ISBN 13: 9781859847923

Published by Verso, 2001

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion
• Publisher: Verso
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1859847927
• ISBN 13: 9781859847923
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

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.  Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? 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.

About the Author

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 Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, In Defense of Lost Causes, four volumes of the Essential Žižek, and many more.