Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism

by Slavoj Zizek

Overview

One of our most famous, most combative philosophers explains how we can find a way out of the crisis of capitalism
 
There is obviously trouble in the global capitalist paradise. But why do we find it so difficult to imagine a way out of the crisis we're in? It is as if the trouble feeds on itself: the march of capitalism has become inexorable, the only game in town.
 
Setting out to diagnose the condition of global capitalism, the ideological constraints we are faced with in our daily lives, and the bleak future promised by this system, Slavoj Žižek explores the possibilities—and the traps—of new emancipatory struggles.
 
Drawing insights from phenomena as diverse as “Gangnam Style” to Marx, The Dark Knight to Thatcher, Trouble in Paradise is an incisive dissection of the world we inhabit, and the new order to come.


“Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than Slavoj Žižek . . . One of the world’s best-known public intellectuals.” —John Gray, New York Review of Books

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781612194455
Publisher:	Melville House Publishing
Publication date:	08/18/2015
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	2 MB

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; Event; and many more.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Divided We Stand! 3

1 Diagnosis: Hors D'oeuvre? 21

Crisis, what crisis?

Breaking eggs without getting an omelette

Now we know who John Gait is!

Being-towards-debt as a way of life

2 Cardiognosis: Du Jambon Cru? 59

Freedom in the clouds

Vampires versus zombies

The cynic's naivety

The obscene underside of the Law

Superego; or, the prohibited prohibition

3 Prognosis: Un Faux-Filet, Peut-Être? 103

Deaths on the Nile

Demands … and more

The fascination of suffering

Rage and depression in the global village

Mamihlapinatapei

Lenin in Ukraine

4 Epignosis: J'ai Hâte De Vous Servir! 163

Back to the economy of gift

The wound of Eurocentrism

A, not G flat

Towards a new Master

'The right of distress'

Appendix: Nota Bene! 219

Batman, Joker, Bane

Traces of Utopia

Violence, which violence?

Weathermen's family values

Out of malttukbakgi

Notes 245

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Slavoj Žižek
 
“Žižek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation.”
—The New Yorker
 
“Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than Slavoj Žižek . . . One of the world’s best-known public intellectuals.”
—John Gray, New York Review of Books
 
“The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in many decades.”
—Terry Eagleton

“[A] great provocateur and an immensely suggestive and even dashing writer . . . Žižek writes with passion and an aphoristic energy that is spellbinding.”
—Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher