Böcker av Slavoj (Birkbeck Institute for Humanities Zizek

This second book in Zizek's Essays sees Slavoj Zizek utilise Lenin's 'zero point' formula as model for responding to the antagonisms of the global order.

In this first book in the new series Zizek's Essays, Slavoj Zizek asks readers to disrupt fake notions of progress in order to fight for something authentically better.

Contemporary life is defined by excess. There must always be more, there is never enough. We need a surplus to what we need to be able to truly enjoy what we have. Slavoj Zizek's guide to surplus (and why it's enjoyable) begins by arguing that what is surplus to our needs is by its very nature unsubstantial and unnecessary. But, perversely, without this surplus, we wouldn't be able to enjoy, what is substantial and necessary. Indeed, without the surplus we wouldn't be able to identify what was the perfect amount. Is there any escape from the vicious cycle of surplus enjoyment or are we forever doomed to simply want more? Engaging with everything from The Joker film to pop songs and Thomas Aquinas to the history of pandemics, Zizek argues that recognising the society of enjoyment we live in for what it is can provide an explanation for the political impasses in which we find ourselves today. And if we begin, even a little bit, to recognise that the nuggets of 'enjoyment' we find in excess are as flimsy and futile, might we find a way out?

In this study the author challenges both cognitivist-historicist accounts of cinema and conventional film-theory, arguing that the reading of Lacan operative in the 1970s and 1980s was particularly reductive. This work is the elaborated version of a series of lectures Zizek gave to the BFI in 1998.

Bringing together a selection of Slavoj Zizek's major writings on politics, this book includes his interventions on such world political events as the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the American-led invasion of Iraq, his celebration of the revolutionary potential of Stalinism, and his critique of Third Way politics.