The Plague of Fantasies (Wo Es War) [Paperback]

Slavoj Zizek (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1859841937 | ISBN-13: 978-1859841938 | Publication Date: November 1997

Slavoj Zizek is, without doubt, one of the most stimulating and vibrant thinkers of our time, and his idiosyncratic blend of Lacan and Hegel is always sparkling with insight and studded with amusing stories, anecdotes and jokes. In The Plague of Fantasies Zizek approaches another enormous subject with characteristic brio and provocativeness. The current epoch is plagued by fantasms: there is an ever intensifying antagonism between the process of ever greater abstraction of our lives - whether in the form of digitalization or market relations - and the deluge of pseudo-concrete images which surround us. Traditional critical thought would have sought to trace the roots of abstract notions in concrete social reality; but today, the correct procedure is the inverse - from pseudo-concrete imagery to the abstract process which structures our lives. Ranging in his examples from national differences in toilet design to cybersex, and from intellectuals' responses to the Bosnian war to Robert Schumann's music, Zizek explores the relations between fantasy and ideology, the way in which fantasy animates enjoy-ment while protecting against its excesses, the associations of the notion of fetishism with fantasized seduction, and the ways in which digitalization and cyberspace affect the status of subjectivity. To the already initiated, The Plague of Fantasies will be a welcome reminder of why they enjoy Zizek's writing so much. For new readers, it will be the beginning of a long and meaningful relationship.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The Giant of Ljubljana provides the best intellectual high since Anti-Oedipus. -- Voice Literary Supplement

Review

Zizek is a thinker who regards nothing as outside his field: the result is deeply interesting and provocative. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 248 pages
• Publisher: Verso (November 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859841937
• ISBN-13: 978-1859841938
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,094,940 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

"The most dangerous philosopher in the West," (says Adam Kirsch of The New Republic) Slavoj Zizek 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;" "Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle;" "In Defense of Lost Causes;" "Living in the End Times;" and many more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reading Theory Isn't Supposed to Be This Fun, Is It?, June 24, 1998

By 

Shawn Wedel (Kirkwood, MO USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Plague of Fantasies (Wo Es War) (Paperback)

For those who enjoy the challenge of reading high theory but are put off by the dry, abstract, pretentious ramblings that more often than not constitute theoretical writing, Zizek is the theorist for you. Is there another theorist alive who can on one page explicate the finer points of Lacan, Hegel and Kant, while on the next page tie it all in with the three most popular female pubic hair styles, homosexual ; and subtle distinctions among toilet designs in Germany, France, and the United States? Perhaps. But Zizek makes these seemingly awkward transitions and uncommon examples quite smoothly; the outrageous examples aren't forced, nor are they merely for "shock" value. In short, they work to clarify the difficult concepts he is discussing. Although Zizek is not what I'd call an easy read - not by a long shot - he certainly knows how to make a challenge a bit less stressful and - gasp! - fun. END

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lacanian pyschoanalysis applied to politics, February 17, 2003

By 

Tron Honto - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Plague of Fantasies (Wo Es War) (Paperback)

Zizek's claim to fame is his rapacious wit, keen insights, and his profound, hilarious and shocking use of anecdotes. Here, Zizek focuses on the relation between fantasy and desire, and the latter he sees as rooted fully in the former. Fantasy, he argues, is the foundation for political and social action. As a Marxist, he makes an interesting some interesting arguments along a line that is seemingly contradictory to his ideological convictions employing Lacan heavily but also drawing upon and offering some interesting interpretations of Hegel. He ends the book with insights on how the digitization of our universe--overly fantasized--as alienated us from our corporeality. This he views negatively as a plague--finally suggesting that the task of critical theory is the inverse of the traditional one starting with concrete social reality and then moving to abstract notions. Rather, the pseudo-concrete and virtual which now structure our lives must be debunked. His writing is erratic but intrepid and certainly worth the effort.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of Lacan's Best Books--Oops,Sorry, I Meant 'Zizek', January 9, 2010

By 

John David Ebert (United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Plague of Fantasies (Second Edition) (The Essential Zizek) (Paperback)

"The Plague of Fantasies" is Zizek at his best: funny, irreverent, brilliant and sometimes just silly. Zizek is a master of critical theory: from Schelling and Hegel to Alain Badiou, he knows it all, and knows it in detail.

In this book, Zizek discusses a number of ideas, all of which focus around one or another aspect of Lacanian theory. Make no mistake about it: Zizek is a Lacanian (he may even know Lacan better than Lacan did). He analyzes various aspects of popular culture and leftist politics. Unlike some of his other books, however, this narrative is fast-paced and moves right along. In terms of ideas, he is mostly a passer-on of those which he has derived from others: the violence of interpretation, for instance, in which the deforming of a text's meaning, though untrue to the author's aims, nonetheless produces a truth effect which justifies the deliberate (mis)intepretation, is borrowed from Paul de Man; or the problem of the desublimated Other, which goes something like this: let's say you're having sex with your partner and all of a sudden your mind wanders. What's happened? According to Zizek, borrowing from Lacan here, your partner has (hopefully temporarily) slipped out of the phantasmatic reference frame you've built around him or her, for Zizek insists that we are always viewing others within frames of fantasy, in one way or another.

His discussion of the three types of shaven vagina in the book's intro is bold and fun; as is also his discussion of the semiotic differences between French, American and German toilets (perhaps a new explanation for the real [i.e. obscene] causes of the World Wars?)

Zizek is at his best and most entertaining in his analyses of movies. In the book's Forward, his comments about John Carpenter's "They Live" is priceless (I'll forgive him his reference to "Spielberg's Star Wars Trilogy,"; after all, one can't get everything right); his discussion of the leading motif of Spielberg's films being about the absent father, or the father figure who has lapsed in his duties and must learn how to make up for his lapse by defending his neglected family against the traumatic impact of the Real of some monstrous force (i.e. Nazis, dinosaurs, aliens from outer space) is a great insight, although he oversteps his bounds when he says that these films are about nothing else. That is false, trust me. There are all kinds of wonderful mythological and cosmological updates and retrievals going on in Spielberg's films. (A dose of heretical Jungian theory here might have helped him out a bit).

In any case, this book is a great place to begin if you are interested in reading Zizek. Though I don't always agree with him, he hardly ever fails to entertain me (except when he goes into long pedantic discussions about the function of the Ego in Fichte or Schelling's concept of the Absolute; I mean, come oooon!) In great books, it's the personality of the author that counts, and so one does not read Zizek so much for his ideas (since, let's face it, they're borrowed from just about everybody who's anybody in Critical Theory) as for the entertaining effect of his personality. He is a great raconteur (like Reagan) and tells great jokes (also like Reagan) but in other respects, he is entirely dissimilar from the former US president.

As Zizek, I mean, Lacan, would have said, borrowing perhaps from Coca-cola: "Enjoy!"

--John David Ebert, author of "The New Media Invasion" and "Dead Celebrities, Living Icons."