From Publishers Weekly
As Slovenian public intellectual and provocateur Zizek puts it in his pungent sequel to Welcome to the Desert of the Real, a major motivational problem with the U.S.'s Iraq adventure has been "too many reasons for the war." As each pretext collapsed in the face of events, another rose to take its place. Thus, he says, the "war" has been as much on logical consistency as on Iraq. As piercing as Zizek can be about the rhetorical excesses of the Bush administration—his Lacanian reading of Rumsfeld's infamous "known knowns" speech is a tour de force—he doesn't spare what he sees as the smug complacencies of "Old Europe" and the left, putting them under the general rubric of convenient pacifism and selective outrage. Structured as an essay with two long appendixes, Zizek's book is consistently funny, engaging and accessible whether discussing Hitchcock or Heidegger. If some of the philosophical excursions in the book's second half threaten to derail the cogency of its arguments, they generally reward patience. And if the sheer exuberance of Zizek's biting invective acts as something of a tonic, the sobriety of his basic message—that we have entered a permanent, Orwellian "state of emergency" that threatens the very freedoms we are supposedly defending—is never lost. Simultaneously invigorating, depressing and maddening, Zizek's book reveals him to be an intellectual made for these times, a mixed blessing if ever there was one.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“Hopping from peak to peak, and periodically descending into the valley of present-day culture for refreshment, iek outlines a topology of activity that recovers revealed truths.”—Counterpunch
“iek will entertain and offend, but never bore.”—The Stranger
About the Author
Slavoj iek 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 iek, and many more.
