First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

From Strand Bookstore

In this take-no-prisoner analysis, Slavoj Zizek frames the moral failures of the modern world in terms of the epoch-making events of the first decade of this century. What he finds is the old one-two punch of history: the jab of tragedy, the righthook of farce. In the attack of 9/11 and the global credit crunch, liberalism died twice, as a political doctrine and as an economic theory. This work is a call for the left to reinvent itself in light of the current desperate historical situation. The time for liberal moralistic blackmail is over! Such is Zizek's provocative take on matters. 157p.

From the Publisher

In this bravura analysis of the current global crisis--following on from his bestselling WELCOME TO THE DESERT OF THE REAL--Slavoj Zizek argues that the liberal idea of the "end of history," declared by Francis Fukuyama during the 1990s, has had to die twice. After the collapse of the liberal-democratic political utopia, on the morning of 9/11, came the collapse of the economic utopia of global market capitalism at the end of 2008. Marx argued that history repeats itself--occurring first as tragedy, the second time as farce--and Zizek, following Herbert Marcuse, notes here that the repetition as farce can be even more terrifying than the original tragedy. The financial meltdown signals that the fantasy of globalization is over and as millions are put out of work it has become impossible to ignore the irrationality of global capitalism. Just a few months before the crash, the world's priorities seemed to be global warming, AIDS, and access to medicine, food and water-tasks labeled as urgent, but with any real action repeatedly postponed. Now, after the financial implosion, the urgent need to act seems to have become unconditional-with the result that undreamt of quantities of cash were immediately found and then poured into the financial sector without any regard for the old priorities. Do we need further proof, Zizek asks, that Capital is the Real of our lives: the Real whose demands are more absolute than even the most pressing problems of our natural and social world?

Review

Publishers Weekly
"An earnest and timely challenge, Zizek's critique of capitalism and repositioning of communist thought is both insightful and well-reasoned, and guaranteed to rile readers across the political and theoretical spectrum." (starred review)