Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Žižek revists his radical interpretation of Antigone 10 years on, elaborating on the original work in daring and surprising ways . This updated text includes an additional essay reflecting on how this play speaks to our contemporary moment more powerfully than ever, as well as a Žižekian version of Sophocles' work . Antigone is universally celebrated as the ultimate figure of ethical resistance to the state power which oversteps its legitimate scope and as the defender of simple human dignity. But is she really so innocent and pure? What if there is a dark side to her? What if Creon, the representative of state power, also has a valuable point to make? And what if both Antigone and Creon are part of a problem that only a popular intervention can confront? Žižek's rewriting of this classic play confronts these issues in a practical way: not by theorizing about them, but by imagining an Antigone in which, at a crucial moment, the action takes a different turn, an Antigone along the lines of Run, Lola, Run or of Brecht's learning plays. A brilliantly funny, moving and political piece for those who are interested in reading and watching Antigone in an entirely new way.

With an apparently contradictory and characteristically makeshift term, ‘Liberal Fascisms’, Slavoj Žižek captures the paradoxical nature of political populism. To see this phenomenon as purely liberal and dictatorially fascistic is to expose liberalism and fascism as two sides of the same coin. The concept offers a glimpse into the murky landscape of half-lies and double-truths that Žižek enters in this latest collection of urgent essays. From the economy and politics to ideology, these short texts work through the different faces of liberal fascism, structured around a trio of the universal, the particular, and the single: our global predicament; Europe and the Middle East; Trump’s America. Peeling back the inadequate labels we hasten to pin on the phenomena that terrify us – like ‘post-truth'– to peer at the seeping wounds beneath them, these writings reveal the uneasy mixture of lies and truths that have always been stacked, matryoshka like, inside of one another. With no cure in hand, but a refusal to dispense with thought that is muddled and murky, the essays are timely and resolute. From the so-called “death of truth” opens up the possibility for a new authentic truth… or for an even worse big Lie. And we must ask – what forms of justice are made possible by this disorder? Liberal Fascisms is also available in audiobook format from audiobook retailers.

Med Trumps återkomst till Vita huset är vänstern tillbaka på ruta noll. Utifrån Lenins idé om ”nollpunkten” – den plats där vi tvingas börja om – och med händelserna i Mellanöstern som fond skriver Slavoj Žižek från ett skede i historien där läget inte verkar kunna bli sämre. Hur går vi vidare? Nollpunkt är den tredje boken i Fri Tankes Žižekserie, efter För sent att vakna (2024) och Krossa framsteget (2025).

A panoramic view of the cosmos must begin with the tension of a single political moment. In Quantum History, Slavoj Žižek brings together Hegelian dialectics, Lacan psychoanalysis and quantum mechanics to rethink history, reality and political possibility.Taking up Lenin’s challenge to radically reconsider materialism in the wake of each big scientific discovery, and rejecting the recent vogue for giving a vague spiritualist spin to wave mechanics, Žižek embraces the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics with characteristic erudition and verve. Drawing on the central themes of the holographic universe, non-commutativity and the collapse of superpositions, Žižek evolves a quantum-inspired ontology which reinvents the historical materialism of Hegel and Heidegger – and compels a brutal, often darkly funny, inquisition into the chances of radical emancipatory acts today.Quantum History takes the reader from the absolute contradiction of the primordial void through quantum oscillations to our ordinary reality, weaving in Lacan and Deleuze, Rovelli and Schelling, opera, cinema, sex and war. Žižek is at his sharpest, saddest, most provocative best as he demonstrates that there is no way of extracting ourselves from the texture of history, no neutral position from which the workings of the world can be observed transparently – we must act from a contingent, complex and inscrutable political moment, in sadness and in doubt, but defiantly.

Historisk utveckling har länge varit synonymt med förbättring. Men vad göra i en global kristid då alternativen till nyliberalismens framtidsvisioner bara verkar formuleras av accelerationister, techoligarker och trumpister?I sin nya essäsamling menar den världsberömde filosofen Slavoj iek att vi måste ompröva den naiva framstegstro som definierat moderniteten. För att hantera vår tids kriser måste vi börja med att ge upp den invanda bilden av en framtid som vi med säkerhet vet inte kommer att inträffa – den där vi obehindrat fortsätter att leva våra liv som vanligt.

We are all afraid that new dangers pose a threat to our hard-won freedoms, so what deserves attention is precisely the notion of freedom.The concept of freedom is deceptively simple. We think we understand it, but the moment we try and define it we encounter contradictions. In this new philosophical exploration, Slavoj Žižek argues that the experience of true, radical freedom is transient and fragile. Countering the idea of libertarian individualism, Žižek draws on philosophers Hegel, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, as well as the work of Kandinsky and Agatha Christie to examine the many facets of freedom and what we can learn from each of them.Today, with the latest advances in digital control, our social activity can be controlled and regulated to such a degree that the liberal notion of a free individual becomes obsolete and even meaningless. How will we be obliged to reinvent (or limit) the contours of our freedom?Tracing its connection to everything from capitalism and war to the state and environmental breakdown, Žižek takes us on an illuminating and entertaining journey that shows how a deeper understanding of freedom can offer hope in dark times.

The essays in Zero Point ask how we distinguish defeat from disaster, and how we confront despair without collapsing into it - questions never more pertinent than the current moment in the wake of electoral victories for authoritarian populists and unceasing news of violent atrocities. The 'zero-point' of the title is ground level, rock bottom, the place to which one retreats and where one regroups. Taken from Vladimir Lenin's 1922 piece 'On Ascending a High Mountain, in which Lenin considers the complexities of how one 'retreats' while keeping faith in the cause, the central simile of the climber offers a blueprint for resilience, flexibility, and the persistence of hope. This is the revolutionary as living out the Beckettian motto: 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' In Žižek's hands, this becomes the formula for confronting the antagonisms of existing world order. With a particular focus on the Middle East -the point at which all our tensions threaten to explode – Žižek argues nothing can be addressed meaningfully without such a confrontation.The consequences of eschewing apolitical acts of solidarity and choosing to attempt to speak truth to power are reckoned with in the second half of Zero Point. In a unique piece assembled chronologically from unpublished writings, Žižek wrestles with the fallout from his controversial speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2023 - a speech which saw him interrupted, condemned and accused of anti-Semitism. The reader bears witness as Zizek processes the criticism, evolves his thinking and explores the full ethical, political and personal ramifications of the question: When is the right time to speak?

The "most dangerous philosopher in the West" returns with a rousing and counterintuitive analysis of our global predicament. Zizek's most urgent and accessible book yet asks us all to imagine that catastrophe is a foregone conclusion--so that we can actually save the world. We hear all the time that we're moments from doomsday. Around us, crises interlock and escalate, threatening our collective survival: Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with its rising risk of nuclear warfare, is taking place against a backdrop of global warming, ecological breakdown, and widespread social and economic unrest. Protestors and politicians repeatedly call for action, but still we continue to drift towards disaster. We need to do something. But what if the only way for us to prevent catastrophe is to assume that it has already happened-to accept that we're already five minutes past zero hour? Too Late to Awaken sees Slavoj Zizek forge a vital new space for a radical emancipatory politics that could avert our course to self-destruction. He illuminates why the liberal Left has so far failed to offer this alternative, and exposes the insidious propagandism of the fascist Right, which has appropriated and manipulated once-progressive ideas. Pithy, urgent, gutting and witty Zizek's diagnosis reveals our current geopolitical nightmare in a startling new light, and shows how, in order to change our future, we must first focus on changing the past.

V sbornik voshli esse Slavoja Zhizheka o kinematografe, kotoryj on interpretiruet cherez prizmu sovremennoj filosofii, sotsiologii i populjarnoj kultury: ot "klassiki" Khichkoka i "modernizma" Tarkovskogo i Kesljovskogo do postmoderna Lincha i takikh "ideologicheskikh" filmov, kak "Akt ubijstva" ili "Betmen".

"Schekotlivyj subekt" - odna iz pervykh bazovykh knig vsemirno izvestnogo filosofa Slavoja Zhizheka. V nej avtor pokazyvaet, kak lakanovskoe ponjatie subekta mozhet primenjatsja k sfere politiki, kak subekt funktsioniruet v sotsialnoj sfere, a takzhe v svoej ostroj kritike prokhoditsja po filosofii Marksa, Gegelja, Frejda, Kanta, Khajdeggera, Derrida, Batler, Badju, Laklo, Ransera, Balibara i drugikh kljuchevykh figur intellektualnogo gorizonta."Schekotlivyj subekt" - odno iz tekh issledovanij, po kotoromu budut sudit o filosofii XXI veka, buduschaja "novaja klassika" i odna iz vazhnejshikh intellektualnykh rabot svoego vremeni.

To define 'progress' is to lay claim to the future. Seminal thinker Slavoj Žižek turns essayist to interrogate the competing visions which form the horizons of human possibility and ask: Can things, which have never seemed worse, get better? What would a better world be? And how, when we are constantly besieged by doomers, degrowthers and disorienting relativisms can we make any headway at all in the face of unprecedented ecological, social and political crises?In thirteen iconoclastic essays, Slavoj Žižek disrupts the death-grip that neoliberalists, Trumpian populists, toxic self-improvement industries and accelerationists alike have established on the idea of progress. Anatomizing what is lost when opponents of the future are allowed to define it, Žižek ruthlessly exposes what different visions of progress exclude or sacrifice and the dynamics of desire, denial and disavowal at work in Hollywood blockbusters, Buddhist economics, decolonization movements and other engines of vision. In a whirlwind tour that takes in everything from gentrification to the theory of relativity, Lacan to Lenin, Putin to Mary Poppins and Marine Le Pen to the end of the world, these essays never stop asking hard questions of imagined futures.Nor does Žižek shrink from the hardest question of all: How do we free ourselves from the hypocritical, guilt-ridden dreaming in which we’re enmeshed, and begin to build a better world?

»Vi får hela tiden höra att det är fem minuter till midnatt, till domedagen, och att det nu är sista chansen att avvärja en katastrof. Men tänk om enda sättet att förhindra katastrofen är att utgå från att den redan har inträffat – att klockan redan är fem minuter över timme noll?«I en global kristid pekar en av världens mest tongivande filosofer ut riktningen för den radikala politik vi behöver för att undvika undergången. På sitt oefterhärmliga sätt visar Slavoj iek varför det enda sättet att förändra vår framtid är att omtolka vårt förflutna.