ENGLISH

Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion

By Slavoj Žižek

Book information

Publisher
Verso
Year
2011
ISBN
9781844677139
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
11 MB (11910498 bytes)
Edition
reprint
Pages
280\144
Library
Bodleian Library
DPI
300
Orientation
landscape
Paginated
yes
Scanned
yes
Time added
2015-01-29 02:16:03

Description

Totalitarianism, as an ideological notion, has always had a precise strategic function: to guarantee the liberal-democratic hegemony by dismissing the Leftist critique of liberal democracy as the obverse, the twin, of the Rightist Fascist dictatorships.Instead of providing yet another systematic exposition of the history of this notion, Žižek’s new book addresses totalitarianism in a Wittgensteinian way, as a cobweb of family resemblances. In so doing it reveals the prevalence of the consensus-view of totalitarianism, in which it is invariably defined by one of the following four things: the holocaust as the ultimate, diabolical evil; the Stalinist gulag as the alleged truth of the Socialist revolutionary project; the recent wave of ethnic and religious fundamentalisms to be fought through multiculturalist tolerance; or the deconstructionist idea that the ultimate root of totalitarianism is the ontological closure of thought, the denial of the irreducible gap in human existence.Žižek concludes that the devil lies not so much in the detail of what constitutes totalitarianism but in what enables the very designation totalitarian, the liberal-democratic consensus itself.

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