ENGLISH

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

By Slavoj Žižek

Book information

Publisher
Verso
Year
2011
ISBN
1844677133, 9781844677139
Language
english
Format
EPUB
Filesize
2 MB (2142335 bytes)
Series
The Essential Žižek
Edition
2
Pages
288\0
Time added
2017-04-23 14:55:26
Political;Philosophy;Politics & Social Sciences;Fa

Description

In some circles, a nod towards totalitarianism is enough to dismiss any critique of the status quo. Such is the insidiousness of the neo-liberal ideology, argues Slavoj Žižek. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? turns a specious rhetorical strategy on its head to identify a network of family resemblances between totalitarianism and modern liberal democracy. Žižek argues that totalitarianism is invariably defined in terms of four things: the Holocaust as the ultimate, diabolical evil; the Stalinist gulag as the alleged truth of the socialist revolutionary project; ethnic and religious fundamentalisms, which are to be fought through multiculturalist tolerance; and the deconstructionist idea that the ultimate root of totalitarianism is the ontological closure of thought. Žižek concludes that the devil lies not so much in the detail but in what enables the very designation totalitarian: the liberal-democratic consensus itself.

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