The Plague of Fantasies (Wo Es War Series)

Product Description Žižek returns to untangle a heady mix of fantasy and ideology. With his idiosyncratic blend of ideas from Lacan and Hegel, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has emerged as one of the most original thinkers of our time. Never missing an opportunity to recount a revealing anec-dote or joke his writing is as entertaining as it is informative. In his latest book, Žižek approaches another enormous subject with characteristic brio. The current epoch is, he claims, plagued by phantasms. There is an intensifying antagonism between the ever greater abstraction of our lives—whether in the form of digitalization or market relations and the deluge of pseudo-concrete images which surround us. Traditional critical thought traces the connections between abstract notions and concrete social reality: but today, Žižek suggests, the correct procedure is the inverse—to work from pseudo-concrete imagery towards the abstract. Ranging in his examples from national differences in toilet design to cybersex, and from intellectuals’ responses to the Bosnian war to Robert Schumann’s music, Žižek explores the relations between fantasy and ideology, the way in which fantasy animates enjoy-ment while protecting against its excesses, the associations of the notion of fetishism with fantasized seduction, and the ways in which digitalization and cyberspace affect the status of subjectivity. To the already initiated, The Plague of Fantasies will be a welcome reminder of why they enjoy Žižek’s writing so much. For new readers, it will be the beginning of a long and meaningful relationship. Review “The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged from Europe in some decades.”—Terry Eagleton “Unafraid of confrontation and with a near limitless grasp of pop symbolism.”— Times of London “Žižek unfolds in this text a theory of the workings of postmodern ideology that is often breathtaking in its scope and acuity.”— Postmodern Culture About the Author Slavoj Žižek 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 Žižek, and many more.