Demanding the Impossible

Where are we today and what is to be done? Slavoj Zizek ponders these questions in this unique and timely book.  Based on live interviews, the book captures Zizek at his irrepressible best, elucidating such topics as the uprisings of the Arab Spring, the global financial crisis, populism in Latin America, the rise of China and even the riddle of North Korea. Zizek dazzles readers with his analyses of Hollywood films, Venezuelan police reports, Swedish crime fiction and much else. Wherever the conversation turns, his energetic mind illuminates unexpected horizons. While analyzing our present predicaments, Zizek also explores possibilities for change. What sort of society is worth striving for? Why is it difficult to imagine alternative social and political arrangements? What are the bases for hope? A key obligation in our troubled times, argues Zizek, is to dare to ask fundamental questions: we must reflect and theorize anew, and always be prepared to rethink and redefine the limits of the possible. These original and compelling conversations offer an engaging and accessible introduction to one of the most important thinkers of our time.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements 1) Politics and Responsibility 2) Obsession for Harmony / Compulsion to Identify 3) Politicization of Ethics 4) Means Without End: Political Phronesis 5) “May you live in interesting times” 6) Communism The Ethico-political Fiasco 7) Who is Afraid of a Failed Revolution? 8) Another World is Possible 9) For They Know Not What They Do 10) Parallax View on Post-modern Globalization 11) The Public Use of the Scandal 12) The Screen of Politeness / Empty Gestures and Performatives 13) Deadlock of Totalitarian Communism 14) The Subversive Use of Theory 15) Becoming Proletarian Position 16) New Forms of Apartheid 17) Intrusion of the Excluded into the Socio-Political Space 18) Rage Capital and Risk-Taking Revolutionary Changes 19) Café Revolution 20) To Begin from the Beginning 21) The Fear of Real Love 22) Dialectic of Liberal Superiority 23) The Day After 24) The Universality of Political Miracles 25) Messianism, Multitude, and Wishful Thinking 26) Politicization of Favelas 27) Bolivarianism, the Populist Temptation 28) Violent Civil Disobedience 29) Legitimacy of Symbolic Violence 30) Gandhi, Aristide, and Divine Violence 31) No Moralization But Egotism 32) Possibility of Concrete Universality 33) Common Struggle for Freedom 34) The Impossible Happens

About the Author :
Slavoj Zizek 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.

Review :
"Zizek is, in fact, the most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged from Europe in several decades." —Terry Eagleton "Zizek is to today what Jacques Derrida was to the '80s: the thinker of choice for Europe's young intellectual vanguard." —The Observer "... an excellent introduction to both the breadth and depth of Zizek's ideas, made all the better to follow his arguments via an imaginative format of short thematic interviews." —The Substantive