Synopses & Reviews
Slavoj Zizek, the maverick philosopher, author of over 30 books, acclaimed as the "Elvis of cultural theory", and today's most controversial public intellectual. His work traverses the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory, taking in film, popular culture, literature and jokes'"all to provide acute analyses of the complexities of contemporary ideology as well as a serious and sophisticated philosophy. His recent films
The Pervert's Guide to the Cinemaand
Zizek!reveal a theorist at the peak of his powers and a skilled communicator. Now Verso is making his classic titles, each of which stand as a core of his ever-expanding life's work, available as new editions. Each is beautifully re-packaged, including new introductions from Zizek himself. Simply put, they are the essential texts for understanding Zizek's thought and thus cornerstones of contemporary philosophy.
The Plague of Fantasies: Zizek explores the relations between fantasy and ideology and the intensifying antagonism between the ever greater abstraction of our lives'"whether through digitization or the market'"and the deluge of pseudo-concrete images which surround us.
Review
"The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged from Europe in some decades." Terry Eagleton
Review
"Unafraid of confrontation and with a near limitless grasp of pop symbolism." Times of London
Review
"[Zizek] unfolds in this text a theory of the workings of postmodern ideology that is often breathtaking in its scope and acuity." Postmodern Culture
Synopsis
Zizek takes on the relations between fantasy and ideology, and the deluge of pseudo-concrete images surrounding us.
Synopsis
Modern audiovisual media have spawned a 'plague of fantasies', electronically inspired phantasms that cloud the ability to reason and prevent a true understanding of a world increasingly dominated by abstractions—whether those of digital technology or the speculative market.
Into this arena, enters Zizek: equipped with an agile wit and the skills of a prodigious scholar, he confidently ranges among a dazzling array of cultural references—explicating Robert Schumann as deftly as he does John Carpenter—to demonstrate how the modern condition blinds us to the ideological basis of our lives.
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 First as Tragedy, Then as Farce; Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle; In Defence of Lost Causes; Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Living in the End Times, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock; and more.