Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?

5 Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion

von Slavoj Zizek

Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

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 ¿i¿ek. 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. ¿i¿ek 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. ¿i¿ek concludes that the devil lies not so much in the detail but in what enables the very designation totalitarian: the liberal-democratic consensus itself.

• Themen: Gesellschaft und Sozialwissenschaften Politik und Staat Politische Strukturen und Prozesse Totalitarismus und Diktatur
• ISBN: 9781844677139
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 01.08.2011
• Größe: 200 x 131 mm
• Verlag: Verso