Dillon praises Living in the End Times as “a thesis with vast geopolitical implications”, which “elaborates some of them with extraordinary wit and rigour.”But it’s not merely that Žižek’s energy for self-promotion is prodigious. Rather, it’s his range that impresses – he’s equal parts forbidding theorist of the contemporary political and cultural scene, and contriver of entertainingly elaborate paradoxes. If it weren’t for the hangdog persona and residual communism, he’d be an intellectual dandy: the closest thing we have to the mock-aristocratic socialist Oscar Wilde.
Žižek, who is a professor at the University of Ljubljana, has been writing in a hectically engaging English for more than 20 years, enlivening his analysis of Marxism and psychoanalysis with sly forays into popular culture. (For example, he’s one of the smartest critics ever of Hitchcock.)
Though the writing never ceases to dazzle, Žižek reveals himself here, surprisingly, as something like an old-fashioned moralist.
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