Slavoj Zizek: Living in the End Times

Žižek analyzes the end of the world at the hands of the “four riders of the apocalypse.”

There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. Slavoj Žižek has identified the four horsemen of this coming apocalypse: the worldwide ecological crisis; imbalances within the economic system; the biogenetic revolution; and exploding social divisions and ruptures. But, he asks, if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it possible for Western society to face up to the end times?

In a major new analysis of our global situation, Žižek argues that our collective responses to economic Armageddon correspond to the stages of grief: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and withdrawal.

For this edition, Žižek has written a long afterword that leaves almost no subject untouched, from WikiLeaks to the nature of the Chinese Communist Party.

“The most dangerous philosopher in the West.”
– Adam Kirsch, The New Republic

“Fierce brilliance … scintillating.”
– Steven Poole, The Guardian

“Žižek is to today what Jacques Derrida was to the 80s: the thinker of choice for Europe’s young intellectual vanguard.”
– The Observer

“Such passion, in a man whose work forms a shaky, cartoon rope-bridge between the minutiae of popular culture and the big abstract problems of existence, is invigorating, entertaining and expanding enquiring minds around the world.”
– Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph

“Žižek weaves together psychoanalytic and historical materialist theories with great panache.”
– Social Text

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. His books include Living in the End Times, In Defense of Lost Causes, six volumes of the Essential Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, and many more.

Double Standards: Richard Seymour on Press TV

Richard Seymour appears on the programme Double Standards to discuss key events of recent weeks, from the escalation of NATO bombardment in Libya to the phone hacking scandal.

Seymour, author of The Liberal Defence of Murder , explores the reasons for and consequences of the involvement of Western powers in conflicts and politics around the world, and  describes Murdoch’s media empire as the vehicle of neo-liberal ideology and the American economic crisis as the consequence of savage capitalism.



Visit Double Standards to watch this and other programmes.

Rosa Luxemburg and the Critique of Political Economy (Routledge Studies in the History of Economics)

This book analyzes the important contributions of Rosa Luxemburg to economic theory as well as devoting some space to her background as a left social-democratic politician and her personality.
The book's main focus of attention is the theory of capitalist development and the theory of the crash, but its connection with the theory of value, the theory of the monetary circuit, the theory of distribution and the theory of international finance are also explored.

The contributors to the volume come from different theoretical perspectives, both from within and outside the Marxian tradition - Post-Keynesians, Kaleckians and Circuitists are all included.