Did Someone Say Totalitarianism? Four Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion

Totalitarianism, as an ideological notion, has always had a precise strategic function: to guarantee the liberal-democratic hegemony by dismissing the Leftist critique of liberal democracy as the obverse, the twin, of the Rightist Fascist dictatorships.

Instead of providing yet another systematic exposition of the history of this notion, Zizek 's new book addresses totalitarianism in a Wittgensteinian way, as a cobweb of family resemblances. In so doing it reveals the prevalence of the consensus-view of totalitarianism, in which it is invariably defined by one of the following four things: the holocaust as the ultimate, diabolical evil; the Stalinist gulag as the alleged truth of the Socialist revolutionary project; the recent wave of ethnic and religious fundamentalisms to be fought through multiculturalist tolerance; or the deconstructionist idea that the ultimate root of totalitarianism is the ontological closure of thought, the denial of the irreducible gap in human existence.

Zizek concludes that the devil lies not so much in the detail of what constitutes totalitarianism but in what enables the very designation totalitarian, the liberal-democratic consensus itself.

"Here is Zizek, again, hoovering up contemporary thought and reworking it through his own rigorous matrix. [He} gives a dazzling show; but behind the performance is a passionate commitment to returning philosophical thought to political work." - The Independent

Slavoj Zizek is Visiting Professor at New York University. His books include The Fragile Absolute, The Ticklish Subject, The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Plague of Fantasies, and Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), all published by Verso.

"The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged from Europe in some decades." - Terry Eagleton