I am disappointed to realize that Verso Books is chasing the websites that try to share this and other Zizek's books. It is the opposite of what most authors of the left (which they represent) think.
Besides that, the book is very interesting and to read. Zizek it is very good because the language is very accessible.

Reading any of Zizek's shorter and considerably more "mainstream" books generally leads the way to the now common repetition of the same material and points simply illuminated through a different series of literal, philosophical, and cinematic references.

Reviewed by Dylan Popowicz

I am writing this review less than 24 hours after a devastating earthquake in Haiti. News reports tell of a school and hospital flattened. Aid from outside Haiti is problematic and delayed by the Haitian airport being in such disrepair that airplanes cannot land there.

Zizek is an original thinker, and sometimes a good writer. In Tragedy/Farce he hangs his hat on Haiti as the example of a righteous revolution.

Once upon a time, Soviet Communists did one thing well: creating massive infrastructure (roads, rail, ports, etc). Zizek points Communists, and sympathetic fellow traveler Leftists such as anarchists, away from Communists as builders, and towards an eternal role as disruptive revolutionary. This disruption's aim is to counter society's tendency to harden into a caste system, to break open barriers to allow all in. Of course it would be anathema to mention creative destruction combined with ever more ubiquitous technology makes the bourgeoisie paradigm a much better "revolutionary" force.

Back to Zizek's pure and beautiful revolution, Haiti. Today they are despicably helpless, and suffered far more death and misery than a same earthquake scenario in bourgeoisie Tokyo. Zizek's book is useful. One can use its recommendations and aspirations to orient one's self, to avoid the places and agendas Zizek promotes .

This is the second book by this author that I have read, and I find myself asking what he intends to achieve with his writing. In his own thinking, I wonder to whom his remarks are addressed. As an avowed Hegelian who fully embraces at least the writing style of the postmodernists, Zizek keeps returning to themes of Marxism, crisis, the mystification of class conflict and its intractability, and so forth. The way he writes "conflicts" with at least much of this content; if he simply wanted to be widely understood by a literate audience, surely all the off-hand bits from Kierkegaard, Kant, and Zizek's pet (Lacan) would be distractions that muddy matters. He has been characterized by some press critics as "the Elvis of philosophy," and if this is fair, then Zizek is properly understood as an entertainer--no more than that. This would at least explain his Mystery Chef manner of whipping up a souffle with apples, onions, and the occasional discarded shoe. As a mere mortal, I find his creative abandon occasionally amusing, but the nutritive value of the meal he serves is, at the least, uneven.

Instead of "What Is To Be Done?" I'd like him to answer the question, "What Are You Doing?" To simply have fun with language while performing at a bullet-train pace as a name-dropper, is not an optimal mix with issues such as human survival, social injustice, and economic rationality--if there is a serious intent to communicate.

So, which is it: Elvis or Marx? And if the answer is Marx, is it Groucho's or Karl's thoughts you mean to convey?

As a reader of Zizek most of this is covered in other books. In Defense of Lost Causes immediately comes to mind. But if you don't want to slough through a 500 page tome but want to look at the latest political reflections by Slavoj Zizek then this book is a good introduction.

Also of note, this may be one of the few books criticizing today's political Left that's by a Leftist(although albeit radical Marxist one)and as such is a better and more well rounded critique concerning the path of the Left. Zizek's style is for experienced readers, one cannot just simply walk into one of Zizek's books and expect the dry pedantic style that plagues much of contemporary academic reading. It takes some skill to recognize what Zizek is arguing, but once you find that hidden gem, you gain an insight into why the system crashed.

As the corporations pass the blanket over our eyes our ears are hearing something is wrong. You thought you'd programed in disco but instead it's the Holy Modal Rounders doing Flop Eared Mule. That Lenard Cohn poem is turning to Archie Shepp,"A sound is not what it seems..." That nice community organizer you elected is turning the world into a remake of the film Tank.
You have passed into the world of the "Public Intellectual Number One." Slovoj Zizek is the one percenter of the philosopher's world. Heidegger might ride the BMW of thinking Zizek rides the Lecan modified Cafe Guzzi. Liberals socialists and do gooder types are left at the side of the road trying to appease the bankers who just robbed the world.
The corporations that own us are turning the Western World into an Asian control state not like China but like China's appendix Singapore. Best fasten you seat belt there's turbulence ahead. A fine read.

This powerful little tract is Zizek at his best and without much of the adulteration many of his more popular books have with regard to the jokes and pop-culture anecdotes. Yet it is as engrossing as anything he's written. The gauntlet is cast. Recent events have only brought to the surface the potential for capitalism to run aground and the remarkable unity of the otherwise bickering elite when it comes to keeping the profit flowing. Zizek discusses these events and maps how ideology, ideology, ideology, is everywhere in this moment where purportedly all ideology (including Alan Greenspan's), seems to have been shaken to rubble, and the only thing in front of us is to take the "pragmatic" but painful steps necessary to restore the markets and restart the engines so everyone can get back to business as usual (remarkable how much cash is suddenly available when the banks can't balance their own checkbooks, as opposed to when people are starving en masse in Africa). In page after page the case for communism becomes terrifyingly reasonable. Whether you are "with him or against him," you can no longer ignore Zizek after taking a serious look at this really magnificently composed work that condenses his whole political perspective without quarter. Personally, I have long been on the fence about embracing all that Zizek represents and all the consequences of his position. But I cannot see how this one can be the butt of jokes except for those so ideologically mystified that they'd chuckle themselves to tears if they were to really sit down with open eyes. Verso cleverly printed at the top of the cover a quote from a New Republic article on Zizek. It simply states, "The most dangerous philosopher in the West." This says it all, except, I wonder, who the heck is not in the west (today) that is a dangerous philosopher? CAN you be truly dangerous (to the western dominated global capitalist order) if you are in the "east?" Hence the geographic qualification means nothing but its mere inclusion implies racist sentiment. And does placing him in the west make him more or less dangerous than whoever in the non-west might be lurking in the jungle, as it were? Is the only possible reference Osama bin Laden? Thus HE is a "philosopher"? (a foolish idea, so indeed best not to state directly - takes cultural relativism to awfully absurd limits, no?), but then by logical substitution must not Zizek be a terrorist? Put the kettle on the burner and crack the celestial seasonings hemlock anti-occident tea, Meletus is back in town.

In this relatively readable but ethically inexcusable work, Mr. Zizek finally does what many of his readers have expected him to do: he outs himself as a communist. The writing was on the, er, "wall", of course, after some of his recent books and especially after he edited one of Lenin's works. Here he's forthright in proffering what he believes would be best for humanity, what social movement he wishes would sweep across the planet. No anodyne or meliorist Scandinavian-style social democratic half-measures for him! He wants the grand-daddy of them all, the Big C: communism.

What is most disturbing is that he weds his musings on the need for communist uprisings and action, with an emphasis on -- as he says a number of times -- the "Pauline" (read: universal) nature of ethics. The upshot is that communism isn't just an option that, say, Peruvians in a jungle camp, or Nepalese militants, or a flat of Bologna mates who want to live as anarchists to try it out, or radicals in Christiania (Copenhagen), or whomever, can avail themselves of, on a local scale. No, communism must be universalized and universalizable. If it is not everywhere, then it is nowhere, and that won't do. (This explains his quasi-Christian animosity towards the relativistic postmodernists: his Truth will mean nothing if it is not True in every possible situation, and True for everyone.) Naturally, as with communism 1.0, those who don't believe will presumably need to be "educated." (Does that mean there will be education camps with Lacan on the reading list?)

Problems abound. For example he quotes John Gray -- a most interesting thinker, indeed a commendably hard-to-categorize thinker -- on a number of occasions. But has he really read Gray's work, or Isaiah Berlin's for that matter? Has he learned nothing from Gray's many compelling essays, written from the centre-right, the centre and the centre-left, over many years? If Gray's thought can be distilled, it is to this: that utopian thinking (whether communist, central-planning, top-down, socialist, neoconservative or efficient market fundamentalist) is mistaken precisely because it is universal, and rides roughshod over pluralistic, local and practical/practice-based, organically evolved alternatives. Zizek weighs up communist totalitarianism (for the horrors of which, see e.g. Caplan's Museum of Communism, online) vs. the merits of piece-meal, muddling, pluralistic social (mini-)engineering, and plumps for the former. To be sure, this is communism shorn of its immutable laws of history talk, and the usual communist messianism is muted by an unspoken acknowledgement that hundreds of millions went to their deaths in a myriad of ways (all miserable) because radicals wished to instantiate some form or other of collectivist utopia.

Overall, for all of the "knowing", sophisticated prose, the references and the name-dropping, this is almost ridiculously simplistic thinking, designed for the undergrad minds who presumably purchase the vast majority of the books Mr. Zizek's churns out with such regularity. Policy options aren't brought up and discussed seriously, opposing views (or should I say the views of "dissenters"?) are given short shift, and of course there little discussion of civil society, let alone -- most crucially, and damningly -- what communism 2.0 would even remotely look like, practically speaking (would there be parliaments? workers councils? any private property? parental input into school curricula? elections?)...

This might very well be the best place to start if you're interested in the politics of this singular Slovenian philosopher. The prose here is as trenchant and as pellucid as it gets- it is clear that Zizek regards this polemic as a conjunctural intervention, and its topicality (much of the text deals with the current financial meltdown) is unparalleled in his oeuvre. Perhaps the closest parallel that one can draw is to Zizek's text on the Iraq War, Welcome to the Desert of the Real. This does mean, however, that one should not approach the text expecting to find a cursory sketch of Zizek's philosophy. Consider this to be an hors d'oeuvre of sorts. If you survive the naked forthrightness of Zizek's approach- his greatest challenge to our postmodern sensibilities lies in his uninhibited resolve to say what he means with a naïveté that is unprecedented since Nietzsche and Marx- you are already on the way to engaging with one of today's great provocateurs. The crucial point of the text lies in Zizek's classically Marxist assertion that, contrary to its (ideological) self-image as the embodiment of `objective reality' (capitalism as a pragmatic, time-tested formula that works in the `real world'), capitalism is, in fact, driven by a utopian fantasy of its own, the truth of which is revealed in crashes and meltdowns. The `crisis of the Left' lies in its incapacity to formulate a viable alternative, a crisis that must be overcome through commitment (allegiance to what Badiou has called the `communist hypothesis') and concerted hegemonic struggle.