Living in the End Times: Updated New Edition [Paperback]

Zizek is a man who sees. He has an instinct that the pall of foreboding which hangs over western life is a bereavement waiting to happen or which has already occurred but has not been recognised. This is about right in my view. He points ahead to the buffers which our runaway train of reckless consumption and exploitation is destined to meet.

As a Christian with an interest in the current relevance of the Apocalypse I found some of his insights into scripture interesting (but somewhat crippled by his "Death of God" atheism).

Many reviewers accuse him of being "post-modern" but that is not quite fair. He seems to believe his synthesis of Lacan, Hegel, Marx and textual analysis forms a powerful glue with which he can paste together his disparate flashes of insight - so producing a collage which becomes a coherent view of our current state. I wanted to be convinced but by the end of the book it was the centrifugal flashes of brilliance which remained in my memory while the structure of his thinking crumpled and crumbled.

The collage remains a collection of parts.

Does this matter to someone wondering whether to read this book? For myself, I am glad I read it. But be prepared to slog through some of the opaque passages. It seems to me that the mood of this book is more convincing than its reasoning. There is a sickness in our late capitalist culture, the skeletons in our overstuffed closets are rattling and trumpets are sounding in the distance. Zizek hears them even if his interpretation of their message may not convince. And the paperback is great value.

Negative reviews of Zizek's work unimaginatively tend to rehash tired old cliches about his personal mannerisms and his failure to provide neat answers, and consist of plain-English-campaign type moans about a lack of intelligibility etc. etc. Such responses illustrate the image-obsessed, ends-orientated mentality of the bovine mass culture that Zizek consistently undermines.

If your idea of philosophy is Alain de Botton/Roger Scruton you will not like this book, if you fail to appreciate that the role of philosophy is to ask questions not to provide pat answers, again, you will not like this book.

It isn't Zizek's best - but it still provides more than enough challenging ideas and fascinating interpretations(e.g. the notion that the biblical injunction to "turn the other cheek" is actually much more ambiguous than is standardly understood) to justify purchasing it and enjoying the intellectual equivalent of whitewater rafting.

More years ago than I care to remember I did a political philosophy course at University with a lecturer who would delight in spinning out names which sounded terribly glamorous and obscure. Many of these people seemed to reside in Paris while others seemed quite partial to Frankfurt. They included thinkers like Theodore Adorno, Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan. The trick with said lecturer was to try and find quotes from books by these "great men" and in turn quote them back at him in your coursework. The slight problem with this theory was that as it turned out much of the stuff that they wrote was unreadable bilge and fashionable nonsense. There wasn't a decent quote in sight and thankfully brighter thinkers and better writers like our own E P Thompson had the gumption to argue against this "poverty of theory". In another sense the whole deck of cards came crashing down when Monsieur Althusser decided to kill Madame Althusser by strangling her, while Lacan's works have since been described as a "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish," and the equally controversial Noam Chomsky described him as an "amusing charlatan". This may or may not be a useful description of Slavoj Zizek who works in the traditions of Mr Lacan albeit with a sense of humour. Some of you may have seen him recently on Newsnight with his manic arm movements, ill fitting clothes, wayward hair, strange lisp and a mind that can draw upon anything from Marx to Mickey Mouse. He is by any standards that rare beast an entertaining Marxist and in his new book "Living in the end times" you will find his views on "Avatar", "Big Brother" and "Gonzo porn" sat next to impenetrable reflections on obscure heavyweights like Hegel and Alain Badiou

One of Zizek's best known sound-bytes of a few years ago was that today it was easier to imagine the end of the world rather than an end to capitalism. In his new book "The end of times" he has however mustered a range of questions which whether you are on the right or the left require debate and most importantly require answering. The collapse of the global economy in the past three years, the rise of Market economies in Communist states, the impact of climate change, the rise of religious fundamentalism and in Zizek's case the key issue of film criticism! Zizek is often berated for his preoccupation with cultural and psychoanalytic gymnastics and his failure to get to grips with politics. There is no shortage of it in "Living in the End times" since Slavoj Zizek concentrates upon what he sees as 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.

I would be economical with the truth if I said that I read every page of this book since some of it is deeply unreadable and other bits come across like sections lifted from Private Eyes "pseuds corner". If truth be told the whole book is the political equivalent of a high speed chase with moments of exhilaration combined with the brakes being slammed on while Zizek once again goes wandering off into to some deeply baffling and overwhelming analysis of the post Cartesian constellation, the cerebral unconscious or the impact of revolutionary love. Some of it moreover is fascinatingly useless and hilarious. Did you know that Quantum of Solace was the first Bond film where Bond didn't have sex with the Bond Girl? Had you noticed the James Cameron's "Avator" was an exercise in "Hollywood Marxism" despite the fact that "idyllic portrait of the blue aborigines totally binds us to their own oppressive hierarchies"? Of course you didn't.

People have asked whether Zizek is just a pretentious poser, an anti Semitic left wing zealot or the rightful heir to Karl Marx? Whether he is philosopher or fool what cannot be denied is that the central propositions in this book require examination. "No one asks the big questions" is his constant refrain, similarly we are "approaching a zero point, with a formula which does not work...and the welfare state dream has come to an end". The experience of the last period suggests that some one had better answer this critique since it was clear that we tottered on the edge of the abyss when Lehman's collapsed and the current sovereign debt crisis with countries verging on bankruptcy sees dangerous times ahead. To be fair to Zizek he is also an arch critic of former communist regimes but his argument is very weak on alternatives where again he lapses into to psychoanalytic thought and ends the book with a very lame joke. Zizek also tries unconvincingly to address the predicament of the deeply defeated progressives of today whose ideological confusion has been brilliantly captured by Nick Cohen in "What's left". Consequently I think I can recommend "Living in the end times" or at least half of it. Perhaps it is worth checking out Zizek on the net before you buy since you find a thinker who is certainly hugely entertaining, thought provoking but completely maddening in equal parts!