“Resolutely atheist” and a “skeptical pessimist,” Žižek does his best to leave no sacred cow ungored.
From the provocative to the outrageous to the impenetrable, the latest from the Slovenian gadfly finds a curious sort of hope in a hopeless situation.
Ever since the Chronicle of Higher Education tagged him “the Elvis of cultural theory,” Žižek (Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism, 2015, etc.) has extended his reach well beyond academic circles. He remains even tougher on neoliberalism than he is on authoritarianism, and he takes great delight in counterintuitiveness—and linguistic density. “What I am advocating is not the process of democratic self-purification by means of which we get rid of the dirty water (abuses of democracy) without losing the healthy baby (authentic democracy),” he writes. “The task is rather to trans-value the (democratic) values themselves, to throw out the baby (the democratic form) while keeping in the dirty water (of ‘chaotic’ popular participation, of large-scale ‘authoritarian’ decisions).” Got that? When the author writes that “the 2016 elections were the final defeat of liberal democracy,” he doesn’t seem despondent, because the possibility of great change seems like the healthier response than the return to political business as usual that might have resulted from a Hillary Clinton victory. America lost its big chance, one senses from his writing, when it didn’t embrace the real choices that an election race between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders would have represented, with both benefitting from populist rage. He thinks the danger of Trump has been exaggerated, particularly if the alternative is a retreat from radical change. Here he returns with a twist to the baby-bathwater analogy: “Trump is not the dirty water one should throw out to keep safe the healthy baby of US democracy; he is himself the dirty baby who should be thrown out in order to reveal the true dirty water of social relations that sustain the Clinton consensus.” The author rejects conventional wisdom at every turn, occasionally risking nonsense for a higher sense.
“Resolutely atheist” and a “skeptical pessimist,” Žižek does his best to leave no sacred cow ungored.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61219-003-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
A timely and impassioned argument for social justice.
Profound contrasts in policing and incarceration reveal disparate Americas.
MSNBC host and editor at large of the Nation, Hayes (Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, 2013, etc.) expands the investigation of inequality begun in his previous book by focusing on law and order. Offering a persuasive analysis, he distinguishes between the Nation, inhabited by the “affluent, white, elite,” and the Colony, largely urban, poor, “overwhelmingly black and brown” but increasingly including working-class whites. The criminal justice system, argues Hayes, is vastly different for each: “One (the Nation) is the kind of policing regime you expect in a democracy; the other (the Colony) is the kind you expect in an occupied land.” In the Colony, “real democratic accountability is lacking and police behave like occupying soldiers in restive and dangerous territory.” Law enforcement, as noted by law professor Seth Stoughton, takes a “warrior worldview” in which “officers are locked in intermittent and unpredictable combat with unknown but highly lethal enemies.” Acknowledging that America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, Hayes traces the country’s history of punishment to the experience of European settlers who, “outnumbered and afraid,” responded with violence. Between 1993 and 2014, although the crime rate declined significantly, most Americans feel that crime has increased and therefore support aggressive police action. Furthermore, although most crime occurs intraracially, the Nation believes that the Colony is a constant, insidious threat; unmistakably, “we have moved the object of our concern from crime to criminals, from acts to essences.” Among other rich democracies, ours is the only one with the death penalty. Whereas in Europe, humane treatment has been widely instituted, in the U.S., perpetrators are treated as unredeemable. “The American justice system is all about wrath and punishment,” the author asserts. Arguing for the erasure of borders between Nation and Colony, Hayes admits, regretfully, that such change might fundamentally alter the comfortable sense of order that he, and other members of the Nation, prizes.
A timely and impassioned argument for social justice.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-25422-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
