Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates

The thing you notice quickly: how often the bastard contradicts himself. At first I wanted to say that he was inconsistent, but then it became clear that it was a bigger part of his mission. And, indeed, his first wish is to problematize the simple choices we have been given. Honestly, too, few are better positioned to do so. As a Slovene, as someone who cut his teeth on Soviet intellectualism then found himself suddenly a part of the Captalist West, Zizek has the perspective and authority to denounce both the Left and the Right in their responses to 9/11.

The book is much larger than this, however, and throughout I think Zizek takes up the mantle of exposing the dangers of simplicity. He jumps in topic, he starts with one belief, stated show more resolutely, then swings to examples that seem to voice the exact opposite, yet every perspective is clearly fit together by his thoughts. In other words, as a bit of a political Tiresias, Zizek delivers a message to us stuck in our simpler ideological bodies: simplicity is part of the problem. show less

I will confess that this book did not actually piss me off as much as I expected that it would, at least not after the first 10 pages. And it is the move that Žižek makes at this point, and several other points, that I take most issue with.

Let's not even argue over whether or not Žižek is right, because in the end it's irrelevant. But he makes it irrelevant by positing solutions that, according to the hard line of American politics, are decidedly anti-American -- and then accusing the reader that clings to patriotism as buying into precisely the kind of dialectical thinking that caused the September 11th attacks. There's validity to this, to be sure, but Žižek goes about it in a dangerous way, making controversial points that are show more hard to justify because of the swerving, stream-of-consciousness style of his argumentation.

What's most disturbing is when this backfires and exposes his own hypocrisy -- for instance, his display of patriotism for a European power after bemoaning American patriotism, or, even worse, when he argues that other attacks or situations in other countries were far worse than 9/11, a chapter after proclaiming that to put 9/11 on a scale is to fall into that same dialectical trap again.

In the end, what this book seems to show is how quickly theorists can seem out of touch with their topics when those issues are too topical. show less

In short, is it not that today, in our resigned postideological era which admits no positive Absolutes, the only legitimate candidate for the Absolute are radically evil acts?

This is a book about dreams. The philosopher notes early that in developing nations people dream about making it to the West, while First Worlders dream about the end of the world. Slavoj Žižek is coy like that. Throughout Welcome To The Desert of the Real he displays his range without much rigor. It doesn't read as caprice, it functions as serial questions, those that make us readers uncomfortable. The Western Malaise is one of excess. Lacan offered diagnosis some time back. we now need to cut ourselves, distract our neuroses in reality programming. We to be show more displaced by the Spectacle. Our choices leave us docile. We stared at the remains of the World Trade Center and asked how could this happen here? The author poses that we should've reacted that this shouldn't happen again anywhere.

This is a riveting work. Many are critical of Žižek's recourse to popular cultural. I am not. While being unaware of the title being a line from The Matrix, I find the analogy comfortably disturbing. show less

As always when I read Zizek/ some brilliant paragraphs that makes it worth reading a lot of philosophical text that makes no sense to me.

Zizek is a wacky, and occasionally brilliant, critic. His essays here range from over-the-top Lacanian analysis to some fairly perceptive (or "perspicuous", his favorite compliment) insights into the way the U.S. in navigating the shoals of terror. The book is also a bit dated now, since it seems to have been written mostly between 9/11 and its publication date in 2002. Overall definitely worth reading, however.

Slavoj Zizek is one of Europe's leading intellectuals and social theorists. In this book he doesn't seem to emulate those credentials. Perhaps it is his writing style, a vast sea of ever changing subjects and thoughts tied together by a vague theme. However his positions on "terrorism" and "liberal democracy" are spot on. In this book he seemed to utilize "Hegelian" reversals quite a bit, as well as revealing the psychological undertones of political events and players making the book a fascinating read.

Purporting to be an analysis of the 9/11 attacks, and the motivations behind them, this book wanders all over the place, and is so abstruse and inaccessible it isn't really worth the time; after all, there are many better books written on the topic, and I was unable to see that the author actually added anything new to the subject.