Slavoj Å½iÅ¾ek
In some circles, a nod towards totalitarianism is enough to dismiss any critique of the status quo. Such is the insidiousness of the neo-liberal ideology, argues Slavoj Å½iÅ¾ek.Â  ,Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, turns a specious rhetorical strategy on its head to identify a network of family resemblances between totalitarianism and modern liberal democracy.Â Â Å½iÅ¾ek argues that totalitarianism is invariably defined in terms of four things: the Holocaust as the ultimate, diabolical evil; the Stalinist gulag as the alleged truth of the socialist revolutionary project; ethnic and religious fundamentalisms, which are to be fought through multiculturalist tolerance; and the deconstructionist idea that the ultimate root of totalitarianism is the ontological closure of thought.Â  Å½iÅ¾ek concludes that the devil lies not so much in the detail but in what enables the very designation totalitarian: the liberal-democratic consensus itself.
Philosophy,Politics,Nonfiction,Psychology,Psychoanalysis,Philosophy,Theory,Politics,Political Science,Psychology,Sociology
Did Someone Say Totalitarianism?: 5 Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion