Slavoj Žižek’s new book has a sinister blue dust jack and the title Living in the End Times. His overarching assumption here (as the flap copy tells us) is that "global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis." But, he asks, if capitalism's demise seems to many people to be the end of the world, how is Western society dealing with life during the end times?
Žižek ingeniously structures his book-length answer around the famous "five stages of grief" identified by Swiss psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross – stages she called: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. Living in the End Times devotes a fat chapter to each of the five stages, as Žižek observes them being acted out (or soon to be acted out) politically on the world stage by the ruling elites of the dominant nations.
Nobody has to believe that Žižek's analysis is either right or wrong in order to profit from the book. To read his prose is sufficiently entertaining as an end in itself. I give one short example below, describing a recent historical event (deliberately chosen because it is one in which I participated, personally and pointlessly) –
The massive demonstrations against the US attack on Iraq back in 2003 were exemplary of a strange symbiotic relationship, parasitism even, between power and the anti-war protesters. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters saved their beautiful souls – they had made it clear that they did not agree with the government's policy on Iraq – while those in power could calmly accept it, even profit from it: not only did the protests do nothing to prevent the (already decided upon) attack on Iraq, they even provided an additional legitimization for it, best rendered by none other than George Bush, whose reaction to the mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London was: "You see, this is what we are fighting for: so that what people are doing here – protesting against their government's policy – will be possible also in Iraq!"
