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With a contradictory and characteristically makeshift term, ''Liberal Fascism'', Slavoj Zizek captures the paradoxical nature of political populism. To see this phenomenon as purely liberal and a dictatorial fascist is to expose liberalism and fascism as two sides of the same coin. It is a concept that offers a glimpse into the murky landscape of half-lies and double-truths that Zizek enters in this latest collection of urgent essays. From the economy and politics to ideology, these short texts work through the different faces of liberal fascism, structured around a trio of the universal, the particular, and the single: our global predicament; Europe and the Middle East; Trump''s US. Peeling back the inadequate labels we hasten to pin on the phenomena that terrify us - like ''post-truth''- to peer at the seeping wounds beneath them, they reveal the uneasy mixture of lies and truths that have always been stacked, matryoshka like, inside of one another. With no cure in hand, but a refusal to dispense with thought that is muddled and murky, they are timely and utterly urgent. From the so-called "death of truth" opens up the possibility for a new authentic truth. or for an even worse big Lie. And we must ask - what forms of justice are made possible by this disorder?
About the author
Slavoj Žižek is a Hegelian philosopher, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, and a Communist. He is International Director at the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities, University of London, UK, Visiting Professor at the New York University, USA, and Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
