Trouble In Paradise

From the End of History to the End of Capitalism

Slavoj Žižek

“Žižek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation.”—The New Yorker

In Trouble in Paradise, Slavoj Žižek, one of our most famous, most combative philosophers, explains how we can find a way out of the crisis of capitalism.

There is obviously trouble in the global capitalist paradise. But why do we find it so difficult to imagine a way out of the crisis we’re in? It is as if the trouble feeds on itself: the march of capitalism has become inexorable, the only game in town.

Setting out to diagnose the condition of global capitalism, the ideological constraints we are faced with in our daily lives, and the bleak future promised by this system, Slavoj Žižek explores the possibilities—and the traps—of new emancipatory struggles.

Drawing insights from phenomena as diverse as “Gangnam Style” to Marx, The Dark Knight to Thatcher, Trouble in Paradise is an incisive dissection of the world we inhabit, and the new order to come.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include Living in the End Times; First as Tragedy, Then as Farce; In Defense of Lost Causes;Event; and many more.

“Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than Slavoj Žižek . . . One of the world’s best-known public intellectuals.” —John Gray, New York Review of Books

“The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in many decades.”—Terry Eagleton

“[A] great provocateur and an immensely suggestive and even dashing writer . . . Žižek writes with passion and an aphoristic energy that is spellbinding.”—Los Angeles Times