Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917: No. 5 (The Essential Zizek) - Tapa blanda

"A return to Marx may be acceptable today ... But a repetition of Lenin? ... Perhaps i ek's return to Lenin is merely tactical, figurative even. He can't be serious, can he? ... i ek claims that Lenin's act, 'his choice, ' continues to speak to those of us on the left today. Faced with our current conceptual deadlock, we must have the courage, the nerve, to risk isolation, self-annihilation even, in order to offer a real alternative to the false oppositions recuperated by and churned out for our consumption by the image industry of late capitalism ... The postmodernists and liberal multiculturalists, today's Bernsteins and Kautskys--our contemporary Plekhanovs and Martovs, beware!"--Bad Subjects

The idea of a Lenin renaissance might well provoke an outburst of sarcastic laughter. Marx is ok, but Lenin? Doesn't he stand for a monumental catastrophe that left an indelible mark on all of subsequent history and political thinking? Lenin, however, deserves wider consideration than this, and his writings of 1917 are testament to a formidable political figure. Zizek puts the 1917 writings in their historical context, while his extensive Afterword tackles the key question of whether this man can be reinvented in our era of cultural capitalism.