Alecs Ștefănescu reviewed Against Progress by Slavoj Zizek
Žižek allowed some optimism to slip through his critique
5 stars
"Against Progress" is a collection of essay that are digestible and lend themselves to be re-read several times. This is unlike my experience reading anything else Žižek wrote, so I am extremely thankful for meeting the author in a milder form. In a way, these essays feel like refined, denser, more strongly phrased versions of his explorations posted on Substack.
The entire collection is timely and addresses the present directly, head-on. Reading it, I wish that this were an eternal collection, and that he was adding essay after essay as the weeks went by, as the world plunged into a painful reckoning with fascism. I wish I could have read his views on things I was seeing on the news, described in the careful and clear-minded way these essays do. But, then again, such essays, I know, can only emerge some distance away from what they describe.
Highly recommended read.