Against Progress

192 pages

English language

Published 2024 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

ISBN:
978-1-350-51585-7
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(1 review)

To define 'progress' is to lay claim to the future. Seminal thinker Slavoj Žižek turns essayist to interrogate the competing visions which form the horizons of human possibility and ask: Can things, which have never seemed worse, get better? What would a better world be? And how, when we are constantly besieged by doomers, degrowthers and disorienting relativisms can we make any headway at all in the face of unprecedented ecological, social and political crises? In thirteen iconoclastic essays, Slavoj Žižek disrupts the death-grip that neoliberalists, Trumpian populists, toxic self-improvement industries and accelerationists alike have established on the idea of progress. Anatomizing what is lost when opponents of the future are allowed to define it, Žižek ruthlessly exposes what different visions of progress exclude or sacrifice and the dynamics of desire, denial and disavowal at work in Hollywood blockbusters, Buddhist economics, decolonization movements and other engines of vision. In a …

1 edition

Žižek allowed some optimism to slip through his critique

"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.