Did somebody say totalitarianism? : five interventions in the (mis)use of a notion

Abstract

"Totalitarianism as an ideological notion has always had a precise strategic function: to guarantee the liberal-democratic hegemony by dismissing the Leftist critique of liberal democracy as the obverse, the twin, of the Rightist Fascist dictatorships." "Instead of providing yet another systematic exposition of the history of this notion, however, Slavoj Zizek here addresses totalitarianism in a Wittgensteinian way, as a cobweb of family resemblances. In so doing he reveals the prevalance of the consensus-view of totalitarianism, in which it is invariably defined by one of the following five things: the holocaust as the ultimate, diabolical evil; the Stalinist gulag as the alleged 'truth' of the Socialist revolutionary project; the recent wave of ethnic and religious fundamentalisms to be fought through multiculturalist tolerance; the stop-gap which fills the hole left by the modernist dissolution of all traditional social links; or the deconstructionist idea that the ultimate root of totalitarianism is the ontological 'closure' of thought, the denial of the irreducible gap in human existence." "Zizek deals with each of these ideas of totalitarianism in turn, exposing them to thorough Marxist criticism. And his conclusion is that the devil lies not so much in the detail of what constitutes totalitarianism but in the thing which enables the very designation totalitarian, the liberal-democratic consensus itself."--BOOK JACKET.

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