Is global emancipation a lost cause? Are the universal values ​​ancient vestiges of a past time? Should we submit to a miserable third way, of economic liberalism and minimal government, for fear of totalitarian horrors?

In this great work, the controversial philosopher Slavoj Žižek faces the prevailing ideology regarding the duty of reappropriation of several "lost causes" and seeks the seed of truth in the "totalitarian" politics of the past. It is not surprising, therefore, that for the supporters of the liberal "postmodern" doxa the list of lost causes that are defended in it is a tunnel of terror starring their worst nightmares, a storehouse of the ghosts of the past that they have tried of exorcising with all his might.

Žižek argues that, although revolutionary terror resulted in failure and atrocities of all kinds, this is not the whole truth; there is, in fact, a moment of redemption that falls into oblivion with the categorical liberal democratic rejection of revolutionary authoritarianism and with the valorization of a soft, consensual and decentralized policy. It also claims the duty to reinvent revolutionary terror and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the struggle for universal emancipation. We need to accept with courage the return of this cause, exposing ourselves to even the most catastrophic disaster. In the words of Samuel Beckett: «Try again. It fails again. Fail better.

«Addictively eclectic ... Žižek manages to leave the reader, as usual, as enthusiastic as disoriented, abandoned in the middle of a moor planted with the rubble of fallen idols.»
Steven Poole, The Guardian

"A treasure of political and philosophical insight."
"Atrocious, provocative and very funny."
Terry Eagleton