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Seven Stories Press

Works of Radical Imagination

Too Late to Awaken

What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future

by Slavoj Žižek

Book cover for Too Late to Awaken
Book cover for Too Late to Awaken

The "most dangerous philosopher in the West" returns with a rousing and counterintuitive analysis of our global predicament.

Žižek's most urgent and accessible book yet asks us all to imagine that catastrophe is a foregone conclusion—so that we can actually save the world.
 

We hear all the time that we're moments from doomsday. Around us, crises interlock and escalate, threatening our collective survival: Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with its rising risk of nuclear warfare, is taking place against a backdrop of global warming, ecological breakdown, and widespread social and economic unrest. Protestors and politicians repeatedly call for action, but still we continue to drift towards disaster. We need to do something. But what if the only way for us to prevent catastrophe is to assume that it has already happened-to accept that we're already five minutes past zero hour?

Too Late to Awaken sees Slavoj Žižek forge a vital new space for a radical emancipatory politics that could avert our course to self-destruction. He illuminates why the liberal Left has so far failed to offer this alternative, and exposes the insidious propagandism of the fascist Right, which has appropriated and manipulated once-progressive ideas. Pithy, urgent, gutting and witty Žižek’s diagnosis reveals our current geopolitical nightmare in a startling new light, and shows how, in order to change our future, we must first focus on changing the past.

Book cover for Too Late to Awaken
Book cover for Too Late to Awaken

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“Multiple kinds of self-destruction” threaten modern civilization, making the future seem like a “fixed point,” according to this thought-provoking treatise from philosopher Žižek (Christian Atheism). He argues that the solution to this predestined mindset is to reexplore the past, rescuing revolutionary ideas from a contemporary ideological framework that robs them of vigor and usefulness (“Neo-Fascist or neoliberal digestive enzymes are removing the radical acidity of the ideas they’ve swallowed, and turning them into pieces of shit that smoothly fit the existing global capitalist system”). Surveying recent world events, Žižek explains how this quelling of ideas happens, from “the ongoing ‘woke’ movement,” which he argues “awakens us... precisely to enable us to go on sleeping,” to the Ukraine War, coverage of which he contends is poisoned by “realpolitik” and a misguided search for “complexity” behind Russia’s invasion. Žižek brings his signature levity with pop-cultural critiques (regarding John Lennon’s “Imagine”: “Imagining that a world could, eventually, ‘live as one’ is the best way to end up in hell”) and his ambivalent hopefulness (“Are we ready to do this? I doubt it. But why not?”). It’s a deceptively optimistic call to action.”

Slavoj Žižek

Philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek is internationally recognized for his works on psychoanalysis, Hegel, cinema, political theory, and current events. He teaches at the European Graduate School and has been a visiting professor at Université de Paris VIII, Columbia, and Princeton, among other institutions. He is founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and is the author of many books on topics ranging from Christianity to the films of David Lynch.