What does ''progress'' mean? Can things get better? And how, when we are constantly battered on all sides by deepfakes, doomers and disorienting relativisms, can we make any headway at all in the face of unprecedented ecological, social and political crises? In this collection of iconoclastic essays, Slavoj Zizek disrupts the death-grip that neoliberalists, Trumpian populists, toxic self-improvement industries and accelerationists alike have established on the idea of progress. In a whirlwind tour that takes in everything from gentrification to the theory of relativity, Lacan to Lenin, Putin to Mary Poppins and Taylor Swift to the end of the world, these essays never stop asking hard questions of imagined futures. Nor does Zizek shrink from the hardest question of all: How do we free ourselves from the hypocritical, guilt-ridden dreaming in which we''re enmeshed, and begin to build a better world?>

Vorwort
In this first book in the new series iek's Essays, **Slavoj iek asks readers to disrupt fake notions of progress in order to fight for something authentically better.

Autorentext
Slavoj iek ****is a Hegelian philosopher, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, and a Communist. He is Visiting Professor at the New York University, USA, and Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Klappentext

To define 'progress' is to lay claim to the future. Seminal thinker Slavoj Zizek 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 Zizek 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, Zizek 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 whirlwind tour that takes in everything from gentrification to the theory of relativity, Lacan to Lenin, Putin to Mary Poppins and Marine Le Pen to the end of the world, these essays never stop asking hard questions of imagined futures.
Nor does Zizek shrink from the hardest question of all: How do we free ourselves from the hypocritical, guilt-ridden dreaming in which we're enmeshed, and begin to build a better world?

Zusammenfassung
In this first book in the new series iek's Essays, Slavoj iek asks readers to disrupt fake notions of progress in order to fight for something authentically better.

Inhalt

Editor's note

1. Progress and its Vicissitudes
2. Against Progress
3. Acceleration
4. Holographic History
5. Absolute Invariants
6. Worsting
7. Concrete Analysis of a Concrete Situation
8. Civil War
9. Authority
10. From Bad to Worse
11. We are Biomass
12. The End of the World
13. Disavowal