As always when I read Zizek/ some brilliant paragraphs that makes it worth reading a lot of philosophical text that makes no sense to me. ( )

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In short, is it not that today, in our resigned postideological era which admits no positive Absolutes, the only legitimate candidate for the Absolute are radically evil acts?

This is a book about dreams. The philosopher notes early that in developing nations people dream about making it to the West, while First Worlders dream about the end of the world. Slavoj Žižek is coy like that. Throughout Welcome To The Desert of the Real he displays his range without much rigor. It doesn't read as caprice, it functions as serial questions, those that make us readers uncomfortable. The Western Malaise is one of excess. Lacan offered diagnosis some time back. we now need to cut ourselves, distract our neuroses in reality programming. We to be displaced by the Spectacle. Our choices leave us docile. We stared at the remains of the World Trade Center and asked how could this happen here? The author poses that we should've reacted that this shouldn't happen again anywhere.

This is a riveting work. Many are critical of Žižek's recourse to popular cultural. I am not. While being unaware of the title being a line from The Matrix, I find the analogy comfortably disturbing.
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Purporting to be an analysis of the 9/11 attacks, and the motivations behind them, this book wanders all over the place, and is so abstruse and inaccessible it isn't really worth the time; after all, there are many better books written on the topic, and I was unable to see that the author actually added anything new to the subject. ( )

Slavoj Zizek is one of Europe's leading intellectuals and social theorists. In this book he doesn't seem to emulate those credentials. Perhaps it is his writing style, a vast sea of ever changing subjects and thoughts tied together by a vague theme. However his positions on "terrorism" and "liberal democracy" are spot on. In this book he seemed to utilize "Hegelian" reversals quite a bit, as well as revealing the psychological undertones of political events and players making the book a fascinating read. ( )