Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?

Download or read book Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? written by Slavoj Zizek and published by Verso. This book was released on 2002 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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, _i_ek’s book addresses totalitarianism in a Wittgensteinian way, as a cobweb of family resemblances. He concludes that the devil lies not so much in the detail of what constitutes totalitarianism as in what enables the very designation totalitarian: the liberal-democratic consensus itself.