UNREST MAGAZINE

It seems that we missed a hell of a conference.

In March 2009, in response to an invitation issued by Costas Douzinas, director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, and Slavoj Zizek, among other things, the Institute’s International Director, twelve hundred people turned up to hear a small galaxy of leftist philosophers address the question “whether ‘communism’ is still the name to be used to designate radical emancipatory projects” (viii). Depending upon how history goes, the conference, whose papers are reproduced in this volume, may turn out to have been a historic event. At least the organizers, who expected only a small audience to attend, dare to think so. We can reach our own conclusions about this after reviewing what the major contributors said and how they said it.
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Žižek’s (2009), First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, is yet another salvo at proponents of the liberal world order.  It is by no means a rigorous academic study or a philosophical treatise, but an unflinching challenge to the status quo of the (un)critical Left.  Using the financial collapse of 2008 as his anchor, Žižek launches his characteristically unflattering assault on global capitalism and liberal democracy.  Francis Fukuyama’s utopian vision of the “end of history” serves as the running joke disparaged over and over throughout to remind readers that the West does not solely determine the delineation of history.  History struck Fukuyama’s dream first as tragedy on the morning of September 11, 2001 and it returned to mock it September of 2008.  While the world panders to the very system and people responsible for the mess, begging that they should clean up after themselves, Žižek asserts capitalism is running on the fumes and assails the Left for their failure to pose a suitable challenge.
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