Zero Point

Description

The essays in Zero Point ask how we distinguish defeat from disaster, and how we confront despair without collapsing into it – questions never more pertinent than the current moment in the wake of electoral victories for authoritarian populists and unceasing news of violent atrocities.

The ”zero-point” of the title is ground level, rock bottom, the place to which one retreats and where one regroups. Taken from Vladimir Lenin”s 1922 piece ”On Ascending a High Mountain, in which Lenin considers the complexities of how one ”retreats” while keeping faith in the cause, the central simile of the climber offers a blueprint for resilience, flexibility, and the persistence of hope. This is the revolutionary as living out the Beckettian motto: ”Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” In Žižek”s hands, this becomes the formula for confronting the antagonisms of existing world order. With a particular focus on the Middle East -the point at which all our tensions threaten to explode – Žižek argues nothing can be addressed meaningfully without such a confrontation.

The consequences of eschewing apolitical acts of solidarity and choosing to attempt to speak truth to power are reckoned with in the second half of Zero Point. In a unique piece assembled chronologically from unpublished writings, Žižek wrestles with the fallout from his controversial speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2023 – a speech which saw him interrupted, condemned and accused of anti-Semitism. The reader bears witness as Zizek processes the criticism, evolves his thinking and explores the full ethical, political and personal ramifications of the question: When is the right time to speak?