Philosophy in the Present by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek

Reviewed by John David Ebert

This little book was published in German in 2005, and then translated into English and published in 2009 by Polity Press. As anyone who has read much of Zizek is well aware, Badiou is a name that he often cites and indeed, in the present book, he reveals that he reads every single one of Badiou’s books and that “every new work of his leaves a trace in mine.” This short book is a perfectly designed introduction to the basic ideas of Badiou, which center around a philosophy of the Event. Read the rest of this entry »

Living in the End Times by Slavoj Zizek:

A Book Review by John David Ebert

Despite its title, Living in the End Times actually has little to do with apocalyptic themes or eschatological scenarios. This would fall under the sphere of religious studies, and as his readers know, religion is not Zizek’s strong suit. His real strength is his particularly incisive understanding of political machinations, especially the hypocritical–or as he terms it “ideological”–manipulations of capitalism, for Zizek is an unapologetic Marxist. Read the rest of this entry »

The Agony of Power by Jean Baudrillard

Reviewed by John David Ebert

The Agony of Power is another posthumous text by Jean Baudrillard, to be published by Semiotexte in October. If you’ve never read Baudrillard but were always curious what the fuss was all about, this would be a good place to start, since the book is only 100 pages and reads swiftly. It is also Baudrillard at his finest. Read the rest of this entry »

Some Thoughts on a First Reading of Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus

by John David Ebert

Published in France in 1972, Anti-Oedipus was the first of several collaboartions between Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A few years later they would go on to write the even larger and more complex A Thousand Plateaus, perhaps Deleuze’s most famous work. Zizek argues that Deleuze’s collaborations with Guattari represent his weakest work, and that his best books are actually The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition, works written in the years prior to Anti-Oedipus. Since I have not yet read these latter two books, I cannot judge their merits, but I must say I was very impressed with Anti-Oedipus, though I think A Thousand Plateaus is the better book. Read the rest of this entry »

On Paul Virilio’s New Book The University of Disaster

Reviewed by John David Ebert

Virilio’s latest book in English is an examination of the state of the planet and the humanities, both under siege by the arrogance of Big Science gone out of control, endocolonizing the body and dreaming of fantasies of exocolonizing outer space. The book is full of the same old brilliant Virilianisms: his wonderful point, for instance, about how the first photographs taken of a city from the air by the French photographer Nadar in 1858, when he floated above the city of Paris in a hot air balloon, created the earliest beginnings of the aerial view of the earth — displacing and replacing Atget’s intimate perspectival view of Paris streets and shops and merchants — that eventually led to the firebombings of European cities in World War II, then to the satellization of the earth during the Cold War and now to our present fantasies of escaping from the earth in order to transform it into a star in the sky of some exotic planet. Read the rest of this entry »