Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

Author(s) : Slavoj Zizek

Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

Book Details

  • Publisher : Bloomsbury
  • Published : October 2023
  • Cover : Paperback
  • Pages : 400
  • Category :
    Lacanian Psychoanalysis
  • Catalogue No : 97283
  • ISBN 13 : 9781350409392
  • ISBN 10 : 1350409391
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Contemporary life is defined by excess. There must always be more, there is never enough. We need a surplus to what we need to be able to truly enjoy what we have. Slavoj Žižek's guide to surplus (and why it's enjoyable) begins by arguing that what is surplus to our needs is by its very nature unsubstantial and unnecessary. But, perversely, without this surplus, we wouldn't be able to enjoy what is substantial and necessary. Indeed, without the surplus we wouldn't be able to identify what was the perfect amount.

Is there any escape from the vicious cycle of surplus enjoyment or are we forever doomed to simply want more? Engaging with everything from The Joker film to pop songs and Thomas Aquinas to the history of pandemics, Žižek argues that recognising the society of enjoyment we live in for what it is can provide an explanation for the political impasses in which we find ourselves today. And if we begin, even a little bit, to recognise that the nuggets of 'enjoyment' we find in excess are as flimsy and futile, might we find a way out?

Reviews and Endorsements

Žižek could never be as dull a writer. He is a great caller of things stupid, which is a skill too little practised in a world dedicated to avoiding offence. But he also has genuine enthusiasms that constantly surprise the reader, such as a brilliant few pages on Shostakovich and, later, on the film Joker … Žižek is at heart really a close reader and a seriously inventive one.
- The Spectator

Surplus-Enjoyment is the author at his most supple, addressing urgent current concerns and the need for a global solidarity that cannot be divorced from egalitarianism. ... Zizek is a pick-me-up for fatigued brains, a true radical and an authentic left-wing conservative who wants to prevent the social disintegration that threatens our civic life.
- The Prisma: The Multicultural Newspaper

Table of Contents

Ouverture: Living In A Topsy-Turvy World

1. Where Is The Rift? Marx, Capitalism, And Ecology
2. A Non-binary Difference? Psychoanalysis, Politics, And Philosophy
3. Surplus-Enjoyment, Or, Why Do We Enjoy Our Oppression

Finale: Subjective Destitution As A Political Category

Bibliography
Index

About the Author(s)

Slavoj Zizek is a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and political activist. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and the author of numerous books on dialectical materialism, critique of ideology and art.

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