Heaven in Disorder

Reviews likely: Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Jacobin, CounterPunch Interviews likely: The Joe Rogan Experience, Under the Skin with Russell Brand, The Owen Jones Show, Jacobin, Interview, Bad Faith, Chapo Trap House, Red Scare, Going Underground, Give Them an Argument Excerpts likely: Jacobin, The Point, The Baffler, American Affairs, RT Book launch in New York

As we emerge (though perhaps only temporarily) from the pandemic, other crises move center stage: outrageous inequality, climate disaster, desperate refugees, mounting tensions of a new cold war. The abiding motif of our time is relentless chaos. Acknowledging the possibilities for new beginnings at such moments, Mao Zedong famously proclaimed “There is great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent.” The contemporary relevance of Mao’s observation depends on whether today’s catastrophes can be a catalyst for progress or have passed over into something terrible and irretrievable. Perhaps the disorder is no longer under, but in heaven itself. Characteristically rich in paradoxes and reversals that entertain as well as illuminate, Slavoj Žižek’s new book treats with equal analytical depth the lessons of Rammstein and Corbyn, Morales and Orwell, Lenin and Christ. It excavates universal truths from local political sites across Palestine and Chile, France and Kurdistan, and beyond. Heaven In Disorder looks with fervid dispassion at the fracturing of the Left, the empty promises of liberal democracy, and the tepid compromises offered by the powerful. From the ashes of these failures, Žižek asserts the need for international solidarity, economic transformation, and—above all—an urgent, “wartime” communism.