Plague of Fantasies

This volume posits that the current epoch is plagued by fantasies.

There is an intensifying antagonism between the ever greater abstraction of people's lives - whether in the form of digitalization or market relations - and the deluge of pseudo-concrete images which surround people.

Traditional critical thought traces the connections between abstract notions and concrete social reality, but today, Zizek suggests, the correct procedure is the inverse: to work from pseudo-concrete imagery towards the abstract.

Ranging in his examples from national differences in toilet design to cybersex, and from intellectuals' responses to the Bosnian War to Robert Schumann's music, Zizek explores the relations between fantasy and ideology, the way in which fantasy animates enjoyment while protecting against its excesses, the associations of the notion of fetishism with fantasized seduction, and the ways in whch digitalization and cyberspace affect the status of subjectivity. Slavoj Zizek is the author of "The Sublime Object of Ideology", "For They Know Not What They Do", "Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality" and "The Indivisible Remainder: Essays on Schelling and Related Matters".