"Living in the End Times"
Tuesday 17 August 2010
by: Aaron Leonard, t r u t h o u t | Book Review
The landscape of the world inSlavoj Žižek's "Living in the End of Times" is dotted with incomprehensible horrors. Global ice sheets melt and various countries rush to plant their flags in order to profit from the exposed resources that lay below. TV talk shows in Indonesia feature participants in the massacre of millions of Communist sympathizers in 1966. Now respectable politicians, they proudly discuss how they were inspired by gangster movies. Local warlords and foreign armies feast on profits from coltan, diamonds, gold and copper extracted from the Congo - funding what Time Magazine called the "Deadliest War in the World," with four million killed in the past decade. Žižek's is not saying the end of the world is nigh ... exactly. What he is saying is that there are things going on to which we are just not paying sufficient attention.


