Totalitarianism, as an ideological notion, has always had a precise strategic function: to guarantee the liberal-democratic hegemony by dismissing the Leftist critique of liberal democracy as the obverse, the twin, of the Rightist Fascist dictatorships. Instead of providing yet another systematic exposition of the history of this notion, Zizek 's book addresses totalitarianism in a Wittgensteinian way, as a cobweb of family resemblances. He concludes that the devil lies not so much in the detail of what constitutes totalitarianism but in what enables the very designation totalitarian, the liberal-democratic consensus itself.

Author Biography

Slavoj Zizek is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Social Studies, Ljubljana. His books include The Sublime Object of Ideology, Everything You Always Wanted to know about Lacan (but were afraid to ask Hitchcock), The Plague of Fantasies, The Ticklish Subject and The Fragile Absolute, all published by Verso.