Revolution at the Gates: Zizek on Lenin: The 1917 Writings - Softcover

Lenin, V.I.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1859845460 ISBN 13: 9781859845462

Publisher: Verso Books, 2004

Synopsis

The Vision of God: As Represented in Ruckert's Fragments (1898)

About this title

Review:

"A return to Marx may be acceptable today ... But a repetition of Lenin? ... Perhaps Žižek's return to Lenin is merely tactical, figurative even. He can't be serious, can he? ... Žižek claims that Lenin's act, 'his choice, ' continues to speak to those of us on the left today. Faced with our current conceptual deadlock, we must have the courage, the nerve, to risk isolation, self-annihilation even, in order to ofeer a real alternative to the false oppositions recuperated by and churned out for our consumption by the image industry of late capitalism ... The postmodernists and liberal multiculturalists, today's Bernsteins and Kautskys--our contemporary Plekhanovs and Martovs, beware!" --Bad Subjects

From the Back Cover:

'After the Hungarian rebellion of 1956 was crushed by the Russian tanks, Georg Lukacs was taken prisoner; when a KGB officer asked him if he had a weapon, Lukacs calmly reached into his pocket and handed over his pen ... If ever a pen was a weapon, it was the pen which wrote Lenin's 1917 texts.' - from the Introduction

The idea of a Lenin renaissance might well provoke an outburst of sarcastic laughter. Marx is OK, but Lenin? Doesn't he stand for the big catastrophe which left its mark on the entire twentieth-century world political scene?

Lenin, however, deserves wider consideration than this, and his writings of 1917 are testament to a formidable political figure. They reveal his ability to grasp the significance of an extraordinary moment in history. Everything is here, from Lenin-the-ingenious-revolutionary-strategist to Leinin-of-the-enacted-utopia. To use Kierkegaard's phrase, what we can glimpse in these writings in Lenin-in-becoming; not yet Lenin-the-Soviet-institution, but Lenin thrown into an open, contingent situation.

Slavoj Zizek's Introduction situates the 1917 writings in their historical context, while his Afterword tackles the key question of whether Lenin can be reinvented in our era of 'cultural capitalism'. Zizek is convinced: whatever the discussion - the forthcoming crisis of capitalism, the possibility of a redeeming violence, the falsity of liberal tolerance - he believes Lenin's time has come again.

About this edition

• Publisher: Verso Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1859845460
• ISBN 13: 9781859845462
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 356
• Editor: Zizek Slavoj