Slavoj Žižek's Post-9/11 Essays Published by Flammarion

Slavoj Žižek's "Bienvenue dans le désert du réel" (Welcome to the Desert of the Real), published by Éditions Flammarion, compiles essays written after September 11, 2001. In the book, Žižek critiques the unconditional support for the American war on terror and explores alternatives to liberalism that avoid authoritarian grand narratives. He adopts a serious, grand-seigneur tone, contrasting with his usual pop-culture and pun-loving persona. Žižek controversially praises the Slavic conception of freedom as an "absolute drive" and advocates for an Islamism "articulated with a socialist project," while declaring the liberal-democratic parliamentary system as no longer "alive." The review by Mark Alizart notes that Žižek's call for an "act" in the messianic sense (after Lacan, Agamben, Badiou) remains purely formal and never actualizes, aligning him with philosophers who embrace irrationalism for lack of reasonable solutions.