Download or read book The Most Dangerous Thinker written by Ezekiel Dayo Adetunji and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 49 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whom do you tell? Who would have believed it? Sometimes you see a priest, pastor, or imam being led off in handcuffs because he molested children, having been found fornicating and committing adultery, while his superiors are concerned with the church’s image or the mosque’s reputation and have a nonchalant attitude towards the victims crying out for help. It wouldn’t be funny to see the chief executive officer of one of the world’s biggest corporations being sentenced to life imprisonment for embezzlement, leaving millions of employees without their jobs, their homes, or their life savings. What about politicians who sell their votes for personal gain, betraying the trust of the masses and callously disregarding the needs of those they promised to care for? They are stealing in the name of a party platform. I wouldn’t be surprised to see nurses, doctors, managers, and supervisors from hospitals, nursing homes, care agencies, and residential homes being sentenced to life imprisonment, turning mad, and becoming killers of mental health patients because of injustices, bad treatment, and mischievousness. How much do managers give to those in positions below them, maltreating them for no reason? The managers refuse to train the junior employees because the former don’t want the latter to attain a managerial level. How interesting it will be to hear that every story we read in the newspapers today is as a result of phone hacking. We think we are reading nice stories, but some people’s personal information has been leaked in a way that hurts them and their precious families. This happens all over the world. Then it is reported in the world news as if it were good news. What about police? They are harbouring criminals and collecting bribes to pervert the course of justice, refusing to do certain investigations. Doctors are not left out. Millions of patients trust doctors to heal them, but then the doctors turn into assassins. What about civil servants working in the government? They promised to do the job, but they are not doing it. Hey, my friend, what about the teachers who are to teach and instil knowledge in young people so they can become good leaders in future? They eventually turn into businessmen and businesswomen, refusing to let their students pass their examinations, following young women around and harassing them, deceiving them with the little money they get to feed their families at home because they want to see their knickers! One of the most lucrative fields in the world to work in today is the travel industry, but it has been polluted beyond a doubt. To secure a booking or get a ticket to travel abroad to the country of your choice for holiday, you might end up paying extra fares or paying through the back door. Oh, dear God, have mercy; I know you are watching our movements! People are killing in the name of religion, which is another escalating news story. Around the world today, we can see a lots of groups with different names springing up, such as ISIS, Boko Haram, and al-Qaeda. These and many others think they are seeking the face of the almighty God, but this is a lie. They are committing crimes—killing, stealing, kidnapping—in the name of God. God hasn’t sent you to kill but to love one another and bring the lost soul to his marvellous life!
Download or read book The Courage of Hopelessness written by Slavoj Zizek and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maverick philosopher Slavoj Zizek returns to explore today's ideological, political and economic battles—and asks whether radical change is possible In these troubled times, even the most pessimistic diagnosis of our future ends with an uplifting hint that things might not be as bad as all that, that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Yet, argues Slavoj Zizek, it is only when we have admitted to ourselves that our situation is completely hopeless—that the light at the end of the tunnel is in fact the headlight of a train—that fundamental change can be brought about. Surveying the various challenges in the world today, from mass migration and geopolitical tensions to terrorism, the explosion of rightist populism and the emergence of new radical politics—all of which, in their own way, express the impasses of global capitalism—Zizek explores whether there still remains the possibility for genuine change. Today, he proposes, the only true question is,or should be, this: do we endorse the predominant acceptance of capitalism as fact of human nature, or does today's capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms to prevent its infinite reproduction? Can we, he asks, move beyond the failure of socialism, and beyond the current wave of populist rage, and initiate radical change before the train hits? “Zizek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation” —The New Yorker
Download or read book What Is Your Dangerous Idea written by John Brockman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world's leading scientific thinkers explore bold, remarkable, perilous ideas that could change our lives—for better . . . or for worse . . . From Copernicus to Darwin, to current-day thinkers, scientists have always promoted theories and unveiled discoveries that challenge everything society holds dear; ideas with both positive and dire consequences. Many thoughts that resonate today are dangerous not because they are assumed to be false, but because they might turn out to be true. What do the world's leading scientists and thinkers consider to be their most dangerous idea? Through the leading online forum Edge (www.edge.org), the call went out, and this compelling and easily digestible volume collects the answers. From using medication to permanently alter our personalities to contemplating a universe in which we are utterly alone, to the idea that the universe might be fundamentally inexplicable, What Is Your Dangerous Idea? takes an unflinching look at the daring, breathtaking, sometimes terrifying thoughts that could forever alter our world and the way we live in it. Contributors include Daniel C. Dennett • Jared Diamond • Brian Greene • Matt Ridley • Howard Gardner and Freeman Dyson, among others
Download or read book Dangerous Minds written by Ronald Beiner and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-03-12 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and demise of the Soviet Union, prominent Western thinkers began to suggest that liberal democracy had triumphed decisively on the world stage. Having banished fascism in World War II, liberalism had now buried communism, and the result would be an end of major ideological conflicts, as liberal norms and institutions spread to every corner of the globe. With the Brexit vote in Great Britain, the resurgence of right-wing populist parties across the European continent, and the surprising ascent of Donald Trump to the American presidency, such hopes have begun to seem hopelessly naïve. The far right is back, and serious rethinking is in order. In Dangerous Minds, Ronald Beiner traces the deepest philosophical roots of such right-wing ideologues as Richard Spencer, Aleksandr Dugin, and Steve Bannon to the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger—and specifically to the aspects of their thought that express revulsion for the liberal-democratic view of life. Beiner contends that Nietzsche's hatred and critique of bourgeois, egalitarian societies has engendered new disciples on the populist right who threaten to overturn the modern liberal consensus. Heidegger, no less than Nietzsche, thoroughly rejected the moral and political values that arose during the Enlightenment and came to power in the wake of the French Revolution. Understanding Heideggerian dissatisfaction with modernity, and how it functions as a philosophical magnet for those most profoundly alienated from the reigning liberal-democratic order, Beiner argues, will give us insight into the recent and unexpected return of the far right. Beiner does not deny that Nietzsche and Heidegger are important thinkers; nor does he seek to expel them from the history of philosophy. But he does advocate that we rigorously engage with their influential thought in light of current events—and he suggests that we place their severe critique of modern liberal ideals at the center of this engagement.
Download or read book On Belief written by Slavoj Zizek and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the basis of belief in an era when globalization, multiculturalism and big business are the new religion? Slavoj Zizek, renowned philosopher and irrepressible cultural critic takes on all comers in this compelling and breathless new book. From 'cyberspace reason' to the paradox that is 'Western Buddhism', On Belief gets behind the contours of the way we normally think about belief, in particular Judaism and Christianity. Holding up the so-called authenticity of religious belief to critical light, Zizek draws on psychoanalysis, film and philosophy to reveal in startling fashion that nothing could be worse for believers than their beliefs turning out to be true.
Download or read book God in Pain written by Slavoj Zizek and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant dissection and reconstruction of the three major faith-based systems of belief in the world today, from one of the world's most articulate intellectuals, Slavoj Zizek, in conversation with Croatian philosopher Boris Gunjevic. In six chapters that describe Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in fresh ways using the tools of Hegelian and Lacanian analysis, God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse shows how each faith understands humanity and divinity--and how the differences between the faiths may be far stranger than they may at first seem. Chapters include (by Zizek) (1) "Christianity Against Sacred," (2) "Glance into the Archives of Islam," (3) "Only Suffering God Can Save Us," (4) "Animal Gaze," (5) "For the Theologico-Political Suspension of the Ethical," (by Gunjevic) (1) "Mistagogy of Revolution," (2) "Virtues of Empire," (3) "Every Book Is Like Fortress," (4) "Radical Orthodoxy," (5) "Prayer and Wake."
Download or read book Living in the End Times written by Slavoj Zizek and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2011-04-18 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. But if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it possible for Western society to face up to the end times? In a major new analysis of our global situation, Zizek argues that our collective responses to economic Armageddon correspond to the stages of grief: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and withdrawal. For this edition, Zizek has written a long afterword that leaves almost no subject untouched, from WikiLeaks to the nature of the Chinese Communist Party.
Download or read book Dying for Ideas written by Costica Bradatan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do Socrates, Hypatia, Giordano Bruno, Thomas More, and Jan Patocka have in common? First, they were all faced one day with the most difficult of choices: stay faithful to your ideas and die or renounce them and stay alive. Second, they all chose to die. Their spectacular deaths have become not only an integral part of their biographies, but are also inseparable from their work. A "death for ideas" is a piece of philosophical work in its own right; Socrates may have never written a line, but his death is one of the greatest philosophical best-sellers of all time. Dying for Ideas explores the limit-situation in which philosophers find themselves when the only means of persuasion they can use is their own dying bodies and the public spectacle of their death. The book tells the story of the philosopher's encounter with death as seen from several angles: the tradition of philosophy as an art of living; the body as the site of self-transcending; death as a classical philosophical topic; taming death and self-fashioning; finally, the philosophers' scapegoating and their live performance of a martyr's death, followed by apotheosis and disappearance into myth. While rooted in the history of philosophy, Dying for Ideas is an exercise in breaking disciplinary boundaries. This is a book about Socrates and Heidegger, but also about Gandhi's "fasting unto death" and self-immolation; about Girard and Passolini, and self-fashioning and the art of the essay.
Download or read book The Dangerous Man written by Karen Sawyer and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of controversial research and alternative worldviews, presenting new and exciting ways of thinking about life as we know it.
Download or read book Violence written by Slavoj Zizek and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-07-22 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosopher, cultural critic, and agent provocateur Zizek constructs a fascinating new framework to look at the forces of violence in the world.
Download or read book Less Than Nothing written by Slavoj Zizek and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2012-05-22 with total page 1049 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thousand-page resurrection of Hegel, from the bestselling philosopher and critic who has been hailed as “one of the world’s best-known public intellectuals” (New York Review of Books) For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, an influence each new thinker struggles to escape. As a consequence, Hegel’s absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring the fact that he is the defining philosopher of the historical transition to modernity, a period with which our own times share startling similarities. Today, as global capitalism comes apart at the seams, we are entering a new period of transition. In Less Than Nothing—the product of a career-long focus on the part of its author—Slavoj Žižek argues it is imperative we not simply return to Hegel but that we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables Žižek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with key strands of contemporary thought—Heidegger, Badiou, speculative realism, quantum physics, and cognitive sciences. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel.
Download or read book Philosophy in the Present written by Alain Badiou and published by Polity. This book was released on 2009-12-14 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two controversial thinkers discuss a timeless but nonetheless urgent question: should philosophy interfere in the world? Nothing less than philosophy is at stake because, according to Badiou, philosophy is nothing but interference and commitment and will not be restrained by academic discipline. Philosophy is strange and new, and yet speaks in the name of all - as Badiou shows with his theory of universality. Similarly, Zizek believes that the philosopher must intervene, contrary to all expectations, in the key issues of the time. He can offer no direction, but this only shows that the question has been posed incorrectly: it is valid to change the terms of the debate and settle on philosophy as abnormality and excess. At once an invitation to philosophy and an introduction to the thinking of two of the most topical and controversial philosophers writing today, this concise volume will be of great interest to students and general readers alike.
Download or read book Iraq written by Slavoj Zizek and published by Verso. This book was released on 2005-11-17 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zizek analyzes the logic behind toppling Saddam Hussein despite no evidence of WMDs and questions the actual ideological and political stakes of the attack on Iraq.
Download or read book Thinking Without a Banister written by Hannah Arendt and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hannah Arendt was born in Germany in 1906 and lived in America from 1941 until her death in 1975. Thus her life spanned the tumultuous years of the twentieth century, as did her thought. She did not consider herself a philosopher, though she studied and maintained close relationships with two great philosophers—Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger—throughout their lives. She was a thinker, in search not of metaphysical truth but of the meaning of appearances and events. She was a questioner rather than an answerer, and she wrote what she thought, principally to encourage others to think for themselves. Fearless of the consequences of thinking, Arendt found courage woven in each and every strand of human freedom. In 1951 she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, in 1958 The Human Condition, in 1961 Between Past and Future, in 1963 On Revolution and Eichmann in Jerusalem, in 1968 Men in Dark Times, in 1970 On Violence, in 1972 Crises of the Republic, and in 1978, posthumously, The Life of the Mind. Starting at the turn of the twenty-first century, Schocken Books has published a series of collections of Arendt’s unpublished and uncollected writings, of which Thinking Without a Banister is the fifth volume. The title refers to Arendt’s description of her experience of thinking, an activity she indulged without any of the traditional religious, moral, political, or philosophic pillars of support. The book’s contents are varied: the essays, lectures, reviews, interviews, speeches, and editorials, taken together, manifest the relentless activity of her mind as well as her character, acquainting the reader with the person Arendt was, and who has hardly yet been appreciated or understood. (Edited and with an introduction by Jerome Kohn)
Download or read book Like a Thief in Broad Daylight written by Slavoj Zizek and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The latest book from "the most despicable philosopher in the West" (New Republic) considers the new dangers and radical possibilities set in motion by advances in Big Tech. In recent years, techno-scientific progress has started to utterly transform our world--changing it almost beyond recognition. In this extraordinary new book, renowned philosopher Slavoj Žižek turns to look at the brave new world of Big Tech, revealing how, with each new wave of innovation, we find ourselves moving closer and closer to a bizarrely literal realization of Marx's prediction that "all that is solid melts into air." With the automation of work, the virtualization of money, the dissipation of class communities, and the rise of immaterial, intellectual labor, the global capitalist edifice is beginning to crumble, more quickly than ever before--and it is now on the verge of vanishing entirely. But what will come next? Against a backdrop of constant socio-technological upheaval, how could any kind of authentic change take place? In such a context, Žižek argues, there can be no great social triumph--because lasting revolution has already come into the scene, like a thief in broad daylight, stealing into sight right before our very eyes. What we must do now is wake up and see it. Urgent as ever, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight illuminates the new dangers as well as the radical possibilities thrown up by today's technological and scientific advances, and their electrifying implications for us all.
Download or read book Contingency Hegemony Universality written by Judith Butler and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2011-01-10 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the contemporary legacy of Gramsci’s notion of Hegemony? How can universality be reformulated now that its spurious versions have been so thoroughly criticized? In this ground-breaking project, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek engage in a dialogue on central questions of contemporary philosophy and politics. Their essays, organized as separate contributions that respond to one another, range over the Hegelian legacy in contemporary critical theory, the theoretical dilemmas of multiculturalism, the universalism-versus-particularism debate, the strategies of the Left in a globalized economy, and the relative merits of post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis for a critical social theory. While the rigor and intelligence with which these writers approach their work is formidable, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality benefits additionally from their clear sense of energy and enjoyment in a revealing and often unpredictable exchange.
Download or read book Welcome to the Desert of the Real written by Slavoj Zizek and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2013-01-16 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liberals and conservatives proclaim the end of the American holiday from history. Now the easy games are over; one should take sides. Žižek argues this is precisely the temptation to be resisted. In such moments of apparently clear choices, the real alternatives are most hidden. Welcome to the Desert of the Real steps back, complicating the choices imposed on us. It proposes that global capitalism is fundamentalist and that America was complicit in the rise of Muslim fundamentalism. It points to our dreaming about the catastrophe in numerous disaster movies before it happened, and explores the irony that the tragedy has been used to legitimize torture. Last but not least it analyzes the fiasco of the predominant leftist response to the events.
