Slavoj Žižek’s diagnosis of late capitalism is of genuine interest. His prescription is a disgrace.

Žižek is a spirited critic of the maladies of a form of life that has swept the globe since Thatcher and Reagan. He indicts its “excesses of individualism” and promotion of “social disintegration,” its ruinous combination of “(selective) private affluence” with “global (ecological, infrastructural) degradation,” and its hollowing-out of representative democracy. By treating these maladies as indicators of “what is wrong in the very structure” of the system Žižek has put back on the agenda of the Left the question of a global alternative to capitalism, warning that we are living through “the self-annihilation of humanity itself.” And as a cultural critic he can be brilliant in forcing us to adopt strange angles of vision on a vast array of familiar objects and mind-sets, high and low, so that we see them afresh as forms of meaning in the service of this system-in-crisis.