'First as Tragedy, Then as Farce' by Slavoj Žižek

I bought this because it was billed, somewhere, as 'Žižek for Beginners'; I probably won't read any more Žižek. Across this book's 157 pages, Žižek rambles on about capitalism, communism, liberalism, populism, radicalism, finance, the French and Haitian revolutions, religious fundamentalism, Obama, and many, many other things. There was quite a bit that I found interesting, and some parts were genuinely (intentionally, I hope and think) funny.

His main argument is that liberal capitalism has died twice, first in the tragedy of 9/11, then in the farce of the 2008 financial crisis. The adherents of liberal capitalism are now only pretending to believe their economic doctrines, not willing to accept that they've been seduced by a false faith, and so now is the time for the Left to start presenting a new communism as an alternative to capitalism.

Communism, not socialism. Socialism is an enemy of communism, according to Žižek.

I skimmed through this all very quickly, so can't deal with his arguments in detail. Žižek's digressionary style was very annoying and distracting; sometimes the tangents were entertaining or interesting, but they made the book feel almost structureless. I like my argumentative books to have structure, the points proceeding logically to their conclusion.

In the book's introduction, Žižek seems to want to start a fight with the reader. I often get the impression that many groups on the Left isolate themselves by not being welcoming to newcomers, to those who don't already share the faith, or by using esoteric language that is very off-putting. Žižek cites an awful lot of Left intellectuals, whose opinions I couldn't bring myself to care about, and his vocabulary is aggressively academic.

I was, I guess very erroneously, expecting 'Žižek for Beginners' to be a mass-market-friendly intro to his radical leftist thoughts and arguments. It seems this is a book for Marxists by a Marxist, and I can't see it converting anyone not part of the choir. As someone who sympathizes strongly with the criticisms of capitalism, I was looking forward to cogent arguments for the alternative system. Alas, they were not found here.