Slavoj Žižek

“The philosophical question here is whether the unfortunate rat was aware that something was wrong, that its movements were being decided by another power. And when the same experiment is performed on a human being . . . will the steered person be aware that an external power is deciding his movements? And if so, will this power be experienced as an irresistible inner drive, or as coercion?”

For me, the name ‘Patricia Highsmith’ designates a sacred territory: she is the One whose place among writers is that which Spinoza held for Gilles Deleuze (a ‘Christ among philosophers’). I learned a lot about her from Andrew Wilson’s biography, a book which strikes the right balance between empathy and critical distance. Wilson’s interpretations of her...

Henning Mankell’s recent series of police procedurals set in the southern Swedish town of Ystad, with Inspector Kurt Wallander as their hero, is a perfect illustration of the fate of the detective novel in the era of global capitalism.

The main effect of globalisation on detective fiction is discernible in its dialectical counterpart: the specific locale, a particular provincial...

Does anyone still remember ‘Comical Ali’, Saddam’s information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, who, in his daily press conferences, heroically stuck to the Iraqi line in the face of the most glaring evidence? (He was still claiming that TV footage of US tanks on the streets of Baghdad were just Hollywood special effects when the tanks were only a few hundred yards from his...

“Although Timothy Garton Ash is my political opponent, I always consider him worth reading for his wealth of precise observations, and as a reliable source on the vicissitudes of the disintegration of Eastern European Communism. In Free World he has taken the same perspicuous and bitterly witty approach to the conundrums of the recent tensions between the key Western European states and the US. In the second half of the book, however, he passes to a general diagnosis of the threats to freedom since the end of the Cold War, and the tone becomes dogmatic and simplistic, and the proposed solutions hopelessly naive. The final pages are full of journalistic commonplaces. And what is one to say of his tendency to moral platitude?”