Praise for Slavoj Žižek:

"The excitable fluency, ursine congeniality and gleeful readiness to provoke and offend all feed the sense of authentic spontaneity and energy that has made Žižek something like European philosophy's punk icon, packing out auditoriums around the world." --Josh Cohen, New Statesman

"Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than Slavoj Žižek, one of the world's best-known public intellectuals." --John Gray, New York Review of Books

"A gifted speaker--tumultuous, emphatic, direct--he writes as he speaks." --Jonathan Ree, Guardian

"Like Socrates on steroids. Breathtakingly perceptive." --Terry Eagleton

"Such passion, in a man whose work forms a shaky, cartoon rope-bridge between the minutiae of popular culture and the big abstract problems of existence, is invigorating, entertaining and expanding enquiring minds around the world." --Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph

Lenin's originality and importance as a revolutionary leader is most often associated with the seizure of power in 1917. But, Zizek argues in his new study and collection of original texts, Lenin's true greatness can be better grasped in the very last couple of years of his political life. Russia had survived foreign invasion, embargo and a terrifying civil war, as well as internal revolts such as at Kronstadt in 1921. But the new state was exhausted, isolated and disorientated in the face of the world revolution that seemed to be receding. New paths had to be sought, almost from scratch, for the Soviet state to survive and imagine some alternative route to the future. With his characteristic brio and provocative insight, Zizek suggests that Lenin's courage as a thinker can be found in his willingness to face this reality of retreat lucidly and frontally.