To define 'progress' is to lay claim to the future. Seminal thinker Slavoj Zizek turns essayist
to interrogate the competing visions which form the horizons of human possibility and ask: Can
things which have never seemed worse get better? What would a better world be? And how when
we are constantly besieged by doomers degrowthers and disorienting relativisms can we make any
headway at all in the face of unprecedented ecological social and political crises? In
thirteen iconoclastic essays Slavoj Zizek disrupts the death-grip that neoliberalists
Trumpian populists toxic self-improvement industries and accelerationists alike have
established on the idea of progress. Anatomizing what is lost when opponents of the future are
allowed to define it Zizek ruthlessly exposes what different visions of progress exclude or
sacrifice and the dynamics of desire denial and disavowal at work in Hollywood blockbusters
Buddhist economics decolonization movements and other engines of vision. In a whirlwind tour
that takes in everything from gentrification to the theory of relativity Lacan to Lenin Putin
to Mary Poppins and Marine Le Pen to the end of the world these essays never stop asking hard
questions of imagined futures. Nor does Zizek shrink from the hardest question of all: How do
we free ourselves from the hypocritical guilt-ridden dreaming in which we're enmeshed and
begin to build a better world?
