Description

Verso [Published Date: 2002]. Hardcover, 344 pp. First Verso edition. Very good in very good dust jacket. Blue cloth covered boards with red lettering on spine. Light bumping and scuffing to edges of covers. Binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has a few small nicks and light creasing along edges. Light overall scuffing to jacket as well. Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. [From front jacket flap] The idea of a Lenin renaissance might well provoke an outburst of sarcastic laughter. Marx is OK, but Lenin? Doesn't he stand for the big catastrophe which left its mark on the entire twentieth-century world political scene? Lenin, however, deserves wider consideration than this, and his writings of 1917 are testament to a formidable political figure. They reveal his ability to grasp the significance of an extraordinary moment in history. Everything is here, from Lenin-the-ingenious-revolutionary-strategist to Lenin-of-the-enacted-utopia. To use Kierkegaard's phrase, what we can glimpse in these writings is Lenin-in-becoming; not yet Lenin-the-Soviet-institution, but Lenin thrown into an open, contingent situation. Slavoj Zizek's Introduction situates the 1917 writings in their historical context, while his Afterword tackles the key question of whether Lenin can be reinvented in our era of "cultural capitalism". Zizek is convinced: whatever the discussion - the forthcoming crisis of capitalism, the possibility of a redeeming violence, the falsity of liberal tolerance - he believes that Lenin's time has come again. Contents include: A Note on Bibliographical Sources; Introduction: Between the Two Revolutions by Slavoj Zizek Revolution at the Gates : Letters from Afar; The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution ("April Theses"); On Slogans; The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It; One of the Fundamental Questions of the Revolution; The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power; Marxism and Insurrection; The Tasks of the Revolution; The Crisis Has Matured; Advice of an Onlooker; Letter to Comrades; Meeting of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies; Afterword : Lenin's Choice; Index