Zero Point

The essays in Zero Point ask how we distinguish defeat from disaster, and how we confront despair without collapsing into it—questions never more pertinent than the current moment in the wake of electoral victories for authoritarian populists and unceasing news of violent atrocities.

The 'zero-point' of the title is ground level, rock bottom, the place to which one retreats and where one regroups. Taken from Vladimir Lenin's 1922 piece "On Ascending a High Mountain," in which Lenin considers the complexities of how one 'retreats' while keeping faith in the cause, the central simile of the climber offers a blueprint for resilience, flexibility, and the persistence of hope.

This is the revolutionary as living out the Beckettian motto: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." In Žižek's hands, this becomes the formula for confronting the antagonisms of existing world order. With a particular focus on the Middle East—the point at which all our tensions threaten to explode—Žižek argues nothing can be addressed meaningfully without such a confrontation.

The consequences of eschewing apolitical acts of solidarity and choosing to attempt to speak truth to power are reckoned with in the second half of Zero Point. In a unique piece assembled chronologically from unpublished writings, Žižek wrestles with the fallout from his controversial speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2023—a speech which saw him interrupted, condemned, and accused of anti-Semitism. The reader bears witness as Žižek processes the criticism, evolves his thinking, and explores the full ethical, political, and personal ramifications of the question: When is the right time to speak?