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Slavoj Žižek. Freedom: A Disease Without Cure. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. 320 s.

Reviewing a Žižek book is a bit like “dancing about architecture,” to borrow a Frank Zappa quotation. Ideally, a review ought to provide a rational overview of a work’s contents and form. But Žižek unusual prose style resists simplified summary, and many of his most recent works are, if not formless, then at least formally idiosyncratic—more like patchworks of loosely interwoven textual fragments than formal or even sustained argument. With strands of text that have been recombined, reused and (occasionally subtly) rewritten, his texts at times seem to draw more upon Burroughs’ “cut-up” collage technique than the Western canon of philosophy, redolent of the free-associating analysand on the couch giving free rein to their thoughts: One idea succeeds the next, certainly, but the sum of it all is naturally quite fragmentary.

It is increasingly recognized that large language models (LLMs) are prone to erroneous outputs, a phenomenon known as hallucinations. As AI spreads ever wider into the technological substrate of late modernity—summarizing news stories, synthesizing search results, condensing research papers, speeding up office worker productivity, and so on—the hallucinatory effectsof AI are only likely to grow more consequential.

To give just one relatively innocent example: In 2022, Google announced that it was deploying its Multitask Unified Model (MUM) to produce “snippets,” or brief summaries, of search results. So how’s it faring? Say you want to learn whether Switzerland is a member of the European Union. You might plausibly search for a phrase like “Switzerland EU.” As of May 2024, the phrase results in the following Google-manufactured summary of a Wikipedia page devoted to Switzerland-European Union relations: “Switzerland is a member state of the European Union (EU).”

Social democracy may be the solution to the problems of some fortunate subset of individual nations, but it is not a solution for the world as such—that is, to collective global problems and to the problems of poorer nations around the globe today. Instead, social democracy—so I argue in a forthcoming publication—fundamentally hinges on the preservation of difference, and in many cases the active production and acceleration of differences between nations, for internal, nationally-bounded ends.[1] Social democracy is, finally, about furthering the well-being of a nation’s own citizens—and by extension, a given state’s own national interests. If everyone were to become a high-functioning Nordic welfare-capitalist society, for instance, the difference-reliant components inherent to the social-democratic model of political economy would in short order begin to break down.

I have just completed writing a chapter destined for an edited volume published by an academic press. Because the topic is a specialist one, unlikely to attract a general readership, I won’t delve into the details of the argument (though interested readers can consult the draft here)[1], which is about how societies deal with crime and punishment, and how they structure the policymaking processes around crime control and imprisonmnet. That might not sound very abstruse, but, alas, it is (for substantially defensible reasons, I  claim).

Geoffrey Roberts (2022), Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and His Books. New Haven: Yale University Press.

One of the many surprising facts about Stalin’s life was his bibliophilia, verging on bibliomania. The man “responsible for about a million purposive killings,” on one historian’s estimate, was a voracious reader, accruing over 25,000 volumes in his personal library. From his austere Kremlin office, where he spent his days crayoning official documents with _nyet_s, question marks, exclamation points, and (chilling) onomatopoietic laughter—with scribbles of “ha-ha-ha” occasionally forewarning an unfortunate author’s imminent departure to the Gulag—and in between running the sprawling Soviet state apparatus, Stalin somehow found the time to accrue and read thousands of books. 

Dwight Garner (2023), The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

There’s much jocularity in The Upstairs Delicatessen, New York Times book critic Dwight Garner’s witty, if meandering, literary-cultural commentary on two seemingly unlikely topics: novels and eating. Garner’s Delicatessen, as the subtitle lightheartedly proclaims, is a book “on eating, reading, reading about eating, & eating while reading.” But while nominally weighing in on literature and food, the book is also a poignant meditation on meatier topics, like class, culture, place, and power.

Israel cannot continue its war on Gaza indefinitely—not so much owing to grueling moral quandaries or unbearable ethical qualms, but due to strictly fiscal and macroeconomic concerns, with all the political-economic consequences that an expensive war must have for both Israeli society and state in...

Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2023). The War That Must Not Occur (translated by Malcolm Debevoise). Stanford University Press.

What is the “war that must not occur” of which the French philosopher and Stanford professor Jean-Pierre Dupuy speaks? All wars are aberrations best avoided, of course, manmade errors in the universe’s (at times overlong) arc bending toward justice, but there is one impermissible mistake that stands above all others: the ever-present, ghoulish specter of nuclear war.

Since Hamas’s horrific October 7 attacks on Israel, Israel has responded by unleashing tremendous amounts of violence on the Gaza Strip. This violence, Israel claims, has been targeted at Hamas infrastructure, aimed at preventing a repeat of the October 7 attacks. But Israel’s warfare has come at a terrible, and untenable, human cost, with UN Secretary General António Guterres repeatedly calling for a ceasefire and determining that Israel was responsible for “clear violations of international humanitarian law” in Gaza.[1] After nearly a month of war, some 9,000 people have been reported killed in Gaza by Israeli attacks, largely involving a combination of airstrikes and mortar attacks, including white phosphorus artillery shells, according to Amnesty International, “which may be considered indiscriminate attacks and therefore unlawful.”[2]

Shadi Bartsch (2023), Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism. Princeton University Press.

Shadi Bartsch, a Classics professor at the University of Chicago, has written an interesting, if uneven, book that starts as a study of the reception of the Western classical tradition in Chinese public discourse, before veering off into something far more ambitious and, perhaps as a result, hazy and ill-defined: A mapping out of what one might call contemporary Chinese ideology, the convergence of Confucianism and state socialism in the era of Xi Jinping, and its rhetorical appropriation of parts of the Western tradition.