“defence” of Heidegger’s espousal of Nazism in the 1930s, and of Michel Foucault’s championing of the Iranian revolution some forty years later. Both commitments Žižek views as deeply objectionable; but in his view they were at least commitments to the need for revolutionary change, even if both Heidegger and Foucault backed the wrong horse in this respect. Behind this case lies Žižek’s indebtedness to the leading French philosopher Alain Badiou, to whom this book devotes some critically sympathetic pages. For Badiou, the good life, ethically and politically speaking, consists in a tenacious adherence to some “Event” which bursts unpredictably on the historical scene, transforms the very coordinates of human reality and refashions from top to toe the men and women who remain loyal to it.

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