The book's title comes from a quote delivered by the character Morpheus in the 1999 filmThe Matrix: "Welcome to the desert of the real". Both Žižek's title and the line from The Matrixrefer to the phrase "desert of the real" in Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. Part of this phrase appears in the following context of the book: Early in The Matrix, protagonist Neo uses a hollowed-out book with the title Simulacra and Simulation to hide an illegal data disc. Later in the film, Morpheus utters these words after Neo wakes up from his computer-generated virtual reality, experiencing the Real as a desolate, war-torn wasteland. For Žižek, this represents a prime example of the 20th-century's "passion for the Real," for which 9/11 attacks were the ultimate artistic expression. His argument is that because this passion was sublimated into the postmodern "passion for the semblance," Americans experienced the "return of the Real" in exactly the same way as Neo did in the film, i.e., as a nightmarish virtual landscape or "reality as the ultimate 'effect.'"
Overview
Žižek argues that global capitalism and fundamentalism are two parts of the same whole: ultimately, their opposition in political and everyday discourses represents a false ideological conflict in both the Marxian and psychoanalytic senses. This is just a continuation of the prior cultural logic in which fascism served as the "obscene superego supplement" or fantasy to liberal democracy's Reality. Žižek shows how today the fundamentalist terrorist plays an analogous symbolic role to the Jew during the Holocaust, the excluded "other" whose alien presence legitimizes measures of internal discipline. Although Americans were victims, so were the attacking terrorists, and therefore neither side was justified in their violent actions. In fact, the attacks were already libidinally invested by a series of Hollywood catastrophe films, showing that it was exactly what Americans secretly wanted, i.e., their ultimate spectacular experience. The false perception of a purely external threat allowed the system of global capitalism to go essentially unchallenged, functioning to indefinitely defer discussion about alternative socioeconomic futures. The only real "other" to global capitalism is a renewed form of socialism, because the "others" of capitalism are almost everyone, even though they are all formally extended the promise of liberal rights. While the United States claims to be standing for democratic rights and principles, it actually suspended these same rights at home and legitimized torture in order to fight the war on terror. Rather than seeing these as real exceptions, Žižek identifies them as central tendencies in liberal democracy, a system inherently susceptible to corruption and unable to universalize its own rights. Changing conditions of war further erode any distinctions that could be made between a state of war or exception and a state of peace, central distinctions in democratic ideology. Because the democratic system is always generating new states of emergency to justify the negation of its ethical principles, the future of emancipatory politics cannot be contained within a liberal democratic framework. As ethical acts such as Israeli "peacenik" soldiers' solidarity with their Palestinian neighbors show, there are other alternatives to capitalism than fundamentalism or fascism; however, the current paradigm of the "end of history" and the "clash of civilizations" restricts the range of apparent conflicts to cultural or ethnic/religious ones, masking anything more fundamental, such as an economic conflict. The same displacement of socio-economic conflict that occurred under fascism is mirrored in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the "symptomal knot" of all the economic and cultural logics of the contemporary world. In his rejection of binary ethical choices and predictive certainty, Žižek is certainly postmodernist, but the substance of his critique of responses to 9/11 is primarily Marxian and secondarily Lacanian.
Reception
Loren Glass argues from a historical materialist and autonomist perspective that Žižek's critique is stronger than other critical theoretical responses because it is "cautiously optimistic" about the possibility for ethical action, whereas other critics have remained pessimistic. In his view, "a larger political programme, a sort of geopolitical act of refusal," at least presents a practical possibility for 21st century activists. However, Glass criticizes Žižek for mirroring Rightist apocalyptic rhetoric by focusing on "glitzy" events rather than slow-building historical processes. And furthermore, he argues against Žižek's use of the "placeholder" concept of the Real because it represents a retreat "from an earlier materialist confidence in the methodological accessibility of historical experience," and against the appropriation of elements of Christianity, which Glass deems unnecessary in Marxist praxis.
