The relations between fantasy and ideology, and the deluge of digital phantasms surrounding us

Modern audiovisual media have spawned a 'plague of fantasies', electronically inspired phantasms that cloud the ability to reason and prevent a true understanding of a world increasingly dominated by abstractions-whether those of digital technology or the speculative market.
Into this arena, enters Zizek: equipped with an agile wit and the skills of a prodigious scholar, he confidently ranges among a dazzling array of cultural references-explicating Robert Schumann as deftly as he does John Carpenter-to demonstrate how the modern condition blinds us to the ideological basis of our lives.

"Unafraid of confrontation and with a near limitless grasp of pop symbolism." - Times of London

"Zizek unfolds in this text a theory of the workings of postmodern ideology that is often breathtaking in its scope and acuity." - Postmodern Culture