If billions of dollars have been injected into the global banking system in a desperate attempt to stabilize financial markets, why have the same forces not been able to cope with global poverty and the environmental crisis? Without leaving a puppet with a head, Slavoj Žižek performs an analysis that frames the moral failures of the modern world in the events that marked the first decade of this century. And he finds an answer in Marx's well-known premise about the repetition of history: first as a tragedy, then as a farce. With the attacks of the 11S and with the global collapse of credit, liberalism has died twice: as a political doctrine and as an economic theory. "First as a tragedy, then as a farce" is a call to the Left to reinvent itself in the light of our desperate historical situation: the time of liberal and moralistic blackmail is over.
