‘Mao Zedong, the Marxist Lord of Misrule’ by Slavoj Žižek

A recording of the introductory text written by Slavoj Žižek to the ‘On Practice and Contradiction’ book by Mao Zedong, read out on audio by Matt Bates.

Mao’s early philosophical writings underpinned the Chinese revolutions, and his clarion call to insurrection has lost none of its ability to stir the blood and stimulate the mind. Drawing on a dizzying array of references from contemporary culture and politics, Slavoj Žižek’s introduction reaches unsettling conclusions about the place of Mao’s thought in the revolutionary canon.

Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include ‘Pandemic!’ & ‘Pandemic! 2’, ‘Hegel in a Wired Brain’, ‘Sex and the Failed Absolute’, ‘Like A Thief In Broad Daylight’, ‘Reading Marx’, ‘Incontinence of the Void’, ‘The Day After the Revolution’ and ‘Disorder in Heaven’.

Mao Zedong (1893–1976), also known as Chairman Mao or, less commonly, Mao Tse-tung, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founding father of the People’s Republic of China, which he ruled as the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from 1949 until his death in 1976.

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