Heaven in Disarray is a current collection of essays by philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in which he addresses topics such as environmental crises, the Black Lives Matter movement, developments in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and others, in his characteristically lucid style.
One of Mao Zedong's most famous quotes goes like this: "Everything under heaven is in disarray; the situation is excellent." It is not difficult to understand what Mao wanted to say: as the fabric of the current social order disintegrates, the impending chaos offers revolutionary forces an extraordinary opportunity to take decisive action and seize political power.
Today, with the COVID-19 pandemic, global warming, signs of a new Cold War, and the outbreak of civil unrest and social resistance around the world – to name just a few – everything under heaven is in chaos. But is this chaos still creating a great situation, or has the risk of self-destruction become too great?
The gap between the situation Mao wrote about and ours today is best explained by a slight difference in terminology. Mao speaks of unrest under heaven, where heaven, or the great Other in whatever form—the irrepressible logic of historical processes, the laws of social development—still exists and discreetly controls social chaos. Meanwhile, today we could say that they are in disarray. heaven itself.
