Revolution of Necessity: Language, Technique, and Freedom in the Writings of Jacques Ellul and Slavoj Zizek

How are we to understand ourselves today? In the increasingly technological late post-modernity of the 21st-century West, some of the most cherished words in our collective heritage-freedom, humanity, truth-are some of the most violently abused and questioned. Can we carry them forward? Alternatively, can we do without them? And what is at stake in language itself? Does it still have any significance in our rapidly changing world?

Revolution of Necessity examines these and other questions by probing the works of two great thinkers of recent times: the French polymath, sociologist, and theologian Jacques Ellul and the globally recognized Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek. What results is a dynamic dialogue questioning ideology, revolution, subjectivity, and our understanding of ourselves in the world, culminating in a rousing round of symbolic wagering on the linguistic question.

"Rollison has written a thoroughly thoughtful, absorbing, and relevant work. By deeply engaging in the subversive thought of Jacques Ellul and Slavoj Žižek, Rollison casts light on the porous nature of language while simultaneously challenging us to re-think the symbolic efficiency of language and how it affects our understanding of the self and the other." -Jacob Van Vleet, Author of Dialectical Theology and Jacques Ellul

"Jacob Rollison has done us a service in this creative volume. By bringing Slavoj Žižek into an unexpected dialogue with Jacques Ellul, he has made a case for renewed engagement with Ellul and cast fresh light on the perennial questions that motivate Žižek's frenetic contemporary interventions. More than that, though, Rollison's study counts as an exploration of the complex dialectics-between contingency and necessity, word and act, mechanism and subjectivity-that drive both thinkers' projects." -Adam Kotsko, author of Žižek and Theology