If you feel like you live in a topsy-turvy world where even the best laid plans often implode into chaos, fear not: philosopher and raconteur Slavoj Zizek is here to help.

In the world of ideas there has never been a figure quite like Slavoj Zizek. Erudite and comic, ironic and profound, his mind frequently travels into territory where few of us would dare to tread.

He joins us now to take on the Hegelian notion of “verkehrte Welt” – “the world turned upside down”, or a dramatic reversal of fortune. In 2022 it seems like even careful plans quickly turn into disaster: a dream of freedom turning into terror, morality into hypocrisy, excessive wealth into poverty for the majority. And is the Covid epidemic not the latest case of such a reversal – all our knowledge of and domination over nature made us helpless victims of life at its most stupid, a simple replicating mechanism of a virus?

So how do we use philosophy to combat the chaos of an upside down world, one gone wrong and turned into its opposite? Do we need to accept the fact that nature follows its own path, including cosmic catastrophes, with total indifference towards human history?

Joined in conversation by philosopher Robert Rowland Smith, Slavoj Zizek will explore these questions through the lens of ecology, Hegel, psychoanalysis, politics, pandemics and popular culture. Don’t miss this chance to hear one of the world’s most iconic – and iconoclastic – thinkers get to grips on the tribulations of the present.