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An all-star cast of radical intellectuals discuss the continuedimportance of communism.Do not be afraid, join us, come back! You’ve had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it—time to get serious once again!—Slavoj Žižek

Responding to Alain Badiou’s ‘communist hypothesis’, the leading political philosophers of the Left convened in London in 2009 to take part in a landmark conference to discuss the perpetual, persistent notion that, in a truly emancipated society, all things should be owned in common. This volume brings together their discussions on the philosophical and political import of the communist idea, highlighting both its continuing significance and the need to reconfigure the concept within a world marked by havoc and crisis. ... Read more

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"Looking Awry is a wonderful introduction to dialectical psychoanalysis; to a fresh approach to the subjectivities of mass culture; and to an extraordinary new voice we will hear often in the coming year." -- Frederic R. Jameson, Duke University

Slavoj Zizek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements of Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan through the works of contemporary popular culture, from horror fiction and detective thrillers to popular romances and Hitchcock films. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

'the Real' title: An Introduction to Zizek
I didn't give this book five stars because I didn't feel I knew Lacan much better after reading it. Granted, there were a few memorable moments of Lacanian interpretation, but now that I look back on it, they were only enlightening because of background information I had from better introductory texts. Fink's 'Clinical Introduction,' and 'Lacanian Subject,' are better for a base understanding of Lacan. Overall, I felt the book was worth the read, because it was Zizek after all.. I enjoyed a lot of the literature interpretations he included, as well as film analysis. Like other reviewers have commented, this is more Zizek in here than Lacan, and this was part of the reason I decided to read this. However, I felt the overall format of the book- divided by Lacanian theoretical points- did not help the reader's already difficult task of trying to keep track of Zizek's often scattered arguments.

Lacanian heresy inside!Beware of being tainted!
I am struck by the negative reviews that caution readers:"Zizek is not an orthodox Lacanian!Read him only if you have already understood Lacan!"This is, of course, the typically cultish--really Catholic--approach to Lacan that treats him as a holy text, pre-supposes a series of high priests who have been properly anoited and through whom one must receive the officially sanctioned interpretation.I don't read Zizek for Lacan--I read him for Zizek, and I encourage others to do likewise.*Looking Awry* and *Enjoy Your Symptom* are prehaps the easiest approaches to Zizek and his brand of cultural criticism, as they rely almost entirely on popular culture, especially film.Zizek's perverse (and often dirty) sense of humor and tendency to read against the grain at all costs are apparent on nearly every page, which makes this a very engaging read, indeed.Intellectually, there are some problems with his approach, of course--but Zizek's voice is such a refreshing change of pace, and his constant turn to a reading that you thought was impossible (but turns out to be preversely appealing) makes them all worthwhile.

Perfect - if that's what you want.
That's what I wanted, at least: An illustration of the key Lacanian concepts. What Zizek'bokk gives you, in fact, is the key to reading Lacan.

Lacan's seminar is an unreadable text - if that's your first/second/third etc. time. Lacan, you see, does not make conclusions. To illustrate that:
- You are writing a paper on, let's say, "Gaze". You would like to know what's Lacan's take on gaze. You open "On Gaze as Object a" chapter from "Four Fundamentals".
- you read a paragraph. You do not quite understand what you have read.
- you read the following paragraph. Now, understanding this one is even more difficult, because Lacan is assuming that you have fully understood the previous one. Ok, third paragragh ... Should I continue?
- You either think that this book is non-sense or that you are stupid. Both conclusions are wrong.

As soon as you get the background - Lacan's non-sense makes perfect sense. Zizek give this background in a highly entertaining manner (his writing is a jewel - keeps you thinking "If only I could write like that!"). I am currently doing a PhD in literature, and I have to go through plenty of academic rubbish - dry and actually, useless critical books, that make use of Lacan, Foucault and others to get published and never be read. Zizec is a breath of fresh air.

Please believe me - do not give up on Lacan, do not call him bad names, (like "idiotic nonsense, nobody ever understood him, they were all pretending to understand him because they were afraid to look stupid in the 60s") - before you read Zizec.

This book is great; those below who don't like it are clowns
Jacques Lacan's theories are completely, utterly undecipherable.The only way to begin to understand the fundamentals of psychoanalytic theory is to read somebody else writing on Lacan.And thank God Zizek does that for us.To understand Lacan, I've always had to turn to film theory critism--Laura Mulvey--but none of that ever goes beyond theories of the gaze, neglecting to dispell the mystery around some of the most basic concepts of Lacan.Zizek rolls through these various terms and ideas, always providing an exemplification of the idea in popular culture, usually in Hitchcock or within Sci-Fi genres, and then a clear-to-understand definition.So if you're confused as to what desire, drive, lack, objet a, other, Other, the Real, or the Thing are in terms of Lacanian jargon, this might be your book.

Titling awry
This book is very interesting but I think it would have been better to call it "An Introduction to Popular Culture trhough Jaques Lacan". This would be a proper title because Zizek dedicates more space to tell us what some products of popular culture are about (i.e. Stephen King's novel "Pet Sematary"; Robert Sheckley's short story "The Store of the Worlds") than to explain, or even outline, the theories of Jaques Lacan. This in itself is not a critique, I just want to say that the title can be misleading. You will not find here an explanation or an introduction to Lacan, but rather a Lacanian reading or interpretation of some products of popular culture (novels, short stories and films.) If you are looking for an easy or brief rendering of Lacan, this book will not be of much help. Moreover, I would say that the readers who will profit the most are those who are already familiar with, or at least know something about, Lacanian thought. This said, I think that Zizek's Lacanian reading of popular works is very good in some cases, and somewhat poor in others. For example, he recalls the novel "Pet Sematary" but he explains almost nothing about it. The good cases, however, make it worth the effort to read the book (Zizek's writing is complicated, but so is Lacan's), and even if you do not agree with some of his points, they are still useful to encourage thought and discussion. If you are interested in the study of popular culture, the interpretation of film and literature, or in the application of Lacanian theory to social analysis, this book will certainly be of use. ... Read more

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What matters is not so much that Žižek is endorsing a demythologized, disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end (despite what he sometimes claims) a heterodox version of Christian belief.
—John Milbank

To put it even more bluntly, my claim is that it is Milbank who is effectively guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank.
—Slavoj Žižek

In this corner, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who represents the critical-materialist stance against religion's illusions; in the other corner, "radical orthodox" theologian John Milbank, an influential and provocative thinker who argues that theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics, and ethics can stand. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Žižek and Milbank go head to head for three rounds, employing an impressive arsenal of moves to advance their positions and press their respective advantages. By the closing bell, they have proven themselves worthy adversaries--and have also shown that faith and reason are not simply and intractably opposed.

Žižek has long been interested in the emancipatory potential offered by Christian theology. And Milbank, seeing global capitalism as the new century's greatest ethical challenge, has pushed his own ontology in more political and materialist directions. Their debate in The Monstrosity of Christ concerns nothing less than the future of religion, secularity, and political hope in light of a monsterful event—God becoming human. For the first time since Žižek's turn toward theology, we have a true debate between an atheist and a theologian about the very meaning of theology, Christ, the Church, the Holy Ghost, universality, and the foundations of logic. The result goes far beyond the popularized atheist/theist point/counterpoint of recent books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others.

Žižek begins, and Milbank answers, countering dialectics with "paradox." The debate centers on the nature of and relation between paradox and parallax, between analogy and dialectics, between transcendent glory and liberation.

Short Circuits series, edited by Slavoj Žižek ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Paradox and the Growth of Knowledge
1. Errata - on pages 6 and 308 the name W. K. (William Kingdon) Clifford was mispelled as James Clifford. This needs correcting.It's also means that the author had conflated the persons of William Jameswith W. K. Clifford.

2. Terminology - the following terms (as a representative sample) are left to the reader to decipher - the reader should probably determine their meaning prior to reading the text:"noumenal","metonymic", "autopoiesis", and "metaxological". Good luck!

3. Paradox versus Dialectic
Defining the dialectical process is tougher to pin down then you might think - neither the proceedure described by Plato, or that of Hegel, or that of Heidegger or that of Derrida (aka deconstruction) or that of Lacan can be used exclusively. By taking how Zizek uses the term operationaly in his texts one ends up with the notion that the process of dialectic on conflicting terms (such as christian faith and enlightenment reason) is first symptomitized by a parallax view when seeing one symbolic order from within the other. The result of the dialectic process will be therapeutic reduction of the original conflict with a corresonding "excreted remainder".

So for Zizek the excreted remainder of the dialectic process of christiainty with reason is the "dwarf christ".

For Freud the dialectical process went in a different direction for which the excreted remainder is the neurotic patient (the believer - belief as illness).

According to this line of analysis, Zizek himself (formerly employed by the communist party central comittee of Yugoslavia) is an excreted remainder of the dialectic process that occurred in eastern europe between marxism and "free market forces" and "solidarity".

In contrast, the paradoxical view doesn't seek a theraputic reduction of conflict (or perhaps disjointness) but instead maintains the "opposition" but through a "growth of knowledge" that will maintain the integrity and power of the conflicting terms.

The best place to see this might actually be in the history of science, where the "paradoxical" path to understanding has had its greatest success. The development of quantum mechanics - where the empirical paradox that electrons are both particles and waves is not reduced, but instead science "grew" by the development of quantum mechanics as a supplement to classical mechanics.

The development of math/science is full of progress (growth) through paradox - irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, cantor's cardinality of infinities, goedels incompleteness, quantum mechanics, the paradox of the invariance of the speed of light with respect to inertial reference frame (aka special relativity), etc..

Its not clear to me that the dialectical method ever has or is even capable of advancing knowledge.

Mounard le Fougueux
Anti Zizek League

Hegel, Jesus, Paradox and Dialectic
Interesting conversation between a committed Marxist atheist and a committed orthodox theologian about what parts of Hegel and Christianity they hold in common - and which they do not. Zizek starts with an essay where he outlines how Hegel has the most to contribute to contemporary theology - namely, the frank admission that God is dead and is now incarnated in the community of radical believers that work against modernity and global capitalism. Milbank agrees, but argues that a paradoxical view of reality - one that recognizes that opposites exist precisely at the same time without resolution - is both more faithful to how reality works and to the vision of Christianity itself, as opposed to Hegelian dialectics. Zizek returns and clearly outlines his commitment to materialism and to the Protestant principle of negation which Milbank eschews. Both thinkers' commitments are clearly and unapologetically evident, and yet their respect for the other person's thought is evident. A fascinating - if philosophically dense - resource for anyone concerned about the runaway abuse of ultra-modern capitalism and the reality of religious resurgence in 21st century society.

The Monstrosity of Christ: Discourse or Deception?
I'm thoroughly disappointed by the maze of evasive verbiage in this book. Neither Zizek not Milbank produced anything radical here!

Don't get deceived by Milbank anyway. Does his kind of #radical-orthodoxy helps at all in struggles against capitalist nihilism [or it's derivatives such as postmodernism]? Well - perhaps this is somewhat better in contrast with the far more deceptive #post-liberal-theology!

Anyway coming back to the very question - why this book at all? Perhaps because we believe that there is a need for resurrecting the #real and the #absolute from the mutilated and rotten body of postmodernism? A need that has been never so urgent as now, when an atmosphere of intellectual subterfuges is widespread (though I also agree that there were someuseful contributions among the less pretentious participants).

Well - to me Zizek appears so dull - specially with his patchy knowledge about "Orthodoxy" and many other things - to make any positive impact. No positive comments for Milbank and his anti-materialist dilettantism anyway :-)

If the world was given to us as something "enigmatic and unintelligible", then what is the task of thought? Making it more enigmatic and more unintelligible - what this book does or the reverse? Well - the reverse is done in the sciences, and in serious commentary on human affairs. I don't know of any relevant contributions of theology (whether pro/anti-materialist) other than constructing vague ideas with vague images.

The book is much exaggerated, and you shouldn't take it seriously. There is no point taking Hegel or Eckhart that seriously as well.

Reason and Religion: Hegel and Theology
This book purports to bring about a dialogue between rationalism and theology, represented by Zizek and Milbank. The works of Hegel, Heidegger and Christian theologians are discussed.

Loving Everything About Coca-Cola Except its Taste
After reading the definitive indictment of Zizek's work published by Adam Kirsch in The New Republic, I thought I was through with Zizek. In that article, the Slovenian philosopher is exposed for what he is: a deadly jester, who speaks up for communist dictatorship, calls for the violent upheaval of the social order, and stands against democracy, human rights, and common decency. So why read another Zizek book, especially one that takes the form of a dialogue with a Catholic thinker I couldn't care less about? The answer lies partly in Zizek's compulsive readability, in his ability to mix high brow references with pop trivia, and in his taste for paradox and dialectical reversals. Reading Zizek is fun, at least if you don't take him seriously.

But here I must confess that there was also a kind of perverse curiosity at play. Would Zizek inflict the same treatment to religion as he does to other sacred issues like democracy or tolerance? Would he take his title to its blasphemous extreme and compare Jesus to a Hollywood monster creature, or read the Scriptures in parallel with Alien or The Return of the Undead? After all, he was the one who compared the Passion of the Christ to a gore movie in The Parallax View, or who wrote in Lost Causes that "Catholic priests' pedophilia is a phenomenon that is inscribed into the very functioning of the Church as a socio-symbolic institution." Less controversially, I was interested to know where Zizek would stand with regard to the return of the religious in contemporary philosophy. Would he align with his Trotskyist associate Alain Badiou in his violent rejection of all things clerical, or side with the late Derrida for whom the uttering of a prayer was possible?

The Monstrosity of Christ didn't live up (down?) to my worst expectations, but that doesn't mean I would endorse it or recommend its reading to non-Zizek fans. First, it is written in heavy Hegelese. Indeed, the expression "monstrosity of Christ" comes from Hegel's Philosophy of Religion and designates the appearance of God in the finite flesh of a human individual that culminates in the Crucifixion. Here is how Zizek's prose goes: "In order for (human) subjectivity to emerge out of the substantial personality of the human animal, cutting links with it and positing itself as the I=I dispossessed of all substantial content, as the self-relating negativity of an empty singularity, God himself, the universal Substance, has to 'humiliate' himself, to fall into his own creation, to 'objectivize' himself, to appear as a singular miserable human individual in al its abjection, i.e., abandoned by God."

But of course Zizek doesn't stick to the historical Hegel: "To act like a full Hegelian today is the same as to write tonal music after the Schoenberg revolution." His Schoenberg takes the figure of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and his atonality consists in giving Hegel a perverse twist, reversing all commonly held notions into their obscene counter-narrative.

Zizek finds in Meister Eckart (as read by Reiner Schurmann) the topological figure typical of Lacanian thought: "while one's [human] being has a center outside of it, in God, God's [being] too has a corresponding excentricity". This is the figure of extimacy, of the externality of God with regard to himself. "God himself can relate to himself only through man, and Christ had to emerge to reveal God not only to humanity, but to God himself." In the end, God is abandoned by himself, and he rebels against himself. For Zizek, following Chesterton, the cry from the cross ("Father, why have you forsaken me?") is the central mystery of Christianity: "Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king." "While, in all other religions, there are people who do not believe in God, only in Christianity does God not believe in himself."

For Zizek, "God (the divine) is a name for that which in man is not human, for the inhuman core that sustains being human." This is where Zizek's religion reconciles with his politics. He is drawn to the most disturbing aspects of Christ's teaching; the Sermon on the Mount (taken literally), Jesus' unsettling statements that he brings the sword, not peace; that "if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters-yes even his own life-he cannot be my disciple." Zizek concurs with Kierkegaard that true neighborly love is that for which I am ready to kill my neighbor, for "the only good neighbor is a dead neighbor."

In the end, of course, this is just a big joke: Zizek is neither a serial killer nor a believer, and his materialist theology is as distant from religion as his calls to revolutionary violence are to real revolutions. Terry Eagleton had it right when he noticed that Zizek "signs on almost all Christian doctrine except for a belief in God, which is rather like loving everything about Coca-Cola except its taste." ... Read more

Product Description
The rediscovery of the Apostle Paul by atheistic or agnostic European philosophers is one of the most striking recent developments in philosophy--and certainly one of keen interest to the church. These philosophers view Paul as having a revolutionary understanding of authority and politics.Bringing together Radical Orthodox theologian John Milbank, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and Creston Davis, who has been a student of both, this book reflects on Paul's new moment in secular philosophy. In a debate format, Žižek brings Marxist and post-Marxist ideas into a discussion with Milbank about the influence of Paul. The book also includes a contribution from Catherine Pickstock. ... Read more

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A disturbing and radical examination of the status of women and the role of violence in contemporary culture and politics.The experience of the Yugoslav war and the rise of "irrational" violence in contemporary societies provides the theoretical and political context of this book, which uses Lacanian psychoanalysis as the basis for a renewal of the Marxist theory of ideology. The author's analysis leads into a study of the figure of woman in modern art and ideology, including studies of The Crying Game and the films of David Lynch, and the links between violence and power/gender relations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Impressive: intellectual fireworks
Zizek writes in the tradition of Adorno, because he takes the Continental philosophical tradition seriously, and, he understands it. I don't pretend to understand this book in full, but, reading it is not as anhedonic as my first encounter with Adorno in the 1980s, when I forced myself to attend to Adorno as a form of therapy-in-recovery.

That's because Zizek is much more chukka chukka hip about popular culture and uses it, along with the canon, to make his points, whereas Adorno would refer to far more obscure literary texts.

But both write in the shadow of what Arthur Koestler called a god that failed (Communism). Zizek writes as another Moloch, another god, fails, and that's globalized capitalism where the condition of entry is self-objectification narrated as freedom to choose.

Freedom to choose...what? Zizek writes from the standpoint of the idle fellow temporarily stranded in a small city on business back when there were movie theaters showing second-run films, and who wanders into the theater like Parsifal in the enchanted castle or at the puppet show, and masochistically gives himself over to an enjoyment which hasn't yet metastasised into its perverse reverse.

The chapter on the extreme, almost catatonically anti-feminist Otto Weininger is interesting because unlike traditional political movements, feminism doesn't get to see its opposite. The reaction towards feminism hastens, whether religious or not, for the most part, to agree with its adversary and to make all sorts of concessions which are often accepted with a great deal of suspicion...as if feminism sought more an adversary like the late Norman Mailer with a mind of his own, who believed feminism just wrong and who invited many feminists to fart in a bottle and paint it.

Marxism had in fact the American opposition to Marxism root and branch which started soon after the (American) civil war, and union busters, and finally the mad woman, Thatcher.

Of course, opposition doesn't always invigorate a cause. Thatcherism and Reagan dealt a death blow to a Marxism already weakened by the discovery that Leninism didn't end competition in the new society.

But, the second-wave feminism had only one man to talk back while the others, until Zizek, were T. S. Eliot's dried voices whispering together.

Don't get me wrong. Zizek, in my understanding, isn't opposed to feminism. But, he won't go along with a womyn-centered programme drained of humanism, either.

His invocation of the angry ghost of Weininger is as if to say, it still moves: culture *as we know it* is male, and is being destroyed by a metastasing American consumption barbarism which won't sign the Kyoto accords and is in hock to China...so, you better call it down and ring, you better pawn it babe: European culture is appreciating like the Euro itself.

Like writing in Adorno, it is a home for the homeless mind.

Perhaps "male" and "female" as adjectives are just too abstract to attach to anything but men and animals to describe their sex, and even this would require an interpretation of the pointy thing, and the receptive thing.

Zizek comes in fact close to celebrating the male "detachment" which looked upon calmly, Spinozistically, sub specie aeternitatis and all that is simply independence from a set of biological concerns which are the domain of the female, having to do with the reproduction of daily life so celebrated by Tolstoy.

Equally attractive is a feminine aporia, and this is the lack of the need to invade Russia.

Specific "tough broads" like Hilary Clinton repel because the matching aporias are vulnerabilities absent in her...the invulnerable has no need of us.

An "androgyne" male politician wouldn't be at all the mathematical opposite of Hilary; Zizek takes pains to remind us that in dialectics, the opposite isn't quantitatively the same as is ~p to p in traditional logic (which could without loss of signal represent p's negation as p, and its assertion as ~p).

No, if someone came along scoring high as female and male, exceeding 100%, they'd lock him up. In a sense Kennedy, to a lesser extent Clinton, were steps in this direction and the hatred they attracted PLUS their attractiveness also was "out of the box": Kennedy was murdered by a man in sexual rage (probably not by a conspiracy after all, but, if you like, a conspiracy fueled by high-class sexual rage against early detente), and by the Clinton era, the fulminations of the likes of Rep. Bob "B1 Bob" Dornan were frightening...he saw Clinton as the AntiChrist.

Zizek provides tools, if that's the word, which it probably isn't, to think about the whole where the whole is untrue.

Intense yet Palatable
This book is complied of 6 short essays by Zizek.Here we have postmod writing; however, not as difficult as Derrida.

Zizek goes through a genealogy of psychoanalysis & film featuring Freud, Deleuze, Lacan, Hegel, Habermas & Frankfurt School, Derrida, Weininger and Lynch.He proceeds to discuss courtly love and anti-feminisms of Weininger.

His marxist inclinations do not come out as strongly as I thought he would.

His logic and analysis are not too difficult to follow but definitely require several re-reads.

The essays are well structured one after the other.I think this is a cohesive compilation.I have yet to read The Ticklish Subject but I have high expectations for it.

I find his essay on courtly love well-written - not surprising in thoughts but the writing is pleasurable to read.He's a feminist to an extent. ... Read more

Product Description
In this new book, Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly engage in a series of entertaining conversations which illustrate the originality of Žižek’s thinking on psychoanalysis, philosophy, multiculturalism, popular/cyber culture, totalitarianism, ethics and politics.

Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher who trained as a Lacanian. He is at the forefront of philosophical, political and cultural debate and is known for his theories, based largely on a Lacanian analysis, on a wide range of subjects, including globalization, cyberspace, film, music and opera. His work continues to provoke controversy and to transform the way we think about these and other issues of popular culture and politics. In conversation with Glyn Daly, Žižek elaborates on a range of topics which encompass the purpose of philosophy and psychoanalysis, the films of Stanley Kubrick, the notion of enjoyment, Marxism, de Sade, Nazism and much more.

This book will provide readers with a unique glimpse at Žižeks humour and character, and is an ideal introduction to his work. At the same time it offers new material and fresh perspectives, which will be of interest to followers of his writings, appealing to the general reader as well as to undergraduates and graduates studying social theory, cultural studies and politics. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

The Easy Way
In order to familiarize yourself with the thoughts and strategies of any critic or philosopher without being exposed to the sufferings sustained in the painful job of reading extremely complex texts, you should always focus on the interviews made with the critic or the philosopher. You will get a much better grasp of highly complicated ideas suggested by philosophers such as Sartre, Foucault, and Said by reading through their published interviews. I mention those three authors for it has been claimed by some reviewers that they have turned the activity of giving an interview into an artform. Daly's interviews with Zizek does not spare us from Zizek's playful, and at times elusive, style when he goes down on Kinder chocolate, virtual reality, globalization, Hitchcock, Fight Club, etc... Zizek is as quick and as versatile as you may have imagined him to be from his previous books or lectures. Daly seems to know to press the right buttons in order to get Zizek off the ground. The chemistry in this book makes even Deleuze sound as a wild and attractive philosopher. However, you should beware Zizek's Lacan is quite different from the clinical readings of Lacan. It became quite clear already in 1989 in "the Sublime Object of Ideology" that Zizek preferred to focus on the underestimated Real in the Lacanian cognitive edifice. Daly explains in a very lucid way the importance of the Real to Zizek's Lacan, and he helps the reader to enter Zizek's streams of thought. This book helps any reader to understand Zizek's highly complex ideas in a very simple way. I would place this book among the other books of interviews made with the authors mentioned above, Sartre, Foucault, and Said. Daly and Zizek are preserving the artform.

Most coherent text on Lacan and/or Zizek ever
Previous to reading this book I had read quite a few of Zizek's books, as well as some other secondary material on Lacan, and always seemed to miss the mark on some key conceptual understandings.They were always too technical, above my head, or hard to understand.In this book, by contrast, and probably in part because it's in an interview format, Zizek does an incredible job of succinctly explaining difficult Lacanian concepts in easy to understand terms.He also outlines his vision of politics and ethics, although if you want to see him defending his politics at his best, I reccomend Revolution at the Gates.The first part of the book also has the added bonus of giving alot of biographical information about Zizek, which, quite frankly, I couldn't care less about, but theory-heads might enjoy the story of his life.Daly also does a pretty good job explaining Zizek's interpretation of Lacan in the introduction - at least far better than most secondary material on Zizek.A great read if you want to get to understand Zizek and Lacan better but have had difficulty understanding his other books.

a great introduction
Anyone interested in learning about Zizek should read this book. It is lively and accessible, a perfect way to get acquainted with a daunting thinker who writes faster than most of us read. ... Read more

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Product Description
Slavoj Zizek, the maverick philosopher, author of over 30 books, acclaimed as the "Elvis ofcultural theory", and today's mostcontroversial public intellectual. His worktraverses the fields of philosophy,psychoanalysis, theology, history and politicaltheory, taking in film, popular culture,literature and jokes—all to provide acuteanalyses of the complexities of contemporaryideology as well as a serious and sophisticatedphilosophy.His recent films The Pervert'sGuide to the Cinema and Zizek!reveal a theorist at the peak of his powers anda skilled communicator. Now Verso is making hisclassic titles, each of which stand as a core of his ever-expanding life's work, available as new editions. Each is beautifully re-packaged,including new introductions from Zizek himself.Simply put, they are the essential texts forunderstanding Zizek's thought and thuscornerstones of contemporary philosophy.

The Ticklish Subject: The AbsentCentre of Political Ontology: A specter ishaunting Western thought, the specter of theCartesian subject. In this book Slavoj Zizekunearths a subversive core to this elusivespecter, and finds within it the indispensablephilosophical point of reference for anygenuinely emancipatory project. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Fighting For The Universal

"Where Kant thinks he is still dealing only with a negative presentation of the Thing, we are already in the midst of the Thing-in-itself- for this Thing-in-itself is nothing but this radical negativity...the negative experience of the Thing must change into the experience of the Thing-in-itself as radical negativity...In short, we must limit ourselves to what is strictly immanent to this experience, to pure negativity, to the negative self-relationship of the representation."

Unlike Monsieur Rolland-Piegue, I have always read Slavoj Zizek the way that I feel he should be read- as a philosopher. In truth, I find it difficult to understand how one could approach Zizek from any other perspective, neglecting his argumentation in lieu of his jokes, anecdotes and dialectical inversions, seeing as how the jokes are themselves incomprehensible without reference to the propositions that they demonstrate. While several of Rolland-Piegue's criticisms of Zizek are, in a way, justified- Zizek's somewhat haphazard style of presentation, which can be as elliptical as it is breathless; the abundance of provocative declaratives; the abstract nature of his thought, which invokes and enlists empirical examples to elaborate upon the dialectical logic of his system- accusations of sloppiness are, in my view at least, wholly unfounded.

Astonishingly, Rolland-Piegue has written an entirely unphilosophical account of Zizek, one which, while disparaging Zizek's philosophical flimsiness, does not offer one philosophical argument in the way of refutation. Should this be read as being symptomatic of our own collective incapacity to READ philosophy as philosophy, of the waning of its 'symbolic efficacy' in a post-deconstructive world? Is Zizek thereby confined to being a living anachronism, condemned to transmitting his thought under the cover of smutty asides? One is free to repudiate Zizek's system in its entirety, as long as one does not deny that it *is* a fully-elaborated system, and should be approached as such. It has been noted by various readers on Amazon that Zizek is a tiresomely repetitious writer, an insight that I would supplement with a remark that should be intuitively obvious: the sameness of his texts inheres not so much in the CONTENT of the enunciated- endlessly-rehearsed variations of the same jokes- but in the position of enunciation from which the argumentation proceeds, the logical form of his analysis. In this regard, Rolland-Piegue is entirely right to underwrite Lenin's proposition on Hegel and Marx by applying it to Zizek himself, though I cannot help but suspect that Rolland-Piegue misses the crucial point- Zizek 'performs', repeats his fidelity to Hegelian dialectics by adhering to its formal procedures, in the same way that Marx did throughout Das Kapital (needless to say, it is strictly impossible to develop a sophisticated understanding of the three volumes of Das Kapital unless one is able to reconstruct the dialectical links that constitute its fabric, the movement that informs its methodology and impels it onwards). The anomalous, unwieldy nature of Zizek's texts lies not so much in his unorthodox sense of humor,but in the fact that, beneath the bawdy banter, he is an embarassingly ORTHODOX philosopher in the classical sense. To read him properly, then, is to arouse faculties that have lain dormant for far too long, languishing in the wake of post-structuralist poetizing. This is precisely what is meant by the 'RETURN to full-blown philosophy' that he discerns in the writings of his partner-in-crime and constant interlocutor, Alain Badiou.

To return to Zizek's repetitiousness, however. While Verso proposes that each volume of the Essential Zizek are essentially different from the next, treating different dimensions of Zizek's 'theoretical edifice', I'm not entirely sure if it is possible to draw firm distinctions between the matter treated in each. In a way, it seems to me that all of Zizek's writings constitute a larger text, fragments of which he feels obliged to paste in each individual publication, supplying the reader with the primary coordinates of his intellectual itinerary. It is this aspect of Zizek's style of presentation that renders each text a whole unto itself- at the risk of belaboring the point and tiring his longtime devotees, Zizek is exceptionally conscientious in making sure that careful, first-time readers will be able to deduce the axiomatic claims that give consistency to each book. All of the foundational postulates of Zizek's ontology are supplied in his major theoretical works ('The Parallax View', 'The Ticklish Subject', 'The Sublime Object of Ideology'), though it is certainly true that he elaborates on it in greater detail in this particular book. For instance, one can already find Zizek's reading of Kant (one that he feels is entirely in keeping with Hegel's appropriation of Kant) in "The Sublime Object of Ideology", and his discussion in said book informs/lays the ground for much of what is (re)iterated here, supplemented by a sustained reading of Heidegger's "Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics". We also find a fully developed exposition of what is arguably "The Ticklish Subject"s central thesis: the subject is the name for a radical negativity/subtraction, a 'cut' in the fabric of being, a lack bereft of any positive predicates. Of course, it is here that Zizek juxtaposes this conception of the subject with Badiou's, which confuses the process of SUBJECTIVATION and SUBLIMATION with the SUBJECT as such.

For me, though, the real highlight of the book is the middle section, where Zizek outlines the dangers inherent in the political philosophies of Badiou, Ranciere and Balibar. Besides his ontological quibbles with Badiou (put forth most forcefully in his identification of Badiou's disavowed Kantianism), the great innovation of Zizek's rather Leninist analysis is twofold: his re-evaluation of Laclau's conception of hegemony, which he distanced himself from following The Sublime Object of Ideology, as well as his suggestion that the political strategies of said triad could very well lead to a "revolution without a revolution". In 'The Sublime Object of Ideology', Zizek provided a recapitulation of the key concepts in Laclau and Mouffe's landmark book: the place of the Universal is empty, a locus of hegemonic struggle. The victor of the struggle occupies this place, constituting the 'quilting point' that unifies and 'sutures' an ideological field, generating a retroactive effect whereby a multitude of atomic 'floating signifiers' refer to it as their ultimate (teleological) frame of reference. Every victory being contingent, the signifier occupying this place is itself precarious, subject to continued contestation. Here, Zizek elaborates further on the precise nature of hegemonic consent, involving as it does the production of 'typical' representations. Hegemonic/discursive struggle hence necessarily involves, beyond the articulation of 'floating signifiers' into a lateral chain of equivalences, the deposition of dominant Universals and 'typicalities'. Again, however, Zizek is careful to emphasize the insuperable gap that persists between him and Laclau and Mouffe (remember that Laclau and Mouffe deplored Althusser for his unwillingness to renounce the last vestige of 'economic essentialism' in his thought, his insistence on the 'economic in the last instance')- every hegemonic articulation is doomed to be captured by its 'bad side' (populism, racism, nationalism) insofar as it neglects to place primacy upon the economic. In fact, this is the first text in which Zizek baldly proposes to 'politicize the economy' once more, to reinvigorate the classical Marxist analysis of political economy.

This, as we know, dovetails into Zizek's readings of Ranciere and Badiou (see "In Defense of Lost Causes"), where we find a similar aversion to the State and its 'ontic', economic functions ("the servicing of goods"). It would be useful here to refer to Zizek's review of Simon Critchley's "Infinitely Demanding" in the London Review of Books, which succinctly encapsulates Zizek's position regarding the seizure of State power. Critchley, in his advocacy of a Derridean brand of anarchism, proposes the formation of syndicalized communes, interstitial spaces of resistance (heterotopias in the Foucauldian sense?) that operate at a distance from the state. In keeping with his tacit acceptance of the persistence of the liberal democratic state, Critchley's conception of critique thus involves deluging the State with implacable demands that `call the state into question and call the established order to account, not in order to do away with the state, desirable though that might well be in some utopian sense, but in order to better it or attenuate its malicious effect'. Zizek's pithy response to this is that it is entirely in keeping with the division of labor that capitalism enforces- the dirty work of realpolitik is thereby left to neo-liberal technocrats and experts, while the task of recrimination and moralizing is left to the ineffectual intelligentsia. In avoiding the subject of the State altogether, Zizek wagers that the 'sequentialist'/'marginalist' thought of Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere announces its complicity with this sense of surrender. When we recall Baudrillard's chilling assertion that "the Left wants to lose" and couple it with Zizek's descriptions of the Beautiful Soul, we can better appreciate Zizek's unflinching fidelity to the revolutionary legacy of Marxist-Leninism, a fidelity that is as sobering as it is disquieting. I am tempted to suggest that Zizek has elaborated an 'existentialism with the unconscious', an exhortation for us to assume the abyssal contingency of the decision.At any rate, he is waiting for us on the other end of the gulf, waiting for us to make the leap by reading him seriously.

I Think Therefore I Tickle
In his Philosophical Notebooks, Lenin wrote that everyone who aims at really understanding Marx's Capital should read the whole of Hegel's Logic in detail, as he did himself. It could also be said that anyone who wants to understand Zizek should first read not only Marx and Hegel, but also Kant, Schelling, Heidegger, Lacan, Althusser, Badiou, and a long list of continental philosophers. Prior knowledge of these philosophers' work seems to be a requisite for reading The Ticklish Subject, in which Zizek engages with what is described as "the unsurpassable horizon of our thinking".

But at that rate, Zizek would lose many readers. Most people, including myself, pick up his books because they provide an entertaining experience in light philosophy, mixing intellectual discussions with humorous quips and original interpretations of Hollywood movies. We read Zizek for fun. A hardcore of devotees adhere to his radical political agenda, which I find rather repulsive. Others use him as a guide to Jacques Lacan's key concepts, as Zizek provides an easily accessible version of this markedly obscure brand of psychoanalysis. Few readers take him at his philosophical face value.

Indeed, it is fortunate that most readers engage Zizek with a light philosophical baggage and little interest for the history of ideas. True philosophers with an attention to detail would often catch him with his intellectual pants down, as does his editor whom Zizek thanks in the introduction. He writes at such a frantic pace and with such intellectual fury that he often seems to be running ahead of his shoes. In The Ticklish Subject, he credits his editor for discerning "repetitions in the line of thought, moronic inconsistencies of the argumentation, false attributions and references that display [his] lack of general education, not to mention the awkwardness of style." Obviously some of the defects escaped the vigilance of the editor's gaze.

Although he sometimes quotes key passages (like Hegel's "night of the world" in his Jena manuscripts, a fascinating piece in which "here shoots a bloody head - there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears"), Zizek does not engage in close readings of philosophers. One sometimes gets the feeling that he hasn't even bothered to read some of the authors that he is discussing, or that his opinion on them was formed long before he consulted their works. This, according to Zizek, should not discredit his approach: his position is that a "view from afar" gives greater access to the essence of a philosophical system than a detailed reading. Like in particle physics, "a cursory approach ignorant of detail reveals (or even generates) the features which remains out of reach to a detailed, exceedingly close approach."

Zizek usually proceeds by starting from broad intuitions offered as paradoxes or outright provocations: Kant "was not Kantian enough" and didn't draw all the consequences from the finitude of the transcendental subject; Heidegger's Nazi engagement was "a step in the right direction", but he mistook the pseudo-Event of the Nazi revolution for the Event of revolution itself; Habermas "throws the baby" of the political with the bathwater of totalitarianism; despite his anti-Christian stance, Badiou's notion of the Truth-Event finds its paradigm in Christ's arrival and death; for all their anticapitalist credentials, deconstructionists and other post-modern intellectuals serve the interests of global capitalism, which favors modes of subjectivity characterized by multiple shifting identifications; etc.

Most of the time Zizek stays at such a level of generality and abstraction that the reader doesn't learn much about the philosophical systems that he takes as his starting point for endless digressions. He is the kind of person that prefers to be wrong than to be dull, and his taste for paradox and dialectical reversals sometimes obfuscates the rather simple points that he is trying to make. I nonetheless found interesting insights, like when he is underscoring the commonalities between Balibar, Badiou, Laclau and Ranciere (they all foreclose their indebtedness to Althusser), or when he provides a general introduction to Judith Butler (her proximity to Foucault and her criticism of Lacan are redeemed by her taste for Hegelian dialectics). The Ticklish Subject is not Zizek's best book, but it does provide fodder for thought.

Much better written than the last two books
If you had pretty much given up on Zizek after Metaseses of Enjoyment and Plague of Fantasies, both of which contain some embarassingly bad writing, you will be happy to rad this book.Routledge finally gave Zizek a new copyeditor, and what a difference she makes! ALthough Zizek's new concept of "the Act" smacks of Chrisitan mysticisim, the book is one of his stngest.It's otfen very insightful about academic trends and as entertaining as ever when it comes to film.he is one of the few theorists who manages to kep thinking, even if he repeats himself over and over again.

Check this Quote out on the Symbolic Institution:
Check this quote out from the book on the symbolic institution:) "The mysterious character of this moment can best be illustrated by afunny thing that happened during the last election campaign in Slovenia,when a member of the ruling political party was approached by an elderlylady from his local constituency, asking for help.She was convinced thatthe street number of her house (not the standard 13, but 23) was bringingher bad luck--the moment her house got this new number, due to someadministrative reorganization, misfortunes started to afflict her (burglarsbroke in, a storm tore the roof off, neighbours began to annoy her), so sheasked the candidate to be so kind as to arrange with the municipalauthorities for the number to be changed.The candidate made a simplesuggestion to the lady: why didn't she do it alone? Why didn't she simplyrepaint or replace the plate with the street number herself by, forexample, adding another number or letter (say, 23A or 231 instead of 23)? The old lady answered: "Oh, I tried that a couple of weeks ago; Imyself replaced the old plate with a new one with the number 23A, but itdidn't work--my bad luck is still with me; you can't cheat it, it has to bedone properly, by the relevant institution." The 'it' which cannot beduped in this way is the Lacanian big Other, the symbolicinstitution." :)

This book might be a really big deal...
Slovenian author Slavoj Zizek has been rearing his head for awhile, but this might be his big break-through.In "The Ticklish Subject", he is actually outlining an argument for the return of the Cartesiansubject, the universal subject, whose presence he claims is "a spectrehaunting Western academia...".He argues that the rejection of thiscogito is what unites an astounding array of intellectual thinking justbefore the milennium. The book consists mainly of three parts, whichcan be categorized broadly as engagements with German idealism andanti-idealism, then French post-...political thought, then withAnglo-American modes of "cultural studies" and multiculturalism. Specifically, in this last part, he engages with Judith Butler in the mostrespectable critique of her work I've ever read. In short, I think thepublication of this book could mark the first major break withpostmodernism in its myriad forms.This feels like an "insider"critique-- there are no kind of typical reactions against postmodernjargon, inaccessability, etc. Zizek comes from a hardcore Lacanianviewpoint, but his major task in this book is to put forth an essentiallypolitical standpoint in the era of global capitalism.As always, Zizek isfunny and anecdotal, drawing from pop culture enough to incite me to sayhe's "keepin it real".Good book, likley to become veryimportant. ... Read more

Product Description
A leading radical intellectual tackles the many controversialinterpretations of Wagner’s work.For over a century, Richard Wagner’s music has been the subject of intensedebate among philosophers, many of whom have attacked its ideological—some say racist and reactionary—underpinnings. In this major new work,Alain Badiou, radical philosopher and keen Wagner enthusiast, offers adetailed reading of the critical responses to the composer’s work, whichinclude Adorno’s writings on the composer and Wagner’s recuperationby Nazism as well as more recent readings by Philippe Lacoue-Labartheand others. Slavoj Zizek provides an afterword, and both philosophersmake a passionate case for re-examining the relevance of Wagner to thecontemporary world. ... Read more

Product Description
The Parallax View is Slavoj Zizek's most substantial theoretical work to appear in many years; Zizek himself describes it as his magnum opus. Parallax can be defined as the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position. Zizek is interested in the "parallax gap" separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an "impossible short circuit" of levels that can never meet. From this consideration of parallax, Zizek begins a rehabilitation of dialectical materialism.

Modes of parallax can be seen in different domains of today's theory, from the wave-particle duality in quantum physics to the parallax of the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis between interpretations of the formation of the unconscious and theories of drives. In The Parallax View, Zizek, with his usual astonishing erudition, focuses on three main modes of parallax: the ontological difference, the ultimate parallax that conditions our very access to reality; the scientific parallax, the irreducible gap between the phenomenal experience of reality and its scientific explanation, which reaches its apogee in today's brain sciences (according to which "nobody is home" in the skull, just stacks of brain meat—a condition Zizek calls "the unbearable lightness of being no one"); and the political parallax, the social antagonism that allows for no common ground. Between his discussions of these three modes, Zizek offers interludes that deal with more specific topics—including an ethical act in a novel by Henry James and anti-anti-Semitism.

The Parallax View not only expands Zizek's Lacanian-Hegelian approach to new domains (notably cognitive brain sciences) but also provides the systematic exposition of the conceptual framework that underlies his entire work. Philosophical and theological analysis, detailed readings of literature, cinema, and music coexist with lively anecdotes and obscene jokes. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (12)

Unsystematic systematizer
To fully appreciate the value of this book, it seems that the reader has to have already read Zizek's earlier key books. What The Parallax View does is to proffer an invisible Hegelian thread to further systematize his philosophy, to pull it all together, to abridge its various components, and to bring in additional bricks (such as Thomas Metzinger's articulation of the ontological absence of the Ego). True, Zizek does put forward in this book his key concepts inherited (descent with modification, that is) from Lacan, Freud, and Marx, but the book is not self-contained in the sense that you would get from it alone a clear layout of Zizek's system. And I am not sure Zizek would admit to doing anything like system-building, but the book has left me with a strong suspicion that Zizek is, after all, a closet Hegelian above being anything else, including a Lacanian.

Overall, I believe the book does succeed in offering us a system, but not as a ready-made product but is instead a box of Legos you have to put together following the instructions (often vague) scattered all over the place. But that is what makes books like this fun. It seems that Zizek has so much to say that he does not think he has time or space to glue it all together let alone build inert transitions -- he trusts you to do that. And what is the system that I think he is building? If you have read his earlier books, you already know its core and will get from this book further fleshing-out and consolidation. If you have not, I would not rely on this book to express its core to you in a self-sufficient manner. You would still enjoy it though, and would feel interested enough to go to his earlier books.

An apology for Philosophy (against postmodernist skepticism)
It is good to read Zizek writing in a more serious, scholarly mode (not that this book doesn't also contain much of his famous humor). Philosophically, he makes a compelling case as to why the various postmodernist philosophers and theorists have done very little to advance philosophical discourse meaningfully beyond Kant and Hegel. In particular, he argues for a Parallax View of Hegel (and post-Hegelian philosophy): dialectical oppositions are never totally reconciled, there remains a gap, the negativity of thinking apart from being, yet this does not mean we regress backward to Kantian skepticism, nor or we stuck in the 'bad infinity' of postmodernist 'deference' or pious reverence for a mysterious Other. Rather, clarification about this gap, the negativity which causes the parallax of view, is shown by Zizek to be what is required of us (scientists and postmodernists alike) if we are at all interested in reason and enlightenment.

Between Object and Subject is nothing but Parallax...
In the documentary Zizek!, the man claims that his three best and most theoretically significant books are (assuming, in true Hegelian fashion, that you can also count three as four): The Sublime Object of Ideology: (Second Edition)(The Essential Zizek), Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Post-Contemporary Interventions), The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (Second Edition)(The Essential Zizek), and The Parallax View (Short Circuits). This then allows us to delineate the conceptual trajectory of Zizek's career so far: from the Object, through Negativity, to the Subject, and finally, Parallax. What justifies Zizek in claiming (on the dust jacket) that this is his "magnum opus"? If anything can legitimate this claim, it is that in this work Zizek finally lays claim to his distinctive ontology (although Zizek would not claim its distinctiveness, he would claim that it is Hegel's ontology, albeit Hegel read in a Lacanian vein)--the ontology of the barred S, the split-subject, the self-different One. This ontology gathers together all the concepts of his intellectual trajectory: both subject and object are nothing more than pure self-relating negativity, and it is only through the shifts of parallax that allow us to discern the difference (which is minimal). This ontology has guided Zizek in an implicit fashion from the beginning, but it is only recently that Zizek has had to develop it in an explicit fashion, to differentiate his position from that of his contemporaries'--most notably from Alain Badiou's mathematical ontology of pure multiplicity woven from the Void.

In this book Zizek develops a new conceptual operator, that of the Parallax Gap, which takes its place alongside Zizek's other theoretical conceptual operators--the Vanishing Mediator, the Indivisible Remainder, the Minimal Difference, etc. Zizek employs a curious (and to some, frustrating) methodology in elaborating his theoretical concepts; rather than articulating them in a concise theortical description, he merely puts them to work in example after example in different contexts. In this book Zizek runs through the usual gamut of intellectual domains in elaborating the notion of parallax gap: from german idealism to Christian theology, cognitive brain sciences to contemprorary politico-economic ideology. (The chapters on cognitive science--a field only recently taken up by Zizek--are particularly impressive.) This methodology demands a peculiar sort of engagement from the reader, in that in order to really discern the theoretical stakes of Zizek's arguments, one has to read carefully and not get distracted by the innumerable references to popular culture, literature and cinema. One must discern, under the continually variegated examples adduced to illustrate his claims, the theoretical tools at work. Anyone willing to give this book the exertion and discipline required, however will be amply rewarded.

This book certainly rates as one of Zizek's best, and is crucial for understanding Zizek's most recent conceptual innovations and his grasp on the ideological coordinates of a post-9/11 world. Although his other books contain specific engagements on various topics of cultural relevance, to understand the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of his engagement, this book is a must read.

Lacan, Lacan, Lacan
I read the Sublime Object of Ideology and shook with excitement. After eagerly reading his next books, including Parallax View, I am still awaiting an answer to the question: Okay I can now understand how Lacan can illustrate isssues in politics and philosophy, but to what end?

Once you get over the initial novelty of his use of Lacan, you begin to wonder whether Zizek just assumes there is something inherently and self-evidently valuable about Lacan.He certainly never articulates what this value is, and after reading his works one wonders if there actually is something important beyond the once novel but now fading insights he generates by the new territory which he traverses with the same tools.

The other thought that occurs while reading his "View" is that after reading the first fifty pages, the rest of the book seems to repeat the same basic procedures over and over without developing towards any specific objective.I can already hear Zizek's defense to this remark: "Hey this repetition is part of my post-modern strategy and it is entirely consistent with my Lacanian (or Lack-Canian) (non) position!"And he would be right about the latter, the psychoanalytic process is interminable.While that might be true in the large sense, and explains why his books have about four interesting concepts that reprise themselves in various contexts in all the rest of his works, this only begs the question: why and for what is the psychoanalytic process good?It is certainly good for Zizek boredom, but I am not o sure about mine.

Lacanian Overload
Slavoj Zizek's dense tome is a wandering and unfocused investigation of what he refers to as a 'parallax,' "the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight." Zizek examines numerous instances of the 'parallax gap' in multiple spheres of social life, from the political to the pop. There are brilliant explanations of Hegelian dialectics here, but Zizek's Lacanian lens is both interesting and restricting. He is ultimately unable to free himself from the baroque terminology of the late analyst and as a result his interpretation suffers from verbose terminology and awkward shifts of perspective. This is a rich book with plenty of insightful ideas, but it fails from sloppiness and lack of discipline. ... Read more

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What is the basis of belief in an era when globalization, multiculturalism and big business are the new religion? Slavoj Zizek, renowned philosopher and irrepressible cultural critic takes on all comers in this compelling and breathless new book.
From 'cyberspace reason' to the paradox that is 'Western Buddhism', On Belief gets behind the contours of the way we normally think about belief, in particular Judaism and Christianity. Holding up the so-called authenticity of religious belief to critical light, Zizek draws on psychoanalysis, film and philosophy to reveal in startling fashion that nothing could be worse for believers than their beliefs turning out to be true. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

oh zizek...
This is one of the my favorites by Zizek (the other being The Fragile Absolute). Zizek is a master at diagnosing the contemporary game for what it is: synthetic, gnostic, and without meaning (Nietzsche wins?!). Yet, he does so in a way that provides, perhaps theoretically, some sort of intellectual resources for how to go beyond our dual fascination with all things material and, paradoxically, immaterial. Plus, he is just a fun read. He is one of few writers that I genuinely can return to time and time again (even if it is to discover exactly where I disagree with him).

just don't expect rigour
I confess from the off that I have only read the first chapter of this book. And yet, even this brief encounter was enlightening - because it confirmed what many have always thought. Zizek is a great thinker - a great associator of ideas; but he doesn't know what he's talking about. I illustrate with a single example.

Hubert L. Dreyfus has spent his career arguing that the mind cannot be reductively explained in any terms that would make it analogous to a computer program. This is because understanding is skillful, not rationalistic, and because the mind is essentially embodied. In the first chapter of this book, Zizek contemplates the possibility of our minds becoming virtual - that is, disembodied, computer programs existing only online. He discusses Dreyfus' work- and yet he fails completely to acknowledge the challenge it presents to the claims that he is considering, eventually concluding that the mind is just "software", apt to be uploaded just as soon as technology advances. Since Dreyfus' arguments against this idea could not be more explicit, this is bizarre.

Why would Zizek gloss this issue? Perhaps he doesn't understand the problem (his reading of Dreyfus is scarcely recognisable, after all). Alternatively, he might have felt Dreyfus' work insufficinetly glamorous to be worthy of development. But this is more strange still, since Zizek is primarily a Lacanian theorist and Lacan's Nom du Pere would seem to present its own challenge to the possibility of a disembodied mind.

I suggest another reading: Zizek simply doesn't pay attention to what he's reading and talking about. Anyone who has seen him lecture will have witnessed this for themselves. His work is charismatic and exciting, for sure - but far from rigorous.

Perhaps a reading of the the rest of the book would answer my questions; and I concede that such a review of an incomplete reading is impertinent, to say the least. But by the end of the first chapter (and despite having made it through several of his other books), I had run out of patience with Zizek's undisciplined stream of consciousness.

bizarre: one of the best as well as the worst
Zizek argues in this book along with Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling) that there should be a "teleological suspension of the ethical category" in favor of the religious.In Kierkegaard's book he says that Abraham is asked by God to suspend the ethical in order to kill his son Isaac.Of course God stops the killing before it takes place, but first he wants to test whether Abraham is willing to suspend the ethical in order to give primacy of place to the religious.Zizek uses this paradigm to argue that Leninists had the right to suspend the ethical in order to put their religious fervor to the test by slaughtering liberal Mensheviks, and millions of others, after the October revolution.This is a strange book played out with fantastic verve and bizarre humor. One isn't sure how seriously Zizek takes his "belief" in Leninism.This is one of the worst books on an ethical basis I've ever read, but aesthetically it's one of the best efforts in contemporary theory -- fun to read, whacky "beyond belief," and filled with a real fun for sentence making.The sentencing of the Marxists, both their own in terms of Solzhenitsyn and others, as well as the sentence that the liberal west has laid on them in order to lay them down to rest, is replayed as if it was a trauma that needs to be relived.The result is a species of madness: a great book with a seemingly bizarre ethical message: kill all liberals to prove your religious fervor for a secular religion that is widely discredited for asking for such mass murder.God never asks Abraham to go through on his killing of his son.Zizek appears to condone the killing of millions by communists in the twentieth century through using Kierkegaard's paradigm for understanding Abraham and Isaac.Zizek has a lot of fun with this comparison. I suffered, and I think most Christians would suffer because the comparison seems so grotesque and so completely out of control, but Marxists will delight in this religious rationale for their peculiarly bloody heritage.

a small treasure
I have recently began reading Zizek after picking up this short essay that he wrote for Routledge's Thinking in Action Series.His idiosyncratic writing style has its quirks which I could imagine some people despising, but I enjoyed it myself.He has an incredible talent for looking abstruse concepts and philosophical debates in a fresh perspective that definitely could be described as 'thinking outside of the box'.He writes with a ad hoc mixture of pop culture, hitchcock, philosophy, theology, doxology, and Lacanian psychology.And his message is a powerful one--reaffirming the human and the real against what he terms 'the digital heresy'.By the end of his essay, he has you wanting to believe once again--or maybe just to admit to yourself that you've believed all along.

a small treasure
I have recently began reading Zizek after picking up this short essay that he wrote for Routledge's Thinking in Action Series.His idiosyncratic writing style has its quirks which I could imagine some people despising, but I enjoyed it myself.He has an incredible talent for looking abstruse concepts and philosophical debates in a fresh perspective that definitely could be described as 'thinking outside of the box'.He writes with a ad hoc mixture of pop culture, hitchcock, philosophy, theology, doxology, and Lacanian psychology.And his message is a powerful one--reaffirming the human and the real against what he terms 'the digital heresy'.By the end of his essay, he has you wanting to believe once again--or maybe just to admit to yourself that you've believed all along. ... Read more

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IllustratedFilm theory is in crisis. The dominant psychoanalytical paradigm is contested by cognitive models and post-theory. In the background is a wider crisis in cultural studies, particularly as regards the public role of the politically engaged intellectual. In this major new study Slavoj Zizek challenges both cognitivist-historicist accounts of cinema and conventional film theory. Arguing that the reading of Lacan operative in the '70s and '80s was particularly reductive, Zizek asserts that there is "another Lacan," in reference to whom film theory, cultural studies, and critical thought as such can be transformed and revitalized. He supports and expands this argument with an extensive reading of the work of Kieslowski and, in a substantial appendix, with a discussion of the relationship between Christianity, Gothicism and the "progressive digitalisation of our life-world." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Zizek requires more than surface understandings
it's difficult to access Zizek's work especially if you have no points of reference,and refuse to delve deeply into the sources of his thought not only Lacan, but Hegel Marx,and Badiou.
Zizek yes many times drops shibboleths, quips and sarcasm but that's his style. What makes Zizek interesting to read however (no matter what he writes) is that he disrupts and tests the given symbolic order of things, What's That? that is what is usually shuved down our throats(via CNN,MTV,celebrated talk shows) as analysis or theoretical renderings that simply amount to the same "mantra" of views usually the liberal kind that is suspect of philosophic/cultural theory or "critique" especially when one so high powered a thinker as Zizek comes into the field of play, since you cannot understand him or say anything critically of him, He is deemed then"Dangerous".

In reality Zizek's sensibility is wholly suited to speak about Kieslowki's work, Lacan works quite well into getting behind what triggers desire,or wantings,fears and anxieties,where the "symbolic" order exists how it is continually nurtured through cultur as film. "The Decalogue" is one such film that tries to test the high symbolic order through the word of god or "g-d" and it inspires fear in all of us, we fear what we don't know, isn't that what religion (any of them) do they instill fear in us, because we don't know, or are told we don't know,"You want to know? follow us. . . " Kieslowski's language is,modern threadbare,very straightforward, we get wonderful views of Poland,Warsaw; yet he's able to instill a kind of "mystery" in the common shape of things;and this 'unknown' of the word of "g-d" or god; ten commandments,his own spirituality interfaces with our own which makes these ten short films quite powerful. Zizek I think is claiming a kind of "stasis" in Kieslowski,that we should view the "Decalogue" as one film not as ten little ones a distinction; an interesting view,very modern, and since his films have a kind of lean functionalism,things just simply move without gimmick unfolding the narrative logically.When viewed this way I think the ten shorts comes across in all its diverse richness;almost as if ten novellas all have inter-referenced schemes and threads that link them all in known and unknown way. Zizek explores various Lacanian topics without specifically mentioning them, as "sinthome", "object petit a" something you really don't need but needs to be there anyway,something we think of ourselves that needs to fit in someplace but cannot for it doesn't know what it is yet.Lacanian analysis claims to not expose what you don't know(as Freud) but merely affirms who and what you are right now in order to at least maintain some coherancy and stable moments within yourself.Like a young man's love for a mature woman he cannot have.The young boy has a series of unknowns he's working with,stalking her, watching her 'peeping-tom like'in this way the boy is not threatened and remains in the stable realm he knows best, his own bedroom where he masterbates;but soon this stability is brokened,with an actual meetings with the woman,like stepping on thin ice, you never know where you will fall in,,including your own suicide, Kieslowski I think often caps many of the "Decalogue"sequences too quickly,as the young boy simply stabbing himself for his oefish awkwardness and has no problem in utilizing gut-wrenching techniques in "Though shalt Not Kill" as the killing of the young boy who killed an innocent cabdriver.People simply die,or their lives robbed previously,as a concentration camp survivor, or fall into an abyss as the young boy not returning home with messages of his demise from an early computer.
If you keep with Zizek I think he delivers insights you will not find within the normal course of theoretical film critic discourse, all you get there is time and tested cliques,predictable "mantras" that really explain the complexity of films like a cooking show, "this was added to intensify. . . ", ". . . this moment will make shudder. . . ",like all you are looking for is what will I get for my money.

Fright of Mambo Jumbo
I'm reviewing this book as a fan of Kieslowski.I'm saying this because the Zizek's approach is literary or, more specifically, Marxist-Lacanian.(Don't ask me what that means.)For starters, it's far more entertaining and insightful than Insdorf book on Kieslowski.For instance, Zizek talks about Kieslowski's movies while mentioning David Lynch's.Also, I was particularly intrigued by Zizek's analysis of "The Dekalog."How each episode leads to the next by not engaging on the specific commandment it should be representing. What you get with this book is a grab bag of meditations on post-modern cynicism, Plato via Marx Brothers, and Hitchcock-Lacan connection.Oy vey!For those interested in the cinema of Kieslowski, this might be a book for you if you're either immersed or have a passing knowledge with (drum rolls, please) Post/Theory.Otherwise, this book is a drag! ... Read more

Product Description
'A modernist work of art is by definition 'incomprehensible'; it functions as a shock, as the irruption of a trauma which undermines the complacency of our daily routine and resists being integrated. What postmodernism does, however, is the very opposite: it objects par excellence are products with mass appeal; the aim of the postmodernist treatment is to estrange their initial homeliness: 'you think what you see is a simple melodrama your granny would have no difficulty in following? Yet without taking into account the difference between symptom and sinthom/the structure of the Borromean knot/the fact that Woman is one of the Names-of-the-Father ...you've totally missed the point!' if there is an author whose name epitomises this interpretive pleasure of 'estranging' the most banal content, it is Alfred Hitchcock (and - useless to deny it - this book partakes unrestrainedly in this madness).' Hitchcock is placed on the analyst's couch in this extraordinary volume of case studies, as its contributors bring to bear an unrivalled enthusiasm and theoretical sweep on the entire Hitchcock oeuvre, from Rear Window to Psycho, as an exemplar of 'postmodern' defamiliarization.Starting from the premise that 'everything has meaning', the films' ostensible narrative content and formal procedures are analysed to reveal a rich proliferation of ideological and psychical mechanisms at work. But Hitchcock is here to lure the reader into 'serious' Marxist and Lacanian considerations on the construction of meaning. Timely, provocative and original, this is sure to become a landmark of Hitchcock studies. Contributors: Frederic Jameson, Pascal Bonitzer, Miran Bozovic, Michel Chion, Mlladen Dolar, Stojan Pellko, Renata Salecl, Alenka Zupancic and Slavoj Zizek. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Chicken Soup for the Brain
When I was a born-feminist bookworm of 16, I was delighted by the Marquise de Merteuil. I knew she was evil, and all, but she was the only literary heroine I'd ever encountered who was also intelligent, complex, and strong-willed. She also scared me a bit. I didn't exactly identify with her, yet she seemed as close to me as any heroine had ever gotten. When later on the same year I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time I realized that Elizabeth Bennet was the real heroine I'd been searching for. Unfortunately the Elizabeth Bennets of literature are much rarer than the Marquise de Merteuils, so I could not abandon the latter as figures of identification.

Where on earth am I going with this? I feel about the hot new scholarly phenomenon that is Slavoj Zizek, the editor of this volume, much the way I did about the Marquise de Merteuil. It's nice to see someone out there championing such academic fashion sins as Christian ethics (in The Fragile Absolute), the Cartesian subject (in The Ticklish Subject), and erudition, and make them trendy by doing it within a Lacanian framework. But unless you really needed to be liberated from the poststructuralist program you probably never lost entire faith in any of these things and concluded all by yourself the same things Zizek seem to have: that the version of Western metaphysics savaged by poststructuralism was a straw man anyway, whereas a more truthful version would acknowledge the fragility or ticklishness of these ideals and intuitions.

If you do not need Zizek to liberate you then there is not much to recommend in this book of Lacanian Hitchcock criticism. Zizek is mostly incomprehensible; unlike the equally erudite Camille Paglia, he doesn't possess the writerly virtue of being able to explain other people's big ideas. He just namechecks and hurries on. His odd prose style contains something compelling about it, but also something unsettling. His attention-grabbing imperatives like "Enjoy your symptom!" (from the title of another of his books) or (from his contribution to this book) "Eat your being-there!" are an odd mixture of much good and bad in contemporary culture: they have the sensationalism of Paglia's scholarship-as-sound-bites ("If women ran the world we would all still be living in grass huts," or however it goes), the shiny emptiness and absurdity of bad Japanese translations on imported gift products (my favourites to date are "Hearts live in the coming day" and "Let us make the most and best of each day's and noble enjoyment" (sic)), a faint ring of sing-song Communist or flaky self-help mantras in a Bizarro universe, and a fainter ring of Nietzsche's piquant, pissy, repellent maxims. Not that what I've read of Zizek reminds me much of Nietzsche. His personality reminds me more of someone like Alfred Jarry or Marcel Duchamp, a mixture of intellectualism and mischief. And that, along with his gimmick uh, I mean project of reforming the house of Lacan from within, is surely what accounts for Zizek's sudden trendiness. Yet to me this seems like a disguised continuation of the deep problems of academe rather than a compromise solution to them: Zizek is the very essence of of-the-momentness.

The book gets three stars from me not for its contents but for its usefulness (maybe) in making certain choices available to students without the cost of sacrificing their cool radicalism. Was it Nietzsche, or Stanley Cavell, or someone else who predicted that morality would only be revived if someone made it cool again? Well, the time has come, and in that Zizek has gone beyond Paglia, who was fighting Judeo-Christianity as much as she was fighting the trendy pack of poststructuralist ideas. The essays in this book not written by Zizek will, I presume, appeal to Lacanians and particularly to Lacanian Hichcockians (I know a couple); they will not appeal to non-Lacanians, Hitchcockian or not. As for Zizek's introduction and essay, what I understood of them I sometimes agreed with, sometimes not. He has good observations to make about the gaze in Hitchcock (if Lacanian theory is ever going to apply to any filmmaker, it's Hitchcock), even if he sometimes comes by them in a tortuously roundabout fashion, but it is certainly not worth it for a non-Lacanian Hitchcock fan to buy the book. Take it out of the library, like I did. But only if you're bored and have nothing else to do but check out the latest trends. Better yet, watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I'm still waiting for criticism of Hitchcock that will be worthy of him. In the meantime Zizek's scattered, mercurial insights will have to do as a poor approximation, just like the Marquise de Merteuil had to do until I discovered Elizabeth Bennet. ... Read more

Product Description
In the last decade, F. W. J. von Schelling has emerged as one of the key philosophers of German Idealism, the one who, for the first time, undermined Kant's philosophical revolution and in so doing opened up the way for a viable critique of Hegel. In noted philosopher Slavoj Zizek's view, the main orientations of the post-Hegelian thought, from Kierkegaard and Marx, to Heidegger and today's deconstructionism, were prefigured in Schelling's analysis of Hegel's idealism, and in his affirmation that the contingency of existence cannot be reduced to notional self-mediation. In The Abyss of Freedom, Zizek attempts to advance Schelling's stature even further, with a commentary of the second draft of Schelling's work The Ages of the World, written in 1813.
Zizek argues that Schelling's most profound thoughts are found in the series of three consecutive attempts he made to formulate the "ages of the world/Weltalter," the stages of the self-development of the Absolute. Of the three versions, claims Zizek, it is the second that is the most eloquent and definitive encompassing of Schelling's lyrical thought. It centers on the problem of how the Absolute (God) himself, in order to become actual, to exist effectively, has to accomplish a radically contingent move of acquiring material, bodily existence. Never before available in English, this version finally renders accessible one of the key texts of modern philosophy, a text that is widely debated in philosophical circles today.
The Abyss of Freedom is Zizek's own reading of Schelling based upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. It focuses on the notion that Lacan's theory--which claims that the symbolic universe emerged from presymbolic drives--is prefigured in Schelling's idea of logos as given birth to from the vortex of primordial drives, or from what "in God is not yet God." For Zizek, this connection is monumental, showing that Schelling's ideas forcefully presage the post-modern "deconstruction" of logocentrism.
Slavoj Zizek is not a philosopher who stoops to conquer objects but a radical voice who believes that philosophy is nothing if it is not embodied, nothing if it is only abstract. For him, true philosophy always speaks of something rather than nothing. Those interested in the genesis of contemporary thought and the fate of reason in our "age of anxiety" will find this coupling of texts not only philosophically relevant, but vitally important.
Slavoj Zizek is the author of The Sublime Object of Ideology, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology, and most recently, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters. Currently he is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Judith Norman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

useful but flawed
This book contains a translation of the second version (1813) of an important fragmentary text by Schelling, the Weltalter.This book also contains a very long essay by the 'popular' but (IMHO) overrated postmodern theorist, Zizek. Take note that the somewhat different third version (1815) of the fragmentary text of the Weltalter by Schelling has been published by SUNY Press.Those interested in these texts by Schelling will also want to read Schelling's Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809), which is also available from SUNY Press and in an older but very good translation published by Open Court.
Concerning the book under review:
Pros: It makes easily available an interesting text for those unable to read the German, and the translation is very good.For those interested in Zizek (I'm not), you get an essay by him.
Cons: The translator did not provide page number references to the German edition.This fault is unfortunate because it creates more work for anyone who wants to check the original German, and makes it useless for someone without German (the presumed target audience) who wants to find passages in this text that are cited by other writers according to the original German edition.The actual text by Schelling takes up about seventy pages of this 182 page book, while Zizek's essay takes up 101 pages.Zizek's interpretation veers off into topics irrelevant to understanding Schelling (Lacan, a Lassie movie, cyberspace...you get the idea).For those interested only in Schelling and not Zizek, the book (I am referring to the paperback) might be overpriced.

A compelling and confusing abyss
This book is an odd creature to say the least.A great but under-appreciated text of German idealism is re-published in a new translation, along with an interpretive essay that evaluates it from the standpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis.Personally, I found Schelling's portrait of the world as moving continuously towards full consciousness of itself to be utterly fascinating.I'm still not sure what to make of Zizek's essay - I have always been utterly baffled by Lacan - but if you're into that kind of thing, you might enjoy it. ... Read more

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The title is just the first of many startling asides, observations and insights that fill this guide to Hollywood on the Lacanian psychoanalyst’s couch.

Zizek introduces the ideas of Jacques Lacan through the medium of American film, taking his examples from over 100 years of cinema, from Charlie Chaplin to The Matrix and referencing along the way such figures as Lenin and Hegel, Michel Foucault and Jesus Christ.

Enjoy Your Symptom! is a thrilling guide to cinema and psychoanalysis from a thinker who is perhaps the last standing giant of cultural theory in the twenty-first century.

Customer Reviews (4)

the point?
"I cannot weigh in an estimation of the value of this book. Surely, it is not as profoundly useful or clear as Zizek's political and philosophical thriller, Ticklish Subject. Yet, the application of Zizek's critical arsenal to Hollywood without the baggage of Politics and History, makes room for exposition through, sad to say, a universal and more immediate medium." Here's a statement that completely misses not only the point but the importance of Zizek. Ofcourse, in an era of achedemics and 'intellectual'-types complacently spiteful to popular culture as the anti-shakespeare (christ?), this isn't surprising.

elevator music piped upwind
Clarity of language and argument one finds, some feel, rarely in current theoretical writing or in psychoanalytic writing. Here Zizek has structured his book so that nearly every idea gets two chances to impress the reader. I would agree with one of the reviews on this site of another of Zizek's books, that the author writes more clearly and persuasively about politics than about culture. However, this book presents a pleasing mixture (as most of Zizek's books do) of the cultural, political, philosophical, and Lacanian munch.

Each chapter sets out to answer a question posed by the chapter heading (e.g., Why is Reality Always Multiple?). First Zizek approaches a solution or description of the problem as it appears in Hollywood films. These Zizek treats as texts or case studies. Whatever your opinion of the merits of psychoanalytic description for general use, the discussion of the films makes marvellously amusing reading. As demanding for this reader as the steep range of theoretical vocabulary employed is the ample library of films from which Zizek draws his examples. Many of which films I'd never seen. The second section of each chapter recasts the first approach through film in the language, theory and realm of analysis, theory and philosophy.

I cannot weigh in an estimation of the value of this book. Surely, it is not as profoundly useful or clear as Zizek's political and philosophical thriller, Ticklish Subject. Yet, the application of Zizek's critical arsenal to Hollywood without the baggage of Politics and History, makes room for exposition through, sad to say, a universal and more immediate medium.

very clear stuff
If you know anything about Hegel and Lacan, Zizek is actually a quite clear expositor of Lacan. Looking awry is particularly clear, lucid to the point of simplification in his account of Lacan, but what can you expectwhen your proof-test is Hitchcock and HOllywood movies. Most academic booksconsist of (dead author) and (contemporary theorist), and if the text athand simply serves to validate the theory, why drag out heavy reading whenHitchcock will do? If the theory is correct, it encompasses bothShakespeare and anything oj simpson ever appeared in, so not to use bothwould only be a sign of stuffiness. Zizek has the virtue of being easy toread and not taking himself too seriously, and begins every chapter with aquote from Lenin or Stalin, as if Stalin was the last philosopher. It's nota parody, but if Kojeve (Lacan) is right, that every philosophy is just arepetition of one moment of the Hegelian spirit, then Zizek's jeu d'espritis an honest accomodation to what's happening now.

Lacanian theory and the movies
This book is impossible, complicated, and confusing. Good luck to anyone who tries to figure it out.Zizek careens through film history, haphazardly - and sometimes carefully - appropriating examples in order to make various 'post-modern' and Lacanian points. It almost seems like parody, but ... it's not. ... Read more

Product Description
The maverick philosopher combines Schelling with popular film for a fascinating study of modern life.

The feature which distinguishes the great works of materialist thought, from Lucretius’ De rerum natura through Capital to the writings of Lacan, is their unfinished character: again and again they tackle their chosen problem. Schelling’s Weltalterdrafts belong to this same series, with their repeated attempt at theformulation of the ‘beginning of the world,’ of the passage from thepre-symbolic pulsation of the Real to the universe of logos.

F.W.J. Schelling, the German idealist who for too long dwelled in theshadow of Kant and Hegel, was the first to formulate the post-idealistmotifs of finitude, contingency and temporality. His unique workannounces Marx's critique of speculative idealism, as well as theproperly Freudian notion of drive, of a blind compulsion to repeatwhich can never be sublated in the ideal medium of language.

The Indivisible Remainder beginswith a detailed examination of the two works in which Schelling'sspeculative audacity reached its peak: his essay on human freedom andhis drafts on the “Ages of the World.” After reconstituting their lineof argumentation, Slavoj Zizek confronts Schelling with Hegel, andconcludes by throwing a Schellingian light on some “related matters”:the consequences of the computerization of daily life for sexualexperience; cynicism as today's predominant form of ideology; theepistemological deadlocks of quantum physics.

Althoughthe book is packed with examples from politics and popular culture —the unmistakable token of Zizek’s style — from Speed and Groundhog Day to Forrest Gump,it signals a major shift towards a systematic concern with the basicquestions of philosophy and the roots of the crisis of ourlate-capitalist universe, centred around the enigma of modernsubjectivity.

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Zizek takes a look through the Rear Window and other cultural classics at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Zizek Before Zizek
The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek's first book in English, has been republished in The Essential Zizek collection at Verso. As I posted a review of this new version on Amazon, I am only reviewing the first edition for reference. It includes a bibliography as well as an original preface by Ernesto Laclau that were dropped out of the new edition. The dedication "For Renata" was also abandoned, and the book cover with a picture by Max Ernst bereft of its erotic charge.

It is perfectly legitimate for an author to try to cover his tracks and to give new coloration to the past. The missing elements of this second edition nonetheless provide important information about the Zizek project. The bibliography of the original edition is evenly distributed into titles in English, in French and in German, bearing witness to the origins of a thought for which the English language was only derivative. Only in continental Europe, and in Slovenia of all places, could a project blending Lacan, Marx, and Hegel develop into such a powerful mix. The Zizek brew was long in the making, and it borrowed heavily from the convergence of Freudism, Marxism, and German philosophy that characterized the French intellectual landscape at the end of the 1970s. English only came as an afterthought to Zizek, and his interventions, especially his spoken ones, are still marked by the accent and proclivities of his native Southern Central Europe.

Ernesto Laclau's preface begins by describing the variegated reception given to Lacan's thought from country to country at the time of his writing. In France, and in Latin countries in general, he notes that the influence of Lacan has been mainly clinical and has therefore been closely linked with psychoanalytic practice. In Anglo-Saxon countries this centrality of the clinical aspect has, to a large extent, been absent and the influence of Lacan has revolved almost exclusively around the literature-cinema-feminism triangle.

The most valuable part of Laclau's preface is that it provides information on Lacan's reception in Slovenia, where Zizek was by no means an isolated case. "Today, he notes, Lacanian theory is the main philosophical orientation in Slovenia. It has also been one of the principal reference points of the so-called 'Slovenian Spring'". The production of this Slovenian school is already considerable: apart from two books in French, Laclau refers to more than twenty volumes published in Slovenian. He also lists ten authors, including Mladen Dolar and Renata Salecl, as close associates to Zizek.

The Slovenian Lacanian School possesses highly original features. In contrast with the Latin and Anglo-Saxon world, Lacanian categories have been used in a reflection which is essentially philosophical and political. And while the Slovenian theoreticians make some efforts to extend their analysis to the domain of literature and film, the clinical dimension is totally absent. A distinctive feature of the Slovenian school is the use of Lacanian categories in the analysis of classical philosophical texts: Plato, Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant, Marx, Heidegger, the Anglo-Saxon analytical tradition and, above all, Hegel. Indeed, the specific flavor of the Slovenian theorists is given by their Hegelian orientation. As Laclau writes in the 1989 preface, "Its special combination of Hegelianism and Lacanian theory currently represents one of the most innovative and promising theoretical projects on the European intellectual scene".

As Laclau notes, The Sublime Object is "a series of intellectual interventions, which shed mutual light on each other, not in terms of the progression of an argument, but in terms of what we could call the reiteration of the latter in different discursive contexts". Zizek puts in place what Barthes has called a 'writerly text', a textual machine that invites the reader to pursue the discursive proliferation in which the author has been engaged. This is why reading one of Zizek's book is equivalent to reading them all, while at the same time the reader is caught by the addictive power of Zizek's prose and constantly demands more. This first edition will fulfill the needs of the Zizek collector, while providing important information on the context in which the Zizek project originated.

All of the philosophers hated this book.
I read this book in an inter-disciplinary reading group (folks from Philosophy, English, Political Science, Psychology, and others).It was very frustrating; the book bordered on making sense for hundreds of pages, but the majority of the group felt that we could not quite grasp his main concepts.The philosophers in the group were all sympathetic to the so-called `Continental tradition' (e.g., Marx, Sartre, Nietzsche, Heidegger), but we all finally decided that Zizek is a charlatan who gives philosophy a bad name.Much of the book is nonsense - by which I mean unintelligible, Sokal-esque garbage.For example - we worked very hard to understand what he means by the Lacanian Real, but in the end had to give up.Here is a partial list of his claims about the Real:the Real is pure negativity, a void; the real is pure positivity, fullness; the Real is the basis of the symbolic order; the Real is a "determinate nothing," the Real is a hard kernel; the Real is not a hard kernel; the Real is desire; the Real does not exist; the Real is structured by the symbolic order.What can you do with a list like that except give up on the book and warn others?

THE best introduction to hegel, marx, freud, and lacan
While it is undoubtedly true that to read most recent critical theorists one wants acquaintance with the philosophical and anti-philosophical canons, Zizek is a different story.This is because he excels at giving coherent and surprisingly entertaining expositions of some of the most difficult thinkers in western thought (especially lacan, hegel, and kant).Reading Zizek will make you want to read these other writers, and Zizek's interpretations are as original as they are accurate, in both cases impeccably so.

The aim of the book is manifold.Among other things it:

1. Rehabilitates Lacan's thinking against charges of obscurantism (sokal, gallop, noel carrol, et al).This is particularly true of the chapters entitled "che vuoi?" (what do you want?) and "you only die twice."The former chapter is a tour du force reading of Lacan's infamous semiotic diagrams on the dialetic of desire (see last chapter of "Ecrits" (short edition)).Improbably, this reading is built up as a response to one of the most "mainstream" debates in all of analytic philosophy: Kripke vs. Searle, anti-deescriptivism v descriptivism.Ultimately the claim is that Lacan represents the Enlightenment ideals more than anyone else today.

2. It challenges the prevailing determinist interpretation of hegel and makes an exceptionally persuasive case that hegel is THE thinker of contingency and indeterminacy and "the opened", so to speak.This is the task the conclusion of the book takes up, starting with a close-reading of the difference between Kant and Hegel's thinking on the sublime.The thing above all in Hegel's legacy is the format of hegel's reasoning, the often misunderstood dialectical triad.Read the last chapter for a definition and application of this mode of logic.

3. Begins by making the case that it was Marx and not Freud who "invented the symptom."Another original and persuasive argument, not to be missed.In edition to a new notion of ideology and how to critique it, this chapter includes one of the best short introductions Freud's theory of dreams I know of.

People often deride Zizek as a "comedian/philosopher" who makes too much light of serious matters (see the new yorker profile of 2003 for such a take).And this book certainly has its share of dirty and/or political jokes.What this view forgets, however, is that while Zizek is perfectly capable of turning serious matters into jokes, it his ability to look awry at the most trivial matters, to take the big Other's jokes seriously, that is perhaps his most enduring quality as a thinker.

A True First Step
"The Sublime Object of Ideology" is perhaps the best introduction to the Zizek-Lacan line of thought in social psychology and psychoanalysis. If "Looking Awry" may be more fascinating because of its many examples from film (Hitchcock in particular), this one thoroughly explains those conceptual knots constantly resumed in Zizek's analyses.

groundbreaking
Zizek brilliantly combines Lacan and Althusser in his reading of Marx and ideology. Unlike other pompous incomprehensible readings of complicated theorists e.g. Lacan and Althusser, Zizek offers a sharp, shrewd, and most important, a comprehensible text to his readers.
This book is probably the best introduction to the Zizek phenomenon. It is very theoritical, but it also introduces Zizek's famous references to movies and popular culture (Zizekian trademarks) in his attempt to explain complex Lacanian and Althusserian propositions. This is not a book only for those specializing in cultural or critical theory; it is written in a language which is accesible to a wider audience - Zizek turns complicated and highly philosophical ideas into a daily practice exercised by non-specialists too.
The most important and Zizek's greatest achievement is his transition from the Althusserian ideology as reality to fantasy as reality. The idea of reality as an imaginary construct - a human fantasy - is the idea that constantly haunts Zizek's later works. The acknowledgement of of some impossible Real kernel becomes Zizek's most effective tool in his attempts to expose our notion of reality as fantasy.
This book introduces Lacan's cognitive paradigm (Real/Imaginary/Symbolic) and Althusser's structuralist readings of ideology and society into cultural theory as never done before. This book is a must for everyone who has the courage to look into ideas that will shake the foundations of reality as we perceive it. It is in short - groundbreaking. ... Read more

Product Description
Totalitarianism, as an ideological notion, has always had a precise strategic function: to guarantee the liberal-democratic hegemony by dismissing the Leftist critique of liberal democracy as the obverse, the twin, of the Rightist Fascist dictatorships.Instead of providing yet another exposition of the history of this notion, Zizek's book addresses totalitarianism in a Wittgensteinian way, as a cobweb of family resemblances. He concludes that the devil lies not so much in the detail of what constitutes totalitarianism but in what enables the very designation totalitarian: the liberal-democratic consensus itself. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

interesting
this is wonderful.i read it in one week.persuade readers to go on and on.

Incomprehensible
I found this in the philosphy section of a local store and was intrigued by the timely theme and title. Nothing else proved commendable about this book. This is the sort of book that gives philosphy a bad name. A dense fog of jagron so abstract that it almost seems like a parody. I must admit I could not finish this book. I was barely able to penetrate the first two chapters. Several honest attempts to scan the rest of the book read like pure gibberish.

An intensely searching evaluation and analysis
Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion is an intensely searching evaluation and analysis of precisely what totalitarianism is, and how the term has been misused -- particularly in twentieth century political science and philosophical discussions. Individual chapter sections address diverse, unusual, and controversial topics such as "The radical ambiguity of Stalinism"; "A plea for material creationism"; and "The Pope versus the Dalai Lama". Deviously written by Slavoj Zizek (Senior Researcher, Institute for Social Studies, Ljublijana) to unweave conundrums about the cross-purpose classification of totalitarian power and governance, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? is a complex, thought-provoking philosophical accounting and a highly recommended addition to academic Political Science and Philosophy Studies departmental reference collections and reading lists. ... Read more

Product Description
In the wake of Heidegger's announcement of the end of onto-theology and inspired by both Levinas and Derrida, many contemporary continental philosophers of religion search for a post-metaphysical God, a God who is often characterized as tout autre, wholly other. Christ in Postmodern Philosophy investigates the Christological ideas of three contemporary thinkers, Gianni Vattimo, Rene Girard and Slavoj Zizek. In doing so, Frederiek Depoortere focuses on the relation between transcendence and the event of the Incarnation on the one hand, and the uniqueness of Christianity on the other. ... Read more