Zizek

A comprehensive overview of Slavoj Zizek's thought, including all of his published works to date.

• Provides a solid basis in the work of an engaging thinker and teacher whose ideas will continue to inform philosophical, psychological, political, and cultural discourses well into the future
• Identifies the major currents in Zizek's thought, discussing all of his works and providing a background in continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory necessary to its understanding
• Explores Zizek's growing popularity through his engagement in current events, politics, and cultural studies
• Pertains to a variety of fields, including contemporary philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, sociology, political science, esthetics, literary theory, film theory, and theology

Epigraphs ix

Acknowledgments x

1 Introduction 1

2 The Sublime Object of Ideology 46

3 For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor 55

4 Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture 66

5 Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out 75

6 Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology 94

7 The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality 108

8 The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters 115

9 The Plague of Fantasies 125

10 The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology 136

11 The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway 146

12 The Fragile Absolute: or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? 155

13 On Belief 163

14 The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kies´lowski between Theory and Post-Theory 171

15 Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion 180

16 Welcome to the Desert of the Real 193

17 The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity 201

18 Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences 212

19 Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle 220

20 How to Read Lacan 227

21 The Parallax View 237

22 In Defense of Lost Causes 249

23 Violence 257

24 First as Tragedy, then as Farce 267

25 Living in the End Times 278

26 Conclusion 295

Further Reading 315

Index 322

Kelsey Wood has taught philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross, at Boston University, and at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Troubling Play: Meaning and Entity in Plato's Parmenides (2005), and Plato's Later Dialectic and Continental Philosophy (forthcoming). Slavoj Zizek is widely regarded as the most significant and provocative thinker of our age. He integrates concepts from the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan with Hegel's dialectical method in philosophy, for a radically new vision of human nature and human society. Zizek has written-with humor, lucidity, and extraordinary erudition-on the philosophical problem of identity, ontology, globalization, postmodernism, political philosophy, literature, film, ecology, religion, the French Revolution, Lenin, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind.

Zizek: A Reader's Guide situates Zizek's wide-ranging work in the broader context of continental philosophy, engages its precedents, and provides an overview of its main preoccupations, providing a backstory for both the philosopher and the general reader.

Moving deftly through the work of G.W.F. Hegel, F.W.J. Schelling, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, and Alain Badiou, in addition to Lacan, this reader's guide offers a comprehensive overview of Slavoj Zizek's thought.

Wood provides an excellent guidebook through ?i?ek’s thought. This book is a tremendously clear, thorough and valuable resource for anyone interested in the most influential philosopher of our time.
-Clayton Crockett, University of Central Arkansas

Kelsey Wood has done something simple and invaluable: a comprehensive account of all ?i?ek's books in English. Apart from providing an indespensible tool and a reference book for the future, he has done a lot more than that, for on each page his account is engaged, passionate, well informed and insightful, displaying a deep understanding of ?i?ek's thought and its development.
-Mladen Dolar, University of Ljubljana and Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht