The Zizek Reader

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects All Subjects Cultural Studies Literary Studies Literary Studies MOSTLY Theory

Edited by Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright,

Foreword by Slavoj Zizek

Blackwell Publishers

Due/Published April 1999, 392 pages, paper

ISBN 0631212019

A new entry in Blackwell's series of Readers!(S99)

Here we have a comprehensive introduction to Zizek with mix of selections from his work; introductions to the individual sections on Culture, Women, and Philosophy; and a general introduction that maps the shiftings of Zizeks thought within the Lacanian framework. Also there is a new, previously unpublished essay on cyberspace from the "Giant of Ljubljana."

Contents :

Part I: Culture



• The Undergrowth of Enjoyment.
• The Obscene Object of Postmodernity 
• The Spectre of Ideology
• Fantasy as a Political Category
• Is it Possible to Traverse the Fantasy in Cyberspace? 


• Otto Weininger, or ´Woman doesn´t Exist´
• Courtly Love, or Woman as Thing
• There is No Sexual Relationship
• Death and the Maiden

Review

If a philosopher gets a Reader it sometimes mean his ideas have found a safe place in the Western canon of ideas. Undoubtedly, Zizek’s work will have a profound influence for years to come, however to think of his creative and original ideas as somehow fitting easily into the storied tradition of Western thought is a bit harder to imagine. Zizek’s ideas relate to many contemporary intellectual movements, most prominently Lacanian thought, but he cannot be confined to any one in particular. Zizek’s mix of concerns, the Cartesian subject, German Idealism, Marxist critiques, jokes, popular movies, assures him an originality and a vitality. This reader, a collection of fourteen essays, inlcudes a previously unpublished work on cyberspace, is divided into three parts -- Culture, Woman, and Philosophy -- and discusses such diverse subjects as Hegel and Hitchcock, Schelling and science fiction, Kant and courtly love, Stalin and psychoanalysis. Of course, central to all of this is Zizek’s use of Lacanian psychoanalysis and concepts. The use of Lacanian frameworks through which to interpret politics, culture, and philosophy force entirely new understandings of many issues.