Como Ler Lacan Zizek Pdf
Author(s) Title: Publisher: Year: Pages: Language: Size: Extension: Mirrors: Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques.
For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, an influence each new thinker struggles to escape. As a consequence, Hegel’s absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring the fact that he is the defining philosopher of the historical transition to modernity, a period with which our own times share startling similari For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, an influence each new thinker struggles to escape. As a consequence, Hegel’s absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring the fact that he is the defining philosopher of the historical transition to modernity, a period with which our own times share startling similarities. Today, as global capitalism comes apart at the seams, we are entering a new period of transition.
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In Less Than Nothing, the product of a career-long focus on the part of its author, Slavoj Žižek argues it is imperative we not simply return to Hegel but that we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables Žižek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with key strands of contemporary thought—Heidegger, Badiou, speculative realism, quantum physics, and cognitive sciences. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel. From the Trade Paperback edition. A boring book about Hegel. For years Slavoj had suggested that his books were simply a means to distract him from working on his big book about Hegel.
Now we have his big book on Hegel and it may serve to distract us from reading Hegel himself. But of course we will need to read Hegel. And Heidegger.
And Hitchcock. I love Žižek. He is the objet a. To misrepresent the thought of Friend (Friar) Jeremy, the only true reason t A boring book about Hegel.
For years Slavoj had suggested that his books were simply a means to distract him from working on his big book about Hegel. Now we have his big book on Hegel and it may serve to distract us from reading Hegel himself. But of course we will need to read Hegel. And Heidegger.
And Hitchcock. I love Žižek. He is the objet a. To misrepresent the thought of Friend (Friar) Jeremy, the only true reason to not read Žižek is because one already reads Hegel and Marx and Lacan et al. He is the surplus enjoyment of philosophy, that je ne sais quoi which is in excess of its series and which compels one to circulate around that never quite completed thought, the inversion of what is at first the wrong choice into what can only find enjoyment in its stupid circulation.
There is a brute stupidity in this compulsion which readers of Žižek such as myself find utterly entrancing, preferring this hardness to the unbearable Dummheit of entertainment, that most deep enmeshment in ideology. But enough of my stupidity. This is not a book for the stupid; it is a book for the imbecile, those of us lacking the becile, who ‘know that the big Other does not exist.” Less Than Nothing counts as (one of) Žižek's masterwork(s). It is a book on Hegel and the redoubling or repetition of Hegel within the thought of Lacan.
He has not written a commentary on any one of Hegel's texts and one will not find here an introduction to the thought of Hegel. What he endeavors to do here is articulate the present tense relevance for Hegel, what Hegel looks like today in the world of post-Hegelian thought. Žižek is engaged in a battle to salvage Hegel, the pinnacle of German Idealism, from a host of straw man (cartoonish) caricatures of Hegel which served as easy means for appearing to allow one to 'go beyond Hegel.' What Žižek presents here is a sustained engagement with claims made by thinkers that they have 'overcome' Hegelian dialectics, having either gotten Hegel wrong, missed the very Hegelian moments of their own thought, or missed a piece of the phenomenon or bit of the real, the kernel of the problem or its solution.
Less Than Nothing is more rigorously structured than the classic form of the Žižekian text which often consists of digressions from the digression which opens the work. Here we have the structure of ‘there is a non-(sexual)relation.’ We open with the drink before followed by the two Things themselves - Hegel and Lacan - wrapped up with the cigarette after. The drink before is a tripartite treatment of Plato’s Parmenides, Christianity, and Fichte. From the Parmenides Žižek takes us through Plato’s dialectical treatment of the relation between the 8(+1) hypotheses in regard to the question of the One and Being: if the One is, if the One is not, if there is One., if there is no One. In his treatment of Christianity Žižek continues (or repeats) his thesis that when Christ was crucified, God died. The recovery of the radical emancipatory collective, the early church, from this catastrophe of God consists in actualizing Hegel’s Absolute Spirit: “fully assuming the big Other’s inexistence, that is to say, the inexistence of the big Other as the subject-supposed-to-know.” Concerning Fichte Žižek analyzes the rise of the subject as a response to the Antoss, that object which impedes the subject, but even as its impediment becomes the very condition of the rise of the subject. “The Thing Itself: Hegel” addresses three questions regarding Hegel: Is it still possible to be a Hegelian today?; what is this about dialectics?; and, what it means to think Hegel’s ‘not only as Substance, but also as Subject’?
Interspersed between the sections are three Interludes which deal with the question of the relationship between Hegel and Marx, the relation between the cogito and Foucault’s work on madness, and development of the concept of the monarch from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The three sections of “The Thing Itself: Lacan” treat the relation between Hegel and Lacan, the notions of ‘suture’ and ‘pure difference,’ and the status of the various forms of ‘the object’ in Lacan’s work. The interludes here address the interplay between past and future in determining what has been (a kind of retroactive formation of teleology), a critique of Meillassoux’s rejection of ‘correlationism’ and his attempt to return to a realism without a subject, and a critique of Hofstadter’s cognitivism. The cigarette after recovers us through a treatment Badiou’s thought, Heidegger’s thinking, and quantum physics. Žižek is very close to Badiou, but the essay here is insightful to see at which points Žižek wants to differentiate himself from Badiou.
Žižek’s piece on Heidegger is the most extended engagement with Heidegger, to my knowledge, in all of Žižek’s corpus. One almost wishes that we could expect a big Heidegger book from Slavoj, being as Žižek began his philosophical studies as a Heideggarian. Finally, Žižek’s study on quantum physics is to be taken with a great deal of interest by those who believe that quantum physics as changed all our notions about reality. What is usually missed when wild claims are made about quantum physics is the symbolic (mathematized) form in which theoretical physics dwells. Žižek’s Hegelian working through of the deadlocks of quantum physics ought to be required reading for anyone interested in the relation between ontology and theoretical physics.
So much for a poor reconstruction of the Table of Contents. I suggest perusing the ToC and the “Introduction: Eppur Si Muove” available at google books The amazon preview is incomplete. If we can note in a summary fashion why we will read this book we should indicate those positions on behalf of which Žižek is fighting tooth and nail, and to which precisely Hegel can give us access. First, as Žižek has been arguing for years, is the return to a concept of the subject or cogito which is not reducible to any lower ontic level, but is itself that which transcendentally constitutes reality. It is a cardinal rule of pretentious academic existence that anyone who fancies herself a philosopher has to love Hegel.
I've spent an embarrassing amount of time studying philosophy and even managed to pick up one of those fancy philosophy degrees that no one wants. But I'm just going to come right out and say it: I hate Hegel. I hate him so much that I seriously contemplated taking antidepressants during an undergraduate class on The Phenomenology of Spirit.
I broke my computer trying to write It is a cardinal rule of pretentious academic existence that anyone who fancies herself a philosopher has to love Hegel. I've spent an embarrassing amount of time studying philosophy and even managed to pick up one of those fancy philosophy degrees that no one wants. But I'm just going to come right out and say it: I hate Hegel. I hate him so much that I seriously contemplated taking antidepressants during an undergraduate class on The Phenomenology of Spirit. I broke my computer trying to write a paper during the same class. And no, I didn't break it because I was typing furiously, inspired by new ideas.
I broke it having a massive temper tantrum that has left my long-suffering dog permanently traumatized. Instead of re-reading Hegel to inspire further understanding (or further suicidal ideation), I responded to the Phenomenology of Spirit by making a video involving puppets, robots and a rapping dog all emphasizing exactly how much Hegel sucks. That is how much I hate this philosopher. But the thing is, I really love Zizek. Even when he goes off on his insane rants wherein everything somehow ties back to Lacan, vampires or communism, I find myself swooning.
I love him so much that I have spent a significant portion of my time trying to convince my husband that, were I to actually meet Zizek, we would immediately become best friends and would wear matching friendship bracelets. I've always ignored Zizek's respect for Hegel, thinking it was just one of his many weird predilections that I don't really need to understand. But Zizek has sold me. Hegel is not all of the horrible things I have called him (but damnit, he is some of them). It took a crazed Slovenian philosopher to help me appreciate a crazed German one. I'm not ready to drink the kool-aid of Hegel being the greatest philosopher ever just yet, but it's a start.
And it's a tribute to Zizek that I've made that start. Don't read all of the critical readers and guides to the Phenomenology of Spirit. For Zizek fans, this book is a breath of fresh air. I've complained quite a bit about Zizek repackaging and recycling old material into a 'new' book every six months or so. But this one is truly novel, and it's probably his most well-written work to date. A Note On These Notes: They are nothing more than my personal notes, they are not a 'review', they will be ongoing throughout my reading of Less Than Nothing and they are simply things I wish to return to and explore more or designate with a digital place-marker in this review-space, mainly to document my progress in coming to understand ideas I do not currently understand.
That being said, if you happen to read over this and wish to comment, add, clarify, discuss, question, correct, etc., please A Note On These Notes: They are nothing more than my personal notes, they are not a 'review', they will be ongoing throughout my reading of Less Than Nothing and they are simply things I wish to return to and explore more or designate with a digital place-marker in this review-space, mainly to document my progress in coming to understand ideas I do not currently understand. That being said, if you happen to read over this and wish to comment, add, clarify, discuss, question, correct, etc., please feel abundantly free to do so in the comments. I am a student here, and any voluntary teachers are welcome pedants. This book was, for me, an exercise in persistence. I'm not much of a fan of Zizek, but I really enjoy reading good Hegel scholarship (and scholarship in continental philosophy generally) so one of my friends who does enjoy Zizek foisted the book on me, extending me an opportunity to read it for free.
It took me several months, as those who look at the reading log will note, for several reasons. The first is that while Zizek has a distinctive writing style that is engaging for his typical reade This book was, for me, an exercise in persistence. I'm not much of a fan of Zizek, but I really enjoy reading good Hegel scholarship (and scholarship in continental philosophy generally) so one of my friends who does enjoy Zizek foisted the book on me, extending me an opportunity to read it for free. It took me several months, as those who look at the reading log will note, for several reasons.
The first is that while Zizek has a distinctive writing style that is engaging for his typical readers, I find the persistent pop-cultural references and redundancy really exhausting. The second is that the book really isn't about Hegel; the book is about Zizek's reappropriation of post-Hegelian ideas, which is something that he's already discussed at length in much of his other work where he deals with Freud and Lacan and various other French figures that are major influences on his scholarship. The Hegel scholarship in the book is, at best, specious.
There are a number of claims made about Hegel and rationalism and idealism that might be plausible interpretations, but they require argumentation that Zizek doesn't give; he instead asserts a claim about something Hegel held as a position and then moves on to explain his application of it in his cultural criticism or political criticism. Even if he had good reasons for asserting these interpretations of Hegel, he does not offer them up and, in the course of 1,000 pages, that isn't really acceptable. I understand why people like Zizek. There's a definite style and rhythm to his writing; he does a good job at painting a picture that supports his claims about culture. (Though those pictures are not the sort of thing I tend to find compelling, since they're generally meant to be evocative, and not particularly deeply invested in argument, as typically understood.) There's also a set of claims that arouse a lot of empathy from activists and critics who are looking for an angle on modernity and capitalism; but even there I can't help but think that there are more successful and engaging scholars coming out of the radical movement. (Even less intellectual, more politically oriented people like Sam Webb are more satisfying for me, personally; ultimately I disagree with many of the conclusions, but I tend to suggest that folks who are sympathetic to that sort of radicalism look there rather than towards Zizek.) There are many major and minor criticisms to be lobbed at Zizek. Most of my peers in philosophy don't think he's a serious academic.
(There are reasons for that, though it is a bit harsh as a claim, and they've rarely read him seriously enough to make it.) Many more think that he's just a sort of wingnut attempting to make headlines and be sensational. Those things are not really pertinent to my criticism of the book, and if the only reservations I had about it was that it might lead readers to cast him that way, I would recommend it to some limited group who might gain something from experiencing that view of him. But that's not the problem with the book. The problem with the book, and the reason why I can't recommend it, is that it is a ponderous book that purports to be an exposition on Hegel that wanders around and around without delving into the central ideas that made, and continue to make, Hegel a central figure of interest for so many philosophers, cultural critics, and political thinkers.
That does not make for a good read. What is 'less than nothing' is what is lost in order to maintain the relationship between subject and object. This nothing sustains the dialectic, but it’s also the ground that is synthesized in Hegel's dialectical project.
Son volt straightaways rarity. But really, this nothing is also the 'form' by which phenomenon is understood. That is to say, coming from Kant, understanding or the law of desire is the pure nothingness that imposes the order we see in the chaotic world. It's actually pretty simple. The universal, the a pri What is 'less than nothing' is what is lost in order to maintain the relationship between subject and object. This nothing sustains the dialectic, but it’s also the ground that is synthesized in Hegel's dialectical project. But really, this nothing is also the 'form' by which phenomenon is understood.
That is to say, coming from Kant, understanding or the law of desire is the pure nothingness that imposes the order we see in the chaotic world. It's actually pretty simple. The universal, the a priori, is the emptiness that is lost in understanding the Real.
This is because we can’t apprehend understanding directly; we can only see it through the empirical world. The closest we get to understanding itself, so to speak, is the petit object a, the pure signifier that is its own lack necessarily: without this particle of necessary being we wouldn't be able to see being in the world at all. As Zizek says, for Heidigger, we wouldn't have Sein without Das Sein. Zizek goes to great lengths to demonstrate the post-structural condition: that how we read comes before what we read. Borrowing from Karen Barad, we can separate how we read from what we read, because we can use how we read to discover what we read - or we can use what we read to discover how we read – but we cannot discover their entanglement, that is the border between the two.
To paraphrase him, in order to find out how the two go together, we need to realign the objects so that we, the viewing apparatus and the object in question, are tested against a third thing.which is impossible. There is no third point of view, in the theory of relativity.
Results always come from the position of the viewing apparatus, as it cannot be outside itself. Philosophically, there's no third view either. We may try to step out of this understanding, out of the metaphysician's realm, but all attempts to determine the root of discourse find themselves mired in the failure to fully explain the framing of that discourse.
To put it another way, Zizek notes that antiphilosophy is at the heart of philosophy. With each failure to explain antiphilosophy, we get more philosophy. With this line of reasoning, Zizek, as usual, goes through a huge nest of thinkers to demonstrate how their different philosophies circumambulate various centers of discourse: The basic motif of antiphilosophy is the assertion of a pure presence (the Real Life of society for Marx, Existence for Kierkegaard, Will for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, etc.) irreducible to and excessive with regard to the network of philosophical concepts or representations. The great theme of post-Hegelian antiphilosophy is the excess of the pre-conceptual productivity of Presence over its representation: representation is reduced to the “mirror of representation,” which reflects in a distorted way its productive ground (841). Of course, Zizek wants to say that Hegel was the first to reach this irreducible ground, as the synthesis of consciousness – and he traces this through a variety of manners that is both entertaining and enlightening. But Barad’s point remains; whatever language Zizek adopts, we see the mysterious Presence continually being shuffled from point to point, which reduces all discourse to a manner of tautology: The mistake resides in the fact that the limit pertaining to the form itself (to the categories used) is misperceived as a contingent empirical limitation.
In the case of cognitivism: it is not that we already have the categorical apparatus necessary to explain consciousness (neuronal process, etc), and our failure to have yet done so pertains only to the empirical limitation of our knowing the relevant facts about the brain; the true limitation lies in the very form of our knowledge, in the very categorical apparatus we are using. In other words, the gap between the form of knowledge and its empirical limitation is inscribed in this form itself (284). So while we understand the mysterious Real though our a priori categories, these categories give us an incomplete view. In order to mirror ourselves with the exterior, to be 'appropriate' to reality, we create a standing social order, a consistency within discourses (or many discourses themselves) each of which approach the mystery of the world from another angle.
Como Ler Lacan Zizek Pdf Online
These discourses are always defractions, which are in themselves incomplete, hinging on one another but only shuffling pure Presence about. Spoken through Fichte: this absence can be expressed as antoss, or as Lacan liked to say about the Self: 'I think where I am not.' This can be unpacked to mean that the self is simply what mediates itself. In this way, Hegel remains for Zizek the genius that first notices how what we read is how we read: In this sense, it is meaningless to call Hegel’s philosophy “absolute idealism”: his point is precisely that there is no need for a Third element, the medium or Ground beyond subject and object-substance. We start with objectivity, and the subject is nothing but the self-meditation of objectivity (144, original italics). Unpacking this thought, lets realize that not only is the self “less than nothing” but “less than nothing” is also the pure Presence mediating the discourse itself. We get the symbolic reality through the loss of pure Presence.
Its lack allows us to read through it to get discursive reality as a full blown immersive social environment of culture. I rather enjoyed this lengthy and inspired book. To be brief, Zizek does philosophy to hide the fact that philosophy no longer works, that in Heidegger’s language, philosophy has been suspended while capitalism contemplates itself. In this sense, capitalism tries to say what reason cannot (in this sense, capitalism occupies the same position as Art for Kant, that of a second nature). No wonder then that Zizek says philosophy stopped with Hegel, that the many guises of Hegel are in fact not-Hegel or a stunted Hegel so that we can continue on with postmodernism, with the avant garde, because we haven't learned Hegel yet. So we hide him away while we continue on in endless jouissance.
So to cut to the chase: In every discourse, in every sense-making, we either sacrifice completeness or we sacrifice contingency. Master discourses (like that of Gods) generally sacrifice contingency to create completeness, to wrap us in universals, to guarantee the universe be stable for us to live in. But in all of these cases (and you can go on ad infinitum), you will end up asking, why is there necessity? As in is there a 'necessity particle' that makes existence be (as existence itself is without cause)? Why are things even necessary? Is there pure being somewhere?
Zizek’s answer is to locate the split of symbolic reality (necessity) and the Real together within the subject, that only through a split subject do we get contingency as the only necessity. Our ability to understand is then only supplemented through both Reason and an encounter with the Real that stands in to verify the completeness of discursive truth. For Zizek the subject’s being split is another way of saying that necessary to subjectivity is the provision of what needs to be included within its view, of what cannot be compromised. Zizek provides the example where some Christians replied to Darwinism by insisting that the world was 4,000 years old, that fossils were placed in the Earth to test faith.
Zizek doesn’t believe this to be true but he cites this example to show that the “grain of truth” in the Christian example is their impossible-Real objectal counter-part which never positively existed in reality – it emerges through its loss, it is directly created as a fossil. The exclusion of this object is consistitutive of the appearance of reality: since reality (not the Real) is correlative to the subject, it can only constitute itself through the withdrawal from it of the object which “is” the subject.
What breaks up the self-closure of transcendental correlation is thus not the transcendent reality that eludes the subject’s grasp, but the inaccessibility of the object that “is” the subject itself. This is the true “fossil,” the bone that is the spirit, to paraphrase Hegel, and this object is not simply the full objective reality of the subject. but the non-corporeal, fantasmatic lamella. This is another way of encountering the symbolic Real, the meaningless floating signifier that would guarantee completeness, that is the subject in its actualization. Be this ontology, money, or joy, fear, anxiety, love, mana or luck, such signifiers often allow discourse to hinge on these terms in order for that discourse to continue to be relevant, a kind of antiphilosophy in the heart of philosophy or antilaw at the heart of law.
Zizek writes Every signifying field thus has to be “sutured” by a supplementary zero-signifier, a “zero symbolic value, that is, a sign marking the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content over and above that which the signified already contains.” This signifier is “a symbol in its pure state”: lacking any determinate meaning, it stands for the presence of meaning and such in contrast to its absence, in a further dialectical twist, the mode of appearance of this supplementary signifier which stands for meaning as such is non-sense. Notions like mana thus “represent nothing more or less that floating signifier which is the disability of all finite thought.
(585, original italics). So is there any way to get out?
The only meaningful answer is no, as to escape pure Presence is to fall into non-sense, or at least a difference sense that is non-sense from where we current are. Even attempt to transgress the limits of the law end up invoking the law in its transgressed form, simply because those forms are how we understand. This is how the Real becomes mirrored within the symbolic as the pure form of the symbolic.
The symbolic Real, which is what Zizek would call meaningless encodings necessary to moor our consistency (our discourse, so to speak), operates through the contingencies qua Real, a maneuver of the subject to mediate itself and actualize. At this point, to recognize a new thing, like a new world order, or a solution from our capitalist dilemma, means coming to new coordinates, a new phenomenon, a new axis. Zizek locates this between drive and reason, to have the two come together.
You can read this like the unification of money with language, but he leaves it open, because after all, these are metaphysical terms. Directly speaking, such terms are always beyond our understanding, lacking substance, even as they are always within the area delineated by our pure understanding, but completely impotent to interrupt our world and realign it. All we need is the right content to come along, the right void to allow us to rename it, and recognize it as the new event, in the language of Nietzsche, 'the eternal return.' With that, we could have a new epoch, a new pure Presence emerging from nothingness itself, and that new Presence would be a new world order, a new symbolic Real to realign our world, to remake our world. Compared to anything in or current state it would be more than anything, a new nothing from which there would never be any possibility of return as we would irreparably be someone else. I know describing any Zizek book as 'his most coherent' is like congratulating a Bob Dylan performance on being his 'least nasal' but if one book can be said to finally put lazy criticism of Zizek to rest then this should be it.
It's not perfect (even though I gave it 5 stars), but what book of philosophy is? Generally speaking, Zizek is trying to 'do Hegel again' whilst filtering in Lacan and Marx, reinterpreting Meilassoux, Butler, Heidegger, Jameson and Freud, as well as exploring the Hegelian I know describing any Zizek book as 'his most coherent' is like congratulating a Bob Dylan performance on being his 'least nasal' but if one book can be said to finally put lazy criticism of Zizek to rest then this should be it. It's not perfect (even though I gave it 5 stars), but what book of philosophy is? Generally speaking, Zizek is trying to 'do Hegel again' whilst filtering in Lacan and Marx, reinterpreting Meilassoux, Butler, Heidegger, Jameson and Freud, as well as exploring the Hegelian sides of speculative realism and quantum physics. In fact, this latter chapter is one of his strongest, showing a direct engagement with ideas above and beyond philosophy and psychoanalysis and refusing to descend into self-parody. This is perhaps the book's key strength: Zizek is less willing to simply repeat a bunch of now tired movie references and jokes from the old country. Instead he directly engages with a range of topics over a series of lengthy chapters with heavy theory and minimal nonsense (although fans of his meandering and tangents will not be disappointed in a few places).
The book is by no means 'entry level'. Many of the early chapters baffled me as I have no background or even the remotest hint of knowledge in German Idealism (I hoped this would teach me a bit about Hegel).
While I know more about Hegel in his Zizekian form after reading this, I can certainly say that it was a hard slog. If you've read Zizek before then the sections on Lacan and Marx are not too taxing, and a little knowledge of Deleuze wouldn't go amiss either. However, if you're willing to pile through the stuff that's incredibly difficult, there are some absolute gems in there (like the previously mentioned chapter on quantum mechanics, his engagement with Badiou's theory of the event and his criticism of speculative realism).
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As a whole it is not perfectly formed, still having 'interludes' that don't often stand out as obvious links between sections, but it reads as a lot more of a consistent piece than his other works. For this, it should be read as his masterpiece- the 'go to' for those who wish to read Zizek at his best, his clearest and his most honest. Žižek is trying to formulate a new political ontology, one that combines Žižek's preferred elements from Hegel, Marx and Jacques Lacan. As I am not familiar enough with these people's writings to know one way or the other whether Žižek properly represents them, I don't focus too much on the accuracy of his representations of philosophers writings and what they meant. I do, however, enjoy and benefit from the whirlwind tour of philosophers that Žižek often engages with.
Cutting through his Hegel/ Žižek is trying to formulate a new political ontology, one that combines Žižek's preferred elements from Hegel, Marx and Jacques Lacan. As I am not familiar enough with these people's writings to know one way or the other whether Žižek properly represents them, I don't focus too much on the accuracy of his representations of philosophers writings and what they meant.
I do, however, enjoy and benefit from the whirlwind tour of philosophers that Žižek often engages with. Cutting through his Hegel/Marx/Lacan argument are engagements with Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Freud, Foucault, Butler, Badiou and many others. These moments of engagement are usually meant to sustain Žižek's own arguments, I don't know how many responses he is going to get from the few living philosophers he engages in. In fact, as I read this 1000 page behemoth I wondered how many people would actually engage with Žižek on the level that he is trying to engage them. Žižek's writing has an affective quality to it, it sensually engages those of us who enjoy labyrinthian tours of people and ideas, but I can't see many people (1) reading it and (2) doing much with it after they have read it.
For myself, there are certain moments I will go back to and further engage with. Žižek always gets my attention with certain parts of his thinking (ontology, capitalist critique, subjectivity, conditions of revolution), but this book proves a pretty good rule when dealing with Žižek: stick to his shorter books. Thankfully, the book doesn't have as tight of a structure as Žižek's introduction would lead you to believe, so you could view each chapter as it's own book. Though there are some developments and back-references you might miss, I don't think this would severely detract from benefiting from reading Žižek. What benefit does this book have? If you are interested in Continental Philosophy (mainly German/French idealism/existentialism) and especially subjectivity and ontology, you will find much to spark some thoughts here.
I don't recommend reading Žižek with the goal of trying to understand everything he says. I most benefit from reading Žižek when I think through the problems that he raises with many philosophical concepts and practices and apply that to my own thinking. If you aren't interested in at least some of the subjects and people I have mentioned in this review.
I don't recommend this book. If you are interested in Žižek, I recommend reading any of his other books, but especially his shorter ones.