Žižek : a reader's guide

341 Pages·2012·4.191 MB·English

by  Žižek, Slavoj, Wood, Kelsey

152mm 15.8mm 152mm
KELSEY KELSEY
WOOD
WOOD
A READER’S GUIDE
“Wood provides an excellent guidebook through Žižek’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 Žižek’s books in English.
Apart from providing an indispensable 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 Žižek’s thought and its development.”
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Mladen Dolar, University of Ljubljana
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and Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht
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Slavoj Žižek 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. Žižek has 2
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written – with humor, lucidity, and extraordinary erudition – on the philosophical problem of 9
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identity, ontology, globalization, postmodernism, political philosophy, literature, film, ecology, m
religion, the French Revolution, Lenin, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind.
Žižek: A Reader’s Guide situates Žižek’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.
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Moving deftly through the works of G. W. F. Hegel, F. W. J. Schelling, Karl Marx, Sigmund
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Freud, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, and Alain Badiou, in addition to E
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Lacan, this reader’s guide offers a comprehensive overview of Slavoj Žižek’s thoughts.
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Kelsey Wood has taught philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross, at Boston University, and

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at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Troubling Play: Meaning and Entity in
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Plato’s Parmenides (2005). I
D A READER’S GUIDE
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Cover image: Slavoj Žižek. Photographed in Paris, 2011. © Eric Fougere / VIP Images / Corbis
Cover design by Cyan Design
ISBN 978-0-470-67476-5
90000
9 780470 674765
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Žižek
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Žižek
A Reader’s Guide
Kelsey Wood
A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication
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This edition first published 2012
© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wood, Kelsey, 1960–
Žižek : a reader’s guide / by Kelsey Wood.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-67475-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-470-67476-5
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Žižek, Slavoj. I. Title.
B4870.Z594W66 2012
199′.4973–dc23
2011052162
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Set in 10/12.5pt Plantin by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
1 2012
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for John Brennon Wood
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Contents
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
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Contents
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
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