Books by Slavoj Žižek

3. Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? How Hegelian should our understanding of Christ be?  The book is written as a confrontational dialogue, and to its benefit.  You do need to be able to stomach sentences such as: “Do the three main versions of Christianity not form a kind of Hegelian triad?” (SZ)  In any case, the smartness of the authors makes it worthwhile.  Once you move past their immediate (and extreme) fan bases, both are in fact considerably...

5. Slavoj Žižek , Hegel in a Wired Brain .  How do transhumanism, Elon Musk/Neuralink, the Singularity, Book of Genesis, and Hegel all fit together?  There is only one person who could pull off such a book, noting this version is dense and not for the uninitiated.  Here is one squib: “Police is closer to civil society than state; it is a kind of representative of state in civil society, but for this very reason it has to be experienced as an external force, not an inner ethical power.”  If you t...

That is the new, forthcoming Žižek book , here is one brief excerpt:

That is from Slavoj Žižek”s book, the subtitle being Enjoyment as a Political Factor , one of his best, intermittently lucid and sometimes brilliant, most of all on Hegel.   Žižek also reminded me of an old Christopher Hitchens quotation: “mass delusion is the only thing that keeps a people sane.”

5. Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: Or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? A lot of this book is only so-so, but the Preface — “A Glance into the Archives of Islam” — counts as one of the better works I’ve read this year, even though it comes in at only 27 pp.  It covers Hagar and Sarah, how Muslim and Christian understandings of the Abraham story differ, and the intellectual sources of institutional problems with Islam and political order.  That’s the secret to reading SZ, not to...

5. Slavoy Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology .  While he is overrated by his trendy partisans, he is underrated by almost everyone else.  Might this be his best book?  Early Žižek is the best Žižek.  We have not escaped from the spectre of the Cartesian self, and what might a truly emancipatory political project have to look like?  2017 is not the worst time to be reading this book.  Here is one probably not very helpful review .  Usually the best five pages in ...

Here is the full interview , via Finoculous .  It contains further revelations.  A few months ago I spent some time browsing his latest book in Borders.  He can’t simply admit: "I was a fool to follow Mao and Stalin" but instead he has to push the line "I just need to reinterpret everybody more and I will still find some movement for "egalitarian terror" [those two words are his] to sign on to."  Grow up, I say, yet he is almost sixty years old .