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 152mm 15.8mm 152mm

KELSEY
WOOD
KELSEY
A READER’S GUIDE
“Wood provides an excellent guidebook through Žižek’s
WOOD
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.”

WOOD
Mladen Dolar, University of Ljubljana
and Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht

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

229mm
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.

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.

A READER’S GUIDE
Moving deftly through the works 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 Žižek’s thoughts.

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).

Cover image: Slavoj Žižek. Photographed in Paris, 2011. © Eric Fougere / VIP Images / Corbis
Cover design by Cyan Design
A READER’S GUIDE
ISBN 978-0-470-67476-5
9 0 0 0 0

9 780470 674765
Wood_ffirs.indd ii 2/10/2012 1:03:45 PM
 Žižek

Wood_ffirs.indd i 2/10/2012 1:03:45 PM

Wood_ffirs.indd ii 2/10/2012 1:03:45 PM
 Žižek
A Reader’s Guide

Kelsey Wood

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

Wood_ffirs.indd iii 2/10/2012 1:03:45 PM

 This edition first published 2012
© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Wiley-Blackwell is an imprint of John Wiley & Sons, formed by the merger of
Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical and Medical business with Blackwell Publishing.
Registered Office
John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex,
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For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information
about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please
see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.
The right of Kelsey Wood to be identified as the authors of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
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The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
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regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher
is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert
assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.
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

Wood_ffirs.indd iv 2/10/2012 1:03:45 PM

 for John Brennon Wood

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Wood_ffirs.indd vi 2/10/2012 1:03:45 PM
 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

Wood_ftoc.indd vii 2/10/2012 3:34:25 PM

 Contents

14 The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski

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

viii

Wood_ftoc.indd viii 2/10/2012 3:34:26 PM

 Epigraphs

As a general rule, disciples have been won over for the wrong reasons, are
faithful to a misinterpretation, overdogmatic in their exposition, and too
liberal in debate. They almost always end up by betraying us.
—Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, p. 96

Lacan’s scandal, the dimension of his work which resists incorporation

into the academic machinery, can be ultimately pinned down to the fact
that he openly and shamelessly posited himself as an authority, i.e., that
he repeated the Kierkegaardian gesture in relationship to his followers:
what he demanded of them was not fidelity to some general theoretical
propositions, but precisely fidelity to his person – which is why, in the
circular letter announcing the foundation of La Cause freudienne, he
addresses them as “those who love me.” This unbreakable link connecting
the doctrine to the contingent person of the teacher, i.e., to the teacher qua
material surplus that sticks out from the neutral edifice of knowledge, is
the scandal everybody who considers himself Lacanian has to assume:
Lacan was not a Socratic master obliterating himself in front of the
attained knowledge, his theory sustains itself only through the transferen-
tial relationship to its founder.
—Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan
in Hollywood and Out, p. 100

Wood_flast.indd ix 2/10/2012 1:03:38 PM

 Acknowledgments

Thanks go to Slavoj Žižek and to Clayton Crockett. John Brennon Wood

read every chapter, offered constructive criticism, and suggested many
improvements to the text. Our frequent conversations were a source of
inspiration, and his knowledge of computer media showed me that dialec-
tical materialism is alive and well in unexpected places. We are grateful to
Stan Wakefield, and to Jeff Dean, Executive Editor at Wiley-Blackwell.
And to Jana Wood, Margaret, Jacqueline, Raymond, and Bruce: we are
close to each other by way of being close to the third thing.

Wood_flast.indd x 2/10/2012 1:03:39 PM

 1

Introduction

Today, one often mentions how the reference to psychoanalysis in cultural

studies and the psychoanalytic clinic supplement each other: cultural
studies lack the real of clinical experience, while the clinic lacks the
broader critico-historical perspective (say, of the historic specificity of the
categories of psychoanalysis, Oedipal complex, castration, or paternal
authority). The answer to this should be that each of the approaches
should work on its limitation from within its horizon – not by relying on
the other to fill up its lack. If cultural studies cannot account for the real
of the clinical experience, this signals the insufficiency of its theoretical
framework itself; if the clinic cannot reflect its historical presuppositions, it
is a bad clinic.
—Slavoj Žižek, “Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses”

Who is Slavoj Žižek?

Slavoj Žižek is widely regarded as the most significant and provocative

thinker of our age. As the above quotation indicates, Žižek deploys concepts
from the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan in order to reactualize a
dialectical method in philosophy.1 The result is a radically new vision of

1
Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) is the most important psychoanalytic theorist after Freud,
and his ideas transformed psychoanalysis; however, his theories are notoriously difficult.

Žižek: A Reader’s Guide, First Edition. Kelsey Wood.

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Wood_c01.indd 1 2/10/2012 3:33:17 PM

 Introduction

human nature and human society. In addition to Jacques Lacan, Žižek has
been strongly influenced by 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 his public lectures, Žižek has concisely
introduced his own thinking as Hegelian in philosophy, Lacanian in
psychology, “Christian-materialist” in religion, and communist in politics.2
But why has Slavoj Žižek become so well known in the two decades
since his first publications in English? What is so captivating and so
revolutionary about his fusion of philosophy and psychoanalysis? Why is
Professor Žižek widely regarded as one of the most important thinkers in
the world today? A preliminary answer to these questions is that he is a
charismatic speaker with an extraordinary ability to engage his audience.
Žižek regularly draws large crowds and packs auditoriums across what-
ever continent he visits, and consistently fills lecture halls beyond their
normal capacity. But anyone who has also sat in his classroom will be
impressed by Žižek’s ability to make difficult ideas comprehensible; he is
an extremely effective teacher. Moreover, a look into any of his books
reveals immediately that Žižek is an enormously accomplished scholar.
He is the sole author of more than 20 books in English (and counting),
and these innovative and theoretically substantial works have established
him as one of today’s preeminent thinkers.
Žižek has written – with humor, lucidity, and extraordinary erudition –
on the philosophical problem of identity, ontology, globalization, post-
modernism, political philosophy, literature, film, ecology, religion, the
French Revolution, Lenin, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of
mind, and numerous other topics. Without question the work of Slavoj

Because Žižek’s remarks are often addressed to an audience that is already familiar with
Lacanian psychoanalysis, the reader new to Lacanian theory may need to consult an intro-
ductory text as well. One of the best short introductions to Lacan is Sean Homer’s Jacques
Lacan (London: Routledge, 2005). A more in-depth (but still non-philosophical) introduc-
tion to Lacan is The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance by Bruce Fink
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). The best essays on Lacan and philosophy are
Alenka Zupancic’s Ethics of the Real (London: Verso, 2000), and Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). For additional essays on Lacan and philosophy, see the
website The International Journal of Žižek Studies, at http://www.zizekstudies.org/. Readers
should regularly explore the wealth of resources available from the website lacan.com, run in
New York by Josefina Ayerza. Newcomers to Lacanian theory might want to consult Dylan
Evans’ An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996).
2
For an online biography of Žižek, see the faculty page of the website for the European
Graduate School at http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/biography/. Another online
biography is available at http://www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-Sp-Z/
Zizek-Slavoj.html.

Wood_c01.indd 2 2/10/2012 3:33:17 PM

 Introduction

Žižek will continue to inform philosophical, psychological, political, and

cultural discourses well into the future. In an effort to explain the Žižek
phenomenon, Ian Parker writes:

Žižek burst onto the world academic stage with commentaries and
interventions in politics and psychoanalysis, with powerful examples of the
way an understanding of these two domains could be dialectically
intertwined and powered through a close reading of German philosophy.
Žižek’s academic performance has also drawn attention from a wider
intellectual audience, and this has given him the opportunity to elaborate
some complex conceptual machinery that can be applied to music,
theology, virtual reality, and, it would seem, virtually any other cultural
phenomenon. His writing appeared at an opportune moment, offering a
new vocabulary for thinking through how ideology grips its subjects.3

But Ian Parker’s remarks do not indicate the fundamental reasons why
Žižek’s work has become so prominent (and so controversial) since the
publication in 1989 of The Sublime Object of Ideology. Žižek is not only a
charismatic speaker and a brilliant cultural theorist who, at an opportune
moment, captivated the public with elaborate and innovative theories.
Significantly, Parker (who is a practicing psychoanalyst) neglects the
philosophical implications of Žižek’s work. According to Marek Wieczorek,
“The originality of Žižek’s contribution to Western intellectual history
lies in his extraordinary fusion of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory,
continental philosophy (in particular his anti-essentialist readings of
Hegel), and Marxist political theory.”4 Žižek utilizes Lacanian
psychoanalytic concepts in order to reinvent Hegelian dialectics; he puts
Lacanian theory to work in order to reactualize German Idealism for the
twenty-first century.

3
Ian Parker, Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2004), pp. 2–3.
Parker’s interpretation of Žižek’s work lapses repeatedly into circumstantial ad hominem
fallacies. For example, in an attempt to formulate a critique of Žižek’s politics, Parker offers
a lengthy digression intended to demonstrate Žižek’s alleged “over-identification” with his
Slovenian origins and affiliations. In fact, Parker’s entire chapter 1 is devoted to the forma-
tion, operation, and decomposition of the Yugoslav state. Parker rehashes this caricature of
Žižek in his contribution to the stunningly misnamed book, The Truth of Žižek, edited by Paul
Bowman and Richard Stamp (London: Continuum, 2007). Significantly, Žižek’s afterward
to The Truth of Žižek is titled “With Defenders like These, Who Needs Attackers.” This after-
ward is by far the most valuable contribution to the work. Žižek responds to Parker’s efforts
to discredit him on pages 231–2 of The Truth of Žižek, and succinctly refutes Parker’s claims.
4
See Marek Wieczorek, “Introduction,” in Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On
David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle: The Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the
Humanities, University of Washington, 2000), p. viii.

Wood_c01.indd 3 2/10/2012 3:33:17 PM

 Introduction

This being said, it must be added that Žižek is also a psychoanalyst,

and it is thus no accident that his discourse provokes what Lacanian
psychoanalysts call jouissance. As students of the history of philosophy
know, many philosophers lack a sense of humor. The prime example of
this is Martin Heidegger, whose only documented joke was a jibe directed
at Lacan: “Significantly, the ONLY joke – or, if not joke then, at least,
moment of irony – in Heidegger occurs in his rather bad taste quip about
Lacan as ‘that psychiatrist who is himself in the need of a psychiatrist’ (in
a letter to Medard Boss).”5 Žižek is one of the few philosophers since
Socrates who is able to inspire the love of learning and also to make his
students and interlocutors laugh. And like Socrates Žižek continuously
engages in self-critique, usually by ironically indicating the obscene
underside of acceptable liberal-tolerant discourse. Žižek’s students
immediately recognize when he ironically criticizes himself. If, for exam-
ple, Žižek jokingly calls himself a racist, it is in the context of his criticism
of those who indulge in obscene racist fantasies. But his endearing and
self-deprecating sense of humor is another fundamental reason for
Žižek’s success. In fact, many of his fans find his books and his lectures
so enjoyable as to be almost addictive, and enjoyment is at the origin of
the Žižek phenomenon.
“Enjoyment” is the accepted translation of the Lacanian term
jouissance, and in his work, Žižek reveals the vital role of enjoyment in
social life. But in order to understand Žižek, it is necessary to keep in
mind that enjoyment is not pleasure: jouissance is surplus enjoyment that
manifests as a strange fascination accompanied by uneasiness or
discomfort (e.g., gawking at a car crash). Enjoyment is a kind of excessive
stimulation, an unbearable pleasure in pain, an incalculable “something
more” that can induce human beings to act against their own self-interest.
Žižek shows that even though subjects are not usually aware of jouissance,
all politics relies upon and manipulates an economy of enjoyment.
However it is not merely Žižek’s understanding of enjoyment, but more
importantly, his ability to produce enjoyment that has led to his large
following. The jouissance engendered by his discourse is one of the
primary reasons why Žižek has been the eye of a storm of cultural,
political, and philosophical controversy for decades.6
5
Slavoj Žižek, “Religion between Knowledge and Jouissance,” available online at http://
www.lacan.com/zizsmokeonthewater.html#_ftn8.
6
In an interview in 2007, Paul A. Taylor described how Žižek constantly questions further
and revises his own thinking. Taylor points out that the uncategorizable aspect of Žižek’s
writing is indicated by the geographical and disciplinary spread of his readers. But perhaps
the primary feature of all his work is its ethical quality: such as his exposure of hypocrisy

Wood_c01.indd 4 2/10/2012 3:33:17 PM

 Introduction

Along these lines, because Žižek is a psychoanalyst, it is no coincidence

that he is so successful at engendering transference. Although transference
may manifest as hate, it more often manifests as love.7 And moreover – as
Lacan showed – transference is primarily related to knowledge and the
love of learning. Žižek’s depth of psychoanalytic insight makes him one
of those rare philosophers who very effectively engender transference as
the love of truth. He thrives on this transference relationship with his
audience and, because of his own love of learning, he pushes himself to
the limit in testing and revising his analyses, and induces his readers to
actively engage in this struggle for truth. Žižek’s aim is always the further
development of previous analyses.
Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, Žižek’s major work on Hegel
is not yet available. This book does not pretend to be a comprehensive
study; it merely provides an introductory-level focus for the approach to
24 of Žižek’s monographs.8 What follows is not intended as an
encyclopedic synopsis of the meaning of Žižek’s work, much less as a
narrative account of Žižek’s development and significance. This guide
simply attempts to facilitate – for general readers – the engagement in
Žižek’s philosophical struggle for the truth. The following essays simply
try to let Žižek speak for himself (as much as possible) about certain
fundamental problems of philosophy. Along the way, we hope to indicate
why philosophy after Žižek, if it is not to regress, must build on his
methodology. What follows is intended as an aid for readers who are
simultaneously reading the texts that are being discussed.

and lazy thinking. Another appeal of Žižek’s theorizing is its practical usefulness; his
unabashed speculative approach nevertheless uncovers the issues behind actual events bet-
ter than so-called “pragmatic” works. The full interview is online at http://zizekstudies.org/
index.php/ijzs/article/viewFile/3/9.
7
Žižek sometimes discusses love with reference to the song “In Praise of the Third Thing”
(Lob der dritten Sache) from Brecht’s Mother: “The mother keeps (or rather, regains) her son
in the very act of losing him ‘through the third thing’; they are close to each other by way
of being close to the third thing (in this case, of course, their common struggle for com-
munism).” See Slavoj Žižek, Opera’s Second Death (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 195.
8
The following essays are arranged in (approximately) the order in which Žižek published
the books, but have been written in such a way that they may be read either sequentially or
individually (i.e. in any order). There are some minor inconsistencies, due to the fact that
Žižek himself is inconsistent. For example, in some texts, he uses the term “non-all,”
whereas in other texts he uses “not-All.” In the following commentary, I have tried to pre-
serve Žižek’s variants. This explains why certain terms are capitalized or spelt differently
depending on which book is under discussion. In addition, the chapter titles (except for this
“Introduction” and also my “Conclusion”) correspond exactly to Žižek’s book titles, except
for standardizing Žižek’s idiosyncratic capitalization.

Wood_c01.indd 5 2/10/2012 3:33:17 PM

 Introduction

What Does Žižek Mean by “Dialectic”?

In addition to the jouissance he provokes, and in addition to his ability to

engender transference as the love of knowledge, there is another reason
for Žižek’s profound impact. He is not just a theorist; he is also a theo-
retical activist and revolutionary. He does not simply write books and
give talks: every book and every talk is an intervention. He intentionally
provokes us, his listeners and readers, to overcome our complacency and
to confront our own relation to fantasy, enjoyment, and the dialectic of
desire. Žižek’s discourse engages us to the point that we actively
participate as both analyst and analysand. Because of the level of
engagement his thinking demands and induces, theory for Žižek is much
more than what Ian Parker refers to as “conceptual machinery.” Žižek’s
dialectical materialism does not merely describe the world; on the
contrary, it is already changing the world. In fact, his work has already
led to the reinvention of the basic theoretical coordinates of an astonish-
ing variety of disciplines and discourses. So on the one hand, his theory
involves intervention, and the inducement to the Lacanian act, which
ruptures symbolic reality, and opens the possibility of new possibilities.
But, on the other hand, Žižek also reveals the extent to which intervention
and struggle always rely (at least implicitly) on theory.
A close reading of Žižek’s books will reveal that his dialectical
materialism offers a new approach to most of the traditional problems of
philosophy. Consider the ancient controversy between nominalism and
realism. Nominalism (derived from the Greek onoma, meaning “name”), is
the doctrine that universal, abstract ideas, have no real existence, but are
simply general names invented by humans to indicate individual entities.
According to nominalism, the locus of truth and reality are these individual
entities. By contrast, realism is the doctrine that (at least some) universal
ideas transcend our identification and naming of them: these universal
natures or essences (allegedly) inform all intelligible experience. Neither
of these doctrines achieves the subtlety or clarity of Žižek’s ontology; but
the very antagonism between them is an example of the moment of
incommensurability that Žižek evokes in his investigations into what we
mean when we say that something is “true.” Žižek shows how both realism
and nominalism fail to recognize that what is universal is the Lacanian
Real as the incommensurability or parallax gap that provokes the struggle
for truth. Philosophical realism errs in conceiving the truth as some
enduring content that serves as an infallible standard of correctness for all
possible disclosures or human actions. Nominalism errs by reducing all

Wood_c01.indd 6 2/10/2012 3:33:17 PM

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