Zizek Reader

Preface: Burning the Bridges by Slavoj Zizek. Acknowledgements. Introduction. Part I: Culture. 1. The Undergrowth of Enjoyment. 2. The Obscene Object of Postmodernity. 3. The Spectre of Ideology. 4. Fantasy as a Political Category. 5. Is it Possible to Traverse the Fantasy in Cyberspace? Part II: Woman. 6. Otto Weininger, or 'Woman doesn't Exist'. 7. Courtly Love, or Woman as Thing. 8. There is No Sexual Relationship. 9. Death and the Maiden. Part III: Philosophy. 10. Hegel's 'Logic of Essence' as a Theory of Ideology. 11. Schelling-in-Itself: The Orgasm of Forces. 12. A Hair of the Dog that Bit You. 13. Kant with (or against) Sade. 14. Of Cells and Selves. Slavoj i ek: Bibliography of Worlds in English. Index.

Elizabeth Wright is a fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. Her main work is in psychoanalytic literary criticism and she has written extensively in this area. She is author of "Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practise" (1984; second edition 1998), "Post-modern Brecht: A Representation" (1989), and she is also the editor of "Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary" (1992) and co-editor of "Coming Out of Feminism?" (1998).Edmond Wright is a poet and free-lance philosopher. He has published regularly in the philosophical journals on language, perception, and epistemology. He has written "The Horwich Hennets" (1976) and "The Jester Hennets" (1981), and he is the editor of "New Representationalisms: Essays in the Philosophy of Perception" (1993).Slavoj Zizek is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His most recent works include "Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology," " The Plague of Fantasies, " and "The Ticklish Subject: A Treatise on Political Ontology. " Slavoj Zizek has over the last decade become something of a cultural phenomenon, variously described as 'one of the most arresting, insightful and scandalous thinkers in recent memory', 'the Giant of Ljubljana... the best intellectual high since "Anti-Oedipus"'. His work is a flamboyant mix of Hegel and Hitchcock, Schelling and science fiction, Kant and Courtly Love, Stalin and Stephen King, all of which is strongly seasoned with lacanian psychoanalysis. As a consequence, it is also one of the most lucid and persuasive readings of Lacan's difficult thought.

"Zizek is, in fact, the most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in Europe for some decades." Terry Eagleton, University of Oxford "The Zizek Reader is an excellent introduction to his thinking and contains the first systematic criticism of his work, in editorial introductions to each essay. In his own preface, Zizek makes his gambit explicit by his categorical rejection of the 'hegemonic trends' of today's academia." The Independent