... This chapter does three things. First it explains Žižek’s Marxism in relation to two moments in Marx’s thought—that of structural/circumstantial determination and that of ruptural/revolutionary change—by looking at the ways in which Žižek employs Lacan, Althusser, and Hegel in making sense...

... This introduction provides an in-depth examination and illustration of the relevance of Slavoj Žižek’s work for literary studies. Challenging the widely held assumption among literary critics that Žižek’s work is far more germane to film and cultural studies, Sbriglia not only highlights...

... In this chapter, Hageman explores what Slavoj Žižek’s critique of contemporary ecological thinking has to offer the field of literary ecocriticism. Identifying the three main ideas of traditional ecocriticism—that nature not only exists but is a harmonious, organic totality; that human beings...

... In this chapter, Boucher argues that Slavoj Žižek’s theory of the traumatic kernel of the Real at the center of social antagonism provides the key to understanding what is for contemporary critics Shakespeare’s most problematic play, The Merchant of Venice . Homing in on the disturbing affect...

... In this chapter, Beaumont uses Slavoj Žižek’s theories of fantasy and parallax to examine a plot widespread throughout world literature: the “Sleeper Awakened” plot. Tracing the trajectory of a particular iteration of this plot involving the medieval Islamic sect known as the Assassins...

... This chapter deals with the example of cats in the work of Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Derrida. Their theorization of animals, and its relation to anthropocentrism, can help us understand the “inhuman core of the human.” The aim here is not to rehabilitate animality per se or an attempt to examine...

... This chapter responds to Žižek’s insightful and detailed critical analysis of the current neurobiological and neuro-psychoanalytic redefinition of the unconscious. In doing so, it examines and reproaches Žižek’s own position as developed in his The Parallax View , where he recognises...

... This chapter studies the relations between Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek starting from the notion of “antiphilosophy” proposed in the 1970s by Jacques Lacan and taken up by Badiou in a series of seminars in the 1990s. Žižek has been at pains to argue that Lacan is no less a philosopher...

... This chapter elucidates in particular what is at stake in Marx within Žižek’s work, by focusing above all on the theoretical complexity of the relation between the form of capital and the form of the subject. The specific wager made by Žižek is that the insight of Marx simultaneously provides us...

... Alain Badiou writes that Slavoj Žižek’s work ‘is the first time that anyone has proposed to psychoanalyze our whole world.’ This chapter takes Žižek seriously as a reader, even as a reading machine who consumes everything. Of course, Žižek is constantly accused of being a bad reader : sloppy...

... In this chapter, Kornbluh contends that Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytic project of reading the Real, the third and most notoriously elusive of Lacan’s three orders of psychic experience, can serve as the groundwork for an altogether new type of materialist literary criticism, a criticism whose...

... In this chapter, Alfrey explores the central role that the aesthetic category of the sublime has played throughout Slavoj Žižek’s oeuvre—a role about which literary critics have had surprisingly little to say. As Alfrey explains, contrary to the more traditional romantic sublime of Burke...

... The phenomena of anamorphism and the subversive effects, which results from the shift or switch of perspectives is also very much present and marks an important aspect in the work of Slavoj Žižek. This change in the perspective, is very much connected to some of Lacan’s concepts, such as object...

... In the early 2000s, Žižek began an intensive project of generating his own account of Christian origins, at once inspired by and in opposition to Alain Badiou’s reading of St. Paul. Žižek’s goal in so doing was to find a way to preserve what he found most attractive in Badiou—his insistence...