Slavoj Žižek is irrepressible. He continues to produce at least two books a year in English and may well have just published what will become his magnum opus, The Parallax View (MIT Press, 2006). The secondary literature on ÎiÏek has also now begun to emerge at an astonishing rate. Žižek tends to be read in a very decontextualized way. Žižek's contribution to a Marxian understanding of ideology has been the structuring role of phantasy, not the idea that it works through the subject. Žižek is a brilliant reader of Hegel and Lacan, but is not an original thinker like Lacan, who formulated his own terminology, or Hegel, who developed his own philosophical system. He has created a startling hybrid of Hegelianism and Lacanese, but the terms and concepts he deploys remain largely Lanan's. Despite caricatured media portrayal as "the Elvis of cultural theory" and "the Marx brother", Žižek has attracted enormous international interest through...
