Preface: Burning the Bridges by Slavoj Zizek vii

Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1

Part I: Culture 9

1. The Undergrowth of Enjoyment: How popular culture can serve as an Introduction to Lacan 11

2. The Obscene Object of Postmodernity 37

3. The Spectre of Ideology 53

4. Fantasy as a Political Category: A Lacanian Approach 87

5. Is it Possible to Traverse the Fantasy in Cyberspace?102

Part II: Woman 125

6. Otto Weininger, or 'Woman doesn't Exist' 127

7. Courtly Love, or Woman as Thing 148

8. There is No Sexual Relationship 174

9. Death and the Maiden 206

Part III: Philosophy 223

10. Hegel's 'Logic of Essence' as a Theory of Ideology 225

11. Schelling-in-Itself: The Orgasm of Forces 251

12. A Hair of the Dog that Bit You 268

13. Kant with (or against) Sade 283

14. Of Cells and Selves 302

Slavoj Zizek: Bibliography of Worlds in English 321

Index 323

"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

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.

E. Wright, University of Cambridge