Slavoj Žižek is one of today’s leading theorists, whose polemical works span topics from German idealism to Lacanian psychoanalysis, from Shakespeare to Beckett, and from Hitchcock to Lynch. Critical through and through of both post-modern ideological complacencies-e.g., the death of the subject and the return to ethics-and pre-modern ones-e.g., the re-enchantment of the world, the embrace of postcritique-Žižek doubles down on the virtues of the modern, on what it means to be modern, and to ask modern questions (about the subject, nature, and political economy) in the age of the Anthropocene.
This volume takes up the challenges laid out by Žižek’s iconoclastic thinking and its reverberations in an array of fields: philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, literary studies, and film studies, among others. Žižek’s multi-disciplinary appeal attests to the provocation, if not scandal, of his politically incorrect thought.
Understanding Žižek, Understanding Modernism makes the force and inventiveness of Žižek’s writings accessible to a wide range of students and scholars invested in the open question of modernism and its legacies.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Understanding Žižek, Understanding Modernism by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Zahi Zalloua
Part I: Mapping Žižek
1. Lacan and Žižek on the Cogito and the Modern: Galileo, or Hegel? by Ed Pluth
2. Žižek’s Hegel, our Hegel by Agon Hamza
3. Žižek and the (Chinese Dialectic of the) Revolution by Frank Ruda
4. Being Sexed: Žižek’s Modern Ontology by James Penney
5. Nil Actum Credens, Si Quid Superesset Agendum: or, Slavoj, Can’t You See I’m Burning? Žižek avec the Clusterfuck of 2020 by Clint Burnham
6. What’s Wrong with Being Happy? Žižek’s Critique of Happiness by Jeffrey R. Di Leo
Part II. A Leftist Plea for Modernism
7. Žižek avec Montaigne by Zahi Zalloua
8. Žižek and the Bartleby Paradox: I Would Prefer Not To? by Cindy Zeiher
9. Hitchcock’s Modernist Hauntology by Laurence Simmons
10. Žižek’s Redemptive Reading of Richard Wagner’s Ambivalent Modernity by Erik Vogt
11. Žižek’s Critique of the Authoritarian Personality by Geoff Boucher
12. What Is Worth Salvaging In Modernity: A Realist Perspective From Non-Philosophical Marxism to Žižek’s Universalism by Katerina Kolozova
13. Are We Human? Or, Posthumanism and the Subject of Modernity by Matthew Flisfeder
Part III: Glossary
14. Enjoyment by Todd McGowan
15. Ideology by Glyn Daly
16. Universality by Ilan Kapoorr
17. The Subject by Russell Sbriglia
18. Symptom by David J. Gunkel
19. Class by Matthew Bost
20. Violence by Oxana Timofeeva
21. The Death Drive by Zahi Zalloua
Simon Gros 
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