About the Book
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:
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Understanding Žižek, Understanding Modernism
Jeffrey R. Di Leo (University of Houston, Victoria, USA) and Zahi Zalloua (Whitman College, US)
Part I: Mapping Žižek
1. Lacan and Žižek on the Cogito and the Modern: Galileo, or Hegel?, Ed Puth
2. Žižek’s Hegel, our Hegel, Agon Hamza
3. Žižek and the (Chinese Dialectic of the) Revolution, Frank Ruda
4. Being Sexed: Žižek’s Modern Ontology, 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, Clint Burnham
6. What’s Wrong with Being Happy? Žižek’s Critique of Happiness, Jeffrey R. Di Leo
Part II. A Leftist Plea for Modernism
7. Žižek avec Montaigne, Zahi Zalloua
8. Žižek and the Bartleby Paradox: I Would Prefer Not To?, Cindy Zeiher
9. Hitchcock’s Modernist Hauntology, Laurence Simmons
10. Žižek’s Redemptive Reading of Richard Wagner’s Ambivalent Modernity, Erik Vogt
11. Žižek’s Critique of the Authoritarian Personality, Geoff Boucher
12. What Is Worth Salvaging In Modernity: A Realist Perspective From Non-Philosophical
Marxism to Žižek’s Universalism, Katerina Kolozova
13. Are We Human? Or, Posthumanism and the Subject of Modernity, Matthew Flisfeder
Part III: Glossary
14. Enjoyment, Todd McGowan
15. Ideology, Glyn Daly
16. Universality, Ilan Kapoorr
17. The Subject, Russell Sbriglia
18. Symptom, David J. Gunkel
19. Class, Matthew Bost
20. Violence, Oxana Timofeeva
21. The Death Drive, Zahi Zalloua
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the Author :
Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston, Victoria, USA. He is editor and founder of the critical theory journal symploke editor and publisher of the American Book Review, and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange. He has written, edited, or co-edited twenty-five books including the Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory (2018).
Zahi Zalloua is the Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and a Professor of French and Interdisciplinary Studies at Whitman College and Editor of The Comparatist. He is the author of five books, including Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti- Racist Future (2020), Theory’s Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy (2018), and Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek (2017). He has edited volumes and special journal issues on globalization, literary theory, ethical criticism, and trauma studies.
Review :
Di Leo and Zalloua have put together an indispensable guide for understanding the centrality of modernity and modernism in Žižek’s influential interventions in philosophy, politics, film studies, sexuality, psychoanalysis, music, and posthuman studies. This thought-provoking collection not only maps current conversations and debates in these terrains, but also explains the reasons leftists must still take Žižek’s engagement with modernism seriously. In addition, this stimulating volume generously offers a glossary of major concepts that will appeal to both the knowbies and newbies in Žižekian studies
From some of his earliest works, Slavoj Zizek has always been the champion of the theses that are still – perhaps more than ever – contemporaries of modern philosophy. This collection of wonderful essays, written by some of the leading Zizekian scholars in the world, explores practically every facet of Zizek’s profound engagement with modernity as the name of an impasse that still haunts us.
Undertanding Žižek, Underszandinng Modernism is an absolutely outstanding collection of essays on Žižek; wide in range, sharp in focus and remarkably vibrant in thought.
