Hailed as the most significant interdisciplinary thinker of modern times, Zizek´s work is a powerful, often explosive combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis and philosophy. It has ignited enthusiasm and stimulated new approaches across a vast range of disciplines, and seems to be attracting an ever-growing readership. In part this is because he himself has a panoramic range of interests encompassing film studies, literature, cyber culture, ethics, theology, and above all politics. But it is also because he is a highly entertaining writer. Blessed with a flair for anecdote and a smutty sense of humour, he has the happy knack of capturing complex ideas in concrete form - for instance, in a blockbuster movie. However, his thought can also be difficult to understand, and this is why a critical introduction is so necessary. His writings to date are here presented and evaluated for the first time, together with an outline of their development, and explanations of his key premises, themes and terms.Zizek´s thought revolves around "the real", an elusive concept in Lacanian psychoanalysis since it is both excluded from what we think of as "reality", but at the same time determines it. Placing Lacan firmly in the mainstream of European thought, Zizek refines and tests this concept against key philosophical thinkers from Descartes to Derrida, especially Hegel. He offers radical and brilliant readings of philosophical and psychoanalytic traditions in relation to one another. Given that "the real" lies at the heart of subjectivity, Zizek is thus a major philosopher of the subject. But "the real" also frames our entire symbolic and institutional environment. A consequence of this, Kay argues, is that the decisive orientation of Zizek´s thought is political. He uses psychoanalysis and philosophy not just to understand the world, but also in order to change it.
Contents: Introduction - thinking, writing and reading about the real; dialectic and the real; "reality" and the real - culture as anamorphosis; the real of sexual difference - imagining, thinking, being; ethics and the real - the ungodly virtues of psychoanalysis; politics, or, the art of the impossible.