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