Understanding Zizek, Understanding Modernism

by Jeffrey R. Di Leo

Slavoj Zizek 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 - Zizek 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...