Slavoj Zizek\u2019s work represents a striking challenge within the contemporary philosophical scene.
Zizek\u2019s very style, and his prodigious ability to write and examine examples from widely divergent
field, is a remarkable thing. His work reintroduces and reinvigorates for a wider audience ideas from
the work of German Idealism. Zizek\u2019s work is framed in terms of a polemical critique of other
leading theorists within today\u2019s new left or liberal academy (Derrida, Habermas, Deleuze), which
claims to unmask their apparent radicality as concealing a shared recoil from the possibility of a
subjective, political Act which in fact sits comfortably with a passive resignation to today\u2019s political
status quo. Not the least interesting feature of his work, politically, is indeed how Zizek\u2019s critique of
the new left both significantly mirrors criticisms from conservative and neoconservative authors, yet
hails from an avowedly opposed political perspective. In political philosophy, Zizek\u2019s Lacanian
theory of ideology presents a radically new descriptive perspective that affords us a unique purchase
on many of the paradoxes of liberalconsumerist subjectivity, which is at once politically cynical (as
the political right laments) and politically conformist (as the political left struggles to come to terms
with). Prescriptively, Zizek\u2019s work challenges us to ask questions about the possibility of
sociopolitical change that have otherwise rarely been asked after 1989 \u2013 including: what forms such
changes might take?; and what might justify them or make them possible?

Looked at in a longer perspective, it is of course too soon to judge what the lasting effects of Zizek\u2019s
philosophy will be, especially given Zizek\u2019s own comparative youth as a thinker (Zizek was born in
1949). In terms of the history of ideas, in particular, while Zizek\u2019s thought certainly turns on their
heads many of today\u2019s widely accepted theoretical notions, it is surely a more lasting question
whether his work represents any more lasting a break with the parameters that Kant\u2019s critical
philosophy set out in the threeCritiqu es.

Iraq The Borrowed Kettle, New York: Verso, 2004.
Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, New York, London: Routledge, 2003.
The Puppet and the Dwarf, New York: Routledge, 2003.
Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Essays on the (Mis)Use of a Notion, London; New York: