Understanding Zizek, Understanding Modernism

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 Anthropocene.

This volume takes up the challenges laid out by Zizek’s iconoclastic thinking and its reverberations in an array of fields: philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, literary studies, and film studies, among others. Zizek’s multi-disciplinary appeal attests to the provocation, if not scandal, of his politically incorrect thought.

Understanding Zizek, Understanding Modernism makes the force and inventiveness of Zizek’s writings accessible to a wide range of students and scholars invested in the open question of modernism and its legacies.

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 Zizek 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.