Changes

What do we [[know ]] [[about ]] [[Hegel]]? What do we know about [[Marx]]? What do we know about [[democracy ]] and [[totalitarianism]]? [[Communism ]] and [[psychoanalysis]]? What do we know that isn’t a platitude that we’ve heard a thousand [[times ]] – or a [[self]]-[[satisfied ]] [[certainty]]? Through his brilliant [[reading ]] of Hegel, [[Slavoj Žižek ]] – one of the most provocative and widely-read thinkers of our [[time ]] – upends our traditional [[understanding]], dynamites every cliche and undermines every conviction in [[order ]] to clear the ground for new ways of answering these questions.

When [[Lacan ]] described Hegel as the ‘most [[sublime ]] hysteric’, he was referring to the way that the [[hysteric ]] asks questions because he experiences his own [[desire ]] as if it were the Other’s desire. In the [[dialectical ]] [[process]], the question asked of the [[Other ]] is resolved through a reflexive turn in which the question begins to function as its own answer. We had made Hegel into the theorist of abstraction and reaction, but by reading Hegel with Lacan, Žižek unveils a Hegel of the [[concrete ]] and of [[revolution ]] – his own, and the one to come.

This early and dazzlingly original [[work ]] by Žižek offers a unique insight into the [[ideas ]] which have since become hallmarks of his mature [[thought]]. It will be of great interest to anyone interested in critical [[theory]], [[philosophy ]] and contemporary [[social ]] thought.