Talk:The Metastases of Enjoyment

Review by Tony Myers

This is one of Žižek's most rewarding books as it covers a range of crucial topics from the cause of the subject through the role of the super- ego to the impossibility of the sexual relationship. In each of the six essays, Žižek begins by asking (and ultimately answering) the kind of basic questions that anyone interested in Lacanian psychoanalysis sooner or later wants to know the answers to. In the spirit of this fundamental questioning, the book's Appendix contains a self-interview in which Žižek poses to himself the kind of queries that bother what he terms common knowledge' about Lacanian theory as well as his own work. As a form of self-interrogation is the elementary procedure of all his books, this interview represents Žižek in his essence or, as he might put it (in Hegelese), Žižek in the mode of 'in-itself'.