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Žižek, S. (1999) The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political

Ontology, London and New York: Verso.

Hailed by some critics as Žižek's most important work to date, it

of his most comprehensive monographs. Its central thesis is that the

nursery tale' of the cogito which has dominated modern thought (in

In bringing together psychoanalysis and German idealism in a new form of social criticism Zizek produces the most interesting development of Hegel's thought since that of Marx, and will, no doubt, come to form one of the most productive schools of Hegel scholarship in the future. The defects of Zizek's work are common to any genuinely novel philosophical development. In striking out on new ground and thinking freely, loose ends emerge. While Zizek advocates a philosophy of action, the paradoxical nature of the Lacanian subject - whose true freedom is really a non-existence, an existence outside of the symbolic order - makes it difficult to grasp what the authentic act would actually consist in. What does it really mean in a concrete case to hearken to the Lacanian maxim: "Don't compromise your desire!" and how can this be distinguished from an activity which sustains the given social order? Part of the difficulty in specifying this act lies in the incongruity between Zizek's broad formula of the subject as pure negativity and the more narrow constraints of a subjective act which doesn't negate reality entire, but only a particular social order. In his insistence on the possibility of a political act, Zizek reveals his Hegelian commitment to some social order ("der objektive Geist"). The negative subject is itself a social product, though one which is directed to the negation of the given order. In the final analysis, this aspect reveals Zizek's commitment to the general assumptions of western metaphysics, indeed Christian metaphysics. Zizek prefers the structure of the intermediate categories (objective spirit) to the extreme relativity of much of post-modern thought. To one who sees the eternity of the moment and the complete vanity of human reality, Zizek might seem to be grasping at straws, unable to face the true nothingness of human existence. But these are straws which any serious reader of Zizek's work must admit are largely consistent with the contemporary human experience. The Zizekian restructuring of the western philosophical tradition has only begun, but it promises to be the most fruitful school of thought on this ticklish border between structure and nihilism.

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