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.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Understanding Zizek, Understanding Modernism
Jeffrey R. Di Leo (University of Houston, Victoria, USA) and Zahi Zalloua (Whitman College, US)
Part I: Mapping Zizek
1. Lacan and Zizek on the Cogito and the Modern: Galileo, or Hegel?, Ed Puth
2. Zizek's Hegel, our Hegel, Agon Hamza
3. Zizek and the (Chinese Dialectic of the) Revolution, Frank Ruda
4. Being Sexed: Zizek's Modern Ontology, James Penney
5. Nil Actum Credens, Si Quid Superesset Agendum: or, Slavoj, Can't You See I'm Burning? Zizek avec the Clusterfuck of 2020, Clint Burnham
6. What's Wrong with Being Happy? Zizek's Critique of Happiness, Jeffrey R. Di Leo
Part II. A Leftist Plea for Modernism
7. Zizek avec Montaigne, Zahi Zalloua
8. Zizek and the Bartleby Paradox: I Would Prefer Not To?, Cindy Zeiher
9. Hitchcock's Modernist Hauntology, Laurence Simmons
10. Zizek's Redemptive Reading of Richard Wagner's Ambivalent Modernity, Erik Vogt
11. Zizek's Critique of the Authoritarian Personality, Geoff Boucher
12. What Is Worth Salvaging In Modernity: A Realist Perspective From Non-Philosophical
Marxism to Zizek's Universalism, Katerina Kolozova
13. Are We Human? Or, Posthumanism and the Subject of Modernity, Matthew Flisfeder
Part III: Glossary
14. Enjoyment, Todd McGowan
15. Ideology, Glyn Daly
16. Universality, Ilan Kapoorr
17. The Subject, Russell Sbriglia
18. Symptom, David J. Gunkel
19. Class, Matthew Bost
20. Violence, Oxana Timofeeva
21. The Death Drive, Zahi Zalloua
Notes on Contributors
Index