Top products from r/zizek

Zizek is a Communist. He was being intentionally ambiguous about his beliefs. His primary intention was to dispel the nonsense fantasy of the postmodern neomarxist. He is nonetheless critical of Stalinism and the like, but maintains a certain fascination with their ideological force (such as in the case of Lenin, the Jacobins, etc etc). He advocates a Decisionistic Anti-Humanist Politics of the Act. It would do you well to perhaps read Badiou, who was a very important influence on Zizeks own thought. These texts in particular:

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alainbadiou.php

https://www.versobooks.com/books/513-the-idea-of-communism

https://www.versobooks.com/books/1872-the-communist-hypothesis

https://www.amazon.com/Ethics-Essay-Understanding-Radical-Thinkers/dp/1781680183

​

As for Zizek, these sources would be good:

http://www.lacan.com/zizrobes.htm

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2445-in-defense-of-lost-causes

​

Admittedly, if you are not familiar with Zizek, these will be very dense.

I personally found this one, one of the best introductions to the key arguments itself: https://www.amazon.de/How-Read-Lacan-Slavoj-Zizek/dp/1862078947/ref=sr_1_1?s=books-intl-de&ie=UTF8&qid=1491763225&sr=1-1&keywords=lacan+zizek

The graphic novel was quite broad and seemed to focused on the variety of his topics of interest

The absolute easiest of his books is Demanding the Impossible. It is an extended interview, so it broken up into relatively concise and self-contained sections for each question.

If you're looking for full book that's still on the easy side, I would check out Trouble in Paradise or First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, which are on similar topics. His book Violence is also quite readable, but I think the other three make better introductions to his thought.

Just thought I'd throw this out there, Zizek's humor is a direct engagement with this work by Freud:
http://www.amazon.com/Joke-Relation-Unconscious-Penguin-Classics/dp/0142437441

Tony Meyers does a very good job on introducing the main ideas

https://www.amazon.com/Slavoj-Zizek-Routledge-Critical-Thinkers/dp/0415262658

Anything by Howard P. Kainz would be a good place to start. https://www.amazon.com/Hegels-Phenomenology-Part-Analysis-Commentary/dp/0821408909

I started with a few essays by zizek and like you, started with Puppet and the Dwarf as my first book of his. And I felt like it was slightly over my head.

So I bought Adrian Johnston's book on Zizek's Ontology. Which was more than a simple summary of Zizek's thought. It was complex enough to keep my mind reeling, but less fuzzy than Zizek was to me at the time. Basically it was the base I needed to understand all the terms and philosophers that Zizek uses without explanation.

If I remember Zizek's quote about the book, it was: "This book is more Zizek than myself"

You should know some Freud. Seminar XI is not that hard compared to other seminars, but it is Lacan we are talking about, so it is never that simple.

I would just start reading it, and maybe read Bruce Fink's The Lacanian Subject. You might also want to read Reading Seminar XI.

Alenka Zupancic: Ethics of the Real

Apparently he's...working on something. Between that, the new book he's working on and the book soon to be released about him, I don't think we're hearing the last of him anytime soon.

I have three suggestions:

1. The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of Philosophy
   
   
2. The shorter Logic
   
   
3. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History

He wrote a while book on the subject.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Violence-Big-Ideas-Slavoj-Zizek/dp/1846680271

As listed by Žižek in the film Žižek!:

• The Sublime Object of Ideology
  
• Tarrying with the Negative
  
• The Ticklish Subject
  
• The Parallax View
  
  Source

You're focused on action, like Zizek is some cart full of dynamite to be brought into the middle of the town square and blown up to end capitalism.

Yeah, identity is ideology, I am not actually an American, there's nothing inherently American about the colors red, white and blue, blah blah blah but we grow up learning different languages, which from what I hear about Zizek should be very important to him. Wouldn't it make a big difference to him to know that there's a society in south america that has more onomatopoeias than any other language, and wouldn't it be interesting to see how desire is regulated in a society whose relationship to language is different to that of Europe's?

I get that identity is a spook and that you should destroy it but Slavoj's theory is prescriptive, not descriptive. You should destroy identity, not seek to understand why you have this identity. I think that's lazy and short sighted. You want to end identity so soon you don't even want to know what it is. There are whole worlds of identities and power struggles across the planet, wouldn't it be interesting to see how class struggle plays out across them? Like, do you not even know that commodity fetishism in rural columbia takes the form of botched baptismal ritual?

There is just too much variation in the world for Slavoj Zizek. Zizeks' good for westen societies but there's a reason why he writes dense philosophical tomes and not investigative anthropological work.