Slavoj Žižek and Radical Politics

Sean Homer is Professor of Film and Literature at the American University in Bulgaria.

• Part I: Žižek in the BalkansIntroduction: The Case of Kosovo1. It’s the Political Economy, Stupid! On Žižek’s Marxism.2. Nationalism, Ideology and Balkan Cinema.3. To Begin at the Beginning Again: Žižek in the Former Yugoslavia.Part II: Radicalising ŽižekIntroduction: Thinking Through Žižek and Beyond4. The Politics of Comradeship: Philosophical Construction and Commitment in Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek.5. On "The Critique of Violence" and Revolutionary Suicide.Conclusion: Resources of Hope: A Critique of Lacanian Anti-Utopianism.

'Critical framing of Žižek’s work in his Balkan and Yugoslav context, as his repressed "maternal space," in order to test overall validity of his so-called radical political praxis is what distinguishes Homer’s book from all other books on Žižek.' - Dušan I. Bjelić author of Normalizing the Balkans. Geopolitics of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry (2011)'Sean Homer shows the political value of a strict and profoundly antagonistic reading of Slavoj Žižek’s work, a reading that does not shy from a necessary degree of interpretative violence to open up fissures in a body of work that pretends to be a system. With the context as the Balkans and crucial conceptual leverage provided by Alain Badiou, this radical scholarly book elaborates a distinctive argument in which violence is pitted against violence. Here we have a body of work as symptom laid bare, and through the course of the reading the reader can come to see more clearly how that symptom consists of a series of contradictions, speaks of a problem that it is not yet conscious of. Homer makes this symptom speak.' - Ian Parker, Psychoanalyst, Manchester, Professor of Management, University of Leicester, UK.