Elizabeth Wright is a fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. Her main work is in psychoanalytic literary criticism and she has written extensively in this area. She is author of Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practise (1984; second edition 1998), Post-modern Brecht: A Representation (1989), and she is also the editor of Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary (1992) and co-editor of Coming Out of Feminism? (1998). Edmond Wright is a poet and free-lance philosopher. He has published regularly in the philosophical journals on language, perception, and epistemology. He has written The Horwich Hennets (1976) and The Jester Hennets (1981), and he is the editor of New Representationalisms: Essays in the Philosophy of Perception (1993).Slavoj Zizek is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His most recent works include Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology, The Plague of Fantasies, and The Ticklish Subject: A Treatise on Political Ontology. Slavoj Zizek has over the last decade become something of a cultural phenomenon, variously described as 'one of the most arresting, insightful and scandalous thinkers in recent memory', 'the Giant of Ljubljana... the best intellectual high since Anti-Oedipus'. His work is a flamboyant mix of Hegel and Hitchcock, Schelling and science fiction, Kant and Courtly Love, Stalin and Stephen King, all of which is strongly seasoned with lacanian psychoanalysis. As a consequence, it is also one of the most lucid and persuasive readings of Lacan's difficult thought.

• Preface: Burning the Bridges by Slavoj Zizek viiAcknowledgements xiIntroduction 1Part I: Culture 91. The Undergrowth of Enjoyment: How popular culture can serve as an Introduction to Lacan 112. The Obscene Object of Postmodernity 373. The Spectre of Ideology 534. Fantasy as a Political Category: A Lacanian Approach 875. Is it Possible to Traverse the Fantasy in Cyberspace?102Part II: Woman 1256. Otto Weininger, or 'Woman doesn't Exist' 1277. Courtly Love, or Woman as Thing 1488. There is No Sexual Relationship 1749. Death and the Maiden 206Part III: Philosophy 22310. Hegel's 'Logic of Essence' as a Theory of Ideology 22511. Schelling-in-Itself: The Orgasm of Forces 25112. A Hair of the Dog that Bit You 26813. Kant with (or against) Sade 28314. Of Cells and Selves 302Slavoj Žižek: Bibliography of Worlds in English 321Index 323

"Zizek is, in fact, the most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in Europe for some decades." Terry Eagleton, University of Oxford "The Zizek Reader is an excellent introduction to his thinking and contains the first systematic criticism of his work, in editorial introductions to each essay. In his own preface, Zizek makes his gambit explicit by his categorical rejection of the 'hegemonic trends' of today's academia." The Independent