Secondary literature 2022

Žižek Responds!

Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

by Todd McGowan, Dominik Finkelde (eds.) (2022)

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Synopsis

Žižek Responds! (Bloomsbury, 2022), edited by Todd McGowan and Dominik Finkelde, is a structured philosophical dialogue in which thirteen scholars—each working within or at the borders of Lacanian-Hegelian-Marxist theory—advance substantive critiques of Žižek's core positions in ontology, ideology theory, and psychoanalysis, and Žižek replies to each in turn. The volume's central wager is that Žižek's thought is best understood through its internal tensions: between Schelling and Hegel on emergentism, between irony and dialectical commitment, between retroactive ontology and scientific realism, between the drive and desire as ethical foundations, and between the formal universality of the subject and the concrete demands of emancipatory politics. Contributors include Adrian Johnston (dialectical materialism and emergentism), Graham Harman (object-oriented critique of retroactivity), Robert Pippin (Hegel's rationalism versus Žižek's "gappy" ontology), Todd McGowan (violence and governance), Hilary Neroni (ideology and the unconscious), Henrik Bjerre (subjectivity and overidentification), Zahi Zalloua (neighbour, hospitality, Derrida), Nadia Bou Ali (sexual difference and the Lacanian subject), Dany Nobus (Kant with Sade), Mari Ruti (desire, drive, and sublimation), Jennifer Friedlander (jouissance and hopelessness), Duane Rousselle (generalized foreclosure and war), and Richard Boothby (das Ding and objet a). The book's distinctive formal move—giving Žižek sustained space for response rather than merely subjecting him to critique—produces a jointly authored map of the limits, stakes, and ongoing productivity of his theoretical project, revealing that the most pressing unresolved question concerns how the psychoanalytic logic of the act can be translated into a durably emancipatory form of governance and collective life.

Distinctive contribution

What Žižek Responds! offers that no other volume in the corpus provides is a systematic dialogical anatomy of Žižek's thought at the level of its internal philosophical architecture. Whereas earlier anthologies on Žižek (e.g., The Truth of Žižek, Traversing the Fantasy) tend either to evaluate him from the outside or to rehearse symptomatic readings, this volume stages genuine immanent critique: each contributor has command of the technical vocabulary Žižek deploys (Hegelian dialectics, Lacanian formulas, Marxist antagonism), so the arguments operate within, not merely against, his framework. This produces something rare: a set of debates that genuinely advance the theoretical stakes rather than repeat them. The dialogue format—contributor essay followed immediately by Žižek's response—means the reader witnesses the live adjustment and clarification of positions, including moments where Žižek concedes a point (e.g., agreeing with McGowan that he lacks a theory of post-revolutionary governance, acknowledging Zalloua's nuanced differentiation of Derrida from Levinas) or sharply defends against misreading (e.g., defending his doughnut over Johnston's cake, his Ur-Verdrängung reading against Butler's social constructivism, his Kant-with-Sade interpretation against Nobus's philological objections).

The volume also makes a distinctive contribution by anchoring Žižek's abstract theoretical claims to concrete contemporary political events—the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the refugee crisis, cancel culture, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street—giving his categories (big Other, foreclosure, jouissance-theft, antagonism) fresh diagnostic purchase. Rousselle's chapter on "generalized foreclosure" and Žižek's counter-response produce what amounts to the volume's most original new theoretical proposition: the question of whether the collapse of the big Other produces an excess of certainty (too much Real) or simply a new form of ideological suturing, and whether psychoanalytic categories derived from the Oedipal structure remain applicable to a post-Oedipal order. This debate is nowhere else in the corpus pursued with comparable clinical precision combined with geopolitical application.

A third distinctive contribution is the book's sustained engagement with the relationship between das Ding and objet a—two concepts Žižek deploys extensively but, as Boothby argues, never explicitly articulates together. Boothby's chapter and Žižek's response constitute the closest thing in the secondary literature to a full theoretical account of how these twin Lacanian concepts form a "couplet": neither can be understood without the other, and the question of their ontological hierarchy (which is ontic, which ontological) reopens fundamental questions about the structure of desire, sublimation, and the ethics of psychoanalysis. This is a conversation the primary corpus (Seminar VII, the Écrits) leaves unfinished, and the volume takes it further than any comparable secondary text.

Main themes

The Schelling/Hegel tension in Žižek's materialist ontology (layer-cake vs. doughnut emergentism)
Retroactive positing and the limits of transcendental idealism
Ideology, enjoyment, and the obscene underside of the big Other
The radical Act, self-destructive violence, and the problem of post-revolutionary governance
Desire versus drive as competing ethical foundations in Lacanian theory
Das Ding and objet a as twin lodestars of Žižek's thought and their unthought articulation
Sexual difference, primordial repression, and the Butler-Žižek debate on universality
The neighbour, hospitality, and the Real of the Other in political ethics
Jouissance, hopelessness, and the politics of repetition and lack
Generalized foreclosure, the collapse of the big Other, and contemporary geopolitical crisis

Chapter outline

Introduction: Pavlovian Reactions Aren't Just for Dogs / On Critics and Disciples / The Unemployed Theorist / A Threefold Cord / The Jester's Epistemic Stance / Real Communism / Universally Antagonistic — p.1-24
Cake or Doughnut? Žižek and German Idealist Emergentisms (Adrian Johnston) + Response to Johnston — p.27-54
Truth as Bacchanalian Revel: Žižek and the Risks of Irony (Dominik Finkelde) + Response to Finkelde — p.55-71
Žižek and the Retroactivity of the Real (Graham Harman) + Response to Harman — p.73-88
Slavoj Žižek's Hegel (Robert Pippin) + Response to Pippin — p.89-116
Slavoj Žižek Is Not Violent Enough (Todd McGowan) + Response to McGowan — p.119-134
Ideology Critique as an Existentialist Choice (Hilary Neroni) + Response to Neroni — p.135-162
The Subject Is Not Enough (Henrik Jøker Bjerre) + Response to Bjerre — p.163-180
Hospitality, Hostility, and the 'Real' Neighbor (Zahi Zalloua) + Response to Zalloua — p.181-210
On Žižek's Theory of the Subject (Nadia Bou Ali) + Response to Bou Ali — p.211-234
On Žižek's Interpretation of Lacan's 'Kant with Sade' (Dany Nobus) + Response to Nobus — p.235-262
When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other (Mari Ruti) + Response to Ruti — p.263-282
Žižek, Jouissance, and the Impossible (Jennifer Friedlander) + Response to Friedlander — p.283-300
Žižek and the War in an Era of Generalized Foreclosure (Duane Rousselle) + Response to Rousselle — p.301-316
Rethinking Lacan's Unthinkable 'Thing' (Richard Boothby) + Response to Boothby — p.317-332

Chapter summaries

Introduction: Pavlovian Reactions Aren't Just for Dogs / On Critics and Disciples / The Unemployed Theorist / A Threefold Cord / The Jester's Epistemic Stance / Real Communism / Universally Antagonistic (p.1-24)

The editors' introduction offers both a scholarly biography of Žižek and a systematic map of his philosophical architecture. McGowan and Finkelde distinguish a 'third Žižek'—beyond the caricatures of charlatan and celebrity genius—who has produced a genuinely original synthesis of Lacan, Hegel, and Marx. The biographical sections trace Žižek's formation: the early influence of Heidegger and Derrida in Yugoslav Slovenia, the decisive turn to Lacan in the mid-1970s, his studied analysis under Jacques-Alain Miller in Paris in the early 1980s, and his institutionally precarious position as a researcher rather than professor, which paradoxically gave him intellectual freedom.

The theoretical sections identify the Real (as internal distortion of the Symbolic, not a beyond), the death drive (as the subject's unnatural self-sabotaging core, its 'minimum of freedom'), and fantasy (as the extimate narrative that mediates access to jouissance and the big Other) as the three conceptual pillars of Žižek's Lacanian inheritance. Hegel contributes the logic of retroactivity, contradiction-in-being, and absolute knowing understood not as completion but as the recognition that contradiction cannot be overcome. Marx provides the critical-political vector: Žižek's communism is not a positive vision of untrammeled production but the name for a society that privileges the encounter with the Real and the commons over capitalist fantasy, refusing both utopian blueprints and permanent resistance.

The introduction also argues that Žižek reconceptualizes universality: not as an all-encompassing whole but as a constitutive antagonism that generates particulars precisely through its failure to constitute itself. Sexual difference and class difference are both understood as structured by this logic—there is no neutral ground that subsequently divides, only the antagonism itself. The section on chapters previews each contribution, establishing the volume's architecture and its commitment to constructive dialogue rather than adversarial dismissal.

Key concepts: Real, Death drive, Fantasy, Big Other, Universality as antagonism, Retroactivity Notable examples: Occupy Wall Street; Churchill's quip on democracy; Samuel Beckett's 'fail better'

Cake or Doughnut? Žižek and German Idealist Emergentisms (Adrian Johnston) + Response to Johnston (p.27-54)

Johnston's essay stages a rigorous immanent critique of Žižek's ontology by arguing that Žižek's simultaneous appeal to Schelling and Hegel generates an irreducible philosophical tension. Schelling's Naturphilosophie, Johnston demonstrates, is a form of 'layer-doughnut' emergentism: it presupposes at the origin (natura naturans) everything that appears at the apex (finite human subjectivity), making emergence a disclosure of what was always-already implicitly present. This structure circles back on itself—the highest product of nature (consciousness) is the return of the cosmic subject already latent in the ground. Johnston shows this is rooted in Spinoza's natura naturans/naturata distinction, which Schelling never fully abandons even in the 1809 Freiheitsschrift. The result is what Johnston calls a 'pseudo-emergentist' model that risks reducing spiritual subjectivity back to natural substance.

Hegel's model, by contrast, is a 'layer-cake': it genuinely refuses to anthropomorphize nature, insists on the radical alterity of Geist from Natur, and therefore makes room for genuine novelty. Johnston reads Hegel's opening of the Science of Logic—'pure being, without any further determination'—as a covert refutation of Schelling's indeterminate 'pure absoluteness,' showing that where Schelling intends to begin systematic philosophy, Hegel reveals, cannot serve as a proper starting point. Žižek's attempt in Sex and the Failed Absolute to reconcile the two by coupling Schellingian quantum ontology with Hegelian epistemology is, for Johnston, philosophically unstable.

Zižek's response embraces the doughnut designation while distinguishing it from Johnston's reading: the doughnut is not Schellingian circularity but the Hegelian 'negation of negation,' the necessity of a return to contingent immediacy (le peu du réel) to suture any rational edifice. Every symbolic structure requires what Lacan called la réponse du réel—the ancient Greeks needed oracles precisely because they lacked a figure of pure subjectivity (a king) at the apex of their state. Žižek admits oscillating between Hegel and Schelling while insisting the oscillation is philosophically productive rather than incoherent.

Key concepts: Emergentism, Schelling's Freiheitsschrift, Hegel's Science of Logic, Retroactivity, Nature/Spirit distinction, Le peu du réel Notable examples: Hegel on ancient Greek democracy and oracles; Schelling's Ages of the World; Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics

Truth as Bacchanalian Revel: Žižek and the Risks of Irony (Dominik Finkelde) + Response to Finkelde (p.55-71)

Finkelde's essay examines the methodological and epistemological status of Žižek's philosophical style, asking whether what looks like dialectical freedom from systematic constraint is not in fact an unacknowledged subscription to philosophical irony—a stance Hegel himself criticized in the Romantics as leading to a dissolution of rational commitment. Finkelde frames the question through Pippin's critique of Žižek's 'gappy ontology': if every discursive form is subjected to relentless dialectical questioning, what normative ground remains? Finkelde argues that Pippin and the Pittsburgh Hegelians (Brandom) implicitly rely on a Kantian 'Doctrine of Method'—a set of regulative subjective certainties (freedom, God, soul, world-as-totality) that anchor rational discourse and prevent it from dissolving into perpetual self-questioning. Žižek, by refusing such dogmatic anchors, risks the same paradox leveled at Derrida: the self-undermining of the truth-claim it makes.

Finkelde does not simply endorse Pippin. He reads the tension between Žižek and the Pittsburgh School as reflecting a genuine divergence about whether Hegel remains committed to a Kantian Methodenlehre or whether Hegelian dialectics is precisely the overcoming of such regulative fictions. Žižek responds by emphatically denying that Hegel is an idealist in the sense of requiring regulative limits: for Hegel, reason has no limits because it inhabits actual infinity—there is only one limit Hegel concedes, which concerns the future, which thought cannot penetrate. Žižek extends this into a reflection on the role of prophetic vision and art after the end of art, gesturing toward a possible role for poetry and mystical prophecy in articulating obscure contours of a possible future, a vision that can only be justified retroactively.

Key concepts: Irony, Kantian Doctrine of Method, Bacchanalian revel, Regulative ideas, Dialectics, Retroactive justification Notable examples: Hegel's criticism of Romantic irony; Nietzsche and Wittgenstein as anti-systematic thinkers; Brandom's inferential pragmatism; North Korean mythological beliefs about Kim Il-sung

Žižek and the Retroactivity of the Real (Graham Harman) + Response to Harman (p.73-88)

Harman's essay approaches Less than Nothing through the lens of Object-Oriented Ontology, identifying Žižek's organizing structure as a Hegel/Lacan composite: just as Hegel implodes Kant's thing-in-itself into an immanent space of negativity, Lacan transforms Freud's unconscious into an immanent space of language and the symbolic order. Harman's central critical move is to identify what he calls 'duomining' in Žižek: while Žižek appears to embrace a fully retroactivist ontology in which the subject retroactively posits its own presuppositions, he nonetheless concedes a pre-subjective layer of 'physical simples'—an empty bottom register—while the only ontologically interesting top register is the subject. For OOO, this leaves out the rich middle world of objects with their own qualities and capacities irreducible to either extreme.

Harman focuses on Žižek's engagement with quantum theory as a test case: the Copenhagen Interpretation supports a retroactive ontology (position and momentum do not pre-exist measurement), but Žižek's only semi-retroactive theory of science concedes surprising ground to scientific realism. Harman reads this as an inconsistency: one cannot hold both 'there is no objective reality outside transcendental constitution' and 'the physical simples pre-exist subjective constitution.' Žižek responds by defending retroactivity through the Lubitsch film Ninotchka example: coffee-without-cream and coffee-without-milk are the same physical object accompanied by different negations, illustrating that the 'without' (the determinate negation) is what gives an object its political and ontological charge. He also contests Harman's reading of quantum complementarity, arguing that the wave/particle duality shows the particle itself—not just its properties—is constituted by measurement.

Key concepts: Retroactive positing, Quantum physics, Object-Oriented Ontology, Duomining, Determinate negation, Scientific realism Notable examples: Lubitsch's Ninotchka (coffee-without-cream); Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation; Karen Barad's agential realism; Schoenberg's break with tonal music

Slavoj Žižek's Hegel (Robert Pippin) + Response to Pippin (p.89-116)

Pippin's reprinted essay (from Interanimations, 2015) offers the most sustained and technically rigorous challenge in the volume to Žižek's reading of Hegel. Pippin identifies Less than Nothing as a serious attempt to reanimate Hegel through Lacanian metapsychology, crediting Žižek for correctly recovering three neglected Hegelian themes: retroactivity (Nachträglichkeit), spirit as self-producing, and the rejection of the narcissistic sublation model attacked by Adorno. However, Pippin argues that Žižek over-assimilates Hegel to Lacan by positing 'holes in the fabric of being'—an ontological incompleteness that Pippin considers both philosophically unnecessary and genuinely non-Hegelian.

Pippin's alternative centers on the Kantian-Hegelian logic of apperception: self-consciousness is not a gap in being but the structure of being-in-the-space-of-reasons. For any conscious act, I am constitutively in a position to give reasons—not as an external requirement but as what it is to be a conscious agent. This 'space of reasons' account can handle everything Žižek wants to do with negativity without positing abyssal acts or voids. Pippin reads Žižek's conclusion—'every ethical edifice must be grounded in an abyssal Act which is in the most radical sense political'—as 'making zero Hegelian sense,' likening it to the 'Beautiful Soul' or the 'Frenzy of Self-Conceit' in Hegel's menagerie of failed stances.

Zižek's response defends the necessity of ontological incompleteness: if science could fully naturalize our moral acts, the Kantian notion of freedom—as a discontinuity in the causal texture of phenomenal reality—would be eviscerated. A free act does imply a 'hole in the texture of phenomenal reality,' an intervention of another dimension. Crucially, Žižek inverts Pippin's picture of the anxious agent uncertain whether his acts are truly free: the true Kantian tension is that freedom is traumatic precisely because it is real and inescapable—the subject pathologizes its free acts in order to schematize and bear them. It is easier to accept that one is a speck of dust than to accept that one is an immortal free being condemned to responsibility.

Key concepts: Gappy ontology, Space of reasons, Apperception, Abyssal Act, Retroactivity, Freedom as traumatic Notable examples: Coetzee's Disgrace (David Lurie); Hitchcock's Vertigo (Scottie and Madeleine/Judy); French Revolutionary terror; The Crusades

Slavoj Žižek Is Not Violent Enough (Todd McGowan) + Response to McGowan (p.119-134)

McGowan argues that Žižek's theory of the radical act—as a violence primarily directed at oneself rather than the external oppressor, modeled on Tyler Durden in Fight Club or Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects—is philosophically correct and politically indispensable, but incomplete. Žižek identifies self-destructive violence (the death drive) as the minimum of freedom and the structural form of emancipatory revolt, distinguishing it from the 'beautiful soul' position of pure resistance that refuses to dirty its hands. But Žižek nowhere theorizes how this self-destructive form might be carried forward into the structure of governance itself. Every revolutionary moment—Occupy, Tahrir, Gilets Jaunes—promises epochal change and returns to normality because the Left cannot formulate what comes the day after.

McGowan proposes, modestly, that constitutional amendment as a built-in mechanism of self-revision might offer one structural model for 'governance that violently strikes against itself.' He draws on Žižek's own insight that a society of the negative must find institutional forms that include failure as integral to their functioning. Žižek accepts the critique but finds McGowan's constitutional proposal too tame, counterposing Lenin's 1922 proposal for a Central Control Commission with a humorous, 'semi-trickster' edge as an alternative model, and ultimately pointing to multi-party democracy (following Lefort) as embodying the structural principle that the place of power is primordially empty and can only ever be temporarily occupied.

Key concepts: Radical Act, Self-destructive violence, Death drive as minimum of freedom, Emancipatory governance, Subjective vs. objective violence, Post-revolutionary normality Notable examples: Fight Club (David Fincher); The Usual Suspects (Keyser Söze); Speed, Ransom; Occupy Wall Street; Lenin's Central Control Commission proposal

Ideology Critique as an Existentialist Choice (Hilary Neroni) + Response to Neroni (p.135-162)

Neroni provides a comprehensive systematic reconstruction of Žižek's theory of ideology, arguing that his most important contribution is the demonstration that ideology is effective only when unconscious, and that it functions through a libidinal hold rather than simple false consciousness. Against Marx's camera obscura model (ideology as distortion that would dissolve with the end of class society) and Althusser's ISA model (ideology as material practice that hails subjects into positions), Žižek's intervention relocates ideology's efficacy in the structure of the subject's unconscious investment, its disavowal, and the obscene underside that gives ideological injunctions their jouissance. Neroni traces this through Freud's eyeball diagram (contra the popular but spurious 'iceberg' metaphor) as a model of a dynamic, non-foundational psyche that Lacan's structural turn reinforces rather than rigidifies.

Neroni argues that Žižek's theory has decisive contemporary relevance: when authority itself becomes obscene (Trump, Bolsonaro, Putin 'flipping off' their subjects), the traditional left gesture of flipping off authority loses its subversive charge—ideology takes on a new form rather than dissolving. Žižek's response accepts this reconstruction but introduces three self-critical supplements: first, the process of disintegration of the big Other is something to worry about practically, illustrated through Sweden's transformation from mythic social trust to gang violence; second, he endorses a strategic argument (drawing on García Linera) that progressive forces must seize state power precisely because the state's biased form can be turned toward universal welfare in moments of crisis; third, he insists on the performative dimension of state authority—states exist only insofar as subjects 'take them seriously,' illustrated by the cartoon cat that only falls when it looks down.

Key concepts: Ideology and the unconscious, Fetishistic disavowal, Obscene underside, Big Other, Camera obscura vs. psychoanalytic subject, ISA critique Notable examples: Lévi-Strauss's village drawings; Trump, Bolsonaro, Putin as obscene authority; Ryszard Kapuściński's Shah of Shahs (Iranian revolution); Sweden's gang violence as collapse of big Other

The Subject Is Not Enough (Henrik Jøker Bjerre) + Response to Bjerre (p.163-180)

Bjerre opens with Zhuang Zi's butterfly dream as glossed by Lacan in Seminar XI: the mark of Zhuang Zi's sanity is not certainty of identity but the capacity for doubt, for non-identity with his imaginary self-image. This introduces the fundamental Lacanian thesis that the subject is constitutively ironic in a minimal sense—not the liberal ironism of Rorty (contingent self-awareness that preserves pluralism) but an immanent undermining of any fixed form of life. Bjerre deploys Laibach as his central example of 'overidentification' as an ideological strategy: the Slovenian band's unironic assumption of totalitarian aesthetics was not fascist but subversive precisely because it exposed the disavowed authoritarian underside of Yugoslav late socialism, forcing a 'Thou art that!' recognition.

Bjerre argues, however, that overidentification alone is insufficient—the purely negative critical gesture risks collapsing into cynicism unless it can 'latch onto' something positive, an emerging political sensibility or collective desire that gives the question somewhere to land. What made Laibach's first phase effective was not just the interrogative gesture but its historical coincidence with a genuine atmosphere of possibility in late Yugoslav opposition culture. Žižek accepts this, but his response pivots to a vigorous defense of identity politics as more complex than blanket dismissal allows: every identity involves an immanent excess, and the symbolic weight of registration (the transgender woman who took her life upon official confirmation of her new status) shows that the big Other's inscription is itself a traumatic event, not a liberatory one.

Key concepts: Overidentification, Irony, Splitting of the subject, Big Other, Fantasy, Identity politics Notable examples: Zhuang Zi's butterfly dream (Lacan, Seminar XI); Laibach in North Korea (2015); Beethoven's Ninth in different ideological contexts

Hospitality, Hostility, and the 'Real' Neighbor (Zahi Zalloua) + Response to Zalloua (p.181-210)

Zalloua's essay reads Žižek's ethics of the neighbor against Levinas and Derrida, arguing that the injunction 'Love thy neighbor' must mean loving the real neighbor—the anxiety-producing, monstrous other—not the decaffeinated multicultural other of liberal respect. Zalloua first shows how Levinas's ethics of the face, despite its philosophical depth, reproduces a structural problem when applied politically: in Levinas's notorious radio interview following the Sabra and Shatila massacre, his ethics of alterity failed to name the Palestinian other as neighbor, revealing a built-in limit when 'the neighbor attacks another neighbor.' Žižek's critique of Levinas (and of Derrida insofar as he remains within a Levinasian framework) is that it is at best a remedy for subjective violence and at worst ignores objective violence.

Zalloua, however, argues that Žižek fails to sufficiently distinguish between Levinas and the later Derrida: Derrida's concept of autoimmunity and his notion of différance as 'minimal difference' (the constitutive non-coincidence of a thing with itself) bring him much closer to Žižek's own position than Žižek acknowledges. The chapter uses the Israeli refusenik movement as a concrete example of loving the Palestinian as real neighbor—refusing interpellation into the Zionist social body not by abstract universalism but by an act of concrete solidarity. Žižek's response accepts Zalloua's correction on Derrida and elaborates the concept of 'dislocation' (illustrated through Bernard Herrmann's reuse of Vertigo's love theme in a chamber quintet) as the dialectical concept that resolves apparent contradictions between Eurocentrism and postcolonial thought.

Key concepts: Neighbour, Hospitality, Objective vs. subjective violence, Différance and minimal difference, Universality and solidarity, Dislocation Notable examples: Sabra and Shatila massacre and Levinas's interview; Israeli refuseniks; Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo score and chamber quintet; Haitian Revolution as dislocation of French Revolutionary ideals

On Žižek's Theory of the Subject (Nadia Bou Ali) + Response to Bou Ali (p.211-234)

Bou Ali offers a rigorously analytic critique of Žižek's theory of the Lacanian subject, arguing that while his project of combining German Idealism and psychoanalysis to correct 'the fatal flaw of Western Marxism' (its inability to account for radical negativity as the condition of subjectivity's emergence) is philosophically compelling, he never concretely locates where and how the Lacanian subject intervenes in specific historical forms of social life. Bou Ali is particularly focused on the question of sexual difference: she endorses Butler's charge that Žižek elevates the feminine/masculine antinomy into an ahistorical a priori, ignoring how the constitutive 'foreclosure' that structures the subject is embedded in specific patriarchal-historical formations. For Bou Ali, Žižek's subject is 'destitute but full of anxiety'—an incompleteness that cannot by itself generate emancipatory political certainty.

Bou Ali argues that what is needed is an account of Bildung beyond capitalist culture—a way for the subject to move from anxiety toward certainty, toward a determinate ethical and political content. She locates the problem in Žižek's exclusive focus on commodity fetishism as Marx's most speculative moment, which anchors his account but leaves the social forms of property, bourgeois law, and productive activity theoretically underdeveloped. Žižek's response defends Ur-Verdrängung as not a trans-historical a priori but a retroactively posited presupposition of any social space—every social formation is based on some grounding 'primordial repression,' and dreaming of another sexuality without castration is like dreaming of modernity without capitalism. He also elaborates, in a rich excursion, the Hegelian logic of identity as difference brought to self-reference, and the three-term structure of class/sexual difference (two opposed terms plus their difference 'as such' as a separate entity).

Key concepts: Splitting of the subject, Sexual difference, Ur-Verdrängung, Retroactive positing, Commodity fetishism, Emancipatory politics Notable examples: Butler's critique of Žižek on sexual difference; Transgender registration and symbolic inscription; Yugoslav army and 'repressive desublimation'

On Žižek's Interpretation of Lacan's 'Kant with Sade' (Dany Nobus) + Response to Nobus (p.235-262)

Nobus mounts the most philologically exacting critique in the volume, organized as a three-ring itinerary through Žižek's reading of 'Kant with Sade.' The first ring is the Kant/Sade circle: Nobus agrees with Žižek that Lacan's most disturbing proposition is not simply 'Sade is the truth of Kant' but its reverse, 'Kant is the truth of Sade'—the Sadean will to jouissance cannot escape the structure of the Kantian law it claims to transgress. He shows, however, that Žižek's reading oscillates: on one hand the Sadean libertine is a covert Kantian; on the other, this very Kantianism fails when universalization of the right to jouissance excludes reciprocity. Nobus reads this oscillation as Žižek having his cake and eating it.

The most damaging philological point concerns the axiom 'Do not give up on your desire,' which Žižek consistently attributes to Lacan as an ethical imperative. Nobus demonstrates meticulously that this formula does not exist in Lacan's text: what Lacan says in the final lesson of Seminar VII is the negative formulation, 'the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire'—which is a claim about guilt, not a positive injunction. The affirmative imperative is Žižek's own retroactive fabrication. Nobus also raises a third ring of questions about how Žižek's alignment of Antigone with the Sadean libertine as paradigms of ethical commitment translates into concrete socio-political transformation, suggesting that the process of working-through and traversal of the fantasy—and specifically the act of writing itself (as in Sade's case)—may be the privileged site of this passage. Žižek defends his reading by insisting on the traumatic Real of freedom as what Kant himself misreads: the true tension is not uncertainty about hidden pathological motives but the unbearability of the free act itself, which one schematizes by 'pathologizing' it.

Key concepts: Kant with Sade, Ethics of psychoanalysis, Do not give up on your desire, Antigone, Traversal of fantasy, Objet a and writing Notable examples: Lacan, Seminar VII (final lesson); Marquis de Sade's Juliette; Sade's writing from prison as approach to objet a; Foucault's 1970 lectures on Sade

When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other (Mari Ruti) + Response to Ruti (p.263-282)

Ruti challenges Žižek's privileging of the drive over desire as the ethical foundation of Lacanian theory, arguing that this move both misreads Lacan's own commitment in Seminar VII to an 'ethics of desire' and impoverishes the subject by leaving it with only two options: the anemic satisfaction of endlessly circling lack (the drive's closed loop) or self-destruction through too-close proximity to the Thing. Her central wager is that sublimation—raising a mundane object to the 'dignity of the Thing' (Seminar VII)—offers a third path: the subject's desire can approach the Thing through a specific, non-Other-mimicking attachment to particular persons, ideals, or principles that arrest the sliding of the signifier and provide genuine (if partial) satisfaction. This desire is not mere compliance with the Other's demand; it is idiosyncratic, counter-productive, and sometimes destructively loyal.

Ruti deploys the objet a as the linchpin: it is precisely because the objet a makes an object 'incommensurate' (as Lacan says, we discern this uniqueness 'only when we truly love') that desire can resist the exchangeability logic of capitalism. She quotes Lacan from Seminar XI and Seminar VIII (on Alcibiades and Socrates) to show that desire, when it is genuinely singular, functions as an ethical force that salvages the subject's dignity. Žižek's response accepts the importance of sublimation but insists that the 'non-negotiable' object of desire is still anchored in symbolic norms (Antigone's principles are part of the big Other's order), and that what Ruti calls 'genuine desire' is in his terms precisely the moment when desire approaches the drive—the two are not simply opposed but form a parallax structure.

Key concepts: Desire vs. Drive, Sublimation, Das Ding, Objet a, Ethics of psychoanalysis, Singularity of jouissance Notable examples: Lacan's Seminar VII matchboxes and Cézanne's apples; Lacan's Seminar VIII on Alcibiades and Socrates; Antigone's loyalty to Polyneices; Neoliberal productivity culture and counter-productive desire

Žižek, Jouissance, and the Impossible (Jennifer Friedlander) + Response to Friedlander (p.283-300)

Friedlander argues that Žižek's 'courage of hopelessness' is not political despair but a structurally radical form of hope grounded in the psychoanalytic logic of repetition and jouissance. Drawing on Lacan's distinction between repetition (Wiederholen—drive-level) and reproduction/return (symptom-level), Friedlander reads Žižek's politics as one that unleashes the unactualized potential of past failures rather than aiming for a future as far removed from the past as possible. By locating lack not as the effect of lost jouissance (the fantasy structure: 'we once had it, they stole it') but as primary and constitutive, Žižek's framework disrupts racist fantasies of stolen enjoyment and recasts the political task as the repetition of failure that generates new possibility.

Friedlander also brings Žižek into productive dialogue with José Esteban Muñoz's queer-theoretical concept of 'the otherwise'—the utopian potentiality of the past that exceeds the 'totalizing rendering of reality' of the present. Despite their apparent opposition (Žižek insists on the drive and present hopelessness; Muñoz advocates hope and desire for the future), both argue that surplus pleasures and jouissance can rupture the established coordinates of the possible rather than merely lubricating ideology. Žižek's response accepts the basic reading but sharpens the radicality of hopelessness: it is not just a zero-level clearing away of false hopes but an irreducibly risky commitment, and he defends the right to apathy—subjective destitution as a refusal of enforced optimism—as a basic political right.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Repetition vs. reproduction, Hopelessness as radical hope, Surplus-jouissance, Drive, Unactualized potential Notable examples: Žižek, The Courage of Hopelessness; Muñoz, Disidentifications (Marga Gomez performance); Stavrakakis's politics of jouissance; COVID-19 pandemic and enforced optimism

Žižek and the War in an Era of Generalized Foreclosure (Duane Rousselle) + Response to Rousselle (p.301-316)

Rousselle's essay, originally published during the early weeks of the 2022 Ukraine war, introduces the concept of 'generalized foreclosure'—drawing on Jacques-Alain Miller's diagnosis of global capitalism as an era of post-Oedipal Real—to argue that the war in Ukraine is not a case of Baudrillardian simulacra (too detached from reality) but its inverse: too much reality, 'an excess of certainty,' the collapse of the big Other that used to sustain shared symbolic coordinates. In an era of generalized foreclosure, traditional categories of civil war, revolution, and political uprising lose traction because they presuppose a shared symbolic world within which revolt can be staged. Rousselle distinguishes 'general war' from 'civil war' as a conflict operating across all scales simultaneously.

Zižek's response is a sustained counter-argument defending the continued relevance of Oedipal-symbolic structures. He rejects Miller's diagnosis of generalized foreclosure as too sweeping: the Iraq War example shows not psychotic certainty (believing something without evidence) but knowing-without-acknowledging (the US positively knew there were no WMDs, which is why they risked ground invasion). More fundamentally, Žižek argues that Rousselle's position is self-defeating: if generalized foreclosure is total, knowledge of it changes nothing, but Žižek insists that knowledge always affects its object. He draws on Hegel's master-servant dialectic to argue that within states, symbolic castration and mutual recognition still function; only between states does raw power and the threat of war operate. He ends by noting that Russia's cancel culture operates on the masculine formula of sexuation (one exception sustains the universal), while Western cancel culture operates on the feminine formula (no exception, but not-all are cancelled).

Key concepts: Generalized foreclosure, Big Other collapse, Psychosis, Foreclosure vs. disavowal, Formulas of sexuation, Symbolic castration Notable examples: Ukraine war (2022); Gulf War and Baudrillard's simulacra; Iraqi WMDs and 'unknown knowns'; Russian 'foreign agent' laws vs. Western cancel culture; Hegel's master-servant dialectic

Rethinking Lacan's Unthinkable 'Thing' (Richard Boothby) + Response to Boothby (p.317-332)

Boothby's essay, which concludes the volume, addresses what he calls the 'strange thread' in Lacan's career: das Ding appears in Seminar VII as a concept of extraordinary weight—the primordial unknown in the maternal Other, correlative of the law of speech in its most primitive form—only to nearly vanish from subsequent work. Boothby argues that Lacan's objet a (which comes to dominate his later work) is not a replacement for das Ding but its 'ontic entry-point': the objet a is the strange incongruous detail (Harpo Marx's grin, the shopkeeper's smile in Freud's Emma case) that opens onto the void of the Thing rather than filling it. Neither can be fully theorized without the other; they form an 'essential couplet.' Boothby also distinguishes Lacan's das Ding from Heidegger's: for Heidegger, anxiety individuates Dasein before itself (solus ipse); for Lacan, anxiety is not without an object—it is produced by the unknown desire of the Other (extimacy), not by Dasein's encounter with its own pure potentiality.

Boothby's wager is that Žižek—who has kept das Ding alive in theoretical discourse more than almost anyone—nonetheless fails to articulate its essential link to objet a, treating them as parallel but disjunct. The closing question is whether this disjunction reflects a deeper conceptual commitment or a philosophical oversight. Žižek's response inverts Boothby's ontological hierarchy: for Žižek, objet a is ontological (it names the void that structures our approach to reality—as Lacan says, reality emerges by the subtraction of objet a) while das Ding has a trans-ontological dimension, pointing to something 'prehistoric'—a trace of what was there before entities were disclosed in an ontological horizon. He invokes Heidegger's own ambiguous formulation ('what nature would be without man') to suggest that das Ding marks the impossible limit of ontological thinking itself.

Key concepts: Das Ding, Objet a, Extimacy, Anxiety, Sublimation, Ontological vs. trans-ontological Notable examples: Freud's case of Emma (shopkeeper's smile); Harpo Marx's grin (Lacan, Seminar VII); Heidegger's earthen vase; Lacan: 'objet a tickles das Ding from the inside' (Seminar XVI)

Main interlocutors

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Hegel, Science of Logic
Hegel, Philosophy of Right
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology
Lacan, Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)
Lacan, Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts)
Lacan, Seminar XX (Encore)
Lacan, Écrits (Kant with Sade)
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason
Schelling, Freiheitsschrift
Schelling, Ages of the World
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
Žižek, Less than Nothing
Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute
Žižek, The Parallax View
Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies
Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
Robert Pippin
Adrian Johnston
Graham Harman
Jacques Derrida
Emmanuel Levinas
Judith Butler
Alain Badiou
Quentin Meillassoux
José Esteban Muñoz
Jacques-Alain Miller
Jean Baudrillard

Position in the corpus

In the Lacanian-Žižekian secondary corpus, Žižek Responds! occupies a unique position as a dialogical meta-commentary: it presupposes familiarity with Žižek's major works (Sublime Object, Less than Nothing, Sex and the Failed Absolute, The Parallax View) and with Lacan's Seminars VII, XI, and XX, and is therefore best approached after rather than before those primary texts. Its closest neighbors are earlier critical anthologies—Traversing the Fantasy (Boucher, Glynos, Sharpe, 2005) and The Truth of Žižek (Bowman, Stamp, 2007)—but it systematically improves on both by virtue of its dialogical format and its refusal of hostile dismissal in favor of immanent critique. Readers who have worked through Finkelde's Excessive Subjectivity (Columbia, 2017) or Johnston's Žižek's Ontology and A New German Idealism will find those debates continued and sharpened here. The volume should also be read alongside Pippin's Interanimations (Chicago, 2015), of which chapter 4 here is a reprint, to appreciate the depth of the Pittsburgh Hegelian challenge to Žižek's gappy ontology.\n\nFor readers focused specifically on Lacanian ethics and psychoanalysis, Žižek Responds! is indispensable as a guide to the contested Seminar VII landscape: the Nobus-Ruti-Boothby triad of chapters constitutes collectively the most sustained secondary engagement available with the relationships among das Ding, objet a, desire, drive, and sublimation in Žižek's corpus. Readers following the political dimensions of Lacanian theory—ideology, the act, governance, and the refugee crisis—will find the McGowan, Neroni, Zalloua, and Rousselle chapters especially valuable, and should read them in conjunction with Žižek's own Against the Double Blackmail (Penguin, 2016) and The Courage of Hopelessness (Allen Lane, 2017). The volume as a whole is a necessary supplement to Repeating Žižek (Hamza, ed., Duke, 2015) and a more philosophically rigorous complement to introductory monographs like Myers's Slavoj Žižek (Routledge, 2003).