For They Know Not What Rad Thk 3

Psychoanalysisis less merciful than Christianity. Where God the Father forgives ourignorance, psychoanalysis holds out no such hope. Ignorance is not asufficient ground for forgiveness since it masks enjoyment; anenjoyment which erupts in those black holes in our symbolic universethat escape the Father's prohibition.Today,with the disintegration of state socialism, we are witnessing thiseruption of enjoymnet in the re-emergence of aggressive nationalism andracism. With the lid of repression lifted, the desires that haveemerged are far from democratic. To explain this apparent paradox,says Slavoj Zizek, socialist critical thought must turn topsychoanalysis.For They Know Not What They Do seeks to understand the status of enjoyment within ideologicaldiscourse, from Hegel through Lacan to these political and ideologicaldeadlocks. The author's own enjoyment of 'œpopular culture'� makes thisan engaging and lucid exposition, in which Hegel joins hands withRossellini, Marx with Hitchcock, Lacan with Frankenstein, high theorywith Hollywood melodrama.

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, In Defense of Lost Causes, four volumes of the Essential Žižek, and many more.