For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (Radical Thinkers) [Paperback]

Slavoj iek (Author)

Book Description

Series: Radical Thinkers | Publication Date: January 17, 2008

The eminent philosopher explodes the roles of pleasure and desire in contemporary politics and culture.

Psychoanalysis is less merciful than Christianity. Where God the Father forgives our ignorance, psychoanalysis holds out no such hope. Ignorance is not a sufficient ground for forgiveness since it masks enjoyment; an enjoyment which erupts in those black holes in our symbolic universe that escape the Father's prohibition.

Today, with the disintegration of state socialism, we are witnessing this eruption of enjoymnet in the re-emergence of aggressive nationalism and racism. With the lid of repression lifted, the desires that have emerged are far from democratic. To explain this apparent paradox, says Slavoj Zizek, socialist critical thought must turn to psychoanalysis.

For They Know Not What They Do seeks to understand the status of enjoyment within ideological discourse, from Hegel through Lacan to these political and ideological deadlocks. The author's own enjoyment of “popular culture” makes this an engaging and lucid exposition, in which Hegel joins hands with Rossellini, Marx with Hitchcock, Lacan with Frankenstein, high theory with Hollywood melodrama.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The Elvis of cultural theory.” (Chronicle of Higher Education )

“Zizek leaves no social or natural phenomenon untheorized, and is a master of the counter-intuitive observation.” (New Yorker )

“The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged from Europe in some decades.” (Terry Eagleton )

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Verso (January 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1844672123
• ISBN-13: 978-1844672127
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #539,638 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

"The most dangerous philosopher in the West," (says Adam Kirsch of The New Republic) Slavoj Zizek 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 "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce;" "Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle;" "In Defense of Lost Causes;" "Living in the End Times;" and many more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Zizek's "Return to Hegel", March 6, 2008

By 

Christopher Kingman "Philosopher / Revolutionary" (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (Radical Thinkers) (Paperback)

If Lacan construed his work as a precise "Return to Freud"--that is to say as a rigorous re-reading of Freud's writings and a demanding articulation of Freudian concepts and a re-animation of Freudian inspiration--then "For they know not what they do" makes the most solid case of Zizek's work performing a homologous "Return to Hegel". This book, like The Sublime Object of Ideology (Phronesis), circulates among three broad theoretical centers of gravity--Hegel, Lacan, and the critique of ideology. By Zizek's own estimation (in the introduction) it is the Lacanian pole that provides the "specific illumination that bathes all else in its light" (I'm paraphrasing, as I don't have the book in front of me)--which may be true. However even a cursory glance through the book's pages reveals that it is Hegel that provides the most abundant reference, and that Zizek is here engaged in a precise re-reading and explication of Hegel's conceptual apparatus and categories. On almost every page of this text we find formulations of this sort: "Contrary to the received doxa on Hegel..." or "This crucial mis-reading of Hegel that we must be careful to avoid is...". This book then, provides some of Zizek's most sustained elucidation of the Hegelian concepts, logics, categories, and topoi that Zizek repeatedly deploys constantly throughout the rest of his considerable oeuvre. Thus, if you are not already an accomplished Hegelian scholar, this is probably one of the most useful (if dense) and underrated works of Zizek to read for an overall understanding of the use Zizek makes of Hegel.

In Zizek!, he claims that his three best (and most theoretically important) works are: The Sublime Object of Ideology (Phronesis), Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Post-Contemporary Interventions), The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, and The Parallax View (Short Circuits). If these then constitute the high water marks of Zizek's corpus, then "For they know not what they do", situated as it is between "The Sublime Object" and "Tarrying with the Negative" (chronologically speaking), serves as a sort of "vanishing mediator" (a theoretical concept frequently employed by Zizek that received its first articulation here) between those two works. The theoretical work undertaken by Zizek in this book is crucial to understanding much of what he has done subsequently and makes it a vital companion to "The Sublime Object"--or as Zizek himself puts it in the preface to the second edition of this book, "Those who won't speak about 'For they know not what they do' should also remain silent about 'The Sublime Object'."

If there is one (minor) disappointment here, it is that the analysis promised by the books subtitle ("Enjoyment as a Political Factor") never quite fully materializes in this work and remains in a certain sense deferred--one has to wait until the final chapter of "Tarrying with the Negative", where Zizek condenses many of the insights he reaches in this work into an incisive and concise analysis of the functioning of enjoyment (Lacanian jouissance) in political contexts (especially apropos of the then contemporary turmoil in the Balkan states, Zizek's home). Other than that minor quibble, "For they know not what they do" remains an essential moment in Zizek's body of work, crucial for understanding many concepts he deploys in later works, especially as regards his reading of Hegel. For anyone seriously grappling with Zizek's place on the contemporary theoretical scene, this book is a must read.