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

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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.