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Early in 1992, when the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ entered the language and images of the civil war in former Yugoslavia were still blistering our eyes, a philosopher from the newly-independent Republic of Slovenia was invited to give a lecture at a prestigious American university. To the consternation of his hosts, he chose as his topic: ‘Why do the birds attack in Hitchcock's The Birds?’ At the end, someone from the audience burst out: ‘How can you talk about such a trifling subject when your ex-country is dying in flames?’ The philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, was quick with his answer, and before the year was out, he had published—in French, German and English—a collection of essays by himself and some of his colleagues in Lubljana, entitled Everything you always wanted to know about Lacan but were afraid to ask Hitchcock—a spoof of a spoof title, in that it is a parody of a Woody Allen parody of a sex education manual.
Uncannily prolific (an average of a book a year since 1989), ubiquitous at conferences and symposia in Paris and New York, London and Los Angeles, Zizek has re-injected an enormous energy and verve into a topic that most considered played-out and tired: the relevance of Lacan to either philosophy or psychoanalysis. After devastating accounts of the École Freudienne and damaging biographies of its founding father had made of Lacan just another fallen idol (along with Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault) in the pantheon of French intellectual gods, here was a sustained attempt to demonstrate that Lacan's famous seminars from the 1960s and 1970s (collected in Écrits) had a sub-text (Western philosophy from Plato to Kant and Hegel to Heidegger) and constituted an oblique but nonetheless perfectly legible commentary on the crisis of society now often referred to as ‘postmodernism’. It seems that it took someone from Eastern Europe, from the West's unconscious (barred, so to speak, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989), to come up with the notion that an imp