Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London and New York:  Verso, 1999.

In this, his most recent book, Slavoj Žižek continues the two-pronged project he inaugurated a decade ago with his path-breaking The Sublime Object of Ideology: to deepen, first, the project upon which Lacan himself first embarked in his seminars of re-interpreting the history of philosophy from the perspective of psychoanalytic conceptuality; and to develop, second, a political engagement with contemporary culture through the lens of Lacanian theory. Readers new to Žižek's work will be delighted to discover one of current theory's most brilliant minds at the peak of his form whose occasional philosophical density is counterbalanced by a talent for illustrating nuanced concepts through entertaining references to popular culture. Seasoned veterans of Žižek-reading, for their part, will encounter what amounts to the author's most politically consequential work to date, in which the ramifications of Lacanian theory for political praxis are spelled out in an unprecedented manner through analyses of the work of numerous authors who heretofore have been either treated cursorily or altogether absent from Žižek's work. The scope of this ambitious book is extraordinarily broad; we will attempt in consequence to provide a concise overview of its fundamental conceptual moves, and then focus on two of Žižek's interventions: his rearticulation of leftist political agency through Lacanian ethics and his extended engagement with Anglo-American queer theory through a dialogue with Judith Butler.

Though it does not feature an extensive dialogue with Descartes, The Ticklish Subject begins with a characteristically polemical and deliberately provocative statement: that the aporetic discourses of contemporary theory—from postmodern deconstructionism to critical post-Marxism, from New Age obscurantism to the post-epistemology of cognitive science—share an obfuscatory inaugural theoretical gesture—namely, the rejection of the allegedly Cartesian, self-transparent thinking subject of moder