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Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions In The (Mis) Use of a Notion is the latest theoretical Molotov cocktail lobbed by Slavoj Žižek in the guerilla war against neo-liberal hegemony and what he views as the forms of postmodern theoretical and cultural cynicism that underwrite it. Žižek has emerged in the last ten years as one of the Euro-American academy's most prominent theorists, leading the charge against what was the hegemony of poststructuralism and de-construction in the late 80s and early 90s and spearheading a return to what he describes as the “twin materialisms” of psychoanalysis and Marxism.
In some ways, Žižek, as a disciple of Lacan, seems like a strange theorist to be leading this charge. Until recently, the conventional wisdom has been that the Lacanian revolution in psychoanalytic theory was essentially a linguistic one, in which Lacan reworked the insights of both Freud and Saussure to produce an account of the subject's emergence in and formation by language. This account of subjectivity seemed fully congruent with the basic tenets of post-structuralism, and many cultural theorists took it as such, deploying a Lacanian account of subjectivity along with a Foucauldian or Derridian account of social power in order to provide a fully working model of the intersection of subjectivity and the social.
In key works such as The Sublime Object of Ideology and Tarrying With the Negative, Žižek challenged this conventional wisdom, arguing that, as Louis Althusser recognized in the 1970s, Lacanian psychoanalysis has more in common with the forms of Marxist critique rejected by most post-structuralists than it does with poststructuralism itself. The reason that this was not evident to most Anglo-American readers of Lacan is that, with the exception of Seminars XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis) and XX (On Feminine Sexuality), only the early, predominantly structuralist, seminars and writings of Lacan have been translated into Engl