You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
For those who have wrestled with the provocative and stimulating work of Slavoj Žižek, the publication of The Žižek Dictionary brings with it a sigh of relief. Žižek’s work has long called for a companion text able to shed light on his more obscure and challenging theorizations. There have been foreshadowings of such a text; introductions to the work of the Slovene philosopher have often included glossaries of technical and psychoanalytic terms deployed in his work. Yet given that many of these terms are derived from Lacanian theory, such glossaries have often slid into the uncertain territory of conflating Lacanian and Žižekian thought. Butler’s volume distinguishes itself in two essential respects: First, it represents the first stand-alone text devoted to defining key concepts essential to understanding Žižek’s theory. Second, it attends to the particularities that differentiate Žižek’s theorizations from Lacan’s. In these ways, Butler fills an important gap in Žižekian scholarship, and does so in erudite and often delightful ways.
The Žižek Dictionary, for a start, includes its fair share of wit. This is apparent not only in the fact that Žižek himself has contributed an entry – on, you guessed it, “Slavoj Žižek” – but also in Butler’s introduction to the volume, in which he speculates on “the Žižek transference effect.” Here, Butler includes an anecdote of his first meeting with the Slovene theoretician, who sat reading a book throughout a talk Butler was giving on Žižek himself. Such humor offers welcome relief from the mental labor that inevitably accompanies working through Žižekian thought.
This is not to suggest that the writing within the collection is unduly difficult. To be sure, Žižek’s theorizations are challenging; in response, the contributions as a whole are necessarily complex, while at the same time remaining largely accessible. A multi-authored text, The Žižek Dictionary, provides a diverse series of perspectives on Žižek’s work by some of the mos