(7/10) Zizek is kind of an academic rockstar right now, and it's easy to see why: he combines political radicalism, Lacan, and pop culture in a way that's both exciting and mystifying, and his writing manages to be fairly accessible without seeming dumbed down. There are also a lot of genuine insights in this book concerning the current state of capitalism, and it's worth reading for them alone.

I do have to argue with a big part of Zizek's ideas here, and that's his condemnation of humanism based on its use to justify capitalism. There's a lot of railing against multiculturalism and feel-good "getting to know others" stuff, and while that's all well and good, it ignores the fact that a lot of this is right. We exist as personal beings as well as political one (with the two sides of course frequetnly blurring), and acknowledging that even the worst political actors have personal lives and goals (Zizek provides the example of the Nazi officer who loved Mozart) does not mean that we should ignore the personal element. In the end this becomes the hoary old Marxist diatribe about how class war is the only real thing and everything else is just a distraction. Zizek tries to argue his way back from this position, but in doing so he just ends up creating a bunch of contradictions (why is it okay to gloss over British working-class xenophobes' prejudices but not Muslim fundamentalists'?).

With that said, as long as Zizek stays away from these contrarian tendencies of proving himself as the ultimate socialist by being against everything liberals stand for, he makes some pretty good analysis. I would advise watching some of his speeches available on Youtube instead of reading this book, however, as they contain the same ideas down to sometimes a word-to-word basis, and Zizek is a much more magnetic speaker than he is a writer. (For instance, he manages to mangle a joke in this book that he nailed in a live speech.) An interesting character for sure.