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My friend Rhett Smith asked me on twitter yesterday where he should start if he wanted to get into some of iek’s writings. There are a few different places to start because he has such a huge corpus and covers a variety of topics. For instance the different areas of his work you can dive into are:
- Christianity
- Politics
- Psychoanalysis
- Film Criticism
- Hegalian Philosophy
He was interested in learning more about his use of Psychoanalysis, which is almost solely based on Jacques Lacan’s work. Here are my recommendations on this particular subject, if you’d like to chime in about the others please feel free ((all these links have embedded referral codes in them to Powell’s independent bookstore in Portland Oregon. I strongly support local bookstores and hope you will too. If you purchase these books through these links I also receive a little kickback from the sale)):
- Sublime Object of Ideology is his first book, is pretty lucid for iek and focuses on his use of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, which he applies mainly to social critique.
- “How to Read Lacan,” is a super easy to read, short and fun. In it Zizek expounds upon key quotes and texts from Lacan’s corpus and applies them to movies, and contemporary cultural examples.
- Finally, “Looking Awray: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture” takes an indepth approach to Lacanian psychoanalysis and uses it to exegete film.
- You can also find more of iek’s books on Lacan on my delicious site.
Finally, If you’re interested in getting books that cover the four main pillars of iek’s thought: Hegel, Lacan, Marx and Christianity then I highly recommend the four volume: The Essential Zizek: The Complete Set (the Sublime Object of Ideology, the Ticklish Subject, the Fragile Absolute, the Plague of Fantasies).