For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (Phronesis) - Softcover

"Slavoj Zizek, the Giant of Llubljana ... provides the best intellectual high since Anti-Oedipus." - Voice Literary Supplement "Zizek's recent spate of books... has been widely and correctly regarded as an enormous contribution to contemporary thought... He inflicts the most obscure theory upon us, in such a way that we are forced to enjoy it." - Charles Shepardson, The Minnesota Review "...it will become one of the 'classics' of postmarxism." - Lillian Zac, Marxism Today "Britons, take our advice, do not read this book; it may seriously infect your mind. And, above allo, keep it out of reach of your wives, your children and your servants." - Laibach

With the disintegration of state socialism, we are witnessing this eruption of enjoymnet in the re-emergence of aggressive nationalism and racism. With the lid of repression lifted, the desires that have emerged are from from democratic. To explain this apparent paradox, says Slavoj Zizek, socialist critical thought must turn to psychoanalysis. For They Know Not What They Do seeks to understand the status of enjoyment within ideological discourse, from Hegel through Lacan to these political and ideological deadlocks. The author's own enjoyment of "popular culture" makes this an engaging and lucid exposition, in which Hegel joins hands with Rossellini, Marx with Hitchcock, Lacan with Frankenstein, high theory with Hollywood melodrama.