Slavoj Zizek is implausibly prolific, though a lot is repeated. It’s forgivable because so much of it repays in re-reading, and sometimes even the jokes are still funny. These three books, two new, one re-issued, show how Zizek alters his message for different audiences, developing his ideas in a constant debate with himself, re-working old material in new contexts.

The Indivisible Remainder was published in 1996 and is now re-issued in Verso’s Radical Thinkers series. Zizek uses the German idealist philosopher Schelling to illuminate the psychoanalytic philosopher Jacques Lacan, drawing on Hegel and Kant along the way. It’s a powerful piece of philosophical analysis, but isn’t the most representative Zizek, or the best. It’s especially tough-going, oriented more towards a professional audience of philosophers. 

The book shows Schelling as an important innovator rather than a mere footnote in the prehistory of Hegel, but the main purpose is not historical; rather, Zizek is interested in the emergence and unfolding of subjectivity. Subjectivity is a central concept in philosophy because it concerns our capacity for conscious action, our ability to know the world and act on it. Zizek engages cautiously with structuralist and poststructuralist philosophers such as Derrida and Foucault (whom he terms a nominalist), who are known for their sceptical attitude towards subjectivity. He is quietly critical of their deconstruction of subjectivity, but The Indivisible Remainder is much more sympathetic than Zizek’s more recent treatment of these thinkers. It comes early in a process of thought that culminates in The Ticklish Subject, which is a strong defence of subjectivity and repudiation of the poststructuralist critics of subjectivity.

As Zizek has become more established he has addressed himself more widely, his latest works have become increasingly political. The difference in language is fascinating – at every point The Indivisible Remainder is much harder than his later work, even when dealing with the same points and the same examples.  He has also responded to pressure to ‘tell us what to do’. Two responses are offered. First he tells us not to look to him to tell them what to do. Then he tells us what to do. Politics has become ever more prominent in his work. 

On Violence is a provocative and wonderful example of Zizek’s more political intervention. It is still a serious engagement with ideas, and in parts it can still be a chore to read, but the irreverent challenges to aspects of conventional wisdom are a real treat. Of course every thinking person likes to think of themselves as being above ‘conventional wisdom’, but a cursory reading of On Violence highlights the gulf between ordinary scepticism and revolutionary challenge. In an age of tolerance and peacefulness where even the most radical doubt the possibility of revolutionary change, Zizek defends (even demands) violence as political action.

The second chapter – ‘Fear thy Neighbour as Thyself’ – is simply the best short description of the politics of our times. He segues between disparate themes that have never been brought together so effectively, avoiding the temptation to identify a single key to unlocking the secrets of our times. He is constantly sensitive to the way that the meaning and function of social phenomena can change in different circumstances, which demands the constant reinvention of radical politics. Where critical people often draw on the objective authority of science, Zizek sees the radical potential of religion: ‘Science and religion have changed places: today, science provides the security religion once guaranteed. In a curious inversion, religion is one of the possible places from which one can deploy critical doubts about today’s society. It has become one of the sites of resistance’ (pp69-70). 

But Zizek is also aware of the dangers in invoking universalism against the establishment ideology of multiculturalism: ‘The key moment of any theoretical – and indeed ethical, political, and … even aesthetic – struggle is the rise of universality out of the particular lifeworld”’ (p129). He explains: ‘Actual universality is not the deep feeling that, above all differences, different civilisations share the same basic values, etc.; actual universality appears…as the experience of negativity, of the inadequacy-to-itself, of a particular identity’ (p133).  Zizek calls on us to share our intolerance. Here, universality is not fluffy pseudo-religion, but something achieved through common struggle, through identifying enemies and fighting them. 

In Defense of Lost Causes is a great big doorstopper of a book, and one of Zizek’s most problematic. If nothing else, it shows that Zizek hasn’t stopped thinking. He is now more cautious in his discussion of populism, recognising the risk of co-option and describing it as the ’‘spontaneous’ ideological supplement to post-political administration’ (p268). The book culminates in Zizek’s most political chapter to date. 

The treatment of subjectivity is noticeably more practical here: ‘how are we to think the singular universality of the emancipatory subject as not purely formal, that is, as objectively-materially determined, but without the working class as its substantial base?”’ (p420). Zizek is wondering how we can capture the progressive potential that was recognised in the working class when the working class no longer has a political existence. It is a good question, but his answer falls back on ‘capitalism’s excess’ – slums and ecological degradation. This is a terrible anti-climax. 

He describes a dialectic of environmentalism, between ‘left’ environmentalists’ primitive beliefs in mother nature and natural balance and ‘right’ environmentalists’ denial of development to the third world. His discussion succinctly identifies all that is bad with environmentalist thought today. But his ‘third way’ environmentalism is very thin gruel as a political programme, and he fails utterly to reflect critically on the trope of environmentalism itself. In the insubstantial form offered here it is a flat ending that is simply pitiful in the context of the thoroughness and brilliance of his theoretical work.

It would be daft to reject Zizek too hastily on the back of his insubstantial conclusions. Zizek truly is the best we’ve got in progressive thought. But I felt cheated by his rather lazy analysis of today’s political possibilities.