Slavoj Zizek 
The Most Sublime Hysteric 
Hegel with Lacan

What do we know about Hegel? What do we know about Marx? What do we
know about democracy and totalitarianism? Communism and
psychoanalysis? What do we know that isn’t a platitude that we’ve
heard a thousand times – or a self-satisfied certainty? Through his
brilliant reading of Hegel, Slavoj Zizek – one of the most
provocative and widely-read thinkers of our time – upends our
traditional understanding, dynamites every cliché and
undermines every conviction in order to clear the ground for new
ways of answering these questions.

When Lacan described Hegel as the ‘most sublime
hysteric’, he was referring to the way that the hysteric asks
questions because he experiences his own desire as if it were the
Other’s desire. In the dialectical process, the question asked of
the Other is resolved through a reflexive turn in which the
question begins to function as its own answer. We had made Hegel
into the theorist of abstraction and reaction, but by reading Hegel
with Lacan, Zizek unveils a Hegel of the concrete and of revolution
– his own, and the one to come.

This early and dazzlingly original work by Zizek offers a unique
insight into the ideas which have since become hallmarks of his
mature thought. It will be of great interest to anyone interested
in critical theory, philosophy and contemporary social thought.

Table of Content

Introduction: Impossible Absolute Knowledge 1

Book I: Hegel with Lacan 7

1. ‘The Formal Aspect’: Reason versus Understanding
9

2. The Retroactive Performative, or How the Necessary Emerges
from the Contingent 21

3. The Dialectic as Logic of the Signifier (1): The One of
Self-Reference 35

4. The Dialectic as Logic of the Signifier (2): The Real of the
‘Triad’ 54

5. Das Ungeschehenmachen: How is Lacan a Hegelian? 70

6. The ‘Cunning of Reason, ‘ or the True Nature of
the Hegelian Teleology 83

7. ‘The Suprasensible is the Phenomenon as
Phenomenon, ‘ or How Hegel Goes Beyond the Kantian
Thing-in-Itself 97

8. Two Hegelian Witz, Which Help Us Understand Why Absolute
Knowledge Is Divisive 105

Book II: Post-Hegelian Impasses 125

9. The Secret of the Commodity Form: Why is Marx the Inventor of
the Symptom? 127

10. Ideology Between the Dream and the Phantasy: A First Attempt
at Defining ‘Totalitarianism’ 146

11. Divine Psychosis, Political Psychosis: A Second Attempt at
Defining ‘Totalitarianism’ 156

12. Between Two Deaths: Third, and Final, Attempt at Defining
‘Totalitarianism’ 175

13. The Quilting Point of Ideology: Or Why Lacan is Not a
‘Poststructuralist’ 195

14. Naming and Contingency: Hegel and

Analytic Philosophy 209

References 230

Index 236

About the author

Slavoj Zizek is Professor at the Institute of Sociology, Ljubljana, Slovenia.