Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp, Eds. The Truth of Zizek

Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp, eds. The Truth of Zizek. New York: Continuum 2007. Pp. 276. US$120.00 (cloth ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-9060-5); US$29.95 (paper ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-9061-2). From Simon Critchley's gratuitous reference to 'fist-fucking' in the first sentence of his Foreword on, this is a depressing, dispiriting volume. As Critchley's reference indicates, the entire aim of the collection seems to be to vulgarise, desublimate, in the old parlance demystify, the work, and indeed the person, of Slavoj Zizek. The 'truth' of Zizek is understood to correspond with some dark secret, vice or even intellectual fraud he has managed to pull off. Essay after essay accuses him not merely of the usual misreading of others' texts or misunderstanding of their arguments, but of a kind of deceit or deception in using his celebrity status to get books published that do not demonstrate 'even a minimal degree of authority on the subjects they pronounce upon' (62).