This book by Slavoj Žižek* was a tricky one, to put it mildly. I went into it knowing that Žižek is a deep & broad thinker & this was his first book so I assumed it would be relatively introductory - I was not prepared for the density of his arguments, his arguable overreliance on Hegelian metaphysics & Lacanian psychoanalysis, his lengthy dissections of what esoteric film references mean in terms of the symbolic phallus, etc. I could not for love nor money explain this book to you, beyond the extremely vague tentative offering that it's an exploration of the subject-object relationship & how this manifests in socio-cultural constructs. If you like a real meaty gristly challenge in your philosophical reading then you might dare to give this a go & see if you can make more sense of it than me - but honestly? This might be the densest, hardest book I've read for this blog ever - harder than Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, harder than Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety, goddamn, harder than Wittgenstein's Tractatus. And so on. Woof.
* If you're not familiar - he is probably best described as "the philosopher you would be least surprised to see eat a dropped hotdog off the ground." (after Diogenes, of course.) His book may have left me baffled but I still find him highly entertaining to watch interviews of - he tends to make much easier sense in them too.
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