Review: Slavoj Žižek’s “Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed”

“Combining inanity with compelling anecdote, idiocy with sensible instruction, Žižek addresses himself to the ‘mess we’re in.'”

Slavoj Žižek’s new book Surplus-Enjoyment is subtitled, A Guide for the Non-Perplexed. It is, presumably, a small audience at which it is aimed, since Žižek’s new offering is nothing if not perplexing. On the first three pages alone, Žižek is logically inconsistent. He jumps from one thought to another, incoherently; he drops names, with little benefit to the argument; and he fails to furnish evidence for his claims.

Žižek, notoriously, is a Lacanian. For the uninitiated, the nomenclature of Lacanian psychoanalysis is inherently perplexing. And one suspects that the Slovenian philosopher hides all manner of elisions and mistakes behind the technical language he deploys in the name of the “Master.” What is most perplexing, however, is that Žižek has an audience at all.

“[A]nti-Semitism is a displaced-mystified form of anti-capitalism, the struggle against vaccination is also a displaced-mystified form of class struggle against those in power,” he writes on page two, pouring out shamelessly reductive analysis, while echoing Marx at his most anti-Semitic. Žižek begins as he means to go on: erratic, offensive, and facile. In short, the theoretical verve for which the philosopher is renowned is not, for the most part, apparent here.

What, then, if anything, redeems the Slovenian ironist and provocateur? Is Žižek merely a charlatan as others, spanning the political spectrum, from Left to Right—Noam Chomsky, John Gray, Roger Scruton, to name only the big beasts—have suggested? Or does Žižek merit perseverance?

Žižek, to be sure, is dreadfully puerile. An opportunity nominally to shock—to cite Stalin, to make a sexist remark, or to knock “PC” culture, which he conflates with wokeism—is never missed. Žižek, though, variously described as the “Elvis of cultural theory” and “Master of the counterintuitive observation,” is, it is true, not without insight. The reader is almost invariably condemned to wade through an excess of sentences and paragraphs, some of which make little sense, but the pith of what Žižek has to say is often interesting.