Pippin, Robert. “Back to Hegel?” Mediations 26.1-2 (Fall 2012-Spring 2013) 7-28.
Perhaps Zadie Smith’s trenchant summary is the best: States now “de-regulate to privatize gain and re-regulate to nationalize loss.” NYR Blog, June 2, 2012
Let us designate the basic problem that the book addresses as the ontological problem of “subjectivity”; what is it to be a thinking, knowing and also acting and interacting subject in a material world? Žižek begins by claiming that there are four main kinds of answers to such a question possible in the current “ideological-philosophical field”:
(i) scientific naturalism (brain science, Darwinism);
(ii) discursive historicism (Foucault, deconstruction);
(iii) New Age Western “Buddhism”;
(iv) some sort of transcendental finitude (culminating in Heidegger).
Žižek’s thesis is that these options miss the correct one, which he calls the idea of a “pre-transcendental gap or rupture (the Freudian name for which is the drive),” and that this framework is what actually “designates the very core of modern subjectivity.”(6-7)