Zizek and Heidegger

Book excerpt: Žižek and Heidegger offers a radical new interpretation of the work of Slavoj Žižek, one of the world's leading contemporary thinkers, through a study of his relationship with the work of Martin Heidegger. Thomas Brockelman argues that Žižek's oeuvre is largely a response to Heidegger's philosophy of finitude, an immanent critique of it which pulls it in the direction of revolutionary praxis. Brockelman also finds limitations in Žižek's relationship with Heidegger, specifically in his ambivalence about Heidegger's techno-phobia. Brockelman's critique of Žižek departs from this ambivalence - a fundamental tension in Žižek's work between a historicist critical theory of techno-capitalism and an anti-historicist theory of revolutionary change. In addition to clarifying what Žižek has to say about our world and about the possibility of radical change in it, Žižek and Heidegger explores the various ways in which this split at the center of his thought appears within it - in Žižek's views on history or on the relationship between the revolutionary leader and the proletariat or between the analyst and the analysand.