Acknowledgments x
1 Introduction 1
2 The Sublime Object of Ideology 46
3 For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor 55
4 Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture 66
5 Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out 75
6 Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology 94
7 The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality 108
8 The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters 115
9 The Plague of Fantasies 125
10 The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology 136
11 The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway 146
12 The Fragile Absolute: or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? 155
13 On Belief 163
14 The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kies´lowski between Theory and Post-Theory 171
15 Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion 180
16 Welcome to the Desert of the Real 193
17 The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity 201
18 Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences 212
19 Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle 220
20 How to Read Lacan 227
21 The Parallax View 237
22 In Defense of Lost Causes 249
23 Violence 257
24 First as Tragedy, then as Farce 267
25 Living in the End Times 278
26 Conclusion 295
Further Reading 315
Index 322