ABSTRACT
This chapter explores questions that are raised by Zizek's challenge to the contemporary 'anti-Cartesian' cultural hegemony in The Ticklish Subject. It shows that it is necessary to read Zizek's work as a response to the 'post-structuralists' who attained such a theoretical hegemony in the 1980s in much of Anglo-American 'cultural studies' or 'theory', as well as our courses on 'continental philosophy'. The chapter examines in some detail Zizek's 'destruktion' of what Jurgen Habermas has called 'the philosophical discourse of modernity'. Through a reading of Descartes, Kant, and then Hegel, Zizek claims to uncover 'the excessive, unacknowledged kernel of the cogito, which is far from the pacifying image of the transparent Self'. Zizek is aware of how close his position on the subject sometimes appears to that of Kojeve and Sartre. In Metastases of Enjoyment, however, he asserts that there is a whole dimension to his Lacanian position that is passed over by their 'quasi-Hegelian' positions.
