ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critical engagement with Slavoj Zizek's concept of the subject and an argument that his attempts to support it are obscurantist and incoherent. In order to provide a background against which the Zizek Effect will stand out clearly, it is perhaps useful to outline a few basic principles and distinctions necessary for a coherent, realist theory of the Lacanian subject. A New Beginning for progressive psychoanalytic social theory: avoid conflating the psychoanalytic and epistemological paradoxes and reject the seduction of the Zizek Effect—the illusion that the subjective and objective perspectives are merely two sides of a Moebius strip joined by a Lacanian twist. Zizek turns from a Lacanian theory of the subject toward a Lacanian mysticism of the subject, from a subject about which something can be known to a sublime Subject that can never be an object of any knowledge.
