ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at Zizek's deployment of his HegeloLacanian social ontology as a form of immanent critique of the present. It offers the author's critique of Zizek's descriptive political philosophy. The author argues that, for all the political insights that Zizek has produced, there are far-reaching limitations to his work, whose existence is indicated by his giving way to telling hesitations about his central categories, and about how they are to be applied to contemporary political phenomena. Zizek contends that his critique of capitalism directs us to the import of the economic sphere in social reproduction. If one wants to speak of 'risk', he claims, it is the market's drive to produce 'surplus value' that mobilises the universal reflexivisation that offsets any traditional certainties. Zizek's analysis of power is premised around the argument that power is always ideological, or that the decisive operations of power can be approached through an analysis of this category.
