The Puppet and the Dwarf by Slavoj Zizek

The Puppet and the Dwarf by Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek has been called an academic rock star and the wild man of theory; his writing mixes astonishing erudition and references to pop culture in order to dissect current intellectual pieties. In The Puppet and the Dwarf he offers a close reading of today's religious constellation from the viewpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis. He critically confronts both predominant versions of today's spirituality--New Age gnosticism and deconstructionist-Levinasian Judaism--and then tries to redeem the materialist kernel of Christianity. His reading of Christianity is explicitly political, discerning in the Pauline community of believers the first version of a revolutionary collective. Since today even advocates of Enlightenment like Jurgen Habermas acknowledge that a religious vision is needed to ground our ethical and political stance in a postsecular age, this book--with a stance that is clearly materialist and at the same time indebted to the core of the Christian legacy--is certain to stir controversy.

Slavoj Žižek is a political activist, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and Hegelian philosopher. He is the Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University and the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. He is the author of several publications on dialectical materialism, ideology critique, and art, including Melville House's Event and Trouble In Paradise.