I’ve long felt that Zizek’s relationship to Heidegger was under-explored — in fact, it seems to me that such a claim is a good token gesture for anyone to make while discussing Zizek (somewhat parallel to claiming you like “the Schelling book” the best). It appears that it is now officially explored, in the extremely expensive form of Thomas Brockelman’s Zizek and Heidegger: The Question Concerning Techno-Capitalism. Perhaps academic librarians will take sufficient note of this volume that Continuum will eventually put out a paper back — until then, fire up your Interlibrary Loan forms, all ye Zizeko-Heideggerians!
6 thoughts on “Zizek and Heidegger”
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An und für sich 
Michael Lewis, in his Heidegger beyond Deconstruction: On Nature, has a nice discussion of the two in relation to Nature. It is somewhat dated by Zizek’s infinite speed of publishing though.
I think that Zizek has something about how Flaubert can only be understood retrospectively, because he was trying to do film by means of the novel — similarly, perhaps Zizek’s writing is anticipating not (as he has somewhere said) the CD-ROM, but rather the blog.
Adam: “similarly, perhaps Zizek’s writing is anticipating not (as he has somewhere said) the CD-ROM, but rather the blog.”
Kvond: This is hilarious.
As someone who has more than once posted ill-informed opinions on Zizek I think there is a certain distance that Heideggerians tend to put between themselves and what they see as the Zizekian culture. This is strange in my opinion since Zizek tends to talk the German philosophical tradition as seriously as Heidegger did. It is difficult to move from classical phemomenology into reading Zizek. There are no jokes in Heidegger. Even his discussion of technology seems slightly archaic (depite his work on technology covering the 50s-70s).
I can’t imagine how one would go about exploring their relationship. From a traditional Heideggerian perspective Zizek tends to employ Heidegger in a pretty functional sense – often to reveal a much more important point related to Hegel (or a dismissive remark on Derrida). Anyway thanks for the tip!
Somewhere in ‘The Ticklish Subject’ Zizek mentions that his earliest scholarship was all Heidegger all the time, a work on Heidegger and Language being his first publication.