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Contemporary Cultural Theory

universalist rationalism’ (p. 409). It is difficult to avoid the con-
clusion that for Habermas the disciplinary habits of sociology
tend to pose a recurrent threat to the claims of particularity.
Whether or not Honneth’s interests in recognition will provide
an adequate solution to this problem remains to be seen. The
characteristically abstract quality of German critical theory serves
to remind us, however, that cultural studies emerged from a
distinctively British intellectual environment barely touched by
sociology. This might not be quite the burden it has sometimes
seemed.

ZIZEK: CRITICAL THEORY GOES LACANIAN

Insofar as critical theory can be defined in terms of its com-
bination of post-Marxist social critique and post-Freudian
psychoanalysis, then Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Insti-
tute of Social Studies in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has at least as much
claim to the title as Habermas or Honneth. Zizek’s work has
combined a version of Marxism derived in the first instance from
the philosopher Louis Althusser with a version of psychoanaly-
sis strongly influenced by Jacques Lacan. Both Althusser and
Lacan were loosely (post-) structuralist thinkers (we will consider
their work in greater detail in the next chapter). But if Zizek’s
theoretical sources were indeed (post-) structuralist, his object has
remained social critique of a peculiarly controversial kind. Zizek
is an immensely prolific writer, whose work has ranged across a
wide variety of cultural phenomena, moving with apparent ease
between philosophy and politics, literature and film, in an often
startling blend of Hegel and Hitchcock, Lacan and Lukács (Zizek,
1992; Zizek, 2001). Quite apart from its applications to clinical
practice, Zizek has brought Lacanian psychoanalysis to bear quite
centrally on philosophy and politics, especially as these are under-
stood from the perspective of ideology critique.
In two early works, The Sublime Object of Ideology and Looking
Awry, Zizek had established, by turn, a Lacanian reconstruction
of the theory of ideology from Marx to Althusser (Zizek, 1989)
and a critical account of the politics of Lacan’s return to Freud

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