Revolution at the Gates

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an aggressive political intervention...and lenin's not bad either - Rated
An odd one, this. You get a selection of letters, articles and pamphlets detailing the course of events between february and october 1917 (contrary to an earlier review, plenty of context is given via footnotes and a more 'on-topic' intro from Zizek than we are accustomed to - coming at it from a more or less virginal perspective I finished Lenin's part with a vague idea of who did what to whom in this complicated period). and then you get a novella-length extended essay from Zizek on Leninism and such.

This was my first Zizek experience - nay, the first bit of 'cultural theory' i came across - and for those coming at it from that sort of perspective, i suppose the best testimonial i can give is that it really did hook me and may well have changed the entire course of my life (although i doubt many people will share that particular experience).

He is often accused of favouring style over substance. This is unfair - there's plenty of substance here, but you have to read the bloody thing ten times before the style stops wowing you off your feet. He moves from anecdote to anecdote, has a pop at seemingly every figure in leftist academia, mounts a Lacanian assault on multiculturalism and has apparently watched every film in history. To give an example - in one chapter, entitled "Did Lenin Love His Neighbour?", you will learn about the socially adhesive effects of obscene racist jokes, why the ideal recipient of Liberal love is a corpse and most importantly, how Lacan accounts for Cindy Crawford being more attractive to more people than Claudia Schiffer; however, you will be left somewhat baffled as to what it all has to do with Lenin.

this bravura should not be confused with populism - this is no 'Lacan for dummies' thing, and Zizek is unafraid to pile on the jargon in the assumption that you already know basically what it means. Furthermore, many ideas here appear, and are better developed, in other parts of his estimably proportioned ouevre. However, for a largely intoxicating romp through the state of the world today with a French psychoanalyst and a rather bemused Vladimir Il'ich for company, this is hard to beat.

Lenin will be turning in his mausoleum - Rated
Zizek has been enthusiastically associating himself with Lenin for some time, although the fit between Zizek's highly psychology-centred Lacanianism and Lenin's sometimes economistic Marxism is tentative to say the least. The Lenin texts in this book are mostly already widely available, and the choice of material - especially the exclusion of texts from before and after 1917, meaning that key works such as "Imperialism" and "What is to be Done?" are absent - is somewhat eccentric.

There is more of Zizek in this book than of Lenin, and Zizek's introduction and afterword (totalling around 150 pages) fill in the context which is left blank by the temporal void in which the Lenin texts are presented. Unfortunately, the context Zizek provides is highly skewed, consising mainly of an attempt to articulate Lenin with his concept of the Act (a nihilistic gesture of symbolic self-destruction - "beating oneself up", in one explication - which forms the core of Zizek's political theory). For this reason, the book should be read with caution, and readers interested in Lenin's ideas should be careful with anything they get from Zizek until they've checked it with other sources. Indeed, in my view the main appeal of this book is likely to be for existing readers of Zizek, especially those interested in his flirtation with Marxism.