On Žižek’s book The Ticklish Subject

The Ticklish Subject is one of Žižek’s most challenging and substantial books; it is a nuanced elaboration of Žižek’s Hegelian-Lacanian understanding of subjectivity. The book traces through the history of modern philosophy the disavowed truth of subjectivity, or, to put it in extremely simplified terms: the hidden functioning of the unconscious. Žižek brings together--with extraordinary subtlety--Hegelian dialectics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and a Leftist critique of capitalism. But what, or rather who, is the ticklish subject? Žižek’s answer is that you are. The individual human being, in both its purely personal dimension and its transcendent universality, is the subject under investigation in this text. One of the primary achievements of The Ticklish Subject is to show that even the most intimate personal experience involves a potentially emancipatory universal dimension.