SOURCE: Callinicos, Alex. “Changing the Possible.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5133 (17 August 2001): 30.

In the following review, Callinicos observes that Žižek's dominant thematic focus in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? is “the conditions of authentic political action.”

How does Slavoj Z̆ĭZ̆ek do it? Since The Sublime Object of Ideology, his first book in English, appeared in 1989, the Slovene cultural theorist and Lacanian analyst has bombarded us with so many erudite, witty and challenging works that even his publishers must have lost count. Perhaps it is a mistake to think of these as separate books rather than chapters in a single, vast and continuing philosophical roman fleuve in which Z̆ĭZ̆ek overwhelms his readers with jokes, arguments, film criticism and political polemic. In the process, he has emerged as one of the major philosophers of the Western Left.

Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? is the latest instalment. Its ostensible...