SOURCE: Salih, Sabah A. Review of Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the Mis(use) of a Notion, by Slavoj Žižek. World Literature Today 76, no. 2 (spring 2002): 252.

In the following review, Salih describes Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? as Žižek's effort to rescue academic thinking from the restrictions of literary theory and cultural studies.

A few years back, Frank Lentricchia, then one of the biggest names around in Literary Theory, created quite a stir by announcing in the now defunct Lingua Franca why he had decided not to have anything to do any more with Theory. Theory, he complained, had robbed thinking of its dialectical edge, thinking in effect becoming a matter of just plain “xeroxing,” something like “Tell me your theory and I will tell you what you would say, even about books that you haven't read.” A recent (4 October 2001) London Review of Books roundtable in...