SOURCE: Hook, Derek. Review of On Belief, Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917, and Welcome to the Desert of the Real, by Slavoj Žižek. Theoria, no. 101 (June 2003): 148-52.

In the following review, Hook discusses several of Žižek's recent publications—including On Belief, Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917, and Welcome to the Desert of the Real—noting that all three texts explore similar subject material.

In three titles, published over a short period of time, Slavoj Žižek has spread out the arguments and concerns of a single book, not to mention a series of similar examples and, in fact, similar tracts of text. One wonders whether this is the first sign of the dissipation of Žižek's intellectual aura, an indication, through repetition and overlap, that the popular theorist has started spreading himself too thin. There are a series...