For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor

Žižek, S. (1991) For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, London and New York: Verso. Presented as a sequel to The Sublime Object of Ideology, this book examines the historical change emblematized by the shift in the telling of the Rabinovitch joke from that first book. In particular, it analyses the re-emergence of militant nationalism and racism in the wake of the break-up of the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. Žižek iden- tifies the cause of this re-emergence in an eruption of enjoyment. This book also contains an extended discussion of the concept of the vanishing mediator.