Zizek returns to untangle a heady mix of fantasy and ideology. With his idiosyncratic blend of ideas from Lacan and Hegel, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has emerged as one of the most original thinkers of our time. Never missing an opportunity to recount a revealing anec-dote or joke his writing is as entertaining as it is informative. In his latest book, Zizek approaches another enormous subject with characteristic brio. The current epoch is, he claims, plagued by phantasms. There is an intensifying antagonism between the ever greater abstraction of our lives -- whether in the form of digitalization or market relations and the deluge of pseudo-concrete images which surround us. Traditional critical thought traces the connections between abstract notions and concrete social reality: but today, Zizek suggests, the correct procedure is the inverse -- to work from pseudo-concrete imagery towards the abstract. Ranging in his examples from national differences in toilet design to cybersex, and from intellectuals' responses to the Bosnian war to Robert Schumann's music, Zizek explores the relations between fantasy and ideology, the way in which fantasy animates enjoy-ment while protecting against its excesses, the associations of the notion of fetishism with fantasized seduction, and the ways in which digitalization and cyberspace affect the status of subjectivity. To the already initiated, The Plague of Fantasies will be a welcome reminder of why they enjoy Zizek's writing so much. For new readers, it will be the beginning of a long and meaningful relationship.

斯拉沃热·齐泽克，斯洛文尼亚卢布尔雅那大学社会学和哲学高级研究员，拉康传统最重要的继承人，他长期致力于沟通拉康精神分析理论与马克思主义哲学，将精神分析、主体性、意识形态和大众文化熔于一炉，形成了极为独特的学术思想和政治立场，成为20世纪90年代以来最为耀眼的国际学术明星之一，被一些学者称为黑格尔式的思想家。他曾任法国巴黎第八大学、美国明尼苏达大学、哥伦比亚大学、普林斯顿大学等许多知名高等院校的访问教授、活跃于各种哲学、精神分析和文化批评国际学术讨论会，所到之处儿乎都引起广泛的注意。詹姆逊说他“发出了一种不平常的声音，我们将在今后数年内反复聆听”。伊格尔顿评价他是欧洲近十年来最重要的思想家之一。