Gjesteredaktør Slavoj Zizek

One of the best philosophical books in the last decades, a detailed Nietzschean critique of Hegel. I disagree with Lebrun, but I love to disagree with him, and I learned a lot from him.

I am very partial here, Alenka is my good friend and fellow Lacanian, but the achievement of her short book is extraordinary – a Hegelian theory of comedy. You must be a Hegelian to understand the blunders of President Bush!

Apart from being a great systematic philosopher, Badiou revived the French art of philosophical interventions in politics. The devastating analysis of our capitalist-parliamentary imbroglio culminates in a plea for the actuality of Communism.

The tragic death of Balmes deprived us from what promised to be the greatest commentator of Lacan. Balmes enables us to see why Lacan was not just an analyst, but a philosopher of the first rang.

A detailed exploration of the new form of pathology which will be our fate in the XXIst century: the post-traumatic subject, a living dead, a shell deprived of its life-substance.

I don’t trust artists, especially not poets – Plato was right when he proposed to exile them from the city. But Platonov is an exception: this short novel of a functionary sent to “civilize” a small group of outcasts in the southern Russia, which takes place in 1935, achieves the impossible: it unites Socialist Realism with a critique of Stalinism stronger than all dissidence.

Again, I am partial, here, Dolar is my friend and Lacanian colleague, but his book on voice is the best Lacanian monography known to me, a detailed analysis of voice in its ontological, political, musical and psychoanalytic dimensions.

Unbelievable but true: a book on Stalin which basically defends him, by the nestor of Italian Marxists. I don't agree with him, but I certainly find the book provoking - I couldn't put it down!