For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor by Slavoj Žižek is a dazzling interrogation of ideology, enjoyment, and the political deadlocks of modernity. In this monumental work, Žižek builds upon a provocative premise: the combination of ignorance and enjoyment is not merely incidental to ideological discourse but is foundational to its most persistent enigmas. With philosophical precision and a breadth of cultural references spanning from Hegel and Lacan to Hollywood thrillers and other films, Žižek crafts a dense, multi-layered analysis of the psychoanalytic underpinnings of our symbolic and political realities.
The book’s title echoes a key theological and psychoanalytic insight. Unlike Christianity, which absolves ignorance, psychoanalysis unmasks ignorance as a veil for enjoyment. This enjoyment, or jouissance, is not an innocent pleasure but a traumatic excess that lurks within the gaps and ruptures of symbolic systems. Žižek’s ambitious project traverses the disintegration of state socialism, the resurgence of nationalism, and the pervasive fantasies that sustain contemporary ideological apparatuses. He contends that socialist thought must embrace psychoanalytic tools to dissect these phenomena, which are often marked by irrational aggression and libidinal investments.
Žižek’s theoretical journey is as eclectic as it is rigorous. He begins by revisiting Hegel’s dialectical logic, which he recasts through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis, exploring how contradictions within ideology generate new forms of enjoyment. Žižek juxtaposes this with contemporary cultural artifacts, illustrating how ideological fantasies materialize in popular narratives. From the forced optimism of Hollywood’s classical era to the perverse fantasies underlying Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, Žižek shows how enjoyment is both revealed and censored in the cultural imagination.
The author’s analysis of ideological censorship in so-called permissive societies exemplifies his ability to uncover the counterintuitive dynamics of power. In Žižek’s reading, the prohibition of certain fantasies—whether through the Hays Code of classical Hollywood or the sanitized resolutions of modern narratives—highlights the libidinal economy underpinning social norms. This dynamic reaches its apex in Žižek’s interpretation of the obscene dimension of the superego: the unbearable injunctions of enjoyment that destabilize the subject. Drawing on Lacan, Žižek explains that the superego does not merely forbid; it imposes an excessive, enigmatic command that the subject cannot fulfill without existential disarray.
Žižek’s theoretical virtuosity lies in his ability to weave cultural examples into philosophical arguments. His discussion of Lars von Trier’s The Idiots reveals the paradox of regression in postmodern ideology: the fantasy of authentic idiocy, ostensibly liberating, exposes the obscene dimensions of bourgeois existence. Similarly, his analysis of Kieslowski’s Decalogue 4 illustrates how the paternal prohibition functions as a void around which perverse fantasies revolve. These examples ground Žižek’s claim that the symbolic order, far from repressing enjoyment, thrives on its disavowal.
The book’s political implications are as unsettling as they are incisive. Žižek critiques the passive nihilism of Western liberalism, where life’s pleasures are sacralized, and contrasts it with the active nihilism of fundamentalist ideologies, which embrace self-destruction for a higher Cause. He situates this antagonism within the Hegelian dialectic of Master and Servant, suggesting that Western consumerist hedonism paradoxically occupies the servile position, clinging to life while being haunted by the specter of radical sacrifice.
For Žižek the concept of the Real is Lacan’s term for that which resists symbolization and disrupts reality’s coherence. Žižek portrays the Real as the traumatic kernel of enjoyment, manifesting in phenomena as diverse as the self-destructive passion of Stalinist purges and the senseless violence of late modernity. He emphasizes that attempts to purify reality, whether through political terror or aesthetic minimalism, ultimately confront the Real as an irreducible remainder.
In his treatment of political universality, Žižek aligns himself with the radical democratic tradition while critiquing its limitations. He argues that genuine politics arises from the “part with no part,” the excluded element that asserts itself as representative of universal humanity. Yet Žižek cautions against the fetishization of democratic formalism, insisting that every emancipatory project must reckon with the antagonisms embedded in the social fabric. This tension between universality and exclusion underpins his exploration of the politics of subtraction, a strategy that begins from the void and constructs minimal differences as sites of resistance.
Žižek does not shy away from the darkest recesses of human enjoyment. His examination of cruelty, whether in the form of sadistic rituals or the pathological obsession with cleanliness, exposes the libidinal undercurrents of political and cultural life. He connects these phenomena to the pathological persistence of traumatic fantasies, arguing that the failure to symbolically mediate enjoyment results in the proliferation of obscene violence.
For They Know Not What They Do culminates in a reflection on the fragility of symbolic systems and the ever-present risk of disintegration. Žižek’s reflections on the spectral persistence of ideological fantasies—whether in Stalinist purges, the erotic excesses of Sade, or the banal violence of contemporary life—underscore his diagnosis of modernity as a site of unresolved tensions. Yet he also points to the creative possibilities of sublimation, which can elevate the traumatic void of the Real into new symbolic configurations.
Slavoj Žižek’s masterpiece is a theoretical tour de force, demanding and rewarding in equal measure. It challenges its readers to confront the uncomfortable truths of their ideological investments and to reimagine the political terrain in the face of enjoyment’s unruly force. Far from offering a consoling vision of emancipation, Žižek compels us to grapple with the contradictions of our desires and the uncanny logics that govern our shared fantasies. This is philosophy at its most exhilarating, unflinching, and indispensable.
Simon Gros 
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