This book contends, with unusual precision, that Žižek’s corpus becomes intelligible when read as a sustained, immanent confrontation with Heidegger’s finitude and its afterlife in the “question concerning technology,” and that the motor of Žižek’s oeuvre is a structurally unresolved tension between a historicist diagnosis of techno-capitalist ideology and a trans-historic theory of the revolutionary act. Its distinctive contribution lies in showing how this tension both organizes and destabilizes Žižek’s positions across topics—subjectivity, ideology, technology, violence, utopia, theology, analysis—by tracking a composition sequence that begins in Heidegger, is slowed and refracted through modernity’s perspectival apparatus and perverse culture, and culminates in a divided theory of history whose very split is the book’s outer frame and inner argumentative engine. The result is an exacting, problem-laden description of Žižek’s project through the Heidean lens it resists and reappropriates.
Brockelman frames his investigation by refusing to begin from style—that convenient way to both celebrate and dismiss Žižek—but by reconstructing the stakes of finitude from the early Heidegger through Žižek’s own methodological practice. The preface establishes the scene: where piety once protected Heidegger from criticism, a similar fixation on Žižek’s voice supplies a prophylaxis against reading him philosophically; the book proposes, instead, a single narrative through which Žižek’s trans-disciplinary excursions take on unity without pretending to system. The wager is that Žižek is a philosopher in the hardest, most unfashionable sense, and that his truth-claims should be assessed as such. This framing already anticipates the book’s final diagnosis: that Žižek’s thought is animated by a constitutive split between two addressees, two temporalities, and two modes of efficacy, a split that cannot be dissolved without losing what makes it powerful.
The opening analytical move proceeds by reconstructing Žižek’s Heidegger. Finitude is the hinge: Žižek credits the early Heidegger with a decisive ontological completion of an apparently epistemological limit—there is no Archimedean Other, no trans-historical stance from which being is seen as a whole—and he reads anticipatory resoluteness as a commitment to the incompletion of reality rather than as a provisional morality for a doubter. On this reading, the abyssal decision does not “make do” with ignorance; it positively affirms that the world is structurally without measure, that there is no external totality, that truth is disclosure with an ineradicable blind spot. Brockelman’s point is that Žižek follows this insight where Heidegger hesitates: he takes the violence of interpretation not as an unfortunate necessity but as the ethos of finite thinking, a gesture that will later authorize his “buggery” of Deleuze and his polemical fidelity to Hegel. The ethical coloration matters: humor, publicness, and a certain shamelessness replace existential pathos, marking the divergence between Swabian solitude and dialectical comedy.
This sets the first arc of composition. Part I shows Žižek appropriating Being and Time’s finitude while repudiating what Brockelman calls Heidegger’s “retreat”: the reinscription of a humble openness that quietly returns the totality of meaning (and, later, counsels Gelassenheit). The analytic crux is truth as a-lētheia: Žižek radicalizes the “un-” of unconcealment so that concealment is not merely our failure to attend, but the immanent blind point from which disclosure happens at all. Hence the terrain on which Heidegger and Žižek part: where the Heideggerian hermeneut admits a “Same” that guarantees dialogue with the classic text, Žižek keeps faith with finitude by refusing any Last Judgment; his “misreadings” are the performance of that refusal. Brockelman’s reconstruction is exact in showing how this difference of hermeneutic ethos will ramify once technology enters the scene.
The book’s decisive middle movement is a double displacement around technology. First, Brockelman painstakingly gathers Žižek’s scattered polemics against the Ge-stell pathos—mockery of “Danger? What danger?”; delight in the scandal of VR affect “more real than reality”; the cloning thought experiment that forces the subject to confront its own gap in the very scene of total objectification. These are not trivial inversions; they secure a thesis about finitude: precisely the technological prospect that appears to threaten humanity confronts us with the most radical dimension of our finitude by dramatizing the impossibility of any closure that would domesticate the subject’s cut. Technology, then, is the wrong question as answer—a false path when it sanctifies “nature” as a harmonious whole violated by human will—but it is the right question as symptom: a privileged site where the mask of scientific reality slips, where we encounter both the liberating passage through metaphysical closure and a genuine crisis at the level of appearance. Brockelman shows that Žižek’s own texts license both determinations and that the tension is not ancillary but constitutive.
Second, Brockelman reframes the “question concerning technology” as a question concerning techno-capitalism. That single hyphen relocates the problem from ontology to social formation without abandoning the earlier ontological gain. Against the anti-modernism shared by Heidegger and segments of postwar critical theory, Žižek’s critique presupposes modern finitude and redeploys it through a Lacanian Marxism recalibrated for the present. The crisis is real, but its index is not a desecration of nature by an alien enframing; it is the form of subjectivity and worldhood produced when the transcendent guarantee collapses and the commodity-form, digital mediation, and cynical reason organize social reality. If the technological imaginary gives us a false picture of “danger,” it nonetheless names the privileged surface where the deeper contradictions of techno-capitalism become thinkable. This is the book’s most valuable reorientation, and Brockelman marks it as the hinge that turns Part I’s immanent critique of Heidegger into Part II’s slow anatomy of modernity.
To “slow Žižek down,” Brockelman undertakes three exacting demonstrations. First, he reconstructs the modern subject as a perspectival achievement—Cartesian excess purified of metaphysical residues—by way of “fundamental fantasy” and the “master signifier.” The aim is neither to rehabilitate a sovereign ego nor to redeem post-structural dispersion; it is to show that the subject is the non-substantial cut that both installs and escapes the representational regime, so that reality is continually re-instituted by acts that can never be fully represented within it. This recovers the revolutionary potential of modernity and breaks the postwar link between critique and anti-subjectivism that had hamstrung earlier critical theories; it also fixes the point from which Žižek’s cultural diagnoses derive their reach.
Second, Brockelman elaborates ideology today. Taking distance from “false consciousness,” he restates Žižek’s maxim that belief resides in what we do, especially where we “disavow” overt belief. Hence a culture of conformist cynicism: we all know the game, yet we play it with a vengeance; the Christmas tree without Santa discloses the form of second-order belief that governs “lifestyle” societies. The deeper claim is that such disavowed belief de-materializes the social precisely by hardening practices, and that “culture” names this practical belief’s seemingly benign surface. From there, Brockelman delineates the perverse individual—post-Oedipal, frenetic, jealous of personal space—whose transgressions secure the rules they seemingly violate; he tallies the scene’s violence and the fantasies through which it is metabolized; and he isolates “over-identification” as a logic where the critic paralyzes power by enacting its obscene underside. The virtue of the analysis is its concreteness; the vice it exposes is a structural unclarity about the addressee and efficacy of critique.
Third, he reads Žižek’s rescue of dialectical materialism. Against the “dumb theory” that turns matter into a crypto-ideal “everything,” Žižek affirms a negative axiom—there is nothing which is not matter—precisely to open space for immaterial phenomena without hypostatizing a beyond. That turn both reanchors critique and clarifies why techno-capitalism becomes the privileged name of our formation: because it is the scene in which the non-existence of the Other is socially organized through the commodity, code, and institutional fantasies that hold together a world after metaphysical closure. Brockelman’s exposition shows how this ontological minimalism grounds the book’s sociological reach without importing external authorities.
Having stabilized this middle stratum, Part III turns to the most delicate problem: the split subject of history. Brockelman follows Žižek into the parallax where revolution is at once impossible (as a form that cannot be presented within the coordinates it would overturn) and necessary (as an act that retroactively invents the very forms in which it will be recognized). The labor of the act is here opposed to any utopian imaginary; genuine revolution appears as a subtractive event that compels the reinvention of dreaming itself, while the criteria by which we distinguish authentic change from its simulacra must be immanent to the act’s consequences. Yet Žižek also supplies, and must supply, such criteria in advance; and he sometimes figures the critic as proletarian actor and sometimes as philosopher-interpreter. Brockelman does not resolve this tension; he insists on it as the engine of Žižek’s best work and as the limit of its systematicity. The “revolutionary parallax” names precisely the incommensurability of two perspectives—evental presentness and the historicity of labor—between which no common ground is available, and fidelity to both is the price of not reducing politics to either policy or pure voluntarism.
The book’s composition sequence thus passes through four interlocked displacements whose transitions are themselves the content. First, an immanent appropriation of Heidegger’s finitude against Heidegger’s own pious recoil; second, a polemical but philosophical recoding of the technology problematic as the privileged symptom of finitude under modern science; third, a deceleration into the subject and its fantasies, producing an anatomy of ideology under techno-capitalism; fourth, a passage into the paradoxes of revolutionary temporality, where the very split that earlier chapters had registered becomes the explicit form of historical thinking. Each passage both continues and displaces what precedes, and Brockelman is careful to mark the thresholds. The “break-up” with Heidegger is exemplary: Žižek is right to see technology as the right question (since it marks where finitude bites) and equally right to deny Heidegger’s answer; but in making technology the site of appearance, Žižek inherits the reality of a crisis that his own anti-pietism cannot wish away. The divorce is thus successful and tragic, and its ambiguity supplies the matrix for the book’s subsequent layers.
Brockelman’s method is internally consistent with his thesis. He reads Žižek philosophically—that is, by staking theses and pursuing their consequences, refusing both the safety of topical “introductions” and the comfort of stylistic containment. At crucial junctures he notes where Žižek’s doing exceeds his saying: the insistence that there can be no dialogue coexists with practiced elucidations that presuppose a “Same” of sense; the scorn for the utopian imaginary coexists with rigorous criteria for recognizing utopia’s evental trace; the call to over-identify coexists with representations of over-identification that risk displacing act into image. Rather than treat these as inconsistencies to be ironed out, he exhibits them as the parallax through which Žižek thinks and by which his texts work on their readers—an effect he thematizes in passing as a kind of transference. In that sense, the book’s outer framing—its refusal of discipline-policing, its philosophical risk, its slow pacing and sudden accelerations—mirrors the split it attributes to its subject.
Two sites display especially well the book’s discipline of problems, claims, evidence, and method. One is the excursus on virtual affect. By insisting that direct neural stimulation can deliver an intensity “more real than reality,” Brockelman does not indulge sci-fi enthusiasm; he extracts a conceptual point about the Real that forces a confrontation with the constitutive gap of subjectivity. The “opportunity” concealed in the “danger” of total objectification thereby becomes legible: technology can stage the inadequacy of any world’s closure to the subject’s cut, and in doing so it can de-ideologize precisely by over-saturating representation. This is not a celebration of gadgetry; it is a targeted use of an example to warrant a claim about finitude’s ethical horizon.
The other is the passage through Engels and back to materialism. The negative axiom—there is nothing which is not matter—is not an ontic thesis about particles but a way to block the re-entry of an Other disguised as “everything.” Brockelman uses that axiom to secure the book’s constraint: if there is no external measure, critique must be immanent to practices, fantasies, and acts; and if technology’s “danger” binds us to a mechanized world without exit, the only exits are those acts that change the coordinates in which “exit” has sense. This is why the book labors so intensively over belief in action and the perverse subject: because only there can one test whether the conditions that hold a world together have been touched.
What, then, does the book finally show? That Žižek’s immanent critique of Heidegger’s finitude pushes that finitude toward praxis and obliges us to recode the technology problematic as a question of techno-capitalist form; that Žižek’s best conceptual tools—perspective, fantasy, over-identification, dialectical materialism—yield determinate insights into contemporary subjectivity but also open a standing ambiguity about address and efficacy; and that this ambiguity is not a flaw to be mended but the shape of a thought faithful to modern finitude and revolutionary possibility at once. If Heidegger’s later piety offered a false peace and much postmodernism offered a false modesty, Žižek’s divided rigor offers a way to state clearly and act dangerously without inventing an Other to guarantee us. The cost is a permanent parallax between knowledge and act, image and event, analysis and revolution. Brockelman does not promise a resolution. He clarifies the structure, shows where it bites, and indicates why any closure would betray what is at stake.
The clarification is therefore double. It clarifies Žižek on our world—how cynical culture, perverse individuality, and the soft coercions of “lifestyle” hold together an order without transcendence—and it clarifies the possibility of radical change—how acts that reinvent dreaming emerge from within that order and cannot be planned in its terms, yet can be recognized by the fissures they open and the labors they demand. In both registers, the book’s discipline is to keep the argument tethered to sources and to move only as far as the warrants allow. The concluding virtue is sobriety without resignation: a philosophical register that holds fast to finitude, refuses nostalgia, and insists that the only honest theory of revolution is one that accepts its own parallax as condition rather than failure.
If one were to compress the arc into a final sentence, it would be this: Žižek and Heidegger is a rigorously composed, self-aware demonstration that the most demanding way to read Žižek is to stage, sustain, and think through the tension that both binds him to Heidegger and breaks him from Heidegger, because only there—in the split between a historicist critique of techno-capitalism and the anti-historicist theory of the act—does his philosophy do what it says and say what it does.
Simon Gros 
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