Richard King in The Australian:
According to this popular view, Zizek’s philosophy is a Trojan horse, a gaudy offering to which the threat of violence is, as he might say himself, ‘‘immanent’’.
Conceived in this way, the Zizek experience is like a scene from a Batman movie, incidentally one of his favourite film franchises. First, we have the crowd-pleasing spectacle, a Cirque du Zizek of highwire philosophy and ideological contortionism — of political theory, psychoanalysis, dirty jokes and Hollywood schlock.
But the scene soon turns to one of horror. Spilling out of a little red car, a bunch of goons made up to look like Hegel, Marx and Jacques Lacan run in all directions at once and spray the audience with noxious gas. At which point the real Zizek steps forward — the apologist for totalitarianism and admirer of Lenin, Stalin and Mao, whose celebration of revolutionary mayhem — ‘‘Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent’’ — echoes around the big top.
My only problem with this characterisation is that, in one sense at least, it has Zizek backwards.
More here.