Kirsch, Adam. "The Deadly Jester." THE NEW REPUBLIC December 3, 2008.

Update: Zizek's response: "Disputations: Who are You Calling Anti-Semitic?" The New Republic January 7, 2009:

I am grateful to Mr. Kirsch for the time and effort he put into running over so many of my books in order to find incriminating passages that would support his thesis on my anti-Semitic Fascism-Communism. Perhaps, however, it would have been better for him to stick to just one or two books and read them with a simple unprejudiced attention - in this way, he would have been able to avoid many unfortunate misreadings. . . . (the rest is here: http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=c6570f94-f4b8-4b2a-b3f5-6adefe8d15ca)

Kirsch's response to Zizek's response: "Disputations: Still the Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West" The New Republic January 7, 2009:

I am happy to hear that some of Slavoj Zizek's best friends are Jews--though I wonder if any of them have evinced discomfort at remarks like the one I quoted: "Typical Jews! Even in the worst gulag, the moment they are given a minimum of freedom and space for maneuver, they start trading--in human blood!" Or the milder, but perhaps still more bizarre, observation in The Fragile Absolute: "As Jewish children put it when they play gently aggressive games: 'Please, bite me, but not too hard...'". (How many Jewish children at play has Zizek observed? Does he believe that all Jewish children everywhere play the same biting game?) Or when he threatens, in In Defense of Lost Causes, apropos of the "obscene pact between anti-Semitic Christian fundamentalists and aggressive Zionists," that "the Jewish people will pay dearly for such pacts with the devil"? . . . (read the rest here: http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=45ff5561-12d0-4a56-b723-f68819169f92)

Original Post: December 12, 2008. Zizek, Slavoj. Violence: Big Ideas/Small Books. London: Picador, 2008. Zizek, Slavoj. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso, 2007. The curious thing about the Zizek phenomenon is that the louder he applauds violence and terror -- especially the terror of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, whose "lost causes" Zizek takes up in another new book, In Defense of Lost Causes -- the more indulgently he is received by the academic left, which has elevated him into a celebrity and the center of a cult. A glance at the blurbs on his books provides a vivid illustration of the power of repressive tolerance. In Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Zizek claims, "Better the worst Stalinist terror than the most liberal capitalist democracy"; but on the back cover of the book we are told that Zizek is "a stimulating writer" who "will entertain and offend, but never bore." In The Fragile Absolute, he writes that "the way to fight ethnic hatred effectively is not through its immediate counterpart, ethnic tolerance; on the contrary, what we need is even more hatred, but proper political hatred"; but this is an example of his "typical brio and boldness." And In Defense of Lost Causes, where Zizek remarks that "Heidegger is 'great' not in spite of, but because of his Nazi engagement," and that "crazy, tasteless even, as it may sound, the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough, that his violence was not 'essential' enough"; but this book, its publisher informs us, is "a witty, adrenalin fueled manifesto for universal values." . . . Read the rest here: http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=097a31f3-c440-4b10-8894-14197d7a6eef.