Abstract

The present paper investigates what would constitute a strictly Žižekian problem – that is, a problem which is born out of the inclusion of Žižek, who is himself a Lacanian, into the Lacanian field.This properly Hegelian totality brings to the fore a productive, but profound contradiction in the reception of the Lacanian teaching, best exemplified by the comparison of Žižek and Jean-Claude Milner and their different diagnoses of the political limits of psychoanalysis. Expounding the relation between the two different positions and their respective readings of Lacan’s institutional and conceptual inventions of the late 60’s, the paper argues that Žižek’s conceptual framework is neither reducible to the Lacanian orthodoxy, nor does it constitute an altogether different field - a position we develop through a comparison of Lacan’s famous reference to the vase and Žižek’s rather infamous ideological analysis of toilets