Is this worth it? Considering reading this or First as Tragedy then as Farce

tldr
you're definitely an idiot

This.

Just pirate a .pdf and see if the book has what interests you and if not try another one. For example The Ticklish subject has some stuff on Lacanian jouissance that Zizek doesn't discuss in any of his talks (and I've heard them all while playing vidya).

Accordig to him as he declared in the documentary "Zizek!", his best books are: The sublime object of ideology, the tickilsh subject, the one I always forget and The parallax view (the current book he was preparing at that time).

I would read only those and maybe just one or two he published after that if you are really interested on him (Less than nothing and the other one about dialectical materialism).

The rest of his books are just publishing house orders for commercial purpose. He just repeats what he always says.

To me he's more a hack than a serious philosopher. He ignores completely the Soviet philosophy and cannot talk properly about materialism.

>the one I always forget
Absolute Recoil probably, i started it once, it was cool but it read like a bunch of unconnected essays and i got bored at some point

>To me he's more a hack than a serious philosopher. He ignores completely the Soviet philosophy and cannot talk properly about materialism.
i think he is smart and has very good insights, but he can't develop shit, and his opinions are always assumptions he takes instead of anything that follows from his ideas

like he will develop an idea that has nothing to do with communism, but they he will add some grandstanding sentences like "we should remain true communists", "the agents of true change", "the october revolution was a true event", or similar shit to keep the communist flavor through his work when the rest of it is completely unrelated to it

I've also listened to almost all his lectures for some reason, and it really is remarkable how similar they are. You get the same 5 jokes, a bunch of Lacan bullshit, and then the sound of a standing ovation. The combination of the sheer derivativeness of his work, his autoplagiarism, funny accent, and wild popularity always puzzle and amuse me and I simply can't stop tuning into the goofiness.

he benefits a lot from being a friendly crazy guy from a shitty country in the balkans, half the shit he says wouldn't roll in those crowds if said by a guy who grew up here and didn't have a funny accent

i’d have him sign a copy of Discipline and Punish

He does repeat the same few talking points over and over, but I thought it was just because he makes cash off of public speaking and is lazy. He does that in his books as well? Can you post an example?

he said in a talk that he unironically loved "Geschlecht und Charakter", that would be a fun one to have him sign

I read Looking Awry and I barely understood shit. Then I read Violence and I mostly understood it except the very last chapter where he pulled some dude's shit that I've never read before.

What are some other more approachable Zizek books?

is that shit written in english?

Can sniff man seriously have anything new or insightful to say?

Zizek is the logical outcome within Western Marxism of the encounter with French poststructuralism. The latter can be identified more easily by tropological figures of argument than by coherent concepts. Two examples. First a Foucault, for whom the linear achievement of bourgeois society takes the form of a “negative dialectic,” negative in the ethical sense. What appears on the horizon as a gain for the humanizing mission of the French revolution turns out, on Foucault’s analyses, to be a bastardization of that mission and the tightening of the grip of power over its human-ized subjects. Here the emphasis is less on any actual content of the analysis than on its figuration: the gradual but dramatic swapping of the signs is a major motif in Foucault which he can always and everywhere demonstrate. Derrida can be read in a similar fashion: what is important about all the endless deconstructions has less to do with any critique of metaphysics they pretend to operate (a critique Derrida frequently acknowledges can never be completed) than the movement of thought and writing they tirelessly trace, the movement that boils a binary down to the mutual interdependence and supplemental interplay of its terms which dissolves their former, hierarchical relationship. Again: the major takeaway from poststructuralism in the fields in which it has been influential, philosophy included, has been a certain rhetoric, a certain figuration, of argument, and not anything conceptual these thinkers have synthesized.

Does Zizek not demonstrate the same quality, the same monotonous stylistic movement of freak reversal? Is not the ex-timate core of the subject, the objet a, not the very concept of a reiterable logic of reduction that can be imported to any subject matter? None of the individual analyses in a Zizek text matter, and in fact the throwaway, self plagiarized texture of his oeuvre suggests that he has consciously absorbed this lesson, choosing to focus less on ameliorating this or that erroneous reading of Hegel, Stalin, or Lacan, than to demonstrate what he sees to be the logical operations these thinkers exemplify and thereby to memetically carve it into the thought pattern of the reader. Whether or not this ideological (literally, logic of ideas) operation can be called “marxist” has been a matter of debate, but it certainly represents the latest in Western Marxism’s ongoing struggle to unite what it imagines as theory and practice.

zizek had a fine analysis of the post-ideological world, he hasn't produced much of value since we entered the post-post-ideological world

In short the academy was a mistake.

Snifffff
Zizek is a covert right-winger so yes of course it’s worth the read