A lot of fellow lefties seem to loathe Zizek. But I suspect many in whom he arouses antipathy are simply taking him the wrong way – as someone asserting propositions that he intends for his readers and listeners to come to hold as definitively true. 

Whether that’s what Z actually intends (I doubt it) or not, I think of him as a sort of Etch-a-Sketch (google it if unfamiliar), the reading of or listening to whom is quite literally ‘refreshing’ WHATEVER his actual intentions (assuming he HAS ‘actual intentions’ (I doubt it))… 

The fellow’s whole shtik, which resembles nothing so much as that of the archetypal Trickster Guru, I find helpful (FWIW) in inducing a good shaking and clearing of the screen, as it were, busting up patterns that one might have been accepting non-deliberately, such that then when you re-sketch you can do so deliberately. 

It makes one, in other words, ask anew what one truly considers essential and what one has only been thinking or saying out of habit. A similar effect, I find, is worked in other contexts by ‘performers’ (no pejorative intended) as diverse as Joyce (Finnegan’s Wake), Burroughs (Anything), Pynchon (almost Anything), Deleuze (almost Anything), Artaud (Anything), van Vliet (Anything, but especially Trout Mask Replica), and my own brain upon waking from deep sleep.

FWIW, I find great value in this, as well as in the sheer FUN that comes with it. I also like Zizek’s sniff, which seems to me an essential part of the Liturgy. One day a Comrade-in-Life and I, I predict, will keep a box of Kleenex always nearby, bearing his image. (Perhaps we will even start a company called Zizek Tissues and use our profits to fund the Revolution.) 

This will tell him that our home is his home – as will the sign over our door: Zizek Welcome Here.