An analysis of the roles of pleasure and desire in contemporary politics. Foreword to the Second Edition: Enjoyment within the Limits of Reason Alone xi The Hard Road to Dialectical Materialism From the Logic of the Signifier - to Hegelian Dialectics The Act Zen at War Religion The Act, Again Ideology Is There a Politics of Subtraction? Lacan and Badiou Surplus-Enjoyment Introduction: Destiny of a Joke 1(6) PART I E Pluribus Unum On the One 7(54) The Birth of a Master-Signifier: The non-analysable Slovene Let the Emperor have his clothes! The ``quilting point'' ``A signifier represents the subject for another signifier'' Why is morality the darkest of conspiracies? How to Count Zero for One?: Derrida is a reader of Hegel Identity as ``reflective determination'' ``God is ...'' A ``chiasmic exchange of properties'' The ``logic of the signifier'' The subjectivized structure The ``metaphor of the subject'' The Hegelian ``one One'' The Wanton Identity 61(38) Impossibility: Hegel's monism The ``silent weaving of the Spirit'' ``From nothingness through nothingness to nothingness'' The condition of (im)possibility Reflection: The logic of re-mark The abyss remarked From failed reflection to reflected failure The tain of the mirror PART II Dialectics and its Discontents Hegelian Llanguage 99(42) With an Eye to Our Gaze: How to do a totality with failures The speculative (lack of) identity Llanguage and its limit The squabble about All Judgement by Default: ``The word is an elephant'' The paradoxes of sexuation How necessity arises out of contingency ``In father more than father himself'' On the Other 141(38) Hysteria, Certainty and Doubt: Wittgenstein as a Hegelian Hegel's hysterical theatre Cogito and the forced choice ``Objective certainty'' From A to S The ``Formal Aspect'': History of an apparition Saying and meaning-to-say The Hegelian performative ``The cunning of Reason'' revisited PART III Cum Grano Praxis All's Well That Ends Well? 179(50) Why Should a Dialectician Learn to Count to Four?: The triad and its excess Protestantism, Jacobinism ... ... and other ``vanishing mediators'' ``A beat of your finger ... '' Why is Truth always political? The ``Missing Link'' of Ideology: The self-referring structure and its void Narrating the origins So-called ``primitive accumulation'' The paradox of a finite totality The Kantian Thing Much Ado about a Thing 229(50) The Variants of the Fetishism-Type: Why is Sade the truth of Kant? The ``totalitarian object'' ``I know, but nevertheless...'' Traditional, manipulative, totalitarian power ``The King is a Thing'': The King's two bodies Lenin's two bodies How to extract the People from within the people? The ``Hypothesis of the Master'' The King is a place-holder of the void Index 279