The philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek has written several books for the MIT Press including The Puppet and the Dwarf, an early title in the Short Circuits series. In this book, he offers a close reading of modern Christianity’s viewpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis. But as Zizek explains to Barry Nolan in an interview with Boston’s CN8 NiteBeat, the book deals with much more—including an examination of the “culture of consumption” and the “era of big ideology.” The goal of the text, he explains, is to “make Lacan back into someone whom even your grandma could understand.”
For further investigation, read “Liberation Hurts: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek” in which he delves into the deeper theoretical underpinnings of the book with Eric Dean Rasmussen.
In The Puppet Called Theology: A BIT of The Puppet and the Dwarf, Zizek ponders a dialectical materialist theology and compares monotheistic and polytheistic violence.