Like many of Žižek's books, it covers a wide range of topics, including philosophy, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, politics, literature, and film.

[1][2] Some of the authors discussed in detail include Jacques Lacan, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Alain Badiou, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Daniel Dennett, Antonio Damasio, Franz Kafka, and Henry James.

Using this notion, Žižek claims that both positions viewing the object are Kantian antinomies, meaning that they are completely incompatible and irreducible ways of seeing something.

[9] Traditionally, this would be seen as a problem for the Hegelian dialectic, which some interpret[10] as involving thesis and antithesis coming together in a synthesis, rather than remaining entirely opposed.

Žižek purports a substance that is constantly "fracturing itself from within so as to produce parallax splits between irreconcilable layers and tiers of existence.

"[13] In neuroscience, Žižek confronts contemporary theorists like Daniel Dennett and Antonio Damasio in terms of materialism and idealism.

Whereas the Real for Lacan meant a hard kernel that resisted symbolization, for Žižek the term refers to the "gap in perspectives.

In his revision of the Freudian Thanatos, Žižek suggest that the death drive's true horror is that it lives through us, embodied in life itself.

"[20] In a similar vein, Alexei Bogdanov described the book as a "vast battlefield of opinions, where the author's own position is often hard to pinpoint.