Still one of Žižek’s most original theoretical contributions, this influential re-reading of Marx, the commodity fetish, and the embeddedness of ideology in the objects of daily life was originally released in October 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It has since become a foundational text in the critique of postmodern theory, in which the author’s familiarity with pop culture (film, science fiction, and music) is entertainingly filtered through a Marxist-Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective.