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Can someone explain Žižek?

When I try to read him or even articles on him, I am at a complete loss.  Could someone try to sum up his main arguments?
gpt
The philosophical core of his work was developed in late eighties and early nineties. In his later books, he basically expounds on insights already published in *Sublime Object of Ideology*, *Enjoy Your Symptom* and *Tarrying with the Negative*. 

His main meta-theoretical thesis is that it is possible to combine German Idealism, especially Schelling and Hegel, with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. According to Žižek, there are, in works such as Hegel's *Phenomenology of Spirit*, some notions that clearly anticipate Freud. On the other hand, some of the main concepts of psychoanalysis -- notably death drive, repression, and Unconscious -- Žižek interprets using Hegel or Schelling.   

The fruit of this combination is a theory of subjectivity that would explain 1) the a priori structure of human experience as well as 2) the way that structure shows itself in, and is in turn affected by, various cultural, political, and social phenomena. In other words, Subjectivity, World Spirit, or Negativity aren't purely philosophical notions that would relate only to the a priori structure of reality, but are rather active principles embodied in our everyday lives, in the way we do politics, or in our sexual behaviour. Psychoanalysis therefore helps Žižek to introduce German philosophy to debates usually associated with cultural critique, post-structuralism, feminism etc.

 For example, one of the main tenets of Žižek's philosophy (drawing once again from Hegel and Schelling) is that our subjectivity is, in essence, an ontological void without any positive content. Human subjectivity is not something inscribed into the order of the Universe, but rather the very crack that prevents the world from forming a coherent totality. But this is not a purely speculative thesis. Žižek shows, on various examples ranging from Antigone and French revolution to von Trier's movies, that this radical openness of our subjectivity produces concrete effects on human reality. Hence just as Freud analysed "clinical cases" of our psychical life, so Žižek too analyses concrete "cases" of our lives as subjects. This is why his philosophy is full of examples. In his work, he tries relentlessly to show that philosophy should be applied to every aspect of human reality, not excluding popular culture or even toilets. On the other hand, this is also the reason why his purely philosophical theses seems so elusive. 

So what exactly are those theses? I'd sum them up really quickly, and in a list:

* As we already saw, human subjectivity is basically an non-thing, a nonsense, an ontological emptiness. 

* This emptiness is best described using Hegel's notion of Negativity.

* The negativity of human subjectivity manifest itself in a radical act that destroy the very fabric of our common, symbolic world (see for example Antigone).

* In our everyday lives -- in our politics, in sexuality, in the way we imagine society -- we try to run away from this negativity. We build ourselves "phantasms" (Lacan's term) that try cover up the essential lack of our subjectivity, our political community, or in the way we perceive the other.

* Every authentic act is therefore a passage or a "transgression" of the phantasm.

* Authentic act is the one that actively assumes the negativity of our existence.

* Marxist or revolutionary politics is a concrete example of such an act. Another is the "traversing the fantasy" in clinical psychoanalysis. 

And so on ... If you're truly interested in Žižek, I'd once again recommend his works from the nineties. Some of them are true philosophical masterpieces. His later articles and books are, however, often without a clear focus (which is, to be sure, a common thing among philosophers coming to age).