Quora answer: Is Zizek’s interpretation of Lacan in keeping with Lacan’s own thought?

No one will ever know because Lacan without Zizek’s interpretation is impenetrable, opaque, obscure, arrogant in the extreme, incompressible except in small doses and with respect to a few overarching ideas like the registers: Imaginary, Symbolic, Real. Zizek actually makes sense, and I think that is because what we are actually hearing is the voice of Hegel, as if it were the voice of Zizek, interpreting Lacan. Zizek has taken on the task of being the Analyst of Lacan and what he has discovered repressed there is Hegel. Forget Structuralism or Semiotics, just read Hegel very closely and you will get the gist of what Lacan has to say, which is what Zizek wants to say, and occasionally it is also what Badiou says. Of course the wizard behind that curtain of Hegel is also Zizek. This is not Marx’s Hegel, or your philosophy teacher’s Hegel, or any Hegel than any other Continental Philosopher would recognize as Hegel. This is the Hegel for whom appearance is everything, and behind which there is no reality. This is the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit on steroids. Lacan did not have thoughts. Lacan was the Delphic oracle who needs the Priest/Analyst to make sense of for the rest of us. His saving grace is that he says everything exactly the opposite of what Derrida said. And his other major philosophical interpreter, Deleuze cannot be trusted. The only one who can half way be trusted in Badiou, because Zizek is positive that Badiou is smarter than him, and more dedicated to the Maoist ideal than Zizek can muster himself. Zizek has doubts about communism and is not a true believer like Badiou. Maoists after the Cultural Revolution, after Pol Pot, are kind of sad. But Badou has Zizek terrified. Zizek does not claim to have mastered Set Theory or Logic as a source of the refined terror that he advocates. Rather he has mastered Film. And all Films especially Hitchcock are merely exemplifications of Lacanian doctrine.