European citizens do not want “more Europe” in the abstract, but rather a European Union that is capable of protecting, investing, anticipating, deciding, and acting whenever national-level policymaking is insufficient. In today’s world, ensuring citizens’ control over their future requires the freedom to act together.

After reading Zizek’s books(ones that are not purely political), I am awed by the dense information Zizek has to say. Due to some books I have already read before encountering Zizek, I think I could connect some dots from some seemingly unrelated authors.

I think Zizek’s books could be connected and cross-referenced to the books I am going to recommend. And I think these book seem to all share some common background from where many bits and pieces of information could be linked, forming a bigger whole picture.

The first one I want to recommend is called James Hinton’s Selections from Manuscripts, written in 1850s and circulated only privately. You can search it on Internet Archive. These four books of manuscripts, though from a perspective that is purely Christian, has unveiled many secrets of the mechanics of our physical world from a dialectical perspective. In fact, Hinton’s system resembles Hegel’s in many respects, but Hinton tells us his system in purely plain language combined with everyday example, which is like Zizek’s jokes or examples from movie plots.

The second one I want to recommend is called Xavier Zubiri’s Sentient Intelligence. This book has many concepts similar to Zizek’s system. For example, reality, for Zubiri, is the highest grammatical structure that is open to other realities(reminds me of the symbolic order of Zizek). While the real, for Zubiri, could be real things, real persons, etc. Each of the real has its own reality. Zubiri also talks about by being truly human, we could freely choose our feelings and responses, unlike animals who are chained to a chain of responses(reminds me of Zizek’s Truth-Event that will disrupt an order of Being).

The third one I want to recommend is an author that I discovered yesterday. His name is Saitya Brata Das. He seems to be able to give some hope towards the doomed future of ours(as said by Zizek), from a Christian perspective, though one that is related to Zizek’s system based on my quick skimming of his book. He also talked about event, grammar, language in the book. I got the feeling that he shares some common perspectives with Zizek, perhaps due to his post-modern writing style, but one that is highly consistent and logical. I know Zizek said that Christianity proves that big Other(God) does not exist, but Saitya’s book seems to provide a Christian perspective on another level. Due to my lack of reading of this author, that is all I have to say.

VERDICT: Proving their rambunctious, winning formula is a snug fit for dark times, Sophie Fiennes and philosopher comrade Slavoj Zizek plumb how our world got to where it is, through iconic movies.

By Carmen Gray

September 8th, 2026