I'm pretty divided on Zizek, though, perhaps less so than I am for the other pop-P.M.ists. Unfortunately I landed on Baudrillard before Debord, and I'll admit that in my formative years I really felt there was something to the general Post-Marxian, Post-Freudian, Post-Saussurean line of critique, but I've grown skeptical of the value of the synthesis of largely discredited ideas beyond being "works of art (for art's sake)"
I still revisit a handful of works by Freud and Marx (
Civilization And It's Discontents, the sections on alienation and Hegel in
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and
Capital, to name but a few) but I strongly think that these currents paint themselves into a corner if they fail to acknowledge the more empirical insights coming out of fields like sociobiology/evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, genetics etc.
I admire Zizek's style, as I'm sure most of his fans here do too, but I disagree with him on so much, and sometimes I think that there is perhaps very little there beyond style. I can't fathom that consciousness is opaque, when we've recently reconstructed sound and vision as it is reconstructed in the brain (primitively at best, but the field is still in it's infancy) and all sorts of other advancements with fMRI and SPECT and whatnot. My thoughts on this are more inline with the eliminativism of Feyerabend, though not the strong form of that position taken up by Paul and Patricia Churchland. Alas, all of this is speculative in theory and practice, and the taking of strong positions one way or the other seems premature, to me. I've also been a lifelong student of Surrealism, and I see contradiction as a fertile ground for growth, not a fault. What's needed is a synthesis that takes into account new ideas and concepts, not a rehashing of ideas that more or less stopped developing decades ago.
Hegel is certainly important, if only as a starting point for modern radical thought, as is Feuerbach and some of the other Young Hegelians, as well as some of the much less well known names on the Hegelian right, but Stirner (who was also one of the Young Hegelians, albeit the black sheep of the bunch) in my opinion anyway, destroyed much of their ideology a long time ago. Still, one wouldn't learn much from Stirner's polemic if they had no basis in the Hegelian modes of reasoning that it was attacking, which again, underscores the importance of Hegel as a starting point. Furthermore, many critics have pointed out the Hegelian character of Stirner's own critique of the Hegelians.
EDIT: I should add that I'm generally skeptical of any kind of totalizing unity of thought coming from the natural sciences alone, just as I am skeptical of the same coming from continental philosophy. Still, science has shown itself to be useful in answering certain kinds of questions, and those answers should be incorporated into a totalizing critique. I'm a romanticist at heart, but perhaps we need a kind of analytical-romanticism.
also: I should add that I favour Nietzsche, Stirner, Kierkegaard, even Heidegger to Hegel.
FINALLY: I'd take Zizek's communism over these guys:
http://revcom.us/a/256/vilifying_communism_and_accommodating_imperialism-en.html ANY FUCKING DAY OF THE WEEK!!!
