(Courtesy Verso Books)

Who knew, right? The Guardian's profile of the cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek, who has a new book out called Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, is...not for the faint of heart.

Some of the profile is about his work, though the interpretations of the article's author are vapid to say the least:

By the standards of cultural theory, Žižek sits at the more accessible end of the spectrum – but to give you an idea of where that still leaves him, here's a typical quote from a book called Žižek: A Guide for the Perplexed, intended to render him more comprehensible: "Žižek finds the place for Lacan in Hegel by seeing the Real as the correlate of the self-division and self-doubling within phenomena.

But that hardly matters because for some horrifying reason, Mr. Žižek opens up about every sordid detail of his sex life, going off on a tangent that feels as random and beside-the-point as some of his more painful writing. Have a look at this exchange:

I keep thinking I should try to intervene with a question, but he's off again. "I have strange limits. I am very – OK, another detail, fuck it. I was never able to do – even if a woman wanted it – annal sex." Annal sex? "Ah, anal sex. You know why not? Because I couldn't convince myself that she really likes it. I always had this suspicion, what if she only pretends, to make herself more attractive to me? It's the same thing for fellatio; I was never able to finish into the woman's mouth, because again, my idea is, this is not exactly the most tasteful fluid. What if she's only pretending?"

Now you know probably the last thing on Earth that you ever wanted to find out.  In all fairness to Mr. Žižek, we always thought Hegel and Lacan were a little too fond of TMIs as well.