Slavoj Zizek may have the strongest "brand identity" (as the advertisers say) of any cultural theorist now in the marketplace of ideas. Scholarly journals are full of cheap knockoffs of Gayatri Spivak and Fredric Jameson. But no one can quite imitate Mr. Zizek, with his virtuoso maneuvering among references to Lacanian psychoanalysis, German philosophy, Hollywood blockbusters, and the history of Marxism-Leninism--all interspersed with jokes, some of them obscene. His intellectually hyperkinetic style developed in the 1970s and '80s, when, in effect, the Yugoslav government paid him a modest salary to stay away from impressionable students.

As it turned out, Mr. Zizek developed a cult following in the Anglophone world during the 1990s, particularly in graduate schools and among off-campus bohemians. He owed that improbable renown largely to the efforts of Verso, a small leftist publisher based in London and New York. Since 1989, when the press issued The Sublime Object of Ideology, his first book in English, the theorist has written or edited at least two dozen volumes, half of them bearing the Verso imprint.

But at academic conferences over the past year or so, Mr. Zizek has been expressing frank discontent with his chief publisher. So eyebrows have been raised at word that his new series, Short Circuits, will be published by MIT Press. The first volume, Mr. Zizek's own The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, appears next month.

"My books were always published very fast" by Verso, says Mr. Zizek, "because they sell relatively well." But the press has recently "turned down three or four proposals, or deferred them indefinitely." Some, he says, he "considered really important." He cites a collection of papers on Lenin he edited "with many so-called big names -- Etienne Balibar, Alain Badiou, Terry Eagleton."

In an interview appearing in Critical Intellectuals on Writing, a volume published this summer by the State University of New York Press, Mr. Zizek complained that Verso

had been unenthusiastic about his 400-page theoretical magnum opus, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology. The press asked him to make it shorter, he says, and to include more obscene jokes. When Verso published the book, in 1999, it sold surprisingly well, at least for a work advocating the post-poststructuralist revival of Cartesian subjectivity. But to get it into print, Mr. Zizek says, he "had to blackmail, to threaten the editors at Verso."

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Sebastian Budgen, the acquisitions editor for theoretical books at Verso, points out that it has been barely a year since the press released Revolution at the Gates, an edition of Lenin's writings edited by Mr. Zizek. "The editorial board felt it was commercially unwise to take on a collection of papers about Lenin until it was possible to gauge the sales of Slavoj's own book on Lenin," says Mr. Budgen. (Mr. Zizek now plans to publish the collection with Duke University Press.)

When asked about Mr. Zizek's claim that Verso tried to discourage him from publishing long theoretical works, Mr. Budgen sounds impatient. "There is no sense in which Verso is hostile," he says. "Far from it. We want to encourage him to work on big, serious books." He calls recent developments "a very tiny incident in a long-term relationship."

As Mr. Zizek himself sees it, however, the situation is more complex. His new series at MIT is part of a long-term strategy "to open up a publishing space for my Lacanian theory, and for my Lacanian friends." The group of Slovenian philosophers and cultural critics to which Mr. Zizek belongs is often described as a branch of poststructuralism. But he rejects that label, insisting that his circle embodies a distinct theoretical movement. "Although superficially I may appear to be popular and, in this sense, influential," says Mr. Zizek, "when you look at the actual structure of American academia, let's be frank, we are extremely marginalized. If we are accepted, it is in the way that I think in boxing you call 'clinching'--embracing the enemy."

As part of his arrangement with MIT, manuscripts for the new series will skip what Mr. Zizek calls "these anonymous 'readers' reports' by frustrated academic theoreticians who act out their traumas on your manuscript--'this should be elaborated, that should be restructured,' blah blah blah." If both Mr. Zizek and his editor at MIT, Roger Conover, agree that a manuscript merits publishing, it will go forward. Several titles are now on the way, including The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two, by Alenka Zupancic, a researcher at the Slovene Academy of Sciences, and Is Oedipus Online? Siting Freud in the Third Millennium, by Jerry Aline Flieger, a professor of French at Rutgers University at New Brunswick.

Given its approach to peer review, the Short Circuits series does appear to be extremely well named. Mr. Zizek "is very clear and direct in his expectations," says Mr. Conover. "He respects you for saying yes or no. Some publishers look at each book as a bet. For me, Zizek himself is the bet." As for the publisher who placed the first and heaviest wager on his work, Mr. Zizek says he will continue to publish works of political commentary with Verso, such as his book on the Iraq war, scheduled to appear next spring. "But for fundamental philosophical texts, where my heart is," he says, "it will be from now on MIT."