Interesting talk on Spinoza vs Hegel, Zizek is a court-jester but certainly not an “idiot” and while I think he goes too far by projecting a kind of alienation into the heart of matter he is certainly right about the profound uncanniness of human-being.
The Posthuman Predicament: Affect, Power and Ethics – Prof. Rosi Braidotti, University of Utrecht // 4th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies. Keynote lecture. July 1st, 2013 http://www.youtube.com/user/bvanhoven/videos
synthetic zerØ 
“Perhaps this is a question of a strategic choice between a rhetoric of purity (Zizek) and a rhetoric of encouragement”
Vibrant matter, zero landscape, an interview with Jane Bennett
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2011-10-19-loenhart-en.html
“Matter refers to that which is non-conceptual and, I would add, to that which evades and escapes all conceptuality and signification. Matter is a-semiotic, a-conceptual.” – Levi Bryant
I appreciate the emphasis on what exceeds, just wish that Levi&co. wouldn’t leap to diagnosing phobia/repression/denial when it seems more likely that it/matter (like the realities/impacts of global warming and such) never even really occurred to most people (especially those bookish types drawn to the humanities, I keep imagining an OOO inspired undergrad triumphantly announcing to folks working in an engineering, physics, or chemistry lab that materials have active properties/powers) as with most things that we take for granted.
As for the resistances of folks to change/challenges that’s hardly a surprise tho much of the work now is fleshing out the details of particular affordances and resistances like cognitive-biases, ever onward…