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…
When I read Levi’s post I kept thinking about Tom McCarthy’s book Remainder (one of my favourites). It is, in part, a novel about the movement from idealism, to matter, to materialism. Thinking about it made me look up the International Necronautical Society, from whom I circulate this:
‘If form…is perfection itself, then how does one explain the obvious imperfection of the world, for the world is not perfect, n’est-ce pas? This is where matter—our undoing—enters the picture. For the Greeks, the principle of imperfection was matter, hyle. Matter was the source of the corruption of form…. In short, against idealism in philosophy and idealist or transcendent conceptions of art, of art as pure and perfect form, we set a doctrine of…materialism’.
I really like this notion. Matter: our undoing.