zizek biography

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Slavoj Zizek Biography

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek (born 1949) is an academic star, the "Elvis of Cultural Studies," according to one often-quoted journalistic formulation. His lectures, dealing in ideas that are often dense to the point of impenetrability, draw crowds numbering in the hundreds, with their mix of philosophical theory and topical political ideas, both often illustrated by examples drawn from American popular culture.

Zizek talks as fast as he thinks, and writes nearly as fast as he can talk (he has published as many as three books in the course of a single year), often making things even more difficult for the reader with a style of argument in which he often seems to contradict himself. James Harkin, writing in the London Guardian , called him "a one-man heavy industry of cultural criticism." Yet Zizek's fame rests on more than sheer mental agility. Consistent with his origins in Communist-era Yugoslavia, Zizek has espoused Marxist-Leninist ideas, which have remained current in academic circles even as they have lost ground in the wider political sphere. Zizek has reinvigorated Marxist-Leninist thought with an approach that brings together philosophy, psychology, film studies, humor, and engaging prose. His writing encompasses both political philosopher Karl Marx and film comedian Groucho Marx. Documentary filmmaker Astra Taylor, who made a film about Zizek, told Reyhan Harmaci of the San Francisco Chronicle that Zizek seems "to make intellectualism exciting and fun and vital in a climate of anti-intellectualism." In Zizek's own biography on the website of the European Graduate School, where he is a faculty member, he indicated that he "uses popular culture to explain the theory of [French philosopher] Jacques Lacan and the theory of Jacques Lacan to explain politics and popular culture."

Grew Up Under Communism

A native and lifelong resident of Ljubljana, Slovenia, Slavoj Zizek (SLAH-voy ZHEE-zhek) was born on March 21, 1949, when the small Alpine capital was part of Communist Yugoslavia. An only child, he grew up in the household of professional parents. Like many other young people in the former satellite states of the Soviet Union, he consumed Western popular culture avidly in preference to officially approved domestic television, books, and films. Much of his encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood cinema was acquired during his teenage years, when he spent long hours at an auditorium that specialized in showing foreign films. The "Prague spring" reform movement of 1968 in Czechoslovakia during which Czechs agitated for greater freedom but were repressed by the Soviet Union, had an important effect on Zizek, even though he was not one of the demonstrators agitating in favor of greater freedom.

Zizek was in the Czech capital when Soviet troops invaded, and he observed the collision of totalitarian power with the aspirations of ordinary people. "I found there, on the central square, a café that miraculously worked through this emergency," he told Rebecca Mead of the New Yorker . "I remember they had wonderful strawberry cakes, and I was sitting there eating strawberry cakes and watching Russian tanks against demonstrators. It was perfect."

Not that Zizek was a supporter of Communist orthodoxy. As an undergraduate at the University of Ljubljana he read widely, not sticking to approved course lists. He spoke six languages, and immersed himself in the works of Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and other philosophers, mostly French, whose writings had found little favor in socialist circles. In the case of Lacan, that philosopher's work relied on psychology—a suspect science from a collectivist point of view because of its preoccupation with the self and the individual mind. Zizek would, in time, set out to reconcile that seeming dichotomy.

Zizek earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy and sociology in 1971, and then pursued a master's degree, also at the University of Ljubljana, writing his master's thesis on the French philosophers whose ideas he had been studying. The brilliance of his thesis stirred up interest among the university's philosophy faculty, but its ideologically suspect qualities were more troublesome. Finally, after being forced to add an appendix in which he outlined the divergences of his ideas from approved Marxist theory, Zizek was awarded a master's degree in philosophy in 1975. The taint on his reputation kept him from finding a teaching position. For several years Zizek depended on his work as a translator to pay his bills, but in 1977 he gave in to pressure and joined the Communist Party. This opened up government speechwriting jobs, as well as the chance to take a job as a researcher at the Institute of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana in 1979. He retained that position for the next several decades, even after gaining international renown.

Worked as Speechwriter

In 1981 Zizek headed to Paris, where he studied with Lacan's son-in-law and was psychoanalyzed by him. He finished a dissertation and received his doctoral degree from the university that year. By that time Zizek had emerged as something of an expert on Lacan, and as the leader of a group of so-called Ljubljana Lacanians, contributing to a level of familiarity with Lacan in Slovenia that perhaps exceeded even that in France itself.

Zizek's playful side began to emerge during this period, when he wrote, under a pen name, a negative review of one of his own books. Sometimes during his career Zizek would seem to adopt one position and then switch to the exact opposite, but this tendency had roots in the dialectical tradition of philosophy in which his thought was rooted—the conviction that truth is ultimately obtained through the resolution of a series of opposites or conflicts. Zizek's first book published in the West was The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), which focused on the greatest of all the dialectical philosophers, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), through the prism of Lacan's thought. It was a daring combination; Zizek drew new links between philosophy and psychology by considering how these thinkers treated the idea of the Other—anything that is not part of the Self.

Zizek also cultivated his more public persona during the 1980s, a period during which Yugoslavia's Communist central government gradually began to lose control over the country's cultural life. He penned a popular newspaper column, and in 1990, when Slovenia was on the brink of independence from Yugoslavia (achieving it after a ten-day war in 1991), he entered the race to become part of the group of four leaders who would hold the country's joint presidency. Of the five candidates, he finished fifth, and was thus not elected. It was at this time that the impressive spurt in Zizek's productivity began. He was living alone; a marriage from the early 1970s, which produced a son, had ended, and his second and third marriages (the second produced another son) were still in the future. Zizek had few responsibilities other than to think and write. His post was that of researcher, and he rarely if ever taught classes.

Partly this kind of financial freedom for an academic was a holdover from the Communist system, in which intellectuals were considered an important part of the theoretical underpinning of the state, and were thus financially supported if they were seen to be making useful contributions. Zizek cherished this freedom. As his fame grew, he was frequently offered teaching positions in the United States, where he garnered a strong following in university cultural studies departments. He turned them all down, although he cheerfully accepted visiting scholar appointments and often spent much of the year traveling from one academic center to another. "When people ask me why I don't teach permanently in the United States," Zizek was quoted as saying in the Philadelphia Inquirer , "I tell them that it is because American universities have this very strange, eccentric idea that you must work for your salary. I prefer to do the opposite and not work for my salary."

Used Film to Illustrate Ideas

In any event, Zizek repaid his university's investment by bringing international intellectual attention to tiny Slovenia. He turned out books quickly, and they were translated into some 20 languages; in the United States many were published by Verso in New York, which profited from its association with Zizek, for the books sold well. Zizek communicated and expanded upon Lacan's difficult ideas about perception, desire, and aggression by illustrating them with examples drawn from decades of popular films that students and general readers knew well. Zizek's own books, such as Looking Awry; An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (1991) and Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (1992), were joined on bookstore shelves by collections of articles he edited, including Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (1992).

Zizek's international fame grew after a 1997 essay written by the influential British literary critic Terry Eagleton was published in the London Review of Books . The essay reviewed several of Zizek's books and concluded, as quoted in Contemporary Authors , that they "have an enviable knack of making [Continental philosophers] Kant or Kierkegaard sound riotously exciting; his writing bristles with difficulties but never serves up a turgid sentence." It was around this time that Zizek's lectures began to attract large crowds of young intellectuals. Police had to be called to a Zizek appearance at a Lower Manhattan art gallery after the shutout portion of an overflow crowd began banging on the building's windows, demanding admission. Nor was his fame confined to America and Europe; a documentary film, Zizek! , followed the philosopher to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where similar crowds awaited him.

Zizek's popularity was due partly to the dizzying virtuosity of his speeches, which were free form traversals of the history of philosophy, mixed with observations on anything from the Matrix film series to surfing, to world events, to theology (although an atheist, Zizek was fascinated by the figure of Saint Paul, seeing in him an analogue to early Soviet Communist leader Vladimir Lenin in terms of building an organization motivated by ideas). One audience member at a Zizek talk told Scott McLemee, author of the "Zizek Watch," a column published in the Chronicle of Higher Education , "I have no idea where we just went, but that was one wild trip." Another explanation of Zizek's success came from McLemee, who noted the theorist's continuing enthusiasm for American films. "One source of Slavoj Zizek's lasting appeal as a cultural theorist is that he provides a really good excuse to go to the video store," McLemee wrote.

Zizek also showed a knack for keeping himself in the headlines, at least those of intellectual journals. He broadened the focus of his writing to include current events, and he even contributed an essay to the staid U.S. journal Foreign Policy that examined the psychological motivations behind the failed U.S. search for weapons of mass destruction during the Iraq war. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway (2000) was one of several Zizek tomes on contemporary entertainment. With Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on 11 September and Related Dates , Zizek showed an uncharacteristic tendency to edit himself, recalling the book several times for revisions as it went through subsequent printings. Zizek's Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (2004) critiqued not only the rationale for war but also explored psychological factors involved in the restrictions placed on American civil liberties after the September 11 attacks.

Academic fashions come and go, but as of the mid-2000s the bearded Zizek had spent nearly a decade as what Carlin Romano of the Philadelphia Inquirer called "the ultimate hottie in recent years on the global intellectual circuit." In April of 2005 he married a 27-year-old Argentine model. He joined the faculty of the European Graduate School, an international institute of communications theory with locations in several countries, and he worked for an unusually long time on The Parallax View , a lengthy philosophical tract that attempted to redefine the dialectical idea itself, leaving room, as ever, for discussions of films, the war on terror, and hot topics such as neuroscience. By the time it was published, Zizek had moved on to a new book, In Defense of Lost Causes , in which he discussed the Christian legacy, class struggle, and problems in the world of theory itself. The book was slated for publication in the summer of 2007.

Periodicals

Artforum International , March 1993.

Chronicle of Higher Education , February 6, 2004; April 2, 2004; June 4, 2004.

Guardian (London, England), October 8, 2005.

New Yorker , May 5, 2003.

Philadelphia Inquirer , December 7, 2005.

Tikkun , January-February 2005.

World Literature Today , Spring 2002.

Contemporary Authors Online , Gale, 2006, reproduced in Biography Resource Center , Thomson Gale, 2006, http://galenet/galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC (December 31, 2006).

"Slavoj Zizek: Biography," The European Graduate School, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek.html (December 31, 2006).

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Žižek: his key ideas explained

Associate Professor in Philosophy, Australian Catholic University

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It might be said that books by Slavoj Žižek don’t conclude, they just end. And indeed, no matter which of his many books you open, you’ll find philosophy, psychoanalysis, pop culture, a smattering of off-key jokes, and commentary on recent events – often in no readily-discernible order.

Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist , is known to many today for his 2019 debate with psychology professor and culture warrior Jordan Peterson. This debate, held in Toronto, Canada, was about the relationship between Marxism, capitalism, and happiness.

Žižek was presented as the Leftist counterpoint to Peterson’s reactionary stylings. While the two disagreed on much, they agreed on certain things, such as their criticism of identity politics. Yet this debate, too, arguably ended rather than came to any conclusions.

Žižek burst onto the anglophone academic scene over 30 years ago with a sequence of groundbreaking works, starting with the 1989 book, The Sublime Object of Ideology . Then there were wonderful explorations of Hollywood cinema in Enjoy your Symptom! and Looking Awry .

Once dubbed a “celebrity philosopher” by Foreign Policy , he has since written books on everything from violence , the GFC and September 11 to Christianity and the pandemic . His latest book explores the question of freedom .

Read more: Karl Marx: his philosophy explained

The critique of ideology

The title of Žižek’s 1989 book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, points towards a key aspect of his profuse intellectual productivity. From the start, Žižek has been interested in what motivates people to act the ways they do. He is especially interested in why people passionately identify with political ideas and causes that may not serve their own best interests.

An ideology is any political doctrine that promises to tell people how to organise political life, and where they fit into the larger scheme of things. Marxism-Leninism is one such ideology, liberalism another, fascism one more. An ideology can bring people meaning and a shared sense of common purpose.

According to Žižek, political ideologies also rationalise to their subjects why societies don’t seem to always become, over the course of time, wiser, better, more just, and less prone to rolling crises. (Since 2000 alone, we have faced 9-11, the wars on terror and in Iraq, the Global Financial Crisis, the sovereign debt crises, the resurgence of authoritarian strongmen, Covid-19, the Ukraine war and now the Israel-Hamas conflict.)

Political systems cannot flourish unless they can garner the peaceful support of the majority of their citizens. So, faced with problems like war, economic failures, or terrorism, argues Žižek, ideologies externalise these problems’ causes: it’s not us, it’s them, or forces beyond our control, so we cannot be blamed – if only these external or disloyal sources of disorder can be removed, all will be well.

The political unconscious

Žižek draws on insights from French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan , to explore the paradoxical sides of ideologies. He couples this with recourse to ideas from German idealist philosophers led by Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, and Friedrich Schelling.

Lacan argued that a good deal of human behaviour is motivated by irrational drives and wishes we do not consciously grasp. This is why one of Žižek’s early books bears the portentous Biblical title, For They Know Not What They Do .

In order to understand these “unconscious” motives, Lacan drew on the linguistics and anthropology of his time , producing writings of almost legendary difficulty. One reason for Žižek’s success is his great ability to help Lacan make sense to us today by using examples from pop culture, jokes, and politics.

For instance, Žižek illustrates the Lacanian idea of the unsymbolisable Real , by comparing it to the monsters of the Alien movies .

Žižek’s basic Lacanian claim, in terms of his “critique of ideology”, is that people do not always identify with political causes on rational bases. They form passionate, sometimes unconditional identifications with causes and leaders based on their earliest attachments to parental figures. They are thus identifying with what Žižek calls the “ sublime objects ” of ideologies: whether it is a “charismatic” leader, or an elevating idea like “the revolution” or “human freedom”.

This identification does not turn upon any individual necessarily knowing what the cause means, truly, or what their “beloved leader” actually stands for. It is enough for us each to see that others around us identify with the ideological cause, and assign especial significance to it. We then “believe through the Other”, as Žižek characteristically says .

Parishioners in medieval churches, he writes, would mostly have not understood the mass, which was carried out in Latin. But it did not matter. The ritual still acted as a salve. People “believed through their priests”, who they supposed knew the meaning of the words being recited.

In exchange for our identification with ideologies, Žižek claims, we gain a sense of “ideological enjoyment”: that we are “all in this together”, sharing everything from public events and festivals to the micro-customs organising everyday life, including shared cultural senses of humour.

On the flipside, Žižek’s analyses suggest that what subjects of ideologies most despise in “out-groups” (ie outsiders), is that they seem not to enjoy the same things, in the same way, that “we” do. They smell, speak, eat, worship, even play differently. It is therefore a very common ideological device to position these others as trying to steal our enjoyment from us: taking away our jobs, our taxpayer’s dollars, our “way of life” …

Whither Žižek?

Žižek’s early work suggested that the goal of his Lacanian rethinking of ideology was to enable societies to free themselves from “ideological fantasies” – like recurrent ideas of a utopian “end of history”, or of a “purified”, fascistic community of the People . The result would be a form of enlightened political democracy.

Read more: The End of History: Francis Fukuyama's controversial idea explained

Since around the turn of the millennium, Žižek has, however, vacillated as to whether any political regime can endure without resting on such irrational political myths. From this time, often seeming to utilise parodic humour, Žižek has positioned himself as a “ defender of lost causes ”, to echo the title of arguably his most controversial book.

These causes sometimes seemingly include even the Jacobin Terror of the French revolution or Stalinism . He has claimed, too, that Martin Heidegger’s embrace of Nazism was a “ right step in the wrong direction ”.

Read more: Heidegger in ruins? Grappling with an anti-semitic philosopher and his troubling rebirth today

Meanwhile, critics like political theorist Ernesto Laclau have questioned the credentials of Žižek’s professed “Marxism”. Some wonder if his patented radical poses are under-girded by any progressive vision of the political good.

Others point out that his own political record in Slovenia in the late 1980s, in which he supported “more privatizations” (“if it works, why not try a dose of it?”), does not sit easily with his Marxist stances in the West since the mid-1990s.

Žižek was recently described by philosopher Gabriel Rockhill as a kind of unlikely “court jester” in today’s hyper market-driven societies: a radical anti-capitalist who is a commercial success, and whose scattered writings are uncannily suited for readers in a rapid-pace world.

Žižek’s evident delight in reversing expectations, and making almost unbelievably provocative propositions , at times makes it difficult to ascertain just how seriously we are meant to take him. Žižek has defended himself against such criticisms by saying he wishes to challenge the “post-political” idea that social change is no longer possible, after the fall of the iron curtain.

Beyond the brilliant exegeses and application of some formidably difficult theory, it is perhaps as an intellectual provocateur that Žižek is most generously to be read.

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Slavoj Žižek

Professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the european graduate school / egs.

Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949) is a Slovenian-born philosopher and psychoanalyst. He is a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS, a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, and founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana. Aside from these appointments, Žižek tirelessly gives lectures around the globe and is often described as “the Elvis of cultural theory”. Although, more seriously, as British critical theorist Terry Eagleton confers, Žižek is the “most formidably brilliant” theorist to have emerged from Europe in decades. Many, in fact, now consider Žižek to be “the most dangerous philosopher in the West.”

He grew up in in Ljubljana, Slovenia, which at the time was part of the former Yugoslavia. The regime’s more permissive, albeit “pernicious,” policies allowed for Žižek’s exposure to Western theory and culture, in particular film, English detective novels, German Idealism, French structuralism, and Jacques Lacan. Studying at the University of Ljubljana, he completed his master’s degree in philosophy in 1975 with a thesis on French structuralism and his Doctoral degree in philosophy in 1981 with a dissertation on German Idealism. He then went to Paris, along with Mladen Dolar, to study Lacan under Jacques Alain-Miller (Lacan’s son-in-law and disciple). During this time in Paris, from 1981–85, Žižek completed another dissertation on the work of Hegel, Marx, and Kripke through a Lacanian lens. After his return to Slovenia, he became more politically active writing for , a weekly newspaper, co-founding the Slovenian Liberal Demorcratic Party, and running for one of four seats that comprised the collective Slovenian presidency (Žižek came in fifth).

Žižek rose to prominence in 1989 following his first book published in English, . Since then he has written countless books, in fact, perhaps the only thing more numerous than the talks he tirelessly gives across the globe are the books on which those interviews stand. For the last twenty-five years Žižek has been writing predominantly in English, and to a far lesser extent in his native Slovenian,  for obvious reasons . His books of the last decades include: (1991), (1993), (1997), (1999), (2006), (2001), (1996), (1992), (1991), (2015), (2003), (2002), (2010), (1994), (2002), (2009), (2009), (2007), (2012), (2007), (2001), (2008), (2000), and (2012). Along with these and many other books, he has also co-authored a number of books with Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Eric Santner, John Millbank, Ernesto Laclau, Boris Gunjević, and Agon Hamza, among others. Further, he is the editor of a number of consequential series, including Wo Es War by Verso, SIC by Duke University Press, and Short Circuits by MIT Press. Finally, Žižek is a consistent contributor to , , and other journals.

Lets “begin at the beginning”––as Žižek is fond of saying, clearly referring to the project of German Idealism, as is evident to the careful reader––or better, still, let’s begin before the beginning. The style of Žižek’s work is infamous. From his many talks and lectures, through his essays and books––the introductory, the directly political works, and the more serious, challenging works ()––Žižek’s style has often led many to not take him seriously. It should, however, be asked: why does Žižek speak and write as he does (given his frequent remarks that his true love is serious philosophical thought, more specifically still, the resurrection of German Idealism)? And what is style? The answer to the second is simpler than that of the first: style, as Jacques Lacan states in the opening pages of  É , is always a question of to whom one is addressing oneself. The answer to the first, however, is the same.

Žižek’s style has long been a point of discussion, and often a consideration by which he is not only not taken seriously and disregarded, but also a preoccupation that offers some sympathizers an excuse to not engage with his thought seriously. Perhaps this is reason enough to take it––as well as our preoccupation with it––more seriously. His style involves not only a disregard for the distinction between high and low culture––strikingly collapsing genres into one another––academically inappropriate uses of examples to illustrate serious philosophical, psychoanalytic and political issues, etc., but also the curious and frustrating moment in which he refuses to answer to the demands of his readers and listeners as to what they are to do with it all, by claiming that he does not know.

But is this really so particular to Žižek? What is the Žižekian procedure, when minimally defined? Žižek always begins with a cultural phenomenon or presupposition, which is slowly poked and probed by other cultural phenomena and presuppositions, until the reader finds himself in a position opposite to the one from which he may have begun, but without ever having been confronted with “philosophical truth,” stated with straight authority. Conceptual tools are used throughout, but are introduced slowly only as to clarify and distinguish the immanent analysis, only fully developed at the end. Moreover, as irreflexive or spontaneous relationships, oppositions, positions, and definitions of phenomena are subverted, the same result takes place in theory. In both cases, odd couples are formed between philosophies, between theories and political practices, between emblems and implications, processes, assumptions and conclusions, and so on. Figures enter the scene in odd positions, arguments are continually problematized, up until the very end, at which point a novice to Žižek’s philosophy is not immediately left with a clear conclusion of his position, but rather a web of confusion, so to speak, and yet at the same time the sense that there is a system­­ of sorts––the consistent grasp of which is the work still left for the reader. Finally, we could even add that the very sequence of Žižek’s work is constant, although his exact position has shifted a number of times, such that he always begins not only with ideology, but with ideology at its purest, that is, a position presupposing itself non-ideological, and an articulation of how the position sees itself, finally arriving at some formulation of absolute knowledge; or, as Žižek constantly reminds his readers, absolute knowing, and the consequent ethical stance to be assumed. There is no reason not to be frank: the Platonic dialogues find their resurrection here.

A second remark bears mention here: in his books and talks Žižek assumes the position offered to him, or even demanded of him––the position of he who, is supposed to, know. The position is offered to him, and demanded of him precisely because he consistently catches theories and positions at the moment of their contradiction or duplicity. Assuming the position, Žižek frustrates the demand; that is, he assumes the position without answering to the demand––revealing the desire of his audience. In short, Žižek’s style, his discourse, is the embodiment of one of the primary elements of his theory: the community of analysts as the model for an emancipatory collective. As Lacan would say, in regards his position, at its most elementary, is not articulable, because it is articulated.

As he so often publicly proclaims, Žižek is a card-carrying Lacanian. This itself is peculiar, given his distance from Jacques-Alain Miller, on, amongst other things, the political implications of psychoanalysis, and most specifically, the psychoanalytic school as a model for emancipatory political organization. In fact, a large part of Žižek’s political project, if not its foundation, assumes the possibility of a passage where Lacan is popularly assumed to have found only an impasse. Even so, Žižek is a Lacanian; it is by way of his fidelity to Lacan, by way of his return to Lacan, that he can see the limits of Lacan and move beyond.

While Žižek’s “exact position” has shifted a number of times, his basic constellation (as he often reiterates, for instance in ) has remained constant: Hegel, Marx, and Lacan. And within this constellation are three related concerns to which he relentlessly returns: (1) enjoyment as a political factor, (2) the subject as a self-relating negativity, and (3), the problem of appearance, i.e., not what is hidden behind it, but precisely why anything appears in the first place, as he writes in :

(Parallax View, p. xx)

Žižek’s search for these conditions of possibility lead him not only to the Lacanian conceptions of the non-existence of the Big Other or the Real as barred, but to German Idealism. Recently, it has become ever more frequent that Žižek confirms that his true master is not Jacques Lacan but G.W.F. Hegel. This remark bears mention as Žižek’s return to German Idealism is not at all merely a resurrection of Hegel, but of all the great philosophers of this time––Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel––or, more accurately, of the movement from Kant to Hegel.

We find mention of this movement from Kant to Hegel frequently in his works. And in brief, Žižek’s understanding of this transition is that Hegel ontologized Kant, meaning, that Hegel names the transition from an epistemological void to an ontological one:

(The Ticklish Subject, p. 55)

The void in the ontological edifice, according to Žižek’s reading of Hegel, is itself the subject. And so, the movement from Kant to Hegel is the movement from the inaccessible Thing beyond the subject’s reach to the subject itself as the Thing incapable of being reduced to the world of phenomena around which is exists. Žižek’s thesis is that the Hegelian Absolute is not a calm and serene All at peace with itself, but an Absolute constantly at war with itself, internally torn asunder by unrest and antagonism. The name of this crack in the One is the subject. This is, he proposes, the sense of Hegel’s fundamental thesis, announced at the outset of , is that the True is not only Substance, but equally Subject.

What takes place for Žižek here is a shift in the real: from the Kantian real to the Hegelian. As is often the case, Žižek uses the terms of psychoanalysis to read philosophy. In this case, he uses Lacan’s conception of the Real to draw out the shift: there is the Kantian Real-as-presupposed and the Hegelian Real-as-posed, i.e., the Kantian Real of being is a being that pre-exists and exists beyond the realm of phenomena, while the Hegelian Real is one posited by the subject behind the real of phenomena. In the first instance, the real is a substantial fullness that precedes the advent of, again in Lacanian terms, the Imaginary-Symbolic reality, i.e., phenomena, while in the second it is an empty void situated within the Imaginary-Symbolic reality, and the posited consequence of breakdowns, inconsistencies, and impasses within it. This is, however, a simplified distinction for the simple reason that as the shift in Lacan, announced after the Seventh Seminar, , is not a simple change from one notion of the real to another, homologously, the movement from Kant through to Hegel is not a simple substitution. The full account of this movement demands an understanding of Žižek’s interpretation of the entire sequence of attempted resolutions to the Kantian problem, i.e., of the passage from Kant to Fichte to Schelling to Hegel, and Žižek’s continuous meditation on this problem constitutes the very kernel of all of his works.

In sum, at the strictly philosophical level, Žižek’s work focuses on the resurrection of German Idealism, specifically the notion of the subject as self-relating negativity, and the problem of the ontological conditions of possibility for appearance. His latest work, as announced in the subtitle of his latest book, , is to establish the foundations of dialectical materialism. At the political level, Žižek’s project can be said to have three primary concerns: first, the identification of contradictions in late or contemporary capitalism, along with its democratic-liberal ideology, second, the overarching problem of enjoyment as a political factor, and three, theoretical work on a new form of mastery and organization.

In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution, Žižek, Slavoj, and Sophie Wahnich. In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution. Verso, 2016. ISBN: 1784782025

Islam, Ateizam i Modernost: Neka Bogohulna Razmisljanja, Žižek, Slavoj. Islam, Ateizam i Modernost: Neka Bogohulna Razmisljanja. Akademska knjiga, 2015. ISBN: 8662630855

Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism, Žižek, Slavoj. Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism. Verso, 2014. ISBN: 1781686823

Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism, Žižek, Slavoj. Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism. Allen Lane, 2014. ISBN: 1612194443

Demanding the Impossible, Žižek, Slavoj. Demanding the Impossible. Polity Press, 2014. ISBN: 0745672299

The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan, Žižek, Slavoj. The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan. Polity Press, 2014. ISBN: 0745663753

Event: A Philosophical Journey Through A Concept, Žižek, Slavoj. Event: A Philosophical Journey Through A Concept. Melville House, 2014. ISBN: 1612194117

What Does Europe Want?: The Union and Its Discontents, Žižek, Slavoj, and Srecko Horvat. What Does Europe Want?: The Union and Its Discontents. Columbia University Press, 2014. ISBN: 0231171072

Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj, Žižek, Slavoj, and Nadezhda Tololonnikova. Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj. Verso, 2014. ISBN: 1781687730

Zizek’s Jokes: Did You Hear the One About Hegel and Negation?, Žižek, Slavoj. Zizek’s Jokes: Did You Hear the One About Hegel and Negation? MIT Press, 2014. ISBN: 0262026716

From Myth to Symptom: The Case of Kosovo, Žižek, Slavoj, and Agon Hamza. From Myth to Symptom: The Case of Kosovo. KMD, 2013. ISBN: 9951883524

The Idea of Communism 2: The New York Conference, Žižek, Slavoj. The Idea of Communism 2: The New York Conference. Verso, 2013. ISBN: 1844679802

The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, Žižek, Slavoj. The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. Verso, 2012. ISBN: 1781680426

God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse, Žižek, Slavoj, and Boris Gunjevic. God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse. Seven Stories Press, 2012. ISBN: 1609803698

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Žižek, Slavoj. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso, 2012. ISBN: 1844678970

Začeti od začetka, Žižek, Slavoj. Začeti od začetka. Cankarjeva Zalozba, 2011.

Living in the End Times, Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. Verso, 2010. ISBN: 184467598X

Philosophy in the Present, Žižek, Slavoj, and Alain Badiou. Philosophy in the Present. Polity Press, 2010. ISBN: 0745640974

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. Verso, 2009. ISBN: 1844674282

The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, Žižek, Slavoj, and John Millbank. The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? MIT Press, 2009. ISBN: 0262012715

Violence, Žižek, Slavoj. Violence. Picador, 2008. ISBN: 0312427182

In Defense of Lost Causes, Žižek, Slavoj. In Defense of Lost Causes. Verso, 2007. ISBN: 1844674290

How to Read Lacan, Žižek, Slavoj. How to Read Lacan. W.W. Norton, 2007. ISBN: 0393329550

Virtue and Terror (Revolution), Žižek, Slavoj, and Maximilien Robespierre. Virtue and Terror (Revolution). Verso, 2007. ISBN: 184467584X

The Parallax View, Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. MIT Press, 2006. ISBN: 0262240513

The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, Žižek, Slavoj, Eric Santner, and Keith Reinhard. The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. University of Chicago Press, 2006. ISBN: 022604520X

The Universal Exception, Žižek, Slavoj. The Universal Exception. Continuum, 2005. ISBN: 1472570073

Interrogating the Real: Selected Writings, Žižek, Slavoj. Interrogating the Real: Selected Writings. Continuum, 2005. ISBN: 0826471102

Iraq: Borrowed Kettle, Žižek, Slavoj. Iraq: Borrowed Kettle. Verso, 2004. ISBN: 1844670015

Conversations with Zizek, Žižek, Slavoj, and Glyn Daly. Conversations with Zizek. Polity Press, 2004. ISBN: 0745628974

Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, Žižek, Slavoj. Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. Routledge, 2003. ISBN: 0415519047

The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. MIT Press, 2002. ISBN: 0262740257

Repeating Lenin, Žižek, Slavoj. Repeating Lenin. Arkzin, 2001. ISBN: 9536542188

Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Essays in the (Mis)Use of a Notion, Žižek, Slavoj. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Essays in the (Mis)Use of a Notion. Verso, 2001. ISBN: 1844677133

The Fright of Real Tears, Kieslowski and The Future, Žižek, Slavoj. The Fright of Real Tears, Kieslowski and The Future. Indiana University Press, 2001. ISBN: 0851707548

On Belief, Žižek, Slavoj. On Belief. Routledge, 2001. ISBN: 0415255325

Opera’s Second Death, Žižek, Slavoj, and Mladen Dolar. Opera’s Second Death. Routledge, 2001. ISBN: 0415930170

Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. The Wooster Press, 2001. ISBN: 1859844219

The Fragile Absolute, Or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For, Žižek, Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute, Or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For. Verso, 2000. ISBN: 1844673022

The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Žižek, Slavoj. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway. University of Washington, 2000. ISBN: 0295979259

Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, 2nd Edition, Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, 2nd Edition. Routledge, 2000. ASIN: B00DT63XJC

NATO as the Left Hand of God, Žižek, Slavoj. NATO as the Left Hand of God. Arkzin, 1999.

The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Verson, 1999. ISBN: 1844673014

The Spectre is Still Roaming Around!, Žižek, Slavoj. The Spectre is Still Roaming Around! Arkzin, 1998. ISBN: 9536542080

The Abyss of Freedom: Ages of the World, Žižek, Slavoj. The Abyss of Freedom: Ages of the World. University of Michigan Press, 1997. ISBN: 0472066528

The Plague of Fantasies, Žižek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. Verso, 1997. ISBN: 1844673030

The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters, Žižek, Slavoj. The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters. Verso, 1996. ISBN: 1859840949

The Metasases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality, Žižek, Slavoj. The Metasases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality. Verso, 1994. ISBN: 086091688X

Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology, Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology. Duke Uniersity Press, 1993. ISBN: 0822313952

Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan In Hollywood And Out, Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan In Hollywood And Out. Routledge, 1992. ISBN: 0415772591

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid To Ask Hitchcock), Žižek, Slavoj. Everything You Always Wanted Yo Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid To Ask Hitchcock). Verso, 1992. ISBN: 0860915921

Looking Awry: an Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: an Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. MIT Press, 1991. ISBN: 026274015X

For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment As A Political Factor, Žižek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment As A Political Factor. Verso, 1991. ISBN: 1844672123

The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 1989. ISBN: 1844673006

Slavoj Žižek – “The Obscene Monster” (Excerpt 2) – 7.30.2020

Slavoj Žižek – Fall 2020 Lecture – “The Rise of Obscene Masters” – 07.27.2020 (Excerpt)

“Disorder Under Heaven”

Capitalism and its Threats

“Christian Atheism”

On The Left (Excerpt)

The great challenge of The Left

Object Petit a and Digital Civilization

Ideology and Modalities of Not Knowing

Lacan’s four discourses and the real

Communist Absconditus

The Buddhist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism

Different Figures of The Big Other

Object a and The Function of Ideology

Ontological Incompleteness In Painting, Literature and Quantum Theory

On Melancholy

The Function of Fantasy In The Lacanian Real

The Irony of Buddhism

Lacanian Theology and Buddhism

Ontological Incompleteness in Film

Being and Subjectivity: Act and Evental Enthusiasm

The Big Other and The Event of Subjectivity

Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern 17/17

Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern 16/17

Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern 15/17

Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern 14/17

Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern 13/17

Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern 12/17

Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern 11/17

Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern 10/17

Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern 9/17

Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern 8/17

Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern 7/17

Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern 6/17

Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern 5/17

Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern 4/17

Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern 3/17

Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern 2/17

Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern 1/17

The Interaction With the Other in Hegel 17/17

The Interaction With the Other in Hegel 16/17

The Interaction With the Other in Hegel 15/17

The Interaction With the Other in Hegel 14/17

The Interaction With the Other in Hegel 13/17

The Interaction With the Other in Hegel 12/17

The Interaction With the Other in Hegel 11/17

The Interaction With the Other in Hegel 10/17

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Slavoj Žižek by Jamil Khader LAST REVIEWED: 25 September 2019 LAST MODIFIED: 25 September 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0080

Slavoj Žižek was born on March 21, 1949, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in the former Yugoslavia. Žižek studied philosophy and sociology as an undergraduate student and completed a master of arts degree in philosophy in 1975 at the University of Ljubljana, writing a 400-page thesis on French structuralism. In 1981, he earned his first doctor of arts degree in philosophy, writing his dissertation on German idealism. Four years later, Žižek successfully defended his second doctoral dissertation titled, “Philosophy Between the Symptom and the Fantasy,” a Lacanian reading of Hegel, Marx, and Kripke, which he completed under the direction of Lacan’s son in law, Jacques-Alain Miller, in Paris. Žižek is one of the most prominent members of the Ljubljana Lacanian School, a group of theorists who have been affiliated with the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis in Ljubljana since the 1970s. Žižek also cofounded the Liberal Democratic Party in Slovenia and ran as its candidate in the first multiparty presidential elections in the country in 1990, narrowly missing office. Later, he completely broke with Slovene public space and became engaged in global radical Leftist politics. He is currently a researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana; the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London; Eminent Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; returning faculty member of the European Graduate School; and visiting professor at the German Department of New York University. Since 1991 he has also held visiting positions at different universities in the United States and United Kingdom. He is also the editor of three major book series, including WO ES WAR, Short Circuits , and SIC Series . In 2012, Foreign Policy listed Žižek as one of its top influential 100 global thinkers, and in 2018 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid, Spain). Ever since the publication of his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology , in 1989, Žižek has become known as one of the most provocative and innovative philosophers in the world. Žižek has developed a challenging dialectical materialist philosophical system that appropriates the late Lacan to reload and retrieve Hegel through Marxism, Christianity, and quantum physics in order to describe the structure of reality (ontology) and to articulate the basis for collective revolutionary change through a wide range of cultural, folkloric (jokes), literary, religious, political, scientific, and philosophical references. Žižek has published extensively, almost a monograph a year, on a wide range of topics, and has been engaged in many debates and controversies that attest to his commitment to reformulating the questions that philosophers, psychoanalysts, political scientists, activists, and the general public have been asking about common everyday notions about reality and its relationship to the subject. Žižek has consequently established a phenomenal presence in the lecture circuits, online, and in the media that has made him a household name and one of the most iconic international public figures and philosophers in the world.

Lucid and comprehensive book-length overviews that do not presuppose any prior knowledge of Žižek’s dialectical materialist philosophical system, its central themes, key Hegelian and Lacanian terms, and major intellectual and conceptual sources (Lacan, Hegel, and Marx) can be found in Myers 2003 , Kul-Want and Piero 2011 , Sheehan 2012 , and Wood 2012 . Myers 2003 approaches Žižek’s work by focusing on the question of identity and the subject; Kul-Want and Piero 2011 focuses on Žižek’s politics, and Sheehan 2012 focuses on the intellectual sources that influenced his work. Sheehan 2012 also provides brief summaries of many books by Žižek, while Wood 2012 provides book-by-book chapter summaries and analysis of Žižek’s work up to its publication date. More critical introductions, which are intended for more advanced audiences, are in Kay 2003 , Butler 2005 , and Parker 2004 . Kay 2003 and Butler 2005 emphasize Žižek’s approach to the Real, and Parker 2004 examines the interrelationship among Žižek’s intellectual sources and the theories that shaped his work. Pound 2008 provides a useful general introduction to Žižek’s work for religious studies students and scholars.

Butler, Rex. Slavoj Žižek – Live Theory . London and New York: Continuum, 2005.

A sophisticated chronological account of Žižek’s philosophy and its overall goal in terms of the function of the master-signifier in the ideological field. Examines the master-signifier, through which the ideological construction of reality is presented as a seamless whole, in relation to the object a as a stand in for the Real and their relationship to the political act. Contains a useful chapter on Žižek’s debate with Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau and a live interview with Žižek.

Kay, Sarah. Žižek: A Critical Introduction . Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003.

An advanced introduction to Žižek as the “philosopher of the Real.” Examines the manifestation of the Real in the cultural field, sexual difference, the ethics of psychoanalysis, and the political act. Shows that the value and importance of Žižek’s ideas must be understood in the overall context of his egalitarian politics and his rejection of cynical postmodernism. Provides a useful glossary of major Žižekian terms.

Kul-Want, Christopher, and Piero. Introducing Slavoj Žižek: A Graphic Guide . London: Icon Books, 2011.

A brief graphic illustration of Žižek’s political thought through his analysis of the underlying ideological causes of the world’s crises and catastrophes. Illuminates Žižek’s position on the ecology, poverty, consumerism, Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, and the law through the Hegelian notion of incomplete reality. Presents the liberating aspect of his philosophy in relation to the struggle for the commons, immoral (authentic) forms of ethics, and revolutionary ethics.

Myers, Tony. Slavoj Žižek . Routledge Critical Thinkers. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.

A clearly written and accessible introduction to Žižek’s work for the uninitiated through an examination of the questions of identity and subjectivity that bind his work together. Offers a concise explanation of Žižek’s debt to Hegel, Marx, and Lacan and analyzes the political and ethical implications of the subject in its different hegemonic forms, including postmodern, ideological, gendered, or ethnic identities or subjects. A “Further Reading” chapter offers brief summaries of Žižek’s major individually authored books in English.

Parker, Ian. Slavoj Žižek – A Critical Introduction . London: Pluto Press, 2004.

A polemical introduction to the intellectual sources of Žižek’s work (Hegel, Lacan, and Marx). Provides a useful biographical context for understanding Žižek and explains how the key concepts of each theory (history, subject, politics) relate to each other and why they are important to understanding Žižek’s work. Offers a useful summary of the existing critical responses to Žižek and the objections to his heterodox readings of Hegel, Marx, and Lacan.

Pound, Marcus. Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction . Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans, 2008.

A comprehensive and systematic introduction to Žižek’s work for religious studies scholars that examines theological motif and themes in Žižek’s philosophical thought, psychoanalytic theory, and politics. Scrutinizes Žižek’s repeated references to Christ, Job, Saint Paul via Alain Badiou’s theory of the political act, the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in terms of Lacan’s formulae of sexuation. Explores the implications of Žižek’s work on enjoyment to anti-Semitism in the context of interreligious relations.

Sheehan, Sean. Žižek: A Guide for the Perplexed . London and New York: Continuum, 2012.

A concise introduction to Žižek’s thought for the general reader through an easy and accessible explication of the major sources (Lacanian psychoanalysis, German Idealism, and Communism) that shaped his philosophy. Places Žižek’s thought in the larger context of these sources. References German Idealism beyond Hegel and relates Žižek’s Marxism to Lenin, Mao, Christianity in general, and Saint Paul in particular. Provides succinct summaries of varying lengths mainly of Žižek’s single-authored books in English.

Wood, Kelsey. Žižek: A Reader’s Guide . Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

A lucid and comprehensive guidebook that provides book-by-book chapter summaries for Žižek’s single-authored books in English. An introductory chapter defines his key Hegelian and Lacanian terms (Absolute Knowledge, the Other, the split subject, fantasy, enjoyment, ideology, belief, the ethics of the Real, etc.) and outlines his major contributions to the discipline of traditional philosophy. Provides detailed summaries for twenty-four books and discusses the importance of the concept of singular universality to Žižek’s politics.

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Professor Slavoj Zizek

• International Director of BIH, Humanities and Social Sciences Institutes and Research Centres

World-renowned public intellectual Professor Slavoj Žižek has published over 50 books (translated into 20 languages) on topics ranging from philosophy and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, to theology, film, opera and politics, including Lacan in Hollywood and The Fragile Absolute. He was a candidate for, and nearly won, the Presidency of his native Slovenia in the first democratic elections after the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1990. Although courted by many universities in the US, he resisted offers until the International Directorship of Birkbeck's Centre came up. Believing that 'Political issues are too serious to be left only to politicians', Žižek aims to promote the role of the public intellectual, to be intellectually active and to address the larger public.

Professor Žižek contributes to various events during the year. Listen to the podcasts of Žižek's events .

Web profiles

Publications.

• Zizek, Slavoj and Frosh, Stephen and Aristodemou, Maria (2010) Unbehagen and the subject: an interview with Slavoj Žižek . Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 15, pp. 418-428. ISSN 1088-0763.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2009) To each according to his greed . Harpers (1913), pp. 15-17. ISSN 0017-789X.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2009) Notes on a poetic-military complex . Third Text 23 (5), pp. 503-509. ISSN 0952-8822.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2009) Berlusconi in Theran . London Review of Books 31 (14), ISSN 0260-9592.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2009) How to begin from the beginning . New Left Review (57), pp. 43-56. ISSN 0028-6060.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2009) . . . I will move the underground: Slavoj Zizek on Udi Aloni's Forgiveness . International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 6 (1), pp. 80-83. ISSN 1742-3341.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2009) Architectural parallax: spandrels and other phenomena of class struggle . Lacan.com
• Zizek, Slavoj (2009) Descartes and the post-traumatic subject: on Catherine Malabou's Les nouveaux blesses and other autistic monsters . Qui Parle 17 (2), pp. 123-148. ISSN 1041-8385.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2009) Excursions into philosophy . Lacan.com
• Zizek, Slavoj (2009) Hermeneutic delirium . Lacanian Ink (34), pp. 138-151. ISSN 1049-7749.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2009) Hollywood today: report from an ideological frontline . Lacan.com
• Zizek, Slavoj (2009) How to read Lacan . Lacan.com
• Zizek, Slavoj (2009) Josephine le sinthome . Lacanian Ink (33), pp. 156-163. ISSN 1049-7749.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2009) Multiculturalism, the reality of an illusion . Lacan.com
• Zizek, Slavoj (2009) My own private Austria . Lacan.com
• Zizek, Slavoj (2009) The Palestinian question: the couple symptom/fetish . Lacan.com
• Zizek, Slavoj (2009) Why cynics are wrong . Lacan.com
• Zizek, Slavoj (2009) A plea for a return to différance (with a minor pro domo sua) . Lacan.com
• Zizek, Slavoj (2008) Use your illusions . London Review of Books ISSN 0260-9592.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2008) Die EU-Zyniker . Schweizer Monatshefte 88 (9-10), pp. 7-8. ISSN 0036-7400.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2008) The secret clauses of the liberal utopia . Law and Critique 19 (1), pp. 1-18. ISSN 0957-8536.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2008) Jenseits des liberalen realismus . Schweizer Monatshefte 88 (2-3), pp. 5-6. ISSN 0036-7400.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2008) Censorship today: violence, or ecology as a new opium for the masses . Lacan.com 18, pp. 42-43.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2008) Christ, Hegel, Wagner . International Journal of Zizek Studies 2 (2), ISSN 1751-8229.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2008) Confessions of an unrepentant Leninist . Lacan.com
• Zizek, Slavoj (2008) Eugene Onegin, a Russian gay gentleman . Lacanian Ink pp. 130-141. ISSN 1049-7749.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2008) The Lacanian real: television . Lacan.com
• Zizek, Slavoj (2008) Masturbation, or sexuality in the atonal world . Lacan.com
• Zizek, Slavoj (2008) Nature and its discontents . SubStance 37 (3), pp. 37-72. ISSN 0049-2426.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2008) Notes on ideology . Lacan.com
• Zizek, Slavoj (2008) Organs without bodies - Gilles Deleuze . Lacan.com
• Zizek, Slavoj (2008) When straight means weird and psychosis is normal . Lacan.com
• Zizek, Slavoj (2008) Why Lacan is not a Heideggerian . Lacanian Ink (32), pp. 134-149. ISSN 1049-7749.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2007) Resistance is surrender . London Review of Books 29 (22), pp. 7. ISSN 0260-9592.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2018) The courage of hopelessness: chronicles of a year of acting dangerously . Penguin. ISBN 9780141986098.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2017) Incontinence of the void: economico-philosophical Spandrels . Short Circuits. MIT Press. ISBN 9780262036818.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2013) Less than nothing: Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism . London, UK: Verso. ISBN 9781781681275.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2011) Living in the end times . London, UK: Verso. ISBN 9781844677023.
• Zizek, Slavoj and Douzinas, Costas Zizek, Slavoj and Douzinas, Costas, eds. (2010) The idea of Communism . London, UK: Verso Books. ISBN 9781844674596.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2009) In defense of lost causes . London, UK: Verso. ISBN 9781844674299.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2008) Violence . BIG IDEAS//small books. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9780312427184.

Book Section

• Zizek, Slavoj (2016) Afterword: objects, objects everywhere . In: Hamza, A. and Ruda, F. (eds.) Slavoj Žižek and Dialectical Materialism . Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 177-192. ISBN 9781349572496.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2015) Divine ex-sistence . In: Tomsic, S. and Zevnik, A. (eds.) Jacques Lacan: Between Psychoanalysis and Politics . Taylor and Francis. ISBN 9780415724326.
• Zizek, Slavoj (2015) The rule of law between obscenity and the right to distress . In: de Sutter, L. (ed.) Zizek and Law . Taylor and Francis. pp. 220-247. ISBN 9781138801844.
• Douzinas, Costas (2010) Adikia: on rights and communism . In: Douzinas, Costas and Zizek, Slavoj (eds.) The Idea of Communism . The Idea of Communism. London, UK: Verso Books. ISBN 9781844674596.
• Douzinas, Costas (2010) Introduction: the idea of communism . In: Douzinas, Costas and Zizek, Slavoj (eds.) The Idea of Communism . The Idea of Communism. London, UK: Verso Books. ISBN 9781844674596.

Conference Item

• Brown, W. and Douzinas, Costas and Frosh, Stephen and Zizek, Slavoj (2012) Critical theory summer school: Friday debate . Critical theory summer school: Friday debate, 2012, The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

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High Profiles

Hegel Don’t Bother Me!

Slavoj žižek.

has been called both ‘the Elvis of cultural theory’ and ‘the most dangerous philosopher in the West’. On 17 April 2015, Simon Joseph Jones  called on him at his home in Ljubljana and, in a three-hour conversation, tried to get a word in edgeways.

This insight of Protestantism is crucial theologically, I think. It’s much closer to me than all that Catholic stuff, because it’s less corruptive, you know? The moment you concede that your salvation depends on your good works, we are at the level of bargaining: ‘Should I do this, so I get that?’ and so on. No! If you take seriously the ethical core of Christianity, you cannot make salvation dependent on good works.

But somehow you must, as it were, civilise that crazy God who, because he is omnipotent, is on the edge of being evil, you know? I think this is the great discovery of Protestantism. In Catholicism, God is the high point of an orderly, hierarchic universe. The absolute excess of God, what mystics called the ‘madness’ of God, is lost.

This is the paradox that people don’t get, I think. This is very profound Protestant logic, that God is an absolute tyrant and only through utter humiliation [do] you get the modern notion of free individuality. Luther even says: We are the shit that fell out of God’s anus. And this reduction to nothing is weirdly liberating, you know?

I think this barbarian [element of Protestantism] is the necessary obverse of modern human freedom. In this sense, I am not very fashionable! I debated this once with Rowan Williams and I told him – OK, I was provoking him – ‘When I take power, even you will go to a re-education camp,’ because he has some tenderness towards Eastern Orthodoxy. I am here totally Western European. Eastern Orthodoxy is the worst, because it has this formula which is totally wrong, I think: that God became human so that we can become God.

There are some nice analogies here with Bolshevism – for example, Gorky and Lunacharsky proposed what they called bogograditelk’stvo , ‘the construction of God’: the idea that humanity will gradually divinise itself. No! I think we should stick to Luther, that, you know, the only space for freedom is to be divine shit.

You referred to ‘when you take power’, and you did in fact run for the presidency of Slovenia in 1990. Why did you do that?

To help my party. It was a very modest party, not even very leftist, called Liberal Democratic. We were nonetheless dissidents, and our fear was that Slovenia would [end up with] just two political blocs: the old Communists, who were, up to a point, genuinely popular, and the (mostly conservative) nationalists. So, the point was to establish, like, a third way! And for almost 20 years it worked and we did avoid those dangerous dynamics that happened in Croatia and Serbia.

Why did you subsequently move from a hands-dirty kind of politics to being almost entirely a theorist? I know you don’t enjoy teaching –

I hate it, actively.

If things go on the way they are going, we are approaching some end point which may be not universal catastrophe but some very sad new authoritarian society

– but the way you reference popular culture means you can communicate with people outside the ivory tower. Is there something you are trying to achieve, or is it just that a philosopher must find ways to communicate or what’s the point in having ideas?

There are two levels here. The first is my terror of jargon. I always say: the idiot I am trying to explain things to is not my public, it’s myself. I have terrible memories from my youth when philosophers just exchanged jargon and people didn’t understand what they meant.

The other level is that, very traditionally, I do feel a kind of public responsibility of an intellectual – at least to raise the right questions. People ask me: ‘What should we do today, politically, ecologically?’ Fuck it! What do I know? I don’t have answers. The important thing is to ask the right questions, because the way ideology works today, I think, is precisely at the level of how we perceive a problem. Ideology is at its most dangerous when it deals with a real problem but there is a mystification in the way it describes it.

For example: sexism, racism and so on. We tend today automatically to [consider these in terms of] tolerance and harassment, and I find both problematic. Of course there is harassment, but isn’t there in this also something of a fear of your neighbour? If I may put it this way, this is today’s predominant anti-Christian attitude. The Christian attitude is ‘Love your neighbour as yourself,’ but this delivers a message to the neighbour: ‘If you come too close to me, you harass me.’ It’s part of, I think, our narcissistic self-perception.

This is why I am also opposed to [giving to] charity, because, I think, its true purpose is precisely to keep the suffering neighbour at a distance.

With ecology, it’s the same. What I especially hate is this, again, pseudo-superego personalisation of ecology. Like, instead of systemic changes, you are personally terrorised: Did you recycle all your newspapers and all your Coke cans and so on? It becomes your problem, and of course you are [made to feel] always guilty – but at the same time, if you recycle everything, ‘Oh, I did my duty. It’s not my problem’ and so on.

How do you think things are going to develop?

I’m a Hegelian optimist. For Hegel, the French Revolution went wrong but he nonetheless wanted to retain its legacy, so there is no return to the ancien régime . And I think: Isn’t our problem today similar? Communism was a fiasco, but the problems are still here which generated it. Look at ecology – the market is not enough. For example, the Japanese government [has admitted] that two, three days after the explosion at Fukushima they thought for one or two days that they would have to evacuate the entire Tokyo area. Like, 30 million people or whatever! Sorry, it’s not the market that you need for that but total, almost military, organisation. And I am not now preaching a return to some sort of Stalinist regime; I am just saying that, to avoid that, we really need to find a new logic of large collective decisions.

If things go on the way they are going, we are – this is my still Marxist belief – approaching some end point which may be not universal catastrophe but some very sad new authoritarian society, where we will keep most of our personal freedoms – gay rights, abortion, whatever you want – even, up to a point, freedom of expression – but key decisions are made elsewhere, in a global process that is more and more impenetrable, untouchable – it’s just capitalism. This is what worries me.

Capitalism less and less needs democracy, and we are so deeply into this depoliticised society where we enjoy our freedoms but politics is left to experts. In some countries it is only the Christian conservatives who are truly engaged and, if the left doesn’t answer this, what I fear is a society where the opposition is between a technocratic centre and the Christian (but in the bad sense) fundamentalists, whatever. And, admit it, we are moving towards that, in France, in Scandinavia and [other] countries. In England, maybe not?

It is vain to wait for a big revolutionary moment. We have just to start modestly here and there and pick out those strategic points that will trigger the process of change

So, I am not a Marxist determinist. I think that, if anything, the [trajectory] of history is…

Yes! Although we still have relatively good lives, in the long term things are going downwards, I’m afraid.

What can we do? Maybe we will not do anything. If we do nothing, it will turn really bad – but I am more than aware of all the problems. For me, the big trauma is Stalinism still. Fascism was a relatively simple thing: there were bad guys who decided they wanted to do bad [things] and when they took power they did them. But Communism, whatever you say, was at the beginning an emancipatory explosion, though it turned into a total nightmare. We still don’t have a good theory of why.

So, what [is the alternative]? At one point, it looked [to be a] social democratic welfare state, but with globalisation and so on that is over. What my friend [Yanis] Varoufakis, [then] the Greek finance minister, is proposing to the Brussels bureaucracy and Germany is something that 40, 50 years ago would have been a very moderate social democracy, but now [if you propose it] you are decried as a lunatic and so on. This makes me really sad. What the Greeks are demanding is modest. They are arguing very rationally.

You have been very critical of those, such as the French economist Thomas Piketty, who have argued that the system is essentially OK if only we can get people to pay more tax or whatever. You point out that we are no more likely to get people to pay more tax than we are to have a revolution and rebuild the whole system. 

Ah, I like this argument. As the Trotskyite Marxist [cultural critic] Alberto Pascano says, maybe modest reformism is our ultimate utopia, you know? Piketty is well aware that capitalism is global, which means that one country [can’t afford to raise taxes on its own]; but if we were in a position to raise taxes globally, it would mean we would already have won, because we would have a worldwide government with full authority. So, his idea is: we will win when we[’ve] already won!

This is why – this was a heavy provocation! – I said that the problem with Hitler was that he wasn’t violent enough. Hitler – here, I’m a classical Marxist – killed millions to keep things basically the way they were. He was a coward: he was afraid to risk real change. Gandhi was more violent than Hitler, in the sense that he didn’t kill anyone but he brought the British Empire down.

What can our readers who believe in the emancipatory logic of Christianity do?

I will give you a very modest proposal of how to be – let’s say ‘reformist-revolutionary’. I don’t like pseudo-radical leftists who say, ‘Don’t get your hands dirty by participating!’ and sit and wait for the big event. I think what gives me hope is precisely what I told you about Syriza and so on. This is how we should proceed.

We need to rehabilitate what is worth saving in our European legacy: Christianity, democracy, whatever. Let’s not behave as if we have to be ashamed of it, because what is replacing it is something terrifying

For example, let me tell you something which may surprise you. It’s so easy to be disappointed by Barack Obama. Some of my stupid leftist friends, if you listen to them – what did they fucking expect? That Obama would introduce communism? OK, he did many things wrong, but some things are important that he didn’t do. He didn’t attack Iran or Syria, for example.

The universal health care he fought for is a moderate success. Now, the point is this: universal health care is not something revolutionary – Canada has it, most of Europe – but obviously in the United States it is. We saw that Obama was dragged to the Supreme Court, he was attacked [on the basis that] ‘he doesn’t really love America’ and all that. OK, but isn’t this a model of how you should [proceed]? You pick a very rational, modest demand and you trigger a process of rethinking.

This is, for me, the art. In every country, you pick the right thing – for example, in India, which prides itself on being the greatest democracy and so on, there is still the system of castes. Try that! It’s not in itself revolutionary, but it triggers the process. You know I am a critic of multiculturalism, but in Turkey it means justice for Armenians, for Kurds – it’s revolutionary. Or in Europe, what Syriza is doing.

Now, I come to my final paradox. The highest art is to [set] the market against itself. Some years ago, I saw on CNN a report on Mali which explained that they grow really good cotton and it’s one-third the price of American cotton. So, why can’t they succeed? Because the United States gives more money to its cotton farmers in financial support than the entire state budget of Mali. So Mali’s minister of finance said: ‘We don’t need any help. Just respect your own market rules and don’t cheat! You tell us “no state intervention”. You do [the same] and our troubles are over!’

You know, that is the problem today with global capitalism: it’s not austerity, it’s that they don’t follow the rules they impose on others. So, this is bad – but at the same time it gives us hope, I think. This is, if you ask me, the way to proceed: it is vain to wait for a big revolutionary moment, we have just to start modestly here and there and pick out those strategic points that will trigger the process of change.

Otherwise, I really am a pessimist. If Greece fails…

By the sound of it, you are ‘a pessimist of the intellect, an optimist of the will’.

Yeah, yeah! OK, I agree. Or I will put it like this: I am a Communist (as I like to say) by default.

And I think that – people start to shout at me when I say this – we need to rehabilitate what is worth saving in our European legacy: Christianity, democracy, whatever. Let’s not behave as if we have to be ashamed of it, we are always the guilty guys. I really think that the left today, with this false multiculturalism and permanent self-hatred, is playing a very dangerous game, because what is replacing that legacy is something terrifying.

This edit was originally published in the August  2015  issue of   Third Way .

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Slavoj Žižek was born in Ljubljana, in what was then Yugoslavia, in 1949, and attended Bežigrad High School. He studied philosophy and sociology at Ljubljana University, but in 1973 was denied a post as assistant researcher after his master’s thesis on French structuralism was judged to be ‘non-Marxist’.

After doing national service in the army, he was unemployed until 1977, when he was given a clerical job at the Central Committee of Slovenia’s Communist Party. He completed his doctorate on German Idealism at Ljubljana in 1981, and then studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII, gaining his second doctorate in 1985.

Returning to Slovenia in the late Eighties, he wrote a column for the left-liberal weekly Mladina and co-founded the Liberal Democratic Party. In 1990, in the country’s first free elections, he ran for a seat on its four-member collective presidency, losing narrowly.

His first book had been published in 1972, but he achieved international recognition in 1989 with his first in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology . It was followed by (among many others) Tarrying with the Negative (1993), Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002), Organs without Bodies (2003), The Parallax View (2006), In Defense of Lost Causes (2008), First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2009), Living in the End Times (2010), Less than Nothing and The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (both 2012) and Event , Žižek’s Jokes , The Most Sublime Hysteric , Absolute Recoil and Trouble in Paradise (all 2014).

He has written and presented two documentaries, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012).

He has taught in Paris and across the United States. He is currently international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at London University, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University and a senior researcher at Ljubljana’s Institute for Social Sciences. He is the president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis.

His work was chronicled in a 2005 documentary entitled Žižek! . The International Journal of Žižek Studies was founded in 2007.

He has married three times, most recently in 2013, and has two sons.

Up-to-date as at 1 May 2015

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Key Theories of Slavoj Zizek

Key Theories of Slavoj Zizek

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 2, 2017 • ( 5 )

It was two books based upon his Paris doctorate and published in English translation, that first rudely awoke the world to Zizek ian discourse: The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) and For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (1990). Another key early text in the English speaking world is The Zizek Reader (1999), edited by Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright. Turning to Zizek ’s exhilarating prose also leads to an associated problem for many beginning readers: the mélange therein of Lacanian discourse and Hegelian methodology – which alternately are ‘illuminated’ by reference to popular culture, or ‘illuminate’ popular culture by reference to psychoanalysis/ philosophy – induces some anxiety and stress. The cure may be to not worry and to enjoy one’s symptom; this involves realizing two things: (1) that  Zizek   writes dialectically, which means that any particular point in one of his arguments is a temporary stage that will eventually be transformed via its opposing argument (proceeding therefore via Hegelian negation), and (2) that Zizek  is part of the Slovene Lacanian School, which operates at a level of intellectual intensity rarely glimpsed in the West. But Zizek ‘s work is not impenetrable, rather, one simply needs to learn a few key Lacanian terms, watch a few Hitchcock movies, and then sit back and enjoy the Hegelian ride. Perhaps the key term to approach the  Zizek  ian rollercoaster equipped with, is the ‘Real’. This is a Lacanian term that the editors of The Zizek   Reader describe as ‘that which is both inside and outside the subject, resisting the Symbolic’s endeavours to contain it’. This definition begs the question: what is the Symbolic? All Lacanian terms are understandable as part of a process of subject formation: sticking with simply the main coordinates, there are three relevant interrelated terms, the pre-linguistic Imaginary, the cultural and linguistic Symbolic, and the Real; the Imaginary is structured by needs and image-identifications; the Symbolic is structured by language and the law; the Real is that which can neither be pictured nor articulated through language. The Real is not reality, existing in opposition to it; it is that which is at the limits of language, and can only be partially and incompletely approached as, or via, trauma, lack or enjoyment.3 But the Real is constitutive and as such forms a ‘hard kernel’ at the heart of existence. Much of Zizek  ’s writing is an oblique approach to the Real.

Zizek ’s Hegelianism is highly self-reflexive and self-explanatory; in a chapter of The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (1999), Zizek   asks ‘What Is “Negation of Negation”?’. He answers via a range of examples: a ‘New Age airport pocketbook’ called From Atlantis to the Sphinx by Colin Wilson, an academic book called States of Injury by Wendy Brown, a brief reference to anthropology, then Marx’s Capital , and finally the ‘experience’ of the dissident struggle against Party rule in Slovenia. How does his argument proceed? First he notes the surprisingly Hegelian conclusion to From Atlantis to the Sphinx, where the historical transition from intuitive to logical types of knowledge, and the current phase of ‘reuniting the two halves’, is resolved not via some bland and balanced New Age synthesis of intuition/logic, but through recognition that it has already happened; as Zizek  says:

the unavoidable conclusion is that the moment of the Fall (the forgetting of the ancient wisdom) coincides with its exact opposite, with the longed-for next step in evolution. Here we have the properly Hegelian matrix of development: the Fall is already in itself its own self-sublation; the wound is already in itself its own healing, so that the perception that we are dealing with the Fall is ultimately a misperception, an effect of our skewed perspective – all we have to do is accomplish the move from In-itself to For-Itself: to change our perspective and recognize how the longed-for reversal is already operative in what is going on.

This is a slightly long-winded way of saying that the subject of ‘misperception’ is in need of Lacanian psychoanalysis . Except, of course, that  Zizek  does not say this; he instead gives the reader another example, that of a ‘misperceived’ world devoid of oppressors, where such a perspective fails to realize that it is mediated by the oppressor in the first place. Zizek   thus poses two answers to his question that structure this chapter: first, negation of negation is a two-stage process, the first negation leaving the subject inside the symbolic domain she is rejecting, the second negation being that of the symbolic domain itself; this is then recognized by Zizek   to be a ‘pure repetition’. What is the point of this chapter? First, it reveals that the Hegelian dialect can be exposed or learnt through examples that have a certain narrative form; second, that a really good way of moving from In-itself to For-itself is via psychoanalysis (moving from ‘misperception’ to recognition); third it reveals how applying Hegel allows a rapid and smooth traversal of anthropological, cultural, political, philosophical and sexual domains of experience and knowledge; and fourth, it enables us to admire Zizek  himself, as the grand expositor of Hegel via unusual examples. Zizek  himself gets even more unusual with his explication of Christianity, but this must be understood to be part of his wider engagement with important twentieth-century thinkers in the humanities, in this instance the philosopher Alain Badiou. Zizek  is interested in Badiou’s ‘politics of truth’ or ‘theory of subjectivity as fidelity to the Truth-Event’. This theory is given full expression in Badiou’s reading of St Paul, but Zizek  also gives minor examples from moments of unexpected and unpredictable political change.

In The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (2003),  Zizek ‘s own reading of St Paul hinges on the recognition of a shared question between St Paul and Lacan: is there love beyond law? The answer is that only in the incomplete, imperfectability of subjectivity can there be love, and this elevation of imperfection is the Real of Christianity. Zizek  also engages extensively with the feminist and gender theorist Judith Butler. As Sarah Kay argues, in this engagement  Zizek ’s fidelity to Lacan reveals a certain weakness in his earlier theorizing of ‘woman’, a weakness that Butler is aware of; further, by charting Zizek ’s reading of a single film – The Crying Game – his movement through multiple perspectives is revealed, thus Zizek  moves

from occupying a ‘heterosexist normative’ position condemned by Butler, via a ‘queer’ position that is quite Butlerian, to adroitly contending that it is, in reality, Butler who confers a content on sexual difference and thus normalizes it in a way  Zizek  would reject.

Zizek  switches from the entire Oedipal scene of conflict to a new notion, drawn from Lacan, whereby sexual difference is constituted via a struggle with the death drive: Butler, in this instance, remains rooted in an orthodox notion of gender, with the logical impasse of positing gender identification and misidentification at a stage in subjective formation prior to the Symbolic – in other words, before there is such a thing as gender differentiation. It is in  Zizek  ’s engagement with Deleuze, however, that he has received the most opprobrium: in this instance, Zizek  ’s shameful act is the book Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (2004), which Zizek calls ‘an encounter between two incompatible fields’. This encounter creates Lacanian and Hegelian equivalences to certain key terms, starting on the very first page, where Deleuze’s ‘excess of the pure flow of becoming’ or the reality of the virtual is posited as the Lacanian Real. In other words, there is not just a Lacanian/Hegelian critique of Deleuze at work in this book, but also a recuperation. A more important equivalence is that of Deleuze’s ‘quasi-cause’ with that of Lacan’s ‘objet petit a’; the former is an ‘excess’ in the emergence of the new, one that cannot be reduced in any way to historical context;  Zizek  calls the ‘quasi-cause’ a ‘metacause’ whereby the effects already exceed the causal explanations. In a Lacanian shift, Zizek   postulates that the ‘cause’ of desire, which is the object and cause of desire at the same time, called ‘objet petit a’ functions in the same way as the ‘quasi-cause’:

the basic premise of Deleuze’s ontology is precisely that corporeal causality is not complete. In the emergence of the New, something occurs that cannot be properly described at the level of corporal causes and effects. Quasi cause is not the illusory theater of shadows, like a child who thinks he is magically making a toy run, unaware of the mechanic causality that effectively does the work – on the contrary, the quasi cause fills in the gap of corporeal causality.

The popular commentator on postmodernism and theory, Steven Shaviro, notes that Deleuze and Guattari foreground this link between their work and Lacan’s in a footnote in their Anti-Oedipus; Shaviro also sketches one of the ‘problems’ with Zizek  s book for many readers, that the recuperated Deleuze is reduced and constrained by the Lacanian-Hegelianism that charges Zizek  ’s writing. Zizek  ’s oblique approach to the Real, then, causes exhilaration and anxiety, creating simultaneously a feeling of intellectual freedom and oppression; the fact that so many commentators on his work express their own psychological and emotional state, is in itself, perhaps, indicative of a desire to be analysed by Zizek  , while simultaneously being horrified by the thought. Perhaps it is a Hegelian desire to move from the In-itself to For-itself, gaining the awareness as Zizek   argues in Organs Without Bodies that the ‘truly New is not simply a new content but the very shift of perspective by means of which the Old appears in a new light’.

Source: FIFTY KEY LITERARY THEORISTS by Richard J. Lane, Routledge Publication.

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Tags: Cultural Studies , Hegel , Lacan , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Mapping Ideology , or They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor , Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences , Psychoanalysis , Slavoj Žižek , The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity , The Sublime Object of Ideology , The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology

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On my radar: Slavoj Žižek’s cultural highlights

The Slovenian cultural theorist on enjoying books that contradict him, Boots Riley’s hilarious TV series, and his ‘terrifying’ taste in food

T he Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek was born in Ljubljana in 1949. Wildly prolific, with a love of provocation, he has published more than 50 books and hundreds of essays and articles on a wide variety of subjects from Lacanian psychoanalysis to Hollywood to Covid-19. Žižek is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. He has two sons and lives in Ljubljana with his fourth wife, the writer Jela Krečič. In his latest book, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure , published by Bloomsbury, he argues that the concept of freedom is less concrete than we would like to believe.

Longyearbyen, Svalbard Islands

Svalbard is halfway from Norway to the North Pole. I went there with my younger son for a few days’ holiday and stayed in the main settlement, Longyearbyen, an ex-mining town. When you exit, there are signs saying: “Don’t cross this line without a gun,” because of polar bears , and when you re-enter, it says: “Leave your guns at the entrance,” like in a western. I like the feeling of emptiness and freedom and peace to work. It gives you a kind of distance from which you can see how crazy our world really is.

Let Them Rot: Antigone’s Parallax by Alenka Zupančič

I hate reading books where you find your own opinion confirmed. Much better are books that create a reaction of intense hatred, like: “Fuck you, you’ve ruined my day, I have to rethink everything!” That’s why I’m choosing this book about Antigone by the Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič. I wrote my own version of Sophocles’s play a few years ago and I thought I had the formula, but in this short book Zupančič successfully ruins my case. It highlights the logic of exception in Antigone and makes a more elaborate philosophical argument.

I’m a Virgo ( Prime Video, 2023)

This TV series from Boots Riley is the best depiction I’ve seen of what’s wrong with today’s United States, not only at the economic level but at the level of politics. It’s about a guy born to a Black family who is more than four metres high. He is totally isolated from the world but not from ideology, because he’s reading cheap comics and watching a lot of stupid, commercial TV. Then he breaks out, and of course he’s terribly exploited. He is in a way a true Barbie, more Barbie than Barbie. On top of it all, it’s very funny.

Gurre-Lieder by Arnold Schoenberg

This is a really intimate choice, almost a kind of mystical experience for me. In my teens, I heard Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder on the radio and it immediately marked me. Schoenberg wrote the basic melodic line before [he embraced] atonality and then orchestrated it afterwards, so it’s not just externally a work of passage between late-expressionist, neo-romantic music and properly atonal modern music, but the work itself reproduces this passage. I’m still joyfully addicted to it. Go to YouTube and find the 1965 recording conducted by Rafael Kubelik. That’s absolutely the version. It is breathtaking.

Korean bibimbap

My tastes in food are terrifying. When I’m in England, I eat pork pies and scotch eggs and totally unhealthy things. I’m very decadent. But when I asked myself: “Is there a food that I would be happy to eat all the time?”, my answer was bibimbap. It’s a popular Korean dish that’s basically boiled rice, vegetables, a fried egg and some slices of meat. You can get it in London – there’s a bibimbap cafe on Museum Street in Bloomsbury. It’s so simple. It’s also ecologically relatively sane because, OK, there’s meat, but only a couple of slices. It’s something that I really enjoy.

Maidan (dir Sergei Loznitsa, 2014)

Loznitsa is a Ukrainian director who, for me, adopts a proper heroic stance, because he’s absolutely pro-Ukrainian, but at the same time he’s hated by nationalists in Ukraine because he doesn’t go in for this bullshit of prohibiting Russian writers or film-makers. Maidan is an excellent documentary about the 2013-14 demonstrations in Kyiv. There’s this Russian propaganda adopted by many in the west that Maidan was some kind of proto-fascist, CIA-financed coup. But if you watch this documentary, filmed over several months, you see that it was a genuine political and artistic awakening.

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Slavoj Zizek: rock star philosopher, communist and TikTok hero

The radical thinker has won a global following — he’s even debated jordan peterson. but will speaking out against the liberal left cost him his career.

T o the uninitiated, or, as he would say, the unperplexed, Slavoj Zizek is the closest the left has to a celebrity philosopher. The septuagenarian Slovenian is beloved by young people — and taking off on TikTok, with more than 100 million views of his hashtag. In 2019 he went up against the alt-right provocateur philosopher Jordan Peterson in what was dubbed “the debate of the century”. Tickets to the event, in Toronto, were sold on eBay for more than $300. Fans can buy Zizek T-shirts (£30 on Etsy), or even go to a Zizek club night in Argentina. He has been named “the most dangerous philosopher in the West” and “European philosophy’s punk icon”.

I’m meeting him in his home in Slovenia because he turns

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Repeating Žižek

[sic] series

More about this series

Editor: Agon Hamza

Contributor(s): Henrik Jøker Bjerre , Bruno Bosteels , Brian Benjamin Hansen , Adrian Johnston , Katje Kolšek , Adam Kotsko , Catherine Malabou , Noys, Benjamin , Geoff Pfeifer , Frank Ruda , Oxana Timofeeva , Samo Tomšič , Gabriel Tupinambá , Fabio Vighi , Gavin Walker , Sead Zimeri

Subjects Sociology > Social Theory , Theory and Philosophy > Critical Theory , Politics > Political Theory

"[A] key contribution to contemporary critical thinking. . . . [T]his is required reading for those interested in understanding the value of Žižek's work as a philosopher." — David S. Moon, Political Studies Review

"A truly excellent collection. The authors are not Žižek followers but members of an independent intellectual fellowship that takes seriously the claim that Žižek offers the world what Badiou calls a 'new topology.'" — Joan Copjec, Brown University

" Repeating Žižek 's new engagements with the work of Slavoj Žižek are serious and refreshing. The essays take up the most pressing questions Žižek's work poses. Whereas other discussions of him endlessly discuss his jokes, style, and embrace of popular culture, the essays collected here pursue philosophical, psychoanalytic, and political questions. From the outset, Agon Hamza's insistence on treating Žižek's thought as a philosophical system sweeps aside the interpretive clutter that has plagued Žižek's interpretation for over twenty years. Finally, we can get some work done." — Jodi Dean, author of Žižek's Politics

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Agon Hamza is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana, Slovenia. With Slavoj Žižek, he is the coauthor of From Myth to Symptom: The Case of Kosovo .

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