Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek (/ˈslɑːvɔɪ ˈʒiːʒɛk/ ⓘ SLAH-voy ZHEE-zhek, Slovene: [ˈslaʋɔj ˈʒiʒɛk]; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual.[4][5] He is the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Department of Philosophy.[6] He primarily works on continental philosophy (particularly Hegelianism, psychoanalysis and Marxism) and political theory, as well as film criticism and theology.
"Žižek" and "Zizek" redirect here. For the biographical documentary film about Slavoj Žižek, see Zizek!
Slavoj Žižek
21 March 1949
2
Interpassivity
Over-identification
Ideological fantasy (ideology as an unconscious fantasy that structures reality)[3]
Revival of dialectical materialism
Žižek is the most famous associate of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, a group of Slovenian academics working on German idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, ideology critique, and media criticism. His breakthrough work was 1989's The Sublime Object of Ideology, his first book in English, which was decisive in the introduction of the Ljubljana School's thought to English-speaking audiences. He has written over 50 books in multiple languages and speaks Slovene, Serbo-Croatian,[7] English, German,[8] and French.[9] The idiosyncratic style of his public appearances, frequent magazine op-eds, and academic works, characterised by the use of obscene jokes and pop cultural examples, as well as politically incorrect provocations, have gained him fame, controversy and criticism both in and outside academia.[10]
In 2012, Foreign Policy listed Žižek on its list of Top 100 Global Thinkers, calling him "a celebrity philosopher",[11] while elsewhere he has been dubbed the "Elvis of cultural theory"[12] and "the most dangerous philosopher in the West".[13] Žižek has been called "the leading Hegelian of our time",[14] and "the foremost exponent of Lacanian theory".[15] A journal, the International Journal of Žižek Studies, was founded by professors David J. Gunkel and Paul A. Taylor to engage with his work.[16]
Life and career[edit]
Early life[edit]
Žižek was born in Ljubljana, PR Slovenia, Yugoslavia, into a middle-class family.[17] His father Jože Žižek was an economist and civil servant from the region of Prekmurje in eastern Slovenia. His mother Vesna, a native of the Gorizia Hills in the Slovenian Littoral, was an accountant in a state enterprise. His parents were atheists.[18] He spent most of his childhood in the coastal town of Portorož, where he was exposed to Western film, theory and popular culture.[3][19] When Žižek was a teenager his family moved back to Ljubljana where he attended Bežigrad High School.[19] Originally wanting to become a filmmaker himself, he abandoned these ambitions and chose to pursue philosophy instead.[20]
Education[edit]
In 1967, during an era of liberalization in Titoist Yugoslavia, Žižek enrolled at the University of Ljubljana and studied philosophy and sociology.[21]
Žižek had already begun reading French structuralists prior to entering university, and in 1967 he published the first translation of a text by Jacques Derrida into Slovenian.[22] Žižek frequented the circles of dissident intellectuals, including the Heideggerian philosophers Tine Hribar and Ivo Urbančič,[22] and published articles in alternative magazines, such as Praxis, Tribuna and Problemi, which he also edited.[19] In 1971 he accepted a job as an assistant researcher with the promise of tenure, but was dismissed after his Master's thesis was denounced by the authorities as being "non-Marxist".[23] He graduated from the University of Ljubljana in 1981 with a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy for his dissertation entitled The Theoretical and Practical Relevance of French Structuralism.[21] He spent the next few years in what was described as "professional wilderness", also fulfilling his legal duty of undertaking a year-long national service in the Yugoslav People's Army in Karlovac.[21]
Academic career[edit]
During the 1980s, Žižek edited and translated Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and Louis Althusser.[24] He used Lacan's work to interpret Hegelian and Marxist philosophy.
In 1986, Žižek completed a second doctorate (Doctor of Philosophy in psychoanalysis) at the University of Paris VIII under Jacques-Alain Miller, entitled "La philosophie entre le symptôme et le fantasme".[25]
Žižek wrote the introduction to Slovene translations of G. K. Chesterton's and John Le Carré's detective novels.[26]
In 1988, he published his first book dedicated entirely to film theory, Pogled s strani.[27] The following year, he achieved international recognition as a social theorist with the 1989 publication of his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology.[28][3]
Žižek has been publishing in journals such as Lacanian Ink and In These Times in the United States, the New Left Review and The London Review of Books in the United Kingdom, and with the Slovenian left-liberal magazine Mladina and newspapers Dnevnik and Delo. He also cooperates with the Polish leftist magazine Krytyka Polityczna, regional southeast European left-wing journal Novi Plamen, and serves on the editorial board of the psychoanalytical journal Problemi.[29] Žižek is a series editor of the Northwestern University Press series Diaeresis that publishes works that "deal not only with philosophy, but also will intervene at the levels of ideology critique, politics, and art theory".[30]
Political career[edit]
In the late 1980s, Žižek came to public attention as a columnist for the alternative youth magazine Mladina, which was critical of Tito's policies, Yugoslav politics, especially the militarization of society. He was a member of the Communist Party of Slovenia until October 1988, when he quit in protest against the JBTZ trial together with 32 other Slovenian intellectuals.[31] Between 1988 and 1990, he was actively involved in several political and civil society movements which fought for the democratization of Slovenia, most notably the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights.[32] In the first free elections in 1990, he ran as the Liberal Democratic Party's candidate for the former four-person collective presidency of Slovenia.[28]
Žižek is a member of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) founded in 2016.[33]
Criticism and controversy[edit]
Inconsistency and ambiguity[edit]
Žižek's philosophical and political positions have been described as ambiguous, and his work has been criticized for a failure to take a consistent stance.[122] While he has claimed to stand by a revolutionary Marxist project, his lack of vision concerning the possible circumstances which could lead to successful revolution makes it unclear what that project consists of. According to John Gray and John Holbo, his theoretical argument often lacks grounding in historical fact, which makes him more provocative than insightful.[123][124][125]
In a very negative review of Žižek's book Less than Nothing, the British political philosopher John Gray attacked Žižek for his celebrations of violence, his failure to ground his theories in historical facts, and his 'formless radicalism' which, according to Gray, professes to be communist yet lacks the conviction that communism could ever be successfully realized. Gray concluded that Žižek's work, though entertaining, is intellectually worthless: "Achieving a deceptive substance by endlessly reiterating an essentially empty vision, Žižek's work amounts in the end to less than nothing."[123]
Žižek's refusal to present an alternative vision has led critics to accuse him of using unsustainable Marxist categories of analysis and having a 19th-century understanding of class.[126] For example, post-Marxist Ernesto Laclau argued that "Žižek uses class as a sort of deus ex machina to play the role of the good guy against the multicultural devils."[127]
In his book Living in the End Times, Žižek suggests that the criticism of his positions is itself ambiguous and multilateral: