Slavoj Žižek

Žižek was born in Ljubljana, PR Slovenia, Yugoslavia, into a middle-class family.[21] 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.[22] He spent most of his childhood in the coastal town of Portorož, where he was exposed to Western film, theory and popular culture.[3][23] When Slavoj was a teenager his family moved back to Ljubljana where he attended Bežigrad High School.[23] Originally wanting to become a filmmaker himself, he abandoned these ambitions and chose to pursue philosophy instead.[24]

In 1967, during an era of liberalization in Titoist Yugoslavia, Žižek enrolled at the University of Ljubljana and studied philosophy and sociology.[25]

He 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.[26] Žižek frequented the circles of dissident intellectuals, including the Heideggerian philosophers Tine Hribar and Ivo Urbančič,[26] and published articles in alternative magazines, such as Praxis, Tribuna and Problemi, which he also edited.[23] 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".[27] 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.[25]

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 army in Karlovac.[25]

During the 1980s, Žižek edited and translated Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and Louis Althusser.[28] He used Lacan's work to interpret Hegelian and Marxist philosophy.

In 1985, Žižek completed a second doctorate (Doctor of Philosophy in psychoanalysis) at the University of Paris VIII[25] under Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault.

He wrote the introduction to Slovene translations of G. K. Chesterton's and John Le Carré's detective novels.[29] In 1988, he published his first book dedicated entirely to film theory, Pogled s strani.[30] 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.[7][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.[31] 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".[32]

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.[33] 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.[34] 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.[7]

Despite his activity in liberal democratic projects, Žižek has continued to identify himself as a communist, and has been critical of right-wing circles, such as nationalists, conservatives, and classical liberals both in Slovenia and worldwide. He wrote that the convention center in which nationalist Slovene writers hold their conventions should be blown up, adding, "Since we live in the time without any sense of irony, I must add I don't mean it literally."[35] Similarly, he jokingly made the following comment in May 2013, during Subversive Festival: "If they don't support SYRIZA, then, in my vision of the democratic future, all these people will get from me [is] a first-class one-way ticket to [a] gulag." In response, the center-right New Democracy party claimed Žižek's comments should be understood literally, not ironically.[36][37]

Žižek signing books in 2009

In a 2008 interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, he described himself as a "communist in a qualified sense", and in another appearance in October 2009 he described himself as a "radical leftist".[38][39] The following year Žižek appeared in the Arte documentary Marx Reloaded in which he defended the idea of communism.[40]

In 2013, he corresponded with imprisoned Russian activist and Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.[41]

All hearts were beating for you as long as you were perceived as just another version of the liberal-democratic protest against the authoritarian state. The moment it became clear that you rejected global capitalism, reporting on Pussy Riot became much more ambiguous.

In 2016, during a conversation with Gary Younge at a Guardian Live event, Žižek discussed Donald Trump running for the US presidency in the 2016 election. He described Trump as a paradox, basically a centrist liberal in most of his positions, desperately trying to mask this by dirty jokes and stupidities.[42] In an opinion piece, published e.g. in Die Zeit, he described the then frontrunner candidate Hillary Clinton as the much less suitable alternative.[43] In an interview with the BBC, Žižek did however state that he thought Trump was "horrible" and his support would have been based on an attempt to encourage the Democratic Party to return to more leftist ideals.[44]

Just before the 2017 French presidential election, Žižek stated that one could not choose between Macron and Le Pen, arguing that the neoliberalism of Macron just gives rise to neofascism anyway. This was in response to many on the left calling for support for Macron to prevent a Le Pen victory.[45]

In 2022, he expressed his support for the Slovenian political party Levica (The Left) at its 5th annual conference.[46]

Žižek speaking in 2011

In 2003, Žižek wrote text to accompany Bruce Weber's photographs in a catalog for Abercrombie & Fitch. Questioned as to the seemliness of a major intellectual writing ad copy, Žižek told The Boston Globe, "If I were asked to choose between doing things like this to earn money and becoming fully employed as an American academic, kissing ass to get a tenured post, I would with pleasure choose writing for such journals!"[47]

Žižek and his thought have been the subject of several documentaries. The 1996 Liebe Dein Symptom wie Dich selbst! is a German documentary on him. In the 2004 The Reality of the Virtual, Žižek gave a one-hour lecture on his interpretation of Lacan's tripartite thesis of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. Zizek! is a 2005 documentary by Astra Taylor on his philosophy. The 2006 The Pervert's Guide to Cinema and 2012 The Pervert's Guide to Ideology also portray Žižek's ideas and cultural criticism. Examined Life (2008) features Žižek speaking about his conception of ecology at a garbage dump. He was also featured in the 2011 Marx Reloaded, directed by Jason Barker.

Foreign Policy named Žižek one of its 2012 Top 100 Global Thinkers "for giving voice to an era of absurdity".[16]

Žižek participated in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll, where he listed his ten favorite films as follows: 3:10 to Yuma, Dune, The Fountainhead, Hero, Hitman, Nightmare Alley, On Dangerous Ground, Opfergang, The Sound of Music, and We the Living.[48]

In 2019, Žižek began hosting a mini-series called How to Watch the News with Slavoj Žižek on the RT network.[49] In April, Žižek debated psychology professor Jordan Peterson at the Sony Centre in Toronto, Canada over happiness under capitalism versus Marxism.[50][51]

Žižek asserts that German Idealism and Lacanian psychoanalysis coincide in their theories of the subject. According to Žižek, Kant's distinction between thought itself and the specific thought corresponds to Lacan's distinction between the enunciation (the empty act of speaking) and the enunciated (the spoken content).[58] For Žižek, the subject is this empty gesture/act; it is a void without positive representation. Because the subjective act resists representation, Žižek insists, against '(post-)structuralist' (Althusserian, Foucauldian) accounts, that the subject is free.

Žižek's Lacanian-informed theory of ideology is one of his major contributions to political theory; his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, and the documentary The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, in which he stars, are among the well-known places in which it is discussed.

For Žižek, as for Marx, ideology is made up of fictions that structure political life; in Lacan's terms, ideology belongs to the symbolic order. Žižek argues that these fictions are primarily maintained at an unconscious level, rather than a conscious one. Since, according to psychoanalytic theory, the unconscious can determine one's actions directly, bypassing one's conscious awareness (as in parapraxes), ideology can be expressed in one's behaviour, regardless of one's conscious beliefs. Hence, Žižek breaks with orthodox Marxist accounts that view ideology purely as a system of mistaken beliefs (see False consciousness). Drawing on Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason, Žižek argues that adopting a cynical perspective is not enough to escape ideology, since, according to Žižek, even though postmodern subjects are consciously cynical about the political situation, they continue to reinforce it through their behaviour.[59]

Although Žižek is an atheist, he nonetheless finds extensive conceptual value in Christianity, particularly Protestantism, drawing on G. W. F. Hegel and G. K. Chesterton; hence, he often labels himself a 'Christian Atheist'.[60]

In The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, Žižek suggests that "the only way to be an Atheist is through Christianity". This is because, Žižek claims, atheism often fails to escape the religious paradigm, since it remains faithful to an external guarantor of meaning, simply switching God for natural necessity or evolution. Christianity, on the other hand, in the doctrine of the incarnation, brings God down from the 'beyond' and onto earth, into human affairs; for Žižek, this paradigm is more authentically godless, since the external guarantee is abolished.[61]

According to Žižek, the state is a system of regulatory institutions that shape our behavior. Its power is purely symbolic and has no normative force outside of collective behavior. In this way, the term the law signifies society's basic principles, which enable interaction by prohibiting certain acts.[62] For Žižek, political decisions have become depoliticized and accepted as natural conclusions. For example, controversial policy decisions (such as reductions in social welfare spending) are presented as apparently "objective" necessities. Although governments make claims about increased citizen participation and democracy, the important decisions are still made in the interests of capital. The two-party system dominant in the United States and elsewhere produces a similar illusion.[63] It is still necessary to engage in particular conflicts – such as labor disputes – but the trick is to relate these individual events to the larger struggle. Particular demands, if executed well, might serve as metaphorical condensation for the system and its injustices. The real political conflict is between an ordered structure of society and those without a place in it.[64]

Žižek has argued in many of his works that "the Balkans is the unconscious of Europe"; he discursively links the Balkans to global capitalism and multicultural democracy and thus circumvents Balkan exceptionalism, and represents the complex social and historical realities of the Balkans as the geopolitical analogue of the psychoanalytic Real.[65] In stark contrast to the intellectual tenets of the European "universalist Left" in general, and those Jürgen Habermas defined as postnational in particular, according to Žižek pro-sovereignty and pro-independence processes opened in Europe are good.[66]

Žižek's philosophical and political positions are not always clearly understandable, and his work has been criticized for a failure to take a consistent stance.[68] 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.[67][69][70]

Roger Scruton has written in "Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left" from the standing point of a traditionalist conservative, "To summarize Žižek's position is not easy: he slips between philosophical and psychoanalytical ways of arguing, and is spell-bound by Lacan's gnomic utterances. He is a lover of paradox, and believes strongly in what Hegel called 'the labour of the negative' though taking the idea, as always, one stage further towards the brick wall of paradox".[71]

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.[72] For example, 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."[73] The use of such analysis, however, is not systematic and draws on critical accounts of Stalinism and Maoism, as well as post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis.[74]

Žižek does not agree with critics who claim he believes in a historical necessity:

There is no such thing as the Communist big Other, there's no historical necessity or teleology directing and guiding our actions. (In Slovene: "Ni komunističnega velikega Drugega, nobene zgodovinske nujnosti ali teleologije, ki bi usmerjala in vodila naša dejanja".)[35]

In his book Living in the End Times, Žižek suggests that the criticism of his positions is itself ambiguous and multilateral:

[...] I am attacked for being anti-Semitic and for spreading Zionist lies, for being a covert Slovene nationalist and unpatriotic traitor to my nation, for being a crypto-Stalinist defending terror and for spreading Bourgeois lies about Communism... so maybe, just maybe I am on the right path, the path of fidelity to freedom."[75]

Critics complain of a theoretical chaos in which questions and answers are confused and in which Žižek constantly recycles old ideas which were scientifically refuted long ago or which, in reality, have different meanings to those which Žižek gives to them.[76] Harpham calls Žižek's style "a stream of nonconsecutive units arranged in arbitrary sequences that solicit a sporadic and discontinuous attention".[77] O'Neill concurs: "a dizzying array of wildly entertaining and often quite maddening rhetorical strategies are deployed in order to beguile, browbeat, dumbfound, dazzle, confuse, mislead, overwhelm, and generally subdue the reader into acceptance."[78]

Such presentation has laid him open to accusations of misreading other philosophers, particularly Jacques Lacan and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Žižek carries over many concepts from Lacan's teachings into the sphere of political and social theory, but has a tendency to do so in an extreme deviation from its psychoanalytic context.[79] Similarly, according to some critics, Žižek's conflation of Lacan's unconscious with Hegel's unconscious is mistaken. Noah Horwitz, in an effort to dissociate Lacan from Hegel, interprets the Lacanian unconscious and the Hegelian unconscious as two totally different mechanisms. Horwitz points out, in Lacan and Hegel's differing approaches to the topic of speech, that Lacan's unconscious reveals itself to us in parapraxis, or "slips-of-the-tongue". We are therefore, according to Lacan, alienated from language through the revelation of our desire. (Even if that desire originated with the Other, as he claims, it remains peculiar to us). In Hegel's unconscious, however, we are alienated from language whenever we attempt to articulate a particular and end up articulating a universal. For example, if I say 'the dog is with me', although I am trying to say something about this particular dog at this particular time, I actually produce the universal category 'dog', and therefore express a generality, not the particularity I desire. Hegel's argument implies that, at the level of sense-certainty, we can never express the true nature of reality. Lacan's argument implies, to the contrary, that speech reveals the true structure of a particular unconscious mind.[80]

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."[67]

Žižek has expressed opinions in which he defends Eurocentrism[81] and recognizes positive aspects of the colonial rule.[82] These views have been criticized by Indian feminist Nivedita Menon,[83] by the Iranian intellectual Hamid Dabashi,[84] by the decolonial Argentine thinker Walter Mignolo[85] and even by someone closer to Žižek, the Mexican Marxist David Pavón Cuéllar,[86] among others.

Noam Chomsky is critical of Žižek, saying that he is guilty of "using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever", adding that his views are often too obscure to be communicated usefully to common people.[87]

Žižek's tendency to recycle portions of his own texts in subsequent works resulted in the accusation of self-plagiarism by The New York Times in 2014, after Žižek published an op-ed in the magazine which contained portions of his writing from an earlier book.[88] In response, Žižek expressed perplexity at the harsh tone of the denunciation, emphasizing that the recycled passages in question only acted as references from his theoretical books to supplement otherwise original writing.[88]

In July 2014, Newsweek reported that online bloggers led by Steve Sailer had discovered that in an article published in 2006, Žižek plagiarized long passages from an earlier review by Stanley Hornbeck that first appeared in the journal American Renaissance, a publication condemned by the Southern Poverty Law Center as the organ of a "white nationalist hate group".[89] In response to the allegations, Žižek stated: "The friend send [sic] it to me, assuring me that I can use it freely since it merely resumes another's line of thought. Consequently, I did just that – and I sincerely apologize for not knowing that my friend's resume was largely borrowed from Stanley Hornbeck's review of Macdonald's book.... In no way can I thus be accused of plagiarizing another's line of thought, of 'stealing ideas'. I nonetheless deeply regret the incident."[90]

• Canning, P. "The Sublime Theorist of Slovenia: Peter Canning Interviews Slavoj Žižek" in Artforum, Issue 31, March 1993, pp. 84–9.
• Sharpe, Matthew, Slavoj Žižek: A Little Piece of the Real, Hants: Ashgate, 2004.
• Parker, Ian, Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction, London: Pluto Press, 2004.
• Butler, Rex, Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory, London: Continuum, 2004.
• Kay, Sarah, Žižek: A Critical Introduction, London: Polity, 2003.
• Myers, Tony, Slavoj Žižek (Routledge Critical Thinkers)London: Routledge, 2003.