Slavoj Žižek ( (listen) SLAH-voy ZHEE-zhek;
Slovene: [ˈslaʋɔj ˈʒiʒɛk]; born 21
March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher. He
is a professor at the Institute for Sociology
and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana
and international director of the Birkbeck
Institute for the Humanities of the University
of London. He works in subjects including
continental philosophy, political theory,
cultural studies, psychoanalysis, film criticism,
Marxism, Hegelianism and theology.
In 1989, Žižek published his first English
text, The Sublime Object of Ideology, in which
he departed from traditional Marxist theory
to develop a materialist conception of ideology
that drew heavily on Lacanian psychoanalysis
and Hegelian idealism. His early theoretical
work became increasingly eclectic and political
in the 1990s, dealing frequently in the critical
analysis of disparate forms of popular culture
and making him a popular figure of the academic
left. A critic of capitalism, neoliberalism
and political correctness, Žižek calls himself
a political radical, and his work has been
characterized as challenging orthodoxies of
both the political right and the social-liberal
universities.Žižek's idiosyncratic style,
popular academic works, frequent magazine
op-eds, and critical assimilation of high
and low culture have gained him international
influence, controversy, criticism and a substantial
audience outside academe. In 2012, Foreign
Policy listed Žižek on its list of Top 100
Global Thinkers, calling him "a celebrity
philosopher" while elsewhere he has been dubbed
the "Elvis of cultural theory" and "the most
dangerous philosopher in the West". Žižek's
work was chronicled in a 2005 documentary
film entitled Zizek! A scholarly journal,
the International Journal of Žižek Studies,
was founded to engage his work.
== Biography ==
=== 
Early life ===
Žižek was born in Ljubljana, SR Slovenia,
Yugoslavia, into a middle-class family. His
father Jože Žižek was an economist and
civil servant from the region of Prekmurje
in eastern Slovenia. His mother Vesna, native
of the Gorizia Hills in the Slovenian Littoral,
was an accountant in a state enterprise. His
parents were atheists. He spent most of his
childhood in the coastal town of Portorož,
where he was exposed to Western film, theory
and popular culture. When Slavoj was a teenager
his family moved back to Ljubljana where he
attended Bežigrad High School. In the 1960s
and early 1970s, Slavoj encountered western
philosophy in Zagreb.
=== Education ===
In 1967, during an era of liberalization in
Titoist Yugoslavia, Žižek enrolled at the
University of Ljubljana and studied philosophy
and sociology.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.
An early influence at university, Božidar
Debenjak, taught the philosophy of German
idealism and introduced the thought of the
Frankfurt School to Slovenia. Debenjak's reading
of Marx's Das Kapital from the perspective
of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit influenced
many future Slovenian philosophers, including
Žižek.Žižek frequented the circles of
dissident intellectuals, including the Heideggerian
philosophers Tine Hribar and Ivo Urbančič,
and published articles in alternative magazines,
such as Praxis, Tribuna and Problemi, which
he also edited. 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 of
being "non-Marxist". 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.He spent the next
few years undertaking national service in
the Yugoslav army in Karlovac.
=== Career ===
During the 1980s, Žižek edited and translated
Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and Louis Althusser.
He used Jacques 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 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.
In 1988, he published his first book dedicated
entirely to film theory. He achieved international
recognition as a social theorist with the
1989 publication of his first book in English,
The Sublime Object of Ideology.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.
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."
=== 
Politics ===
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. 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.
In the first free elections in 1990, he ran
as the Liberal Democratic Party's candidate
for Slovenian presidency (an office formally
abolished in the 1991 constitution).Despite
his activity in liberal democratic projects,
Žižek has remained committed to the communist
ideal 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."
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 right-wing New Democracy party claimed
Žižek's comments should be understood literally,
not ironically.
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." The following year Žižek
appeared in the Arte documentary Marx Reloaded
in which he defended the idea of communism.
In 2013, he corresponded with imprisoned Russian
activist and Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.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 endorsed
Donald Trump for the US presidency. 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.
In an opinion piece, published e.g. in Die
Zeit, he described Hillary Clinton as the
much less suitable alternative. The inaccuracy
and contradictory nature of this position
served to further damage his credibility as
a political commentator. 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 centrist
ideas and adopt more leftist ideas too.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.
=== Public life ===
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!"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."
=== 
Personal life ===
Žižek has been married three times: firstly,
to Renata Salecl, another Slovene philosopher;
secondly, to fashion model Analia Hounie,
daughter of an Argentine Lacanian psychoanalyst;
and thirdly, to the Slovene journalist Jela
Krečič, daughter of the architectural historian
Peter Krečič. He has a son.He is a fluent
speaker of Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, French,
German and English. He claims to be more or
less fluent in Spanish.
=== Impact ===
His body of writing spans dense theoretical
polemics, academic tomes, and accessible introductory
books; in addition, he has taken part in various
film projects, including two documentary collaborations
with director Sophie Fiennes, The Pervert's
Guide to Cinema (2006) and The Pervert's Guide
to Ideology (2012). His work has impacted
both academic and widespread public audiences
(see for example his commentary in the 2003
Abercrombie and Fitch Quarterly).
Hundreds of academics have addressed aspects
of Žižek's work in professional papers,
and in 2007, the International Journal of
Žižek Studies was established for the discussion
of his work.
== Thought ==
=== Ontology, ideology, and the Real ===
Žižek argues:
Against Karl Marx's concept of ideology as
described in The German Ideology, false consciousness
prevents people from seeing how things really
are. Building upon Althusser, ideology is
thoroughly unconscious and functions as a
series of justifications and spontaneous socio-symbolic
rituals which support virtual authorities.
The Real is not experienced as something which
is ordered in a way that gives satisfactory
meaning to all its parts in relation to one
another. Instead the Real is experienced as
through the lens of hegemonic systems of representation
and reproduction, while resisting full inscription
into ordering system ascribed to it. This
in turn may lead subjects to experience the
Real as generating political resistance.Drawing
on Lacan's notion of the barred subject, the
subject is a purely negative entity, a void
of negativity (in the Hegelian sense), which
allows for the flexibility and reflexivity
of the Cartesian cogito (transcendental subject).
Though consciousness is opaque (following
Hegel), the epistemological gap between the
In-itself and For-itself is immanent to reality
itself;. The antinomies of Kant, quantum physics,
and Alain Badiou's 'materialist' principle
that 'The One is Not', point towards an inconsistent
("Barred") Real itself (that Lacan conceptualized
prior).Although there are multiple Symbolic
interpretations of the Real, they are not
all relatively "true". Two instances of the
Real can be identified: the abject Real (or
"real Real"), which cannot be wholly integrated
into the symbolic order, and the symbolic
Real, a set of signifiers that can never be
properly integrated into the horizon of sense
of a subject. The truth is revealed in the
process of transiting the contradictions;
or the real is a "minimal difference", the
gap between the infinite judgement of a reductionist
materialism and experience as lived, the "Parallax"
of dialectical antagonisms are inherent to
reality itself and dialectical materialism
(contra Friedrich Engels) is a new materialist
Hegelianism, incorporating the insights of
Lacanian psychoanalysis, set theory, quantum
physics, and contemporary continental philosophy.
=== Political thought and the postmodern subject
===
Žižek argues:
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.
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. 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.
In stark contrast to the intellectual tenets
of the European "universalist Left" in general,
and those Jürgen Habermas defined as postnational
in particular, pro-sovereignty and pro-independence
processes opened in Europe are good.
The postmodern subject is cynical toward official
institutions, yet at the same time believes
in conspiracies. When we lost our shared belief
in a single power, we constructed another
of the Other in order to escape the unbearable
freedom that we faced. It is not enough to
merely know that you are being lied to, particularly
when continuing to live a normal life under
capitalism. For example, that despite people
being aware of ideology, they may continue
to act as automata, mistakenly believing that
they are thereby expressing their radical
freedom. Although one may possess a self-awareness,
just because one understands what one is doing
does not mean that one is doing the right
thing.
Religion is not an enemy but rather one of
the fields of struggle. Atheism is good. Religious
fundamentalists are in a way no different
from "godless Stalinist Communists". They
both value divine will and salvation over
moral or ethical action.
== Criticism ==
There are two main themes of critique of Žižek's
ideas: his failure to articulate an alternative
or program in the face of his denunciation
of contemporary social, political, and economic
arrangements, and his lack of rigor in argumentation.
=== Ambiguity and unclear alternatives ===
Žižek's philosophical and political positions
are not always clear, and his work has been
criticized for a failure to take a consistent
stance. 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.Roger Scruton has written
in "Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers
of the New Left", "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".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. 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." 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.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".)
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 right path, the path of fidelity to
freedom."
=== 
Unorthodox style and scholarship ===
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 quite a different
meaning than Žižek gives to them. Harpham
calls Žižek's style "a stream of nonconsecutive
units arranged in arbitrary sequences that
solicit a sporadic and discontinuous attention."
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."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.
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.In a very negative
review of Žižek's magnum opus 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.'
=== 
Accusations of self-plagiarism in 2014 ===
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. 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.On 11
July 2014, American weekly newsmagazine Newsweek
reported that in an article published in 2006
Žižek plagiarized substantial passages from
an earlier review 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." However, in response to the allegations,
Žižek stated:
When I was writing the text on Derrida which
contains the problematic passages, a friend
told me about Kevin Macdonald's theories,
and I asked him to send me a brief resume.
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. [...] As any reader can
quickly establish, the problematic passages
are purely informative, a report on another's
theory for which I have no affinity whatsoever;
all I do after this brief resume is quickly
dismissing Macdonald's theory as a new chapter
in the long process of the destruction of
Reason. In no way can I thus be accused of
plagiarizing another's line of thought, of
"stealing ideas". I nonetheless deeply regret
the incident.
=== Chomsky ===
Noam Chomsky is critical of Žižek saying
Žižek is guilty of "using fancy terms like
polysyllables and pretending you have a theory
when you have no theory whatsoever," and also
said that Žižek’s theories never go "beyond
the level of something you can explain in
five minutes to a twelve-year-old."
== 
Published works ==
=== 
Filmography ===
=== Bibliography ===
Žižek is a prolific writer and has published
in numerous languages
