Slavoj Žižek: Difference between revisions
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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 (Ljubljana)|Dnevnik]]'' and ''[[Delo language|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''.<ref name="Editorial Staff - Problemi International">{{cite web|url=https://problemi.si/editorial-staff/ |title= Editorial Staff - Problemi International |access-date=25 October 2021}}</ref> 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".<ref>{{cite web|title=Diaeresis series page|url=http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/diaeresis|website=Northwestern University Press|publisher=Northwestern University Press|access-date=28 January 2017}}</ref> |
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 (Ljubljana)|Dnevnik]]'' and ''[[Delo language|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''.<ref name="Editorial Staff - Problemi International">{{cite web|url=https://problemi.si/editorial-staff/ |title= Editorial Staff - Problemi International |access-date=25 October 2021}}</ref> 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".<ref>{{cite web|title=Diaeresis series page|url=http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/diaeresis|website=Northwestern University Press|publisher=Northwestern University Press|access-date=28 January 2017}}</ref> |
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===Political |
===Political engagement=== |
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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.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.slovenskapomlad.si/1?id=103 |title=Skupinski protestni izstop iz ZKS |date=28 October 1998 |publisher=Slovenska Pomlad |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111003180147/http://www.slovenskapomlad.si/1?id=103 |archive-date=3 October 2011 |language=sl }}</ref> 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]].<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.slovenskapomlad.si/1?id=31&aofs=3 |title=Odbor za varstvo človekovih pravic |date=3 June 1998 |website=Slovenska Pomlad |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111003180306/http://www.slovenskapomlad.si/1?id=31&aofs=3 |archive-date=3 October 2011 |language=sl }}</ref> In the [[1990 Slovenian presidential election|first free elections]] in 1990, he ran as the [[Liberal Democracy of Slovenia|Liberal Democratic Party]]'s candidate for the former four-person collective presidency of Slovenia.<ref name="Britannica"/> |
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.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.slovenskapomlad.si/1?id=103 |title=Skupinski protestni izstop iz ZKS |date=28 October 1998 |publisher=Slovenska Pomlad |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111003180147/http://www.slovenskapomlad.si/1?id=103 |archive-date=3 October 2011 |language=sl }}</ref> 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]].<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.slovenskapomlad.si/1?id=31&aofs=3 |title=Odbor za varstvo človekovih pravic |date=3 June 1998 |website=Slovenska Pomlad |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111003180306/http://www.slovenskapomlad.si/1?id=31&aofs=3 |archive-date=3 October 2011 |language=sl }}</ref> In the [[1990 Slovenian presidential election|first free elections]] in 1990, he ran as the [[Liberal Democracy of Slovenia|Liberal Democratic Party]]'s candidate for the former four-person collective presidency of Slovenia.<ref name="Britannica"/> |
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In his early career, Žižek claimed "a theoretical space moulded by three centres of gravity: [[Hegelian Dialectic|Hegelian dialectics]], [[Lacanianism|Lacanian psychoanalytic theory]], and contemporary criticism of [[ideology]]", designating "the theory of Jacques Lacan" as the fundamental element.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Žižek |first1=Slavoj |title=For They Know Not What They Do |date=1991 |publisher=Verso |location=London & New York |page=2}}</ref> In 2010, Žižek instead claimed that for him Hegel is more fundamental than Lacan—"Even Lacan is just a tool for me to read Hegel. For me, always it is Hegel, Hegel, Hegel."<ref>{{cite web |last1=O'Hagan |first1=Sean |title=Slavoj Žižek: interview |url=https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/jun/27/slavoj-zizek-living-end-times |website=Guardian |access-date=6 May 2022}}</ref>—while in 2019, he claimed that "For me, in some sense, all of philosophy happened in [the] fifty years" between [[Immanuel Kant]]'s [[Critique of Pure Reason]] (1781) and the death of [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel]] (1831).<ref>{{cite web |last1=Žižek |first1=Slavoj |title=Slavoj Žižek on what really makes him mad |url=https://blog.oup.com/2019/09/slavoj-zizek-on-what-really-makes-him-mad/ |website=Oxford University Press |access-date=18 May 2022}}</ref> |
In his early career, Žižek claimed "a theoretical space moulded by three centres of gravity: [[Hegelian Dialectic|Hegelian dialectics]], [[Lacanianism|Lacanian psychoanalytic theory]], and contemporary criticism of [[ideology]]", designating "the theory of Jacques Lacan" as the fundamental element.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Žižek |first1=Slavoj |title=For They Know Not What They Do |date=1991 |publisher=Verso |location=London & New York |page=2}}</ref> In 2010, Žižek instead claimed that for him Hegel is more fundamental than Lacan—"Even Lacan is just a tool for me to read Hegel. For me, always it is Hegel, Hegel, Hegel."<ref>{{cite web |last1=O'Hagan |first1=Sean |title=Slavoj Žižek: interview |url=https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/jun/27/slavoj-zizek-living-end-times |website=Guardian |access-date=6 May 2022}}</ref>—while in 2019, he claimed that "For me, in some sense, all of philosophy happened in [the] fifty years" between [[Immanuel Kant]]'s [[Critique of Pure Reason]] (1781) and the death of [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel]] (1831).<ref>{{cite web |last1=Žižek |first1=Slavoj |title=Slavoj Žižek on what really makes him mad |url=https://blog.oup.com/2019/09/slavoj-zizek-on-what-really-makes-him-mad/ |website=Oxford University Press |access-date=18 May 2022}}</ref> |
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===Defence of the |
===Defence of the subject=== |
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Žižek defends a [[Lacanianism|Lacano]]-[[Hegelianism|Hegelian]] notion of the [[Subject (philosophy)|subject]], which he claims both [[Culturalism|culturalists]] (eg [[Michel Foucault]], [[Louis Althusser]]) and new materialists/[[Object-oriented ontology|object-oriented ontologists]] (eg [[Jane Bennett (political theorist)|Jane Bennett]], [[Levi Bryant]]) have failed to properly engage with in their critiques of the subject.<ref>{{cite book |editor-last=Žižek |editor-first=Slavoj |editor-first2=Russell |editor-last2=Sbriglia |year=2020 |chapter=Introduction |title=Subject Lessons |place=Evanston |publisher=Northwestern University Press |pp=3-8 }}</ref> |
Žižek defends a [[Lacanianism|Lacano]]-[[Hegelianism|Hegelian]] notion of the [[Subject (philosophy)|subject]], which he claims both [[Culturalism|culturalists]] (eg [[Michel Foucault]], [[Louis Althusser]]) and new materialists/[[Object-oriented ontology|object-oriented ontologists]] (eg [[Jane Bennett (political theorist)|Jane Bennett]], [[Levi Bryant]]) have failed to properly engage with in their critiques of the subject.<ref>{{cite book |editor-last=Žižek |editor-first=Slavoj |editor-first2=Russell |editor-last2=Sbriglia |year=2020 |chapter=Introduction |title=Subject Lessons |place=Evanston |publisher=Northwestern University Press |pp=3-8 }}</ref> |
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For Žižek, the subject is the pure form of thought or act of enunciation, the vessel for every specific thought or enunciated content.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Žižek |first1=Slavoj |title=Tarrying with the Negative |date=1993 |publisher=Duke University Press |location=Durham |page=14}}</ref> Thus, all positive content is pre-conditioned by an empty form (the subject) that it cannot represent. The subject can only be located in the content as something always ''missing'', as a constitutive absence, as something the content ''fails'' to express.<ref>See {{cite book |last=Žižek |first=Slavoj |year=1989 |title=The Sublime Object of Ideology |place=London & New York |publisher=Verso |p=174ff}}</ref> The Lacanian name for the subject insofar as it figures in the content as an absence is [[objet a]].<ref>{{cite book |editor-last=Žižek |editor-first=Slavoj |editor-first2=Russell |editor-last2=Sbriglia |year=2020 |chapter=Introduction |title=Subject Lessons |place=Evanston |publisher=Northwestern University Press |p=11 }}</ref> |
For Žižek, the subject is the pure form of thought or act of enunciation, the vessel for every specific thought or enunciated content.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Žižek |first1=Slavoj |title=Tarrying with the Negative |date=1993 |publisher=Duke University Press |location=Durham |page=14}}</ref> Thus, all positive content is pre-conditioned by an empty form (the subject) that it cannot represent. The subject can only be located in the content as something always ''missing'', as a constitutive absence, as something the content ''fails'' to express.<ref>See {{cite book |last=Žižek |first=Slavoj |year=1989 |title=The Sublime Object of Ideology |place=London & New York |publisher=Verso |p=174ff}}</ref> The Lacanian name for the subject insofar as it figures in the content as an absence is [[objet a]].<ref>{{cite book |editor-last=Žižek |editor-first=Slavoj |editor-first2=Russell |editor-last2=Sbriglia |year=2020 |chapter=Introduction |title=Subject Lessons |place=Evanston |publisher=Northwestern University Press |p=11 }}</ref> |
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===Political |
===Political theory=== |
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====Ideology==== |
====Ideology==== |
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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. |
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. |
Revision as of 15:04, 17 June 2022
Slavoj Žižek | |
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![]() Žižek in 2015 | |
Born | |
Education | University of Ljubljana (BA, MA, DA) University of Paris VIII (PhD) |
Era | 20th-/21st-century philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | |
Institutions | |
Main interests | |
Notable ideas | Interpassivity Over-identification Ideological fantasy (ideology as an unconscious fantasy that structures reality)[3] Revival of dialectical materialism |
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 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 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. The idiosyncratic style of his public appearances, frequent magazine op-eds, and academic works, characterised by 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.[7]
In 2012, Foreign Policy listed Žižek on its list of Top 100 Global Thinkers, calling him "a celebrity philosopher",[8] while elsewhere he has been dubbed the "Elvis of cultural theory"[9] and "the most dangerous philosopher in the West".[10] Žižek has been called "the leading Hegelian of our time",[11] and "the foremost exponent of Lacanian theory".[12] A journal, the International Journal of Žižek Studies, was founded by professors David J. Gunkel and Paul A. Taylor to engage with his work.[13]
Life and career
Early life
Žižek was born in Ljubljana, PR Slovenia, Yugoslavia, into a middle-class family.[14] 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.[15] He spent most of his childhood in the coastal town of Portorož, where he was exposed to Western film, theory and popular culture.[3][16] When Žižek was a teenager his family moved back to Ljubljana where he attended Bežigrad High School.[16] Originally wanting to become a filmmaker himself, he abandoned these ambitions and chose to pursue philosophy instead.[17]
Education
In 1967, during an era of liberalization in Titoist Yugoslavia, Žižek enrolled at the University of Ljubljana and studied philosophy and sociology.[18]
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.[19] Žižek frequented the circles of dissident intellectuals, including the Heideggerian philosophers Tine Hribar and Ivo Urbančič,[19] and published articles in alternative magazines, such as Praxis, Tribuna and Problemi, which he also edited.[16] 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".[20] 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.[18] 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.[18]
Career
During the 1980s, Žižek edited and translated Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and Louis Althusser.[21] 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".[22]
Žižek wrote the introduction to Slovene translations of G. K. Chesterton's and John Le Carré's detective novels.[23] In 1988, he published his first book dedicated entirely to film theory, Pogled s strani.[24] 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.[25][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.[26] 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".[27]
Political engagement
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.[28] 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.[29] 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.[25]
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."[30] 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.[31][32]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/Slavoj_Zizek_Fot_M_Kubik_May15_2009_10.jpg/170px-Slavoj_Zizek_Fot_M_Kubik_May15_2009_10.jpg)
In 2013, Žižek corresponded with imprisoned Russian activist and Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.[33]
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.
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.[34]
In 2022, Žižek expressed his support for the Slovenian political party Levica (The Left) at its 5th annual conference.[35]
Support for Donald Trump
In a 2016 interview with Channel 4, Žižek claimed that, were he American, he would vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 United States presidential election:
I'm horrified at him [Trump]. I'm just thinking that Hillary is the true danger. ... if Trump wins, both big parties, Republicans and Democratics, would have to return to basics, rethink themselves, and maybe some things can happen there. That's my desperate, very desperate hope, that if Trump wins—listen, America is not a dictatorial state, he will not introduce Fascism—but it will be a kind of big awakening. New political processes will be set in motion, will be triggered. But I'm well aware that things are very dangerous here ... I'm just aware that Hilary stands for this absolute inertia, the most dangerous one. Because she is a cold warrior, and so on, connected with banks, pretending to be socially progressive.[36]
These views were derisively characterised as accelerationist,[37] and were labelled "regressive" by Noam Chomsky, who claimed that "it was the same point that people like him said about Hitler in the early 30's."[38]
In 2019 and 2020, Žižek defended his statements,[39] claiming that Trump's election "created, for the first time in I don't know how many decades, a true American left", citing the boost it gave Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.[40]
However, regarding the 2020 United States presidential election, Žižek reported himself "tempted by changing his position", claiming "Trump is a little too much".[40] In another interview, he stood by his 2016 "wager" that Trump's election would lead to a socialist reaction ("maybe I was right"), but claimed that "now with coronavirus: no, no—no Trump. ... difficult as it is for me to say this, but now I would say 'Biden better than Trump', although he is far from ideal."[41] In his 2022 book, Heaven in Disorder, Žižek continued to express a preference for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, stating that even though Biden, like Trump, lies and represents big capital, only in a more polite form, "Trump was corroding the ethical substance of our lives".[42]
Public life
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek_2011.jpg/220px-Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek_2011.jpg)
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!"[43]
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.[citation needed] 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.[citation needed]
Foreign Policy named Žižek one of its 2012 Top 100 Global Thinkers "for giving voice to an era of absurdity".[8]
In 2019, Žižek began hosting a mini-series called How to Watch the News with Slavoj Žižek on the RT network.[44] In April, Žižek debated psychology professor Jordan Peterson at the Sony Centre in Toronto, Canada over happiness under capitalism versus Marxism.[45][46]
Personal life
Žižek has been married four times. His third wife was Argentine model Analía Hounie, whom he married in 2005.[47][48] He is currently married to the Slovene journalist, and philosopher Jela Krečič, daughter of the architectural historian Peter Krečič.[49][50] He has two sons.[51]
Aside from his native Slovene, Žižek is a fluent speaker of Serbo-Croatian, French, German and English.[52]
Taste
In the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll, Žižek listed his 10 favourite films: 3:10 to Yuma, Dune, The Fountainhead, Hero, Hitman, Nightmare Alley, On Dangerous Ground, Opfergang, The Sound of Music, and We the Living.[53] In his tour of The Criterion Collection closet, he chose Trouble in Paradise, Sweet Smell of Success, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Murmur of the Heart, The Joke, The Ice Storm, Great Expectations, Roberto Rossellini's History Films, City Lights, a box set of Carl Theodor Dreyer's films, Y tu mamá también and Antichrist.[54]
In an article called 'My Favourite Classics', Žižek states that Arnold Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder is the piece of music he would take to a desert island. He goes on to list other favourites, including Beethoven's Fidelio, Schubert's Winterreise, Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina and Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore. He expresses a particular love for Wagner, particularly Das Rheingold and Parsifal. He ranks Schoenberg over Stravinsky, and insists on Eisler's importance among Schoenberg's followers.[55]
Žižek often lists Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Andrei Platonov as his "three absolute masters of 20th century literature".[56] He ranks/prefers Varlam Shalamov over Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam over Anna Akhmatova,[57] Daphne du Maurier over Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett over James Joyce.[56]
Thought
In his early career, Žižek claimed "a theoretical space moulded by three centres of gravity: Hegelian dialectics, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, and contemporary criticism of ideology", designating "the theory of Jacques Lacan" as the fundamental element.[58] In 2010, Žižek instead claimed that for him Hegel is more fundamental than Lacan—"Even Lacan is just a tool for me to read Hegel. For me, always it is Hegel, Hegel, Hegel."[59]—while in 2019, he claimed that "For me, in some sense, all of philosophy happened in [the] fifty years" between Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and the death of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1831).[60]
Defence of the subject
Žižek defends a Lacano-Hegelian notion of the subject, which he claims both culturalists (eg Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser) and new materialists/object-oriented ontologists (eg Jane Bennett, Levi Bryant) have failed to properly engage with in their critiques of the subject.[61]
For Žižek, the subject is the pure form of thought or act of enunciation, the vessel for every specific thought or enunciated content.[62] Thus, all positive content is pre-conditioned by an empty form (the subject) that it cannot represent. The subject can only be located in the content as something always missing, as a constitutive absence, as something the content fails to express.[63] The Lacanian name for the subject insofar as it figures in the content as an absence is objet a.[64]
Political theory
Ideology
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.[65]
Freedom
Žižek claims that (a sense of) political freedom is sustained by a deeper unfreedom, at least under liberal capitalism. In a 2002 article, Žižek endorses Lenin's distinction between formal and actual freedom, claiming that liberal society only contains formal freedom, "freedom of choice within the coordinates of the existing power relations", while prohibiting actual freedom, "the site of an intervention that undermines these very coordinates."[66] In an oft-quoted passage from a book published in the same year, he writes that, in these conditions of liberal censorship, "we 'feel free' because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom".[67] In a 2019 article, he writes that Marx "made a valuable point with his claim that the market economy combines in a unique way political and personal freedom with social unfreedom: personal freedom (freely selling myself on the market) is the very form of my unfreedom."[68] However, in 2014, he rejects the "pseudo-Marxist" total derision of 'formal freedom', claiming that it is necessary for critique: "When we are formally free, only then we become aware how limited this freedom actually is."[56]
Communism
Although sometimes adopting the title of 'radical leftist',[69] Žižek also controversially insists on identifying as a communist, even though he rejects 20th century communism as a "total failure", and decries "the communism of the 20th century, more specifically all the network of phenomena we refer to as Stalinism" as "maybe the worst ideological, political, ethical, social (and so on) catastrophe in the history of humanity."[70] Žižek justifies this choice by claiming that only the term 'communism' signals a genuine step outside of the existing order, in part since the term 'socialism' no longer has radical enough implications, and means nothing more than that one "care[s] for society"[71]
In Marx Reloaded, Žižek rejects both 20th-century totalitarianism and "spontaneous local self-organisation, direct democracy, councils, and so on". There, he endorses a definition of communism as "a society where you, everyone would be allowed to dwell in his or her stupidity", an idea with which he credits Fredric Jameson as the inspiration.[72]
Žižek has labelled himself a "communist in a qualified sense".[73] When he spoke at a conference on The Idea of Communism, he applied (in qualified form) the 'communist' label to the Occupy Wall Street protestors:
They are not communists, if 'communism' means the system which deservedly collapsed in 1990 - and remember that the communists who are still in power today run the most ruthless capitalism (in China). ... The only sense in which the protestors are 'communists' is that they care for the commons - the commons of nature, of knowledge - which are threatened by the system. They are dismissed as dreamers, but the true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely the way they are now, with just a few cosmetic changes. They are not dreamers; they are awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. They are not destroying anything; they are reacting to how the system is gradually destroying itself.[74]
Theology
Žižek is a committed atheist, a stance he defended at length in his article "Atheism is a legacy worth fighting for" in The New York Times.[75] However, he nonetheless finds extensive conceptual value in Christianity, particularly Protestantism: the subtitle of his 2000 book The Fragile Absolute is "Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?". Hence, he labels his position 'Christian Atheism',[76] and has written about theology at length.[77]
In The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, Žižek suggests that "the only way to be an Atheist is through Christianity", since, he claims, atheism often fails to escape the religious paradigm by remaining 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.[78]
Criticism and controversy
Inconsistency and ambiguity
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.[79] 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.[80][81][82]
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."[80]
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.[83] 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."[84]
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."[85][page needed]
Stylistic confusion
Žižek has been criticized for his chaotic and non-systematic style: Harpham calls Žižek's style "a stream of nonconsecutive units arranged in arbitrary sequences that solicit a sporadic and discontinuous attention".[86] 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."[87] Noam Chomsky deems Žižek 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.[88]
Conservative thinker Roger Scruton claims that:
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.[89]
Careless scholarship
Žižek has been accused of approaching phenomena without rigour, reductively forcing them to support pre-given theoretical notions. For example, Tania Modleski alleges that "in trying to make Hitchcock 'fit' Lacan, he [Žižek] frequently ends up simplifying what goes on in the films".[90] Similarly, Yannis Stavrakakis criticises Žižek's reading of Antigone, claiming it proceeds without regard for both the play itself and the interpretation, given by Lacan in his 7th Seminar, which Žižek claims to follow. According to Stavrakakis, Žižek mistakenly characterises Antigone's act (illegally burying her brother) as politically radical/revolutionary, when in reality "Her act is a one-off and she couldn't care less about what will happen in the polis after her suicide."[91]
Noah Horwitz alleges that Žižek (and the Ljubljana School to which Žižek belongs) mistakenly conflate the insights of Lacan and Hegel, and registers concern that such a move "risks transforming Lacanian psychoanalysis into a discourse of self-consciousness rather than a discourse on the psychoanalytic, Freudian unconscious."[92] He goes on to argue that Lacan and Hegel differ in that Lacan aims to access the particular unconscious of a given subject, Hegel outlines the impossibility of a direct particular encounter, due to the presence of "unconscious" universals.
Plagiarism
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.[93] 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.[93]
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".[94] 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.[95]
Defence of Eurocentrism
Žižek has expressed opinions in which he defends Eurocentrism[96] and recognizes positive aspects of the colonial rule.[97] These views have been criticized by Indian feminist Nivedita Menon,[98] by the Iranian intellectual Hamid Dabashi,[99] by the decolonial Argentine thinker Walter Mignolo[100] and even by someone closer to Žižek, the Mexican Marxist David Pavón Cuéllar,[101] among others.
Transgender issues
Žižek has published several articles concerning transgender issues that have proved controversial, and led to accusations of transphobia.
In 2016, he published an article called "The Sexual Is Political" in The Philosophical Salon,[102] within which transgender issues are a central topic. Žižek argues that, from the breakdown of biology-identity links implicit in "transgenderism", the logical conclusion is a postgenderist vision of complete sexual fluidity. However, he claims, transgender subjects do not, in reality, show such "heroic indifference" to gender roles; instead, they seek a stable site (for instance, in relation to bathroom access). Drawing on Jacques Lacan's theory of sexual difference, he argues that such a stable identification is impossible, because there is a fundamental antagonism in every sexual identity: this holds for cisgender subjects (inaccurately termed "'normal' heterosexuals") as well as transgender subjects. Hence, he endorses a "General Gender" bathroom which accommodates this necessary incompletion of every sexual interpellation.
Che Gossett criticized Žižek for his use of the "pathologising" term "transgenderism", for writing "about trans subjectivity with such assumed authority while ignoring the voices of trans theorists (academics and activists) entirely", as well as for purportedly claiming that a "futuristic", postgenderist vision underlies so-called "transgenderism", against which Gossett argues that "trans and gender nonconforming people are situated (like the violence of the gender binary which we oppose) within the theoretical and political coordinates of history and history’s present tense — the afterlife of slavery and colonialism."[103] Lacanian Sam Warren Miell criticized the article for rehearsing homophobic/transphobic clichés (noting Žižek's quip about inter-species marriage as a possible "anti-discriminatory demand[]", for instance), for mistakenly equating transgenderism and postgenderism, and for misusing Lacanian theory.[104]
Žižek defended his article in two follow-up pieces. The first addresses purported misreadings of his position,[105] while the second is a more sustained defence (against Miell) of the article's application of Lacanian theory,[106] to which Miell responded in turn.[107] Douglas Lain also defended Žižek, claiming that, if one takes his comments in context, it becomes clear that he is "not opposed [to] the struggle of LGBTQ people" but is instead critiquing "a phony liberal ideology that set up the terms of the LGBTQ struggle", "a certain utopian postmodern ideology that seeks to eliminate all limits, to eliminate all binaries, to go beyond norms because the imposition of a limit is patriarchal and oppressive."[108]
In 2019, Žižek published an article in The Spectator entitled "Transgender dogma is naive and incompatible with Freud",[109] which also discusses transgender issues. There, he argued that there is "a tension in LGBT+ ideology between social constructivism and (some kind of biological) determinism", between, on the one hand, the idea that gender is a social construct, and, on the other, the idea that transgender people's gender is an essential quality that precedes socialisation. He concludes the essay with a "Freudian solution" to this deadlock:
...psychic sexual identity is a choice, not a biological fact, but it is not a conscious choice that the subject can playfully repeat and transform. It is an unconscious choice which precedes subjective constitution and which is, as such, formative of subjectivity, which means that the change of this choice entails the radical transformation of the bearer of the choice.
In response to the title, McKenzie Wark had t-shirts made with the transgender flag and "Incompatible with Freud" printed on them.[110]
Both of these articles were criticized by Chris Coffman in her book Queer Traversals. Coffman criticises Žižek for engaging with the issue superficially, ignoring recent Lacanian scholarship and the voices of trans theorists, academics and activists, and "conflating transgenderism and "so-called postgenderism". According to Coffman, the position with which Žižek concludes the 2019 article is entirely consonant with transgender discourse, and hence Žižek's opposal of psychoanalytic and transgender discourses is inaccurate.[111]
Works
Bibliography
Filmography
Year | Title |
---|---|
1993 | Laibach: A Film From Slovenia |
1996 | Liebe Dein Symptom wie Dich selbst! |
Predictions of Fire | |
1997 | Post-Socialism+Retro Avantgarde+Irwin |
2004 | The Reality of the Virtual |
2005 | Zizek! |
2006 | The Pervert's Guide to Cinema |
The Possibility of Hope | |
2008 | Examined Life |
2009 | Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution |
Alien, Marx & Co. - Slavoj Žižek, Ein Porträt | |
2011 | Marx Reloaded |
2012 | Catastroika |
The Pervert's Guide to Ideology | |
2013 | Balkan Spirit |
2016 | Risk |
Houston, We Have a Problem! | |
2018 | Turn On (short)[112] |
2021 | Bliss |
References
Citations
- ^ Hook, Derek (July 2016). Ffytche, Matt; Herzog, Dagmar (eds.). "Of Symbolic Mortification and 'Undead–Life': Slavoj Žižek on the Death Drive". Psychoanalysis and History. 18 (2). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 221–256. doi:10.3366/pah.2016.0190. eISSN 1755-201X. hdl:2263/60702. ISSN 1460-8235.
- ^ Nedoh, Bostjan, ed. (2016). Lacan and Deleuze: A Disjunctive Synthesis. Edinburgh University Press. p. 193.
Žižek is convinced that post-Hegelian psychoanalytic drive theory is both compatible with and even integral to a Hegelianism reinvented for the twenty-first century.
- ^ a b c Sharpe, Matthew. "Slavoj Žižek". The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 2161-0002. Retrieved 27 September 2015.
- ^ "Slavoj Žižek". Brittanica. Retrieved 8 June 2022.
- ^ "Professor Slavoj Zizek". Birkbeck. Retrieved 8 June 2022.
- ^ "Slavoj Žižek". Bloomsbury. Retrieved 8 June 2022.
- ^ "Big Thinker: Slavoj Žižek". The Ethics Centre. Retrieved 8 June 2022.
- ^ a b "The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers". Foreign Policy. 26 November 2012. Archived from the original on 30 November 2012. Retrieved 28 November 2012.
- ^ "International Journal of Žižek Studies, home page". Retrieved 27 December 2011.
- ^ "Slavoj Zizek - VICE - United Kingdom". 4 October 2013.
- ^ Şahin, Tuna. "Slavoj Žižek: The Hegelian of Our Time". Retrieved 4 May 2022.
- ^ McGowan, Todd (2013). "Hegel as Marxist: Žižek's Revision of German Idealism." In Žižek Now: Current Perspectives in Žižek Studies. Cambridge: Polity Press. p. 42.
- ^ "About the Journal". Retrieved 1 May 2019.
- ^ "Kdo je kdaj: Slavoj Žižek. Tisti poslednji marksist, ki je iz filozofije naredil pop in iz popa filozofijo" [Who's When: Slavoj Žižek. The Last of the Marxists who made Pop from Philosophy and Philosophy from Pop] (in Slovenian). Mladina. 24 October 2004. Archived from the original on 10 December 2008. Retrieved 13 August 2010.
- ^ Slovenski biografski leksikon (Ljubljana: SAZU, 1991), XV. edition
- ^ a b c "Slovenska pomlad: Slavoj Žižek (Webpage run by the National Museum of Modern History in Ljubljana)". Slovenskapomlad.si. 29 September 1988. Archived from the original on 3 October 2011. Retrieved 4 June 2011.
- ^ "Down with ideology". YouTube. Archived from the original on 31 October 2021.
- ^ a b c Tony Meyers Slavoj Zizek - His Life lacan.com, from: Slavoj Zizek, London: Routledge, 2003.
- ^ a b "Tednik, številka 42, Slavoj Žižek". Mladina.Si. 24 October 2004. Archived from the original on 10 December 2008. Retrieved 13 August 2010.
- ^ Žižek's response to the article "Če sem v kaj resnično zaljubljena, sem v življenje Sobotna priloga Dela, p. 37 (19.1. 2008)
- ^ "Prevajalci – Društvo slovenskih književnih prevajalcev". Dskp-drustvo.si. Archived from the original on 5 January 2012. Retrieved 7 January 2012.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj (1988). Le plus sublime des hystériques (in French). Paris: Distribution, Distique. p. 10.
- ^ Sean Sheehan (2012). Zizek: A Guide for the Perplexed. Continuum International Publishing Group. p. 10. ISBN 978-1441180872.
- ^ Pogled s strani at worldcat.org
- ^ a b "Slavoj Zizek - Slovene philosopher and cultural theorist".
- ^ "Editorial Staff - Problemi International". Retrieved 25 October 2021.
- ^ "Diaeresis series page". Northwestern University Press. Northwestern University Press. Retrieved 28 January 2017.
- ^ "Skupinski protestni izstop iz ZKS" (in Slovenian). Slovenska Pomlad. 28 October 1998. Archived from the original on 3 October 2011.
- ^ "Odbor za varstvo človekovih pravic". Slovenska Pomlad (in Slovenian). 3 June 1998. Archived from the original on 3 October 2011.
- ^ Interview with Žižek – part two, Delo, 2 March 2013.
- ^ Sabby Mionis (6 March 2012). "Israel must fight to keep neo-Nazis out of Greece's government". Haaretz. Retrieved 6 March 2012.
- ^ "Slovenian philosopher Zizek proposes 'gulag' for those who do not support SYRIZA". 20 May 2013. Retrieved 20 May 2013.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj; Tolokonnikova, Nadezhda (15 November 2013). "Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot's prison letters to Slavoj Žižek" – via www.theguardian.com.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj (3 May 2017). "Don't Believe the Liberals – There Is No Real Choice between Le Pen and Macron." TheIndependent.co.UK. Retrieved 19 June 2018.
- ^ Slavoj Zizek gives support to Levica and comments on the Ukrainian crisis, retrieved 3 April 2022
- ^ "Slavoj Žižek: 'I would vote Trump'". Channel 4. Retrieved 18 May 2022 – via Facebook.
- ^ Steinman, Ian. "From Farce to Tragedy: Žižek Endorses Trump". Left Voice. Retrieved 18 May 2022.
- ^ "Noam Chomsky speaks with 'Upfront' - slams media coverage, criticises third party voters". Aljazeera. Retrieved 18 May 2022.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj. "Voices Was I right to back Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton? Absolutely". The Independent. Retrieved 18 May 2022.
- ^ a b Humphreys, Joe. "Slavoj Žižek: 'Joe Biden is long-term the same catastrophe as Trump'". Irish Times. Retrieved 18 May 2022.
- ^ "Communist Philosopher Debates Capitalism - Slavoj Žižek". Valuetainment. Retrieved 18 May 2022 – via YouTube.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj (2022). Heaven in Disorder. New York & London: OR Books. p. 119.
- ^ Glenn, Joshua. "The Examined Life: Enjoy Your Chinos!", The Boston Globe. 6 July 2003. H2.
- ^ "Koniec niewinności".
- ^ Raju Mudhar; Brendan Kennedy (19 April 2019). "Jordan Peterson, Slavoj Zizek each draw fans at sold-out debate". Toronto Star. Retrieved 20 April 2019.
- ^ Stephen Marche (20 April 2019). "The 'debate of the century': what happened when Jordan Peterson debated Slavoj Žižek". The Guardian. Retrieved 20 April 2019.
- ^ Clark, John (7 January 2008). "Acting up". New Humanist. Retrieved 31 May 2020.
- ^ Engelhart, Katie (30 December 2012). "Slavoj Zizek: I am not the world's hippest philosopher!". Salon. Retrieved 30 May 2020.
- ^ "Žižka vzela Jela z Dela". Delo. 1 July 2013. Retrieved 3 July 2013.
- ^ "Philosopher and Beauty". Delo. 29 March 2005. Retrieved 4 December 2012.
- ^ "Slovenske novice". Retrieved 25 September 2020.
- ^ Ippolit Belinski (30 June 2017). "Slavoj Žižek - A plea for bureaucratic socialism (June 2017)." Youtube.com. Retrieved 20 June 2018.
- ^ "Slavoj Zizek". www2.bfi.org.uk.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj. "DVD Picks". YouTube. Retrieved 17 May 2022.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj (2017). "My Favourite Classics". International Journal of Žižek Studies. 11 (3).
- ^ a b c Žižek, Slavoj. "Slavoj Žižek webchat – as it happened". Guardian. Retrieved 17 May 2022.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj and Stephen Kotkin. "Stalin: Paradoxes of Power". YouTube. Retrieved 17 May 2022.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj (1991). For They Know Not What They Do. London & New York: Verso. p. 2.
- ^ O'Hagan, Sean. "Slavoj Žižek: interview". Guardian. Retrieved 6 May 2022.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj. "Slavoj Žižek on what really makes him mad". Oxford University Press. Retrieved 18 May 2022.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj; Sbriglia, Russell, eds. (2020). "Introduction". Subject Lessons. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. pp. 3–8.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj (1993). Tarrying with the Negative. Durham: Duke University Press. p. 14.
- ^ See Žižek, Slavoj (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London & New York: Verso. p. 174ff.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj; Sbriglia, Russell, eds. (2020). "Introduction". Subject Lessons. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. p. 11.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj (1989). "Chapter 1". The Sublime Object of Ideology. London & New York: Verso.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj (2002). "A Plea For Leninist Intolerance". Critical Inquiry. 28 (2): 542–544. doi:10.1086/449051. S2CID 162381806.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj (2002). Welcome to the Desert of the Real!. London & New York: Verso. p. 2.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj (2019). "Hegel, Retroactivity & The End of History". Continental Thought & Theory. 2 (4): 9.
- ^ "Slovenian Philosopher Slavoj Zizek on Capitalism, Healthcare, Latin American "Populism" and the "Farcical" Financial Crisis". Democracynow.org. Retrieved 13 August 2010.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj. "20th Century Communism". YouTube. Retrieved 7 May 2022.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj and Tyler Cowen. "Slavoj Žižek on His Stubborn Attachment to Communism". Conversations With Tyler. Retrieved 7 May 2022.
- ^ Barker, Josef (dir.) (2011). Marx Reloaded.
- ^ Democracy Now! television program online transcript, 11 March 2008.
- ^ Slavoj, Žižek (2013). "Answers Without Questions". In Slavoj, Žižek (ed.). The Idea of Communism. Vol. 2. London & New York: Verso. pp. 198–9.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj. "Atheism is a legacy worth fighting for Slavoj Zizek". New York Times. Retrieved 18 May 2022.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj (2017). "Christian Atheism". YouTube (European Graduate School Video Lectures). Retrieved 4 May 2022.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ See his The Fragile Absolute, The Monstrosity of Christ, The Puppet and the Dwarf, and On Belief.
- ^ Fiennes, Sophie (dir.). (2012). The Pervert's Guide to Ideology. London: P Guide Productions.
- ^ Kuhn, Gabriel (2011). "The Anarchist Hypothesis, or Badiou, Žižek, and the Anti-Anarchist Prejudice". Alpine Anarchist. Retrieved 4 September 2013.
- ^ a b Gray, John (12 July 2012). "The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek". New York Review of Books. Retrieved 22 September 2012.
- ^ Holbo, John (1 January 2004). "On Žižek and Trilling". Philosophy and Literature. 28 (2): 430–440. doi:10.1353/phl.2004.0029. S2CID 170396508.
...an unhealthy anti-liberal is one, like Z+iz=ek, who ticks and tocks in unreflective revulsion at liberalism, pantomiming that he is de Maistre (or Abraham) or Robespierre (or Lenin) by turns, lest he look like Mill.
- ^ Holbo, John (17 December 2010). "Zizek on the Financial Collapse – and Liberalism". Crooked Timbers. Retrieved 21 August 2012.
To review: Zizek does this liberal = neoliberal thing. Which is no good. And he doesn't even have much to say about economics. And Zizek does this liberal = self-hating pc white intellectuals thing. Which is no good.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj (3 July 2012). "Slavoj Zizek responds to his critics". Jacobin. Retrieved 13 April 2018.
- ^ Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. Verso. London, New York City 2000. pp. 202–206
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times.
- ^ Harpham "Doing the Impossible: Slavoj Žižek and the End of Knowledge"
- ^ O'Neill, The Last Analysis of Slavoj Žižek
- ^ Springer, Mike (28 June 2013). "Noam Chomsky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Empty 'Posturing'". OpenCulture.com. Retrieved 20 June 2018.
- ^ Scruton, Roger (2015). Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. Bloomsbury. p. 256. ISBN 978-1408187333.
- ^ Modleski, Tania (2005). The Women Who Knew Too Much (2 ed.). New York & London: Routledge. p. 132.
- ^ Stavrakakis, Yannis (2007). The Lacanian Left. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. p. 115.
- ^ Horwitz, Noah (2005). "Contra the Slovenians". Philosophy Today. 49 (1): 24. doi:10.5840/philtoday200549161.
- ^ a b "Slavoj Žižek On 'Self Plagiarism' in The New York Times: What's the Big Deal?". Newsweek. 10 September 2014.
- ^ "Did Marxist Philosophy Superstar Slavoj Žižek Plagiarize a White Nationalist Journal?". Newsweek. 11 July 2014. Retrieved 13 July 2014.
- ^ Dean, Michelle. "Slavoj Žižek Sorta Kinda Admits Plagiarizing White Supremacist Journal". Gawker.com. Gawker Online. Retrieved 20 February 2015.
- ^ Žižek, S. (1998). "A Leftist Plea for 'Eurocentrism'". Critical Inquiry. 24 (4). The University of Chicago Press: 988–1009. JSTOR 1344115.
- ^ Žižek, S. (2009). First as tragedy, then as farce. London: Verso. p. 115ff.
- ^ Menon, N. (2010). The Two Zizeks. Kafila - Collective explorations since 2006.
- ^ Dabashi, H. (2015). Can Non-Europeans Think? London: Zed Books.
- ^ Mignolo, W. D. (2013). Yes, we can: Non-European thinkers and philosophers. Al Jazeera, 19 February 2013
- ^ Pavón-Cuéllar, D. (2020). "Žižek, universalismo y colonialismo: doce tesis para no aceptarlo todo" (pdf). International Journal of Zizek Studies (in Spanish). 14 (3): 1–22.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj. "The Sexual Is Political". The Philosophical Salon. Retrieved 8 May 2022.
- ^ Gossett, Che. "Žižek's Trans/gender Trouble". LA Review of Books. Retrieved 8 May 2022.
- ^ Miell, Sam Warren. "Slavoj Žižek is wrong about stuff". Retrieved 8 May 2022.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj. "A Reply to My Critics". The Philosophical Salon. Retrieved 8 May 2022.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj. "A Reply to My Critics, Part Two". The Philosophical Salon. Retrieved 8 May 2022.
- ^ Miell, Sam Warren. "Interrogating the père's version: a response to Slavoj Žižek".
- ^ Lain, Douglas. "The Fate of Slavoj Žižek". Thought Catalog. Retrieved 11 June 2022.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj. "Transgender dogma is naive and incompatible with Freud". The Spectator. Retrieved 11 June 2022.
- ^ Erlij, Evelyn. "McKenzie Wark: reinventing the future".
- ^ Coffman, Chris (2022). Queer Traversals. London: Bloomsbury. p. 98. ISBN 9781350200005.
- ^ "London". The MUTE Series — video snacks served dry. Retrieved 23 August 2021.
External links
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External videos | |
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- Slavoj Žižek at Curlie
- Slavoj Žižek on Big Think
- Slavoj Žižek Faculty Page at European Graduate School
- Žižek's entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Žižek bibliography at Lacanian Ink magazine
- Column archive at The Guardian
- Column archive at Jacobin
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- Slavoj Žižek on Charlie Rose
- Slavoj Žižek at IMDb
- Wendy Brown, Costas Douzinas, Stephen Frosh, and Zizek at the London Critical Theory Summer School – Friday Debate 2012
- Slavoj Žižek on the Muck Rack journalist listing site
- Slavoj Žižek
- 1949 births
- 20th-century atheists
- 20th-century non-fiction writers
- 20th-century Slovenian philosophers
- 20th-century Slovenian writers
- 21st-century atheists
- 21st-century non-fiction writers
- 21st-century Slovenian philosophers
- 21st-century Slovenian writers
- Academics of Birkbeck, University of London
- Analysands of Jacques-Alain Miller
- Anti-capitalists
- Anti-consumerists
- Aphorists
- Atheist philosophers
- Atheist theologians
- Atheist writers
- Continental philosophers
- Critical theorists
- Criticism of capitalism
- Critics of Islamism
- Critics of multiculturalism
- Critics of political economy
- Critics of postmodernism
- Critics of religions
- Cultural critics
- Death of God theologians
- Deleuze scholars
- Epistemologists
- European Graduate School faculty
- Film theorists
- Freudo-Marxism
- Hegelian philosophers
- Jacques Lacan
- Liberal Democracy of Slovenia politicians
- Living people
- Logicians
- Maoist theorists
- Marxist theorists
- Materialists
- Members of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
- Metaphysicians
- Moral philosophers
- Ontologists
- Opinion journalists
- University of Ljubljana faculty
- Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis alumni
- People involved in plagiarism controversies
- Philosophers of art
- Philosophers of culture
- Philosophers of education
- Philosophers of ethics and morality
- Philosophers of history
- Philosophers of logic
- Philosophers of mind
- Philosophers of nihilism
- Philosophers of psychology
- Philosophers of religion
- Political philosophers
- Poststructuralists
- Slovenian anti-fascists
- Slovenian atheists
- Slovenian communists
- Slovenian ethicists
- Slovenian Marxist writers
- Slovenian Marxists
- Slovenian non-fiction writers
- Slovenian philosophers
- Slovenian psychoanalysts
- Slovenian socialists
- Slovenian sociologists
- Slovenian theologians
- Social commentators
- Social critics
- Social philosophers
- Theorists on Western civilization
- University of Ljubljana alumni
- Writers about activism and social change
- Writers about globalization
- Writers about the Soviet Union
- Yugoslav dissidents