Slavoj Žižek facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Slavoj Žižek
Žižek in 2015
Born	(1949-03-21) 21 March 1949 (age 75) Ljubljana, PR Slovenia, FPR Yugoslavia
Education	University of Ljubljana (BA, MA, DA) University of Paris VIII (PhD)
Spouse(s)	Jela Krečič ​ (m. 2013)​
Era	20th-/21st-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Continental philosophy Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis Lacanian psychoanalysis Post-Hegelianism Freudo-Marxism Post-Marxism
Institutions	University of Ljubljana New York University Birkbeck, University of London
Main interests	Ideology Marxism ontology political theory psychoanalysis cultural studies film theory theology German idealism dialectic
Notable ideas	Interpassivity Over-identification Ideological fantasy (ideology as an unconscious fantasy that structures reality) Revival of dialectical materialism
Influences Althusser Adorno Badiou Benjamin Balibar Chesterton Debenjak Dolar Engels Foucault Freud Hegel Lefebvre Jameson Job Lacan Laclau Marx Kant Rancière Schelling Schmitt Spinoza Strauss Zupančič
Influenced Brooks Dean Dolar Fisher Horvat Johnston Santner Tsipras Zupančič Rousselle Varoufakis Di Nicola McGowan

Slavoj Žižek (ⁱ/ˈslɑːvɔɪ ˈʒiːʒɛk/ slah-VOY-_-ZHEE-zhek, Slovene: [ˈslaʋɔj ˈʒiʒɛk]; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. 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. 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 the use of pop cultural examples, as well as politically incorrect provocations, have gained him fame, controversy and criticism both in and outside academia.

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 has been called "the leading Hegelian of our time", and "the foremost exponent of Lacanian theory". A journal, the International Journal of Žižek Studies, was founded by professors David J. Gunkel and Paul A. Taylor to engage with his work.

Life and career

Early life

Žižek was born in Ljubljana, PR 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, a 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 Žižek was a teenager his family moved back to Ljubljana where he attended Bežigrad High School. Originally wanting to become a filmmaker himself, he abandoned these ambitions and chose to pursue philosophy instead.

Education

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

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. 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 as 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 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.

Academic career

During the 1980s, Žižek edited and translated Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and Louis Althusser. 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".

Žižek 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, Pogled s strani. 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.

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".

Political career

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 the former four-person collective presidency of Slovenia.

Public life

Žižek speaking in 2011

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. 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".

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

Personal life

Žižek has been married four times and has two adult sons, Tim and Kostja. His second wife was Slovene philosopher and socio-legal theorist Renata Salecl, fellow member of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. His third wife was Argentinian model and Lacanian scholar Analia Hounie, who he married in 2005. Currently, he is married to Slovene journalist, author and philosopher, Jela Krečič.

In early 2018, Žižek experienced Bell's palsy on the right side of his face. He went on to give several lectures and interviews with this condition; on March 9 of that year, during a lecture on political revolutions in London, he commented on the treatment he had been receiving, and used his paralysis as a metaphor for political idleness.

Aside from his native Slovene, Žižek is a fluent speaker of Serbo-Croatian, French, German and English.

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. On this list, he clarified: "I opted for pure madness: the list contains only ‘guilty pleasures’". 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.

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.

Žižek often lists Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Andrei Platonov as his "three absolute masters of 20th century literature". He ranks/prefers Varlam Shalamov over Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam over Anna Akhmatova, Daphne du Maurier over Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett over James Joyce.

Thought and positions

Žižek and his thought have been described by many commentators as "Hegelo-Lacanian". 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. 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."—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). Alongside his academic, theoretical works, Žižek is a prolific commentator on current affairs and contemporary political debates.

Political theory

Ideology

Žižek's theory of ideology is one of his major contributions to political theory.

For Žižek, as for Marx, ideology is made up of fictions that structure political life. 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, ideology can be expressed in one's behaviour, regardless of one's conscious beliefs. 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.

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." 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". 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." 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."

Theology

Žižek has asserted that "Atheism is a legacy worth fighting for" in The New York Times. However, he nonetheless finds extensive conceptual value in Christianity, particularly Protestantism.

Communism

Although sometimes adopting the title of 'radical leftist', Žižek also controversially insists on identifying as a communist.

Žižek has labelled himself a "communist in a qualified sense". 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.

Social issues

Žižek's views on social issues such as Eurocentrism, immigration and the LGBT movement have triggered criticism and accusations of bigotry.

In his 1997 article 'Multiculturalism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism', Žižek critiqued multiculturalism for privileging a culturally 'neutral' perspective from which all cultures are disaffectedly apprehended in their particularity because this distancing reproduces the racist procedure of Othering. He further argues that a fixation on particular identities and struggles corresponds to an abandonment of the universal struggle against global capitalism.

Selected works

Filmography