Slavoj Žižek

 ( 1949 Births ) 

Žižek had already begun reading French Structuralism 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 Martin Heidegger philosophers Tine Hribar and Ivo Urbančič, and published articles in alternative magazines, such as Praxis School, 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".Žižek's response to the article "Če sem v kaj resnično zaljubljena, sem v življenje Sobotna priloga Dela, p. 37 (19.1. 2008) 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 People's Army in Karlovac.

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.

Žižek is a member of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) founded in 2016.

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 an hour-long 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".

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 over happiness under capitalism versus Marxism.

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.

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, Franz Schubert's Winterreise, Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina and Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore. He expresses a particular love for Richard Wagner, particularly Das Rheingold and Parsifal. He ranks Schoenberg over Igor Stravinsky, and insists on Hanns 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. His theories have been applied to studying a variety of literature, including Finnegans Wake.Frazer, Michael. "Closer to Consciousness: Waking as the Žižekian Event in" Finnegans Wake"." James Joyce Quarterly (2015): 95-110.

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 Freudian slip), 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.

Žižek defended his 2016 article in two follow-up pieces. The first addresses purported misreadings of his position, while the second is a more sustained defence (against Miell) of the article's application of Lacanian theory, to which Miell responded in turn. Douglas Lain also defended Žižek, claiming that context makes it clear that Žižek 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."

In a 2023 piece for Compact Magazine, Žižek took a hard stance against access to puberty blockers for trans youth, and against trans adults being sent to prisons matching their gender, citing the case of Isla Bryson, whom he referred to as "a person who identifies itself as a woman using its penis to rape two women". Both of these things were attributed by Žižek to wokeness (the wider subject of the article).

He criticized Western military interventions in developing countries and wrote that it was the 2011 military intervention in Libya "which threw the country in chaos" and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq "which created the conditions for the rise" of the Islamic State.

Žižek believes that China is the combination of capitalism and authoritarianism in their extreme forms, and the Chinese Communist Party is the best protector of the interests of capitalism. From the Cultural Revolution to Deng's reforms, "Mao Zedong himself created the ideological condition for rapid capitalist development by tearing apart the fabric of traditional society."

In 2016, Žižek criticized the political left's unwillingness to criticize Cuba out of a perceived loyalty to Fidel Castro, arguing that the U.S. embargo against Cuba could not alone be blamed for its economic crisis. He also defended Cuban immigrants to the U.S., writing, "what right does a typical middle-class Western Leftist...have to despise a Cuban who decided to leave Cuba not only because of political disenchantment but also because of poverty?" However, he also sympathized with the Cuban Revolution and hoped that a "reasonable compromise" between socialism and privatization would be reached.

In an opinion article for The Guardian, Žižek argued in favour of giving full support to Ukraine after the Russian invasion and for creating a stronger NATO in response to Russian aggression, later arguing that it would also be a tragedy for Ukraine to yoke itself to western neoliberalism. Commenting on the meeting between Presidents Donald Trump and Zelenskyy in February 2025, he stated, "Ukrainians are being portrayed as if they could choose peace but instead decide to engage in a war that displaces a quarter of their population, just for the sake of a proxy war. But in reality, it’s a matter of their survival." He compared the struggle of Ukraine against its occupiers to the Palestinians' struggle against the Israeli occupation.

After the October 7 attacks in Israel, Žižek wrote:

In April 2024, Žižek criticized Israel's Gaza war in the Gaza Strip, arguing that Israel's true goal, disguised under claims of eliminating Hamas, was to annex both Gaza and the West Bank.

In a very negative review of Žižek's book Less than Nothing, 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."

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, post-Marxist Ernesto Laclau argued that "Žižek uses class as a sort of deus ex machina to play the role of the good guy against the multicultural devils."Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. Verso. London, New York City 2000. pp. 202–206

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

Conservative thinker Roger Scruton claims that:

Noah Horwitz alleges that Žižek (and the Ljubljana School to which Žižek belongs) mistakenly conflates 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."