Slavoj ŽižekBorn on 21 March 1949

Slovenian

Marxist philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural critic

Education

• In 1967, he enrolled at the University of Ljubljana, where he studied philosophy and sociology.

• He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana.

• He studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII .

Activities

• Žižek started his studies in an era of liberalization of the Titoist Yugoslavia. , and French structuralists.

• Žižek frequented the circles of dissident intellectuals, including the Heideggerian philosophers.

• He published articles in alternative magazines, such as Praxis, Tribuna and Problemi, of which he was also an editor.

• He spent few years of 1970s undertaking national service in the Yugoslav army in Karlovac.

• In the 1980s, he also edited and translated into Slovene Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and Louis Althusser.

• In 1988, he published his first book dedicated entirely to “film theory”.

• Žižek achieved international recognition as a social theorist with the 1989 publication of his first book in English, “The Sublime Object of Ideology”.

Academic Life

• He is a professor at the European Graduate School.

• A senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy, University of Ljubljana Slovenia

• Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University

• International director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London

• In July 2013, he was appointed as an Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University, South Korea.

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

Poliical life

• In the late 1980s, Žižek came to public attention as a columnist for the alternative youth magazine Mladina, criticizing several aspects of Yugoslav politics, especially the militarization of society.

• He was member of the “Communist Party” of Slovenia until October 1988.

• 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 candidate for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution abolished in the constitution of 1991) for the Liberal Democratic Party.

• Despite his activity in liberal democratic projects, Žižek remains committed to the communist ideal and is critical of right-wing circles, such as nationalists, conservatives, and classical liberals both in Slovenia and worldwide.

Thoughts

• Žižek has written on topics including political theory, film theory, cultural studies, theology, psychoanalysis, subjectivity, ideology, capitalism, fundamentalism, racism, tolerance, multiculturalism, human rights, ecology, globalization, the Iraq War, revolution, utopianism, totalitarianism, postmodernism, pop culture, opera, cinema, political theology, and religion.

• Žižek's work and thought aims to provoke and critique common views of the self and the world. The philosopher, for Žižek, is more someone engaged in critique than someone who tries to answer questions by creating a theory.

• Ontology, ideology, and the Real:

• Žižek's ontology gives primacy to the creative subject who can manipulate discourse even while he or she is shaped by it.

• Žižek suggests that consciousness is opaque. He says that one cannot ever know if an apparently conscious being is truly conscious or a mime—and furthermore, that this confusion is fundamental to consciousness itself.

• Žižek argues that although there are multiple Symbolic interpretations of the Real, they are not all relatively "true

• Political thought:

• Žižek argues that 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 for Žižek 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 real political conflict for Žižek is between an ordered structure of society and those without a place in it.

• The postmodern subject:

• Žižek argues that 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. For Žižek, it is not enough to merely know that you are being lied to, particularly when continuing to live a normal life under capitalism. Although one may possess a self-awareness, Žižek argues, just because one understands what one is doing does not mean that one is doing the right thing.

• Žižek has said that he considers religion not an enemy but rather one of the fields of struggle. In 2006 he made the argument for atheism, arguing that believers—no differently, in a way, from " 'godless' Stalinist Communists"—value divine will and salvation over moral or ethical action.

Filmography

• Year Title Role

• 2004 The Reality of the Virtual Script author, lecturer (as himself)

• 2005 Zizek! Lecturer (as himself)

• 2006 The Pervert's Guide to Cinema Screenplay writer, presenter (as himself)

• 2012 The Pervert's Guide to Ideology Screenplay writer, presenter (as himself)

Works

• Living in the End Times

• First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

• Zizek's Jokes: Did You Hear the One about Hegel and Negation? (with A. Mortensen & Momus)

• How to Read Lacan (with Simon Critchley)

• Violence: Six Sideways Reflections

• Less Than Nothing: Hegel And The Shadow Of Dialectical Materialism

• Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture

• Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism

• The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan

• The Sublime Object of Ideology

• Event: A Philosophical Journey Through A Concept

• Absolute Recoil: Towards A New Foundation Of Dialectical Materialism

• The Year of Dreaming Dangerously

• Demanding the Impossible

• The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity

• The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?

• The Plague of Fantasies

• The Parallax View

• Virtue and Terror (Revolutions) (with Maximilien Robespierre, Jean Ducange, John Howe)

• God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse (with , Boris Gunjevic and Ellen Elias-Bursac )

• For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (Radical Thinkers)

• The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (with John Milbank and Creston Davis)

• On Belief (Thinking in Action)

• Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

• The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology

• Theology and the Political: The New Debate (with Creston Davis, John Milbank)

• Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates

• Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth (with Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, David Fernbach)

• Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences

• The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters

• In Defense of Lost Causes

• The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (with E. L. Santner & K. Reinhard)

• The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality

• What Does Europe Want? The Union and its Discontents (with Srecko Horvat)

• States of Crisis and Post-Capitalist Scenarios (with Heiko Feldner & Fabio Vighi)

• Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? 5 Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion

• The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway (with M. Wieczorek)

• The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism)(with F.W.J. von Schelling and Judith Norman)

• Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan . . . But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock

• The Fright of Real Tears: Krzystof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-theory)

• The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality

• Interrogating the Real (Bloomsbury Revelations) (with Rex Butler and Scott Stephens)

• Conversations with Zizek (Conversations) (with Glyn Daly)

• Lacan: The Silent Partners (with Alain Badiou, Bruno Bosteels and Miran Bozovic)

• Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle

• Opera's Second Death (with Mladen Dolar)

• Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out

• Interrogating the Real (with Rex Butler and Scott Stephens)

• The Universal Exception (with Rex Butler and Scott Stephens)

• Cogito and the Unconscious (with Sina K. Najafi)

• Revolution at the Gates: Zizek on Lenin

• The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters

• Perversion and the Social Relation (with Molly Anne Rothenberg and Dennis A. Foster)

• Jacques Lacan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory