Slavoj Zizek

 1) His Biography: 

Slavoj Zizek was born into a middle-class household in Ljubljana, PR Slovenia, Yugoslavia. Joze Zizek, his father, was an economist and public servant from the Prekmurje district in eastern Slovenia. Vesna, a native of the Gorizia Hills in the Slovenian Littoral, worked for the government as an accountant. His parents did not believe in God. He spent the most of his boyhood in Portoro, a seaside village where he was exposed to Western movies, philosophy, and popular culture. Slavoj’s family returned to Ljubljana when he was a teenager, and he attended Beigrad High School. He had originally intended to become a filmmaker, but he changed his mind and decided to study philosophy instead. 

Zizek entered at the University of Ljubljana in 1967, during a period of openness in Titoist Yugoslavia, to study philosophy and sociology. Prior to starting university, he began reading French structuralists, and in 1967, he released the first Slovenian translation of a Jacques Derrida essay. Zizek frequented the groups of dissident intellectuals, including Tine Hribar and Ivo Urbancic, both Heideggerian philosophers, and wrote essays in alternative publications such as Praxis, Tribuna, and Problemi, which he also edited. He obtained a position as an assistant researcher with the prospect of tenure in 1971, but was fired when his Master’s thesis was deemed “non-Marxist” by the authorities. His dissertation, The Theoretical and Practical Relevance of French Structuralism, earned him a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana in 1981. He spent the following three years in what was dubbed “professional wilderness,” while simultaneously performing his legal obligation to serve in the Yugoslav army for a year in Karlovac. 

Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and Louis Althusser were all edited and translated by Zizek in the 1980s. He interpreted Hegelian and Marxist ideas using Lacan’s work. Under the supervision of Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault, Zizek obtained a second doctorate (Doctor of Philosophy in Psychoanalysis) at the University of Paris VIII in 1985. He authored the introductions to G. K. Chesterton’s and John Le Carré’s detective books in Slovene. Pogled s strani, his first book devoted solely to cinema theory, was released in 1989. With the release of his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, in 1989, he gained worldwide prominence as a social theorist. 

Zizek has contributed to publications 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 the Slovenian left-liberal magazine Mladina, as well as the newspapers Dnevnik and Delo. He also works with the Polish leftist magazine Krytyka Polityczna, the regional southeast European left-wing newspaper Novi Plamen, and the psychoanalytical journal Problemi on the editorial board. Zizek is a series editor for the Northwestern University Press series Diaeresis, which publishes works that will intervene at the levels of ideology critique, politics, and art theory in addition to philosophy. 

Zizek rose to prominence in the late 1980s as a contributor for Mladina, an alternative youth magazine critical of Tito’s policies and Yugoslav politics, particularly the militarization of society. He was a member of the Communist Party of Slovenia until October 1988, when he and 32 other Slovenian intellectuals resigned in protest over the JBTZ trial. He was engaged in numerous political and civil society groups to fight for Slovenia’s democracy between 1988 and 1990, most notably the Committee for the Preservation of Human Rights. He competed for the previous four-person collective presidency of Slovenia in the first free elections in 1990 as a candidate of the Liberal Democratic Party. 

Despite his involvement in liberal democratic initiatives, Zizek has maintained his communist identity and has criticized right-wing groups such as nationalists, conservatives, and classical liberals in Slovenia and across the globe. “Since we live in a time without any sense of irony, I must add I don’t mean it literally,” he said, adding that the convention center where nationalist Slovene authors have their congresses should be blown up. In May 2013, at the Subversive Festival, he joked, “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.” The center-right New Democracy party responded by claiming that Zizek’s words should be taken literally rather than humorously. 

He defined himself as a “communist in a qualified sense” in a 2008 interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, and as a “radical leftist” in an October 2009 appearance. Zizek featured in the Arte documentary Marx Reloaded the next year, in which he advocated communism. During a talk with Gary Younge at a Guardian Live event in 2016, Zizek examined Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the United States. Trump, he said, is a conundrum, being a center liberal in most of his ideas but frantically attempting to hide it with nasty jokes and stupidities. He labeled then-frontrunner candidate Hillary Clinton as the much less appropriate option in an opinion article published, for example, in Die Zeit. Zizek did, however, declare in an interview with the BBC that he believed Trump was “terrible,” and that his support would have been motivated by a desire to persuade the Democratic Party to revert to more Marxist values. Zizek claimed shortly before the 2017 French presidential election that one could not choose between Macron and Le Pen, noting that Macron’s neoliberalism just breeds neofascism. This was in reaction to those on the left urging support for Macron in order to avert a win for Le Pen. 

In a catalog for Abercrombie & Fitch in 2003, Zizek produced words to complement Bruce Weber’s images. When asked about the propriety of a major intellectual writing ad copy, Zizek told The Boston Globe, “If I had to choose between doing things like this for money and becoming a fully employed American academic, kissing asses to get a tenured position, I would gladly choose writing for such journals!” Zizek was selected one of Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2012 for “bringing voice to an era of absurdity.” 

Zizek has had four marriages. Anala Hounie, an Argentine model, was his third wife, whom he married in 2005. He is married to Jela Krei, a Slovenian journalist and philosopher who is the daughter of architectural historian Peter Krei. He has two sons. Aside from his native Slovene, Zizek is a fluent speaker of Serbo-Croatian, French, German and English. 

2) Main Works: 

• • Laibach: A Film From Slovenia (1993) 
• • Liebe Dein Symptom wie Dich selbst! (1996) 
• • Predictions of Fire (1996) 
• • Post-Socialism+Retro Avantgarde+Irwin (1997) 
• • The Reality of the Virtual (2004) 
• • Zizek! (2005) 
• • The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) 
• • The Possibility of Hope (2006) 
• • Examined Life (2008) 
• • Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution (2009) 
• • Alien, Marx & Co. – Slavoj Žižek, Ein Porträt (2009) 
• • Marx Reloaded (2011) 
• • Catastroika (2012) 
• • The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012) 
• • Balkan Spirit (2013) 
• • Risk (2016) 
• • Houston, We Have a Problem! (2016) 
• • Turn On (short) (2018) 
• • Bliss (2021) 

3) Main Themes in his Work: 

Ontology, Ideology, and the Real: 

In The German Ideology, Zizek criticizes Karl Marx’s idea of ideology, claiming that false awareness stops individuals from understanding things as they truly are. Ideology, according to Althusser, is completely unconscious and operates as a succession of justifications and spontaneous socio-symbolic rituals that reinforce virtual authority. According to Zizek, the Real is not seen as something that is arranged in a manner that offers all of its elements adequate meaning in connection to one another. Instead, the Real is seen via the lenses of hegemonic representation and reproduction processes, while refusing complete inscription into the ordering system given to it. As a result, individuals may see the Real as a source of political opposition. 

The subject, based on Lacan’s concept of the barred subject, is a wholly negative entity, a vacuum of negativity (in the Hegelian sense), which permits the Cartesian cogito to be flexible and reflexive (transcendental subject). The epistemological gap between the In-itself and the For-itself is inherent to reality itself, despite the fact that awareness is opaque (according to Hegel). Kant’s antinomies, quantum physics, and Alain Badiou’s ‘materialist’ thesis that ‘The One is Not’ all lead to a contradictory (“Barred”) Real (that Lacan conceptualized prior). 

Although there are a variety of Symbolic interpretations of the Real, not all of them are “true.” The abject Actual (or “real Real”), which cannot be fully integrated into the symbolic order, and the symbolic Real, a collection of signifiers that can never be fully integrated into a subject’s horizon of sense, may be distinguished. The real is a “minimal difference,” the gap between the infinite judgment of a reductionist materialism and experience as lived, the “Parallax” of dialectical antagonisms are inherent to reality itself, and dialectical materialism (contra Friedrich Engels) is a new materialist Hegelianism, incorporating the insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis, set theory, quantum physics, and contemporary philosophy that is continental. 

Political Thought and the Postmodern Subject: 

The state, according to Zizek, is a system of regulatory institutions that affect human actions. Outside of collective conduct, its influence is essentially symbolic and has no normative force. In this sense, the word “law” refers to society’s fundamental rules, which facilitate interaction by preventing certain behaviors. Political choices, according to Zizek, have been depoliticized and accepted as natural outcomes. For example, contentious policy choices (such as cuts to social welfare expenditure) are presented as though they were “objective” requirements. Even while governments claim that public engagement and democracy have risen, major choices are still decided in the interests of capital. 

In the United States and others, the two-party system creates a similar illusion. It is still vital to participate in specific conflicts, such as labor disputes, but the key is to connect these little events to the bigger picture. If well performed, specific demands might serve as a symbolic distillation of the system and its inequalities. The fundamental political battle is between those who have no place in society and those who do. 

In many of his works, Zizek claims that “the Balkans is Europe’s unconscious”; he discursively links the Balkans to global capitalism and multicultural democracy, circumventing Balkan exceptionalism, and portrays the Balkans’ complex social and historical realities as the geopolitical analogue of the psychoanalytic Real. In sharp contrast to the ideological convictions of the European “universalist Left” in general, and those Jürgen Habermas described as post national in particular, Zizek believes that pro-sovereignty and pro-independence movements that have emerged in Europe are beneficial. The postmodern subject, according to Zizek, is skeptical against official institutions but nevertheless believing in conspiracies. 

We built another of the Other to escape the painful freedom we encountered when we lost our common belief in a single force. Knowing you’re being lied to isn’t enough, especially if you’re trying to live a regular life under capitalism. People may, for example, continue to behave like automata while being conscious of ideology, falsely assuming that they are expressing their extreme freedom in this way. Even if one has self-awareness, just because one knows what one is doing does not guarantee one is doing it well. 

Religion, according to Zizek, is not an adversary but rather one of the battlegrounds. Atheism is a positive thing. Religious fundamentalists are similar to “godless Stalinist Communists” in several ways. They both place a higher weight on divine will and salvation than moral or ethical behavior. 

4) Importance of his Works Today: 

Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, is one of the few academics who has attained true fame among the common public. He speaks to sold-out audiences on a regular basis, is the subject of a documentary film (titled simply Zizek! ), and is unquestionably one of the world’s most prominent proponents of left-wing ideals. “Ideology” is one of those intellectual concepts that has taken on a tainted meaning in common discourse. In the same way that “deconstruction” has come to represent nothing more than “detailed analysis” in common use, “ideology” has come to denote a set of views, frequently with connotations of rigidity or fanaticism. However, as Zizek emphasized in his 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology, ideology is found in our daily behaviors, not in our conscious beliefs or convictions, as Marx proposed. Explicit views are valuable, but they should be read as symptoms rather than assertions to be accepted at face value. 

Take, for example, racism. Zizek advises looking for symptomatic inconsistencies, such as when anti-Semites allege that Jews are both archcapitalist exploiters and Bolshevik subversives, that they are both too committed to their highly specific heritage and deracinated cosmopolitans undermining national traditions. In the Jim Crow South, blacks were portrayed as both young innocents in need of white leadership and vicious sexual predators. Mexican immigrants are perceived in modern America as both slackers who burden our social assistance system and tireless workaholics who are grabbing all of our jobs. 

These inconsistencies don’t prove that ideology is “irrational”; rather, they illustrate that there are too many reasons to sustain their positions. These piled-up rationalizations, according to Zizek, show that something else is going on. The purpose is to inoculate readers against Zizek’s ideas so that they feel comfortable discarding them, rather than to offer an account of Zizek’s arguments and analyze their merits. To find left-wing intellectuals and groups both amusing and dangerous, unorganized and dictatorial, highly idealistic and motivated by a desire for power, suggests that there is no other option. It is an effort to silence discussion on the fundamental basis of our society, rather than merely banging about a poor, misunderstood scholar in the public square. The ongoing calamity of modern capitalism — war, crises, worker exploitation, and imminent environmental catastrophe — need daring and imaginative thinking in order to establish some sort of sustainable alternative. Zizek can assist you. 

The difference between the exploited and the exploiter is more than a difference of opinion; it is a completely different framework. “Class struggle” is important for Zizek because it produces two completely incompatible and conflictual views of the world. Reasonable individuals on “both sides” are unable to get together and work out a solution that addresses everyone’s concerns. The “middle ground” is a gulf that cannot be bridged, and ideology symbolizes our efforts to cover it up and ignore it. 

So, when people in the United States create the image of the Mexican immigrant as a workaholic welfare queen, what is really at stake can’t be a cultural conflict, because that would imply pre-existing, more or less stable or homogeneous cultures that first exist and then happen to come into conflict, according to Zizek. It also can’t be about Mexicans who come to America and upset the cultural balance, since that balance didn’t exist to begin with. The tension is inherent in capitalism exploitation, not the other way around. The Mexicans aren’t stealing “our” jobs; the owners are doing all they can to keep wages low, regardless of who pays them. 

To have access to the truth, according to Zizek, one must pick sides. Truth isn’t “universal” in the sense that it applies to all situations equally – each circumstance has its own truth. Zizek discusses this dynamic in Less Than Nothing in terms of the link between the universal and the specific, a question that has confounded philosophers for millennia. Rather than seeing a “universal” as an impossible ideal like justice or democracy that we must continually seek to approach in our unique circumstances, Zizek believes that the very notion of the universal originates out of the inherent deficiencies of any given system. In other words, the genuinely universal factor is the complaint, not the noble ideal — what unites us is not our adherence to great principles and profound human values, but the reality that the world stinks, everywhere. 

Zizek does not believe in the utopian dream of eradicating all conflict; in fact, he feels that our ostensibly “post-ideological” society is blinded by the actually utopian expectation of resolving all true disputes, enabling liberal-democratic capitalism to continue more or less indefinitely. In tracking down the contradiction at the heart of our society and identifying with the class that embodies it, Zizek hopes not that the world will stop being horrible, but that it will stop being horrible in this particular way, that we will no longer be stuck in this particular vicious cycle, that we can find a way to stop frantically grasping at rationalizations for our self-destructive fixations and do something else — in short, to jolt us into the epiphany that there is an alternative.