Slavoj Žižek

Early life

Žižek was born in Ljubljana, SR 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, native of the Brda region 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 Slavoj was a teenager his family moved back to Ljubljana where he attended Bežigrad High School.

Education

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

He 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. An early influence at university was Božidar Debenjak who taught the philosophy of German idealism and introduced the thought of the Frankfurt School to Slovenia. His reading of Marx's Das Kapital from the perspective of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit influenced many future Slovenian philosophers, including Žižek.

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 accused of 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 undertaking national service in the Yugoslav army in Karlovac.

Career

During the 1980s, Žižek edited and translated Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and Louis Althusser. He used Jacques Lacan's work to interpret Hegelian and Marxist philosophy.

In 1985, Žižek completed a second doctorate (Doctor of Philosophy in psychoanalysis) at the University of Paris VIII under Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault.

He 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. 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."

Politics

In the late 1980s, Žižek came to public attention as a columnist for the alternative youth magazine Mladina, which was critical of the Titoist regime, 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 Slovenian presidency (an office formally abolished in the 1991 constitution).

Despite his activity in liberal democratic projects, Žižek has remained committed to the communist ideal 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." 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 right-wing New Democracy party claimed Žižek's comments should be understood literally, not ironically.

In a 2008 interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, he described himself as a "communist in a qualified sense," and in another appearance in October 2009 he described himself as a "radical leftist." The following year Žižek appeared in the Arte documentary Marx Reloaded in which he defended the idea of communism.

In 2013, he corresponded with imprisoned Russian activist and Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.

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.

In 2016, during a conversation with Gary Younge at a Guardian Live event, Žižek endorsed Donald Trump for the US presidency. He described Trump as a paradox, basically a centrist liberal in most of his positions, desperately trying to mask this by dirty jokes and stupidities. In an opinion piece, published e.g. in Die Zeit, he described Hillary Clinton as the much less suitable alternative. Some comments referred to Žižek not being too different to Trump - both thriving on their quotability, provoking outrage and both being, in their own very different ways, "big personalities" in the media with Slovenian spouses. In an interview with the BBC, Žižek did however state that he thought Trump was "Horrible" and his support would have been based on an attempt to encourage the Democratic Party to return to more centrist ideas and adopt more leftist ideas too.

Public life

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!"

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. 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 aesthetics 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 January 2013, the British Royal Opera House announced that four new operas inspired by Žižek's writings have been commissioned.

Personal life

Žižek has been married three times: first, to Renata Salecl, another Slovene philosopher; second, to fashion model Analia Hounie, daughter of an Argentine Lacanian psychoanalyst; and third, to the Slovene journalist Jela Krečič, daughter of the historian of architecture Peter Krečič.

He is a fluent speaker of Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, French, German and English.

Ontology, ideology, and the Real

In developing a thesis of ideology and its function, Žižek makes two intertwined arguments:

1. Žižek begins with a critique of Marx's concept of ideology (as described in The German Ideology), in which false consciousness prevents people from seeing how things really are. He builds upon Althusser, arguing that ideology is thoroughly unconscious and functions as a series of justifications and spontaneous socio-symbolic rituals which support virtual authorities.
2. Žižek argues that the Real is not experienced as a meaningfully ordered totality. The Real names points within an ontology which consist of hegemonic systems of representation and reproduction, resist full inscription into its terms, and may attempt to generate political resistance .

Drawing on Lacan's notion of the barred subject, for Žižek the subject is a purely negative entity, a void of negativity (in the Hegelian sense), which allows for the flexibility and reflexivity of the cartesian Cogito (Transcendental Subject). Žižek claims that though consciousness is opaque, following Hegel, that the epistemological gap between the In-itself and For-itself is immanent to reality itself; that the antinomies of Kant, quantum physics, and Badiou's 'materialist' principle that 'The One is Not', point towards an inconsistent ("Barred") Real itself that Lacan conceptualized prior.^{[opaque language]}

Žižek argues that although there are multiple Symbolic interpretations of the Real, they are not all relatively "true". Žižek identifies two instances of the Real: the abject Real (or "real Real"), which cannot be wholly integrated into the symbolic order, and the symbolic Real, a set of signifiers that can never be properly integrated into the horizon of sense of a subject. The truth is revealed in the process of transiting the contradictions; or the real is a "minimal difference", the gap between the infinite judgement of a reductionist materialism and experience as lived, developing his thesis of the "Parallax" of dialectical antagonisms as inherent to reality itself, and developing Dialectical Materialism - contra Engels - as a new materialist Hegelianism, incorporating the insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis, set theory, quantum physics, and contemporary continental philosophy (most notably in his magnum opus "Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism" (2012), as well as "Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism" (2014)).

Political thought and the postmodern subject

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 two-party system dominant in the United States and elsewhere produces a similar illusion. Žižek says that it is still necessary to engage in particular conflicts—such as labor disputes—but the trick is to relate these individual events to the larger struggle. Particular demands, if executed well, might serve as metaphorical condensation for the system and its injustices. The real political conflict for Žižek is between an ordered structure of society and those without a place in it.

In stark contrast to the intellectual tenets of the European "universalist Left" in general, and those Jürgen Habermas defined as postnational, in particular, Žižek spares no efforts in his clear and unequivocal defense of the pro-sovereignty and pro-independence processes opened in Europe.

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. He argues, for example, that despite people being aware of ideology (for example Wikipedia bias), they may continue to act as automata (for example continuing to read and edit the biased Wikipedia, improving its reputation in the process), mistakenly believing that they are thereby expressing their radical freedom. 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 a 2006 New York Times op-ed he made the argument for atheism, arguing that religious fundamentalists are, in a way, no different from "godless Stalinist Communists." He argued that both value divine will and salvation over moral or ethical action.

Criticism

Hundreds of academics have addressed aspects of Žižek's work in professional papers, and in 2007, the International Journal of Žižek Studies was established for the discussion of his work. There are two main themes of critique of Žižek's ideas: his failure to articulate an alternative or program in the face of his denunciation of contemporary social, political, and economic arrangements, and his lack of rigor in argumentation. Roger Scruton has written, "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".

Ambiguity and unclear alternatives

Žižek's philosophical and political positions are not always clear, and his work has been criticized for a failure to take a consistent stance. 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 & John Holbo, his theoretical argument often lacks grounding in historical fact, which makes him more provocative than insightful.

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, 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." The use of such analysis, however, is not systematic and draws on critical accounts of Stalinism and Maoism, as well as post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Žižek does not agree with critics who claim he believes in a historical necessity:

There is no such thing as the Communist big Other, there's no historical necessity or teleology directing and guiding our actions." (In Slovene: "Ni komunističnega velikega Drugega, nobene zgodovinske nujnosti ali teleologije, ki bi usmerjala in vodila naša dejanja".)

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 right path, the path of fidelity to freedom."

Unorthodox style and scholarship

Critics complain of a theoretical chaos in which questions and answers are confused and in which Žižek constantly recycles old ideas which were scientifically refuted long ago or which in reality have quite a different meaning than Žižek gives to them. Harpham calls Žižek's style "a stream of nonconsecutive units arranged in arbitrary sequences that solicit a sporadic and discontinuous attention." 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."

Such presentation has laid him open to accusations of misreading other philosophers, particularly Jacques Lacan and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Žižek carries over many concepts from Lacan's teachings into the sphere of political and social theory, but has a tendency to do so in an extreme deviation from its psychoanalytic context. Similarly, according to some critics, Žižek's conflation of Lacan's unconscious with Hegel's unconscious is mistaken. Noah Horwitz, in an effort to dissociate Lacan from the more problematic Hegel, interprets the Lacanian unconscious and the Hegelian unconscious as two totally different mechanisms. Horwitz points out, in Lacan and Hegel's differing approaches to the topic of speech, that Lacan's unconscious reveals itself to us in parapraxis, or "slips-of-the-tongue." We are therefore, according to Lacan, alienated from language through the revelation of our desire (even if that desire originated with the Other, as he claims, it remains peculiar to us). In Hegel's unconscious, however, we are alienated from language whenever we attempt to articulate a particular and end up articulating a universal. For example, if I say 'the dog is with me', although I am trying to say something about this particular dog at this particular time, I actually produce the universal category 'dog,' and therefore express a generality, not the particularity I desire. Hegel's argument implies that, at the level of sense-certainty, we can never express the true nature of reality. Lacan's argument implies, to the contrary, that speech reveals the true structure of a particular unconscious mind.

In a very negative review of Žižek's magnum opus "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.'

Accusations of self-plagiarism in 2014

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. 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.

On 11 July 2014, American weekly newsmagazine Newsweek reported that in an article published in 2006 Žižek plagiarized substantial passages from an earlier review that first appeared in the white nationalist journal American Renaissance, a publication condemned by the Southern Poverty Law Center as the organ of a "white nationalist hate group." However, in response to the allegations, Žižek stated:

When I was writing the text on Derrida which contains the problematic passages, a friend told me about Kevin Macdonald's theories, and I asked him to send me a brief resume. 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. [...] As any reader can quickly establish, the problematic passages are purely informative, a report on another's theory for which I have no affinity whatsoever; all I do after this brief resume is quickly dismissing Macdonald's theory as a new chapter in the long process of the destruction of Reason. In no way can I thus be accused of plagiarizing another's line of thought, of "stealing ideas." I nonetheless deeply regret the incident.