In 1971, Žižek received a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and sociology at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana.
In 1975, he earned a Master of Arts in philosophy also at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana.
Žižek received a Doctor of Arts in philosophy at the University of Ljubljana in 1981.
Gallery of Slavoj Žižek
2 Rue de la Liberté, 93526 Saint-Denis, France
In 1985, Žižek earned a Doctor of Arts in psychoanalysis at the Universite Paris-VIII.
In 1971, Žižek received a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and sociology at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana.
In 1975, he earned a Master of Arts in philosophy also at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana.
Žižek received a Doctor of Arts in philosophy at the University of Ljubljana in 1981.
The Courage of Hopelessness: A Year of Acting Dangerously
(In The Courage of Hopelessness, maverick philosopher Slav...)
In The Courage of Hopelessness, maverick philosopher Slavoj Zizek returns to explore today's ideological, political and economic battles, and asks whether radical change is possible. In these troubled times, even the most pessimistic diagnosis of our future ends with an uplifting hint that things might not be as bad as all that, that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Yet, argues Slavoj Zizek, it is only when we have admitted to ourselves that our situation is completely hopeless - that the light at the end of the tunnel is in fact the headlight of a train - that fundamental change can be brought about.
(In the most rigorous articulation of his philosophical sy...)
In the most rigorous articulation of his philosophical system to date, Slavoj Žižek provides nothing short of a new definition of dialectical materialism. In forging this new materialism, Žižek critiques and challenges not only the work of Alain Badiou, Robert Brandom, Joan Copjec, Quentin Meillassoux, and Julia Kristeva (to name but a few), but everything from popular science and quantum mechanics to sexual difference and analytic philosophy. Alongside striking images of the Möbius strip, the cross-cap, and the Klein bottle, Žižek brings alive the Hegelian triad of being-essence-notion. Radical new readings of Hegel, and Kant, sit side by side with characteristically lively commentaries on film, politics, and culture. Here is Žižek at his interrogative best.
(Slavoj Zizek is one of the most prolific and well-known p...)
Slavoj Zizek is one of the most prolific and well-known philosophers and cultural theorists in the world today. His inventive, provocative body of work mixes Hegelian metaphysics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Marxist dialectic in order to challenge conventional wisdom and accepted verities on both the left and the right.
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian-born political philosopher and cultural critic. He was described by British literary theorist, Terry Eagleton, as the "most formidably brilliant" recent theorist to have emerged from Continental Europe.
Background
Slavoj Žižek was born on March 21, 1949, in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Like many other young people in the former satellite states of the Soviet Union, he consumed Western popular culture avidly in preference to officially approved domestic television, books, and films. Much of his encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood cinema was acquired during his teenage years, when he spent long hours at an auditorium that specialized in showing foreign films. The "Prague spring" reform movement of 1968 in Czechoslovakia during which Czechs agitated for greater freedom but were repressed by the Soviet Union, had an important effect on Zizek, even though he was not one of the demonstrators agitating in favor of greater freedom.
Education
In 1971, Žižek received a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and sociology at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. In 1975, he earned a Master of Arts in philosophy also at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. Žižek received a Doctor of Arts in philosophy at the University of Ljubljana in 1981. In 1985, he earned a Doctor of Arts in psychoanalysis at the Universite Paris-VIII.
For several years Žižek depended on his work as a translator to pay his bills, but in 1977 he gave in to pressure and joined the Communist Party. This opened up government speechwriting jobs, as well as the chance to take a job as a researcher at the Institute of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana in 1979. He retained that position for the next several decades, even after gaining international renown.
In 1981 Žižek headed to Paris, where he studied with Lacan's son-in-law and was psychoanalyzed by him. By that time Žižek had emerged as something of an expert on Lacan, and as the leader of a group of so-called Ljubljana Lacanians, contributing to a level of familiarity with Lacan in Slovenia that perhaps exceeded even that in France itself.
Žižek's playful side began to emerge during this period, when he wrote, under a pen name, a negative review of one of his own books. Sometimes during his career, Žižek would seem to adopt one position and then switch to the exact opposite, but this tendency had roots in the dialectical tradition of philosophy in which his thought was rooted - the conviction that truth is ultimately obtained through the resolution of a series of opposites or conflicts. Žižek's first book published in the West was The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), which focused on the greatest of all the dialectical philosophers, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), through the prism of Lacan's thought. It was a daring combination; Žižek drew new links between philosophy and psychology by considering how these thinkers treated the idea of the Other - anything that is not part of the Self.
Žižek also cultivated his more public persona during the 1980s, a period during which Yugoslavia's Communist central government gradually began to lose control over the country's cultural life. He penned a popular newspaper column, and in 1990, when Slovenia was on the brink of independence from Yugoslavia (achieving it after a ten-day war in 1991), he entered the race to become part of the group of four leaders who would hold the country's joint presidency. Of the five candidates, he finished fifth, and was thus not elected. It was at this time that the impressive spurt in Žižek's productivity began.
Partly this kind of financial freedom for an academic was a holdover from the Communist system, in which intellectuals were considered an important part of the theoretical underpinning of the state, and were thus financially supported if they were seen to be making useful contributions. Žižek cherished this freedom. As his fame grew, he was frequently offered teaching positions in the United States, where he garnered a strong following in university cultural studies departments. He turned them all down, although he cheerfully accepted visiting scholar appointments and often spent much of the year traveling from one academic center to another. "When people ask me why I don't teach permanently in the United States," Žižek was quoted as saying in the Philadelphia Inquirer, "I tell them that it is because American universities have this very strange, eccentric idea that you must work for your salary. I prefer to do the opposite and not work for my salary."
Žižek's use of humor, including frequent jokes about life under Stalinist bureaucratic socialism and about consumer culture, may help to explain his popularity even among readers who are unfamiliar with contemporary European cultural theory. Dramatic shifts of focus in Žižek's work after 1990 - a reaction to changes in the political and intellectual climate in the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall - included more explicit appeals to Marxism, apparent in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2009), and the staging of academic "conferences" and other events as a form of political theatre in collaboration with Žižek’s colleague and kindred spirit, the French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou. An early intimation of their dialogue is to be found in Žižek’s book The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (1999), which was partly responsible for bringing Badiou to the attention of English-language readers and which also criticized the work of Heidegger (again) and that of the American feminist philosopher Judith Butler. Further debates between Žižek, Butler, and Laclau were presented in their jointly written work, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (2000).
Žižek's understanding of political belief is modeled on Lacan's understanding of transference in psychoanalysis. The belief or "supposition" of the analysand in psychoanalysis is that the Other (his analyst) knows the meaning of his symptoms. This is obviously a false belief, at the start of the analytic process. But it is only through holding this false belief about the analyst that the work of analysis can proceed, and the transferential belief can become true (when the analyst does become able to interpret the symptoms). Žižek argues that this strange intersubjective or dialectical logic of belief in clinical psychoanalysis also what characterizes peoples' political beliefs. Belief is always "belief through the Other," Žižek argues. If subjects do not know the exact meaning of those "master signifiers" with which they politically identify, this is because their political belief is mediated through their identifications with others. Although they each themselves "do not know what they do" (which is the title one of Žižek's books), the deepest level of their belief is maintained through the belief that nevertheless there are Others who do know. A number of features of political life are cast into new relief given this psychoanalytic understanding, Žižek claims:
First, Žižek contends that the key political function of holders of public office is to occupy the place of what he calls, after Lacan, "the Other supposed to know." Žižek cites the example of priests reciting mass in Latin before an uncomprehending laity, who believe that the priests know the meaning of the words, and for whom this is sufficient to keep the faith. Far from presenting an exception to the way political authority works, for Žižek this scenario reveals the universal rule of how political consensus is formed.
Second, and in connection with this, Žižek contends that political power is primarily "symbolic" in its nature. What he means by this further technical term is that the roles, masks, or mandates that public authorities bear is more important politically than the true "reality" of the individuals in question (whether they are unintelligent, unfaithful to their wives, good family women, and so forth). According to Žižek, for example, fashionable liberal criticisms of George W. Bush the man are irrelevant to understanding or evaluating his political power. It is the office or place an individual occupies in their political system (or "big Other") that ensures the political force of their words, and the belief of subjects in their authority. This is why Žižek maintains that the resort of a political leader or regime to "the real of violence" (such as war or police action) amounts to a confession of its weakness as a political regime. Žižek sometimes puts this thought by saying that people believe through the big Other, or that the big Other believes for them, despite what they might inwardly think or cynically say.
According to Žižek, like and after Althusser, ideologies are thus political discourses whose primary function is not to make correct theoretical statements about political reality (as Marx's "false consciousness" model implies), but to orient subjects’ lived relations to and within this reality. If a political ideology’s descriptive propositions turn out to be true (for example: "capitalism exploits the workers," "Saddam was a dictator," "the Spanish are the national enemy," and so forth), this does not in any way reduce their ideological character, in Žižek’s estimation. This is because this character concerns the political issue of how subjects’ belief in these propositions, instead of those of opponents, positions subjects on the leading political issues of the day. For Žižek, political speech is primarily about securing a lived sense of unity or community between subjects, something like what Kant called sensus communis or Rousseau the general will. If political propositions seemingly do describe things in the world, Žižek’s position is that people nevertheless need always to understand them as Marx understood the exchange value of commodities - as "a relation between people being concealed behind a relation between things." Or again: just as Kant thought that the proposition "this is beautiful" really expresses a subject’s reflective sense of commonality with all other subjects capable of being similarly affected by the object, so Žižek argues that propositions like "Go Spain!" or "the King will never stop working to secure our future" are what Kant called reflective judgments, which tell us as much or more about the subject’s lived relation to political reality as about this reality itself.
If ideological statements are thus performative utterances that produce political effects by their being stated, Žižek in fact holds that they are a strange species of performative utterance overlooked by speech act theory. Just because, when subjects say "the Queen is the Queen!" they are at one level reaffirming their allegiance to a political regime, Žižek at the same time holds that this does not mean that this regime could survive without appearing to rest on such deeper Truths about the way the world is. Žižek maintains that political ideologies always present themselves as naming such deeper, extra-political Truths. Ideological judgments, according to Žižek, are thus performative utterances which, in order to perform their salutary political work, must yet appear to be objective descriptions of the way the world is (exactly as when a chairman says "this meeting is closed!" only thereby bringing this state of affairs into effect). In Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek cites Marx's analysis of being a King in Das Capital to illustrate his meaning. A King is only King because his subjects loyally think and act like he is King. Yet, at the same time, the people will only believe he is King if they believe that this is a deeper Truth about which they can do nothing.
According to Žižek, all successful political ideologies necessarily refer to and turn around sublime objects posited by political ideologies. These sublime objects are what political subjects take it that their regime's ideologies’ central words mean or name extraordinary Things like God, the Fuhrer, the King, in whose name they will (if necessary) transgress ordinary moral laws and lay down their lives. When a subject believes in a political ideology, Žižek argues that this does not mean that they know the Truth about the objects which its key terms seemingly name - indeed, Žižek will finally contest that such a Truth exists. Nevertheless, by drawing on a parallel with Kant on the sublime, Žižek makes a further and more radical point. Just as in the experience of the sublime, Kant's subject resignifies its failure to grasp the sublime object as indirect testimony to a wholly "supersensible" faculty within herself (Reason), so Žižek argues that the inability of subjects to explain the nature of what they believe in politically does not indicate any disloyalty or abnormality. What political ideologies do, precisely, is provide subjects with a way of seeing the world according to which such an inability can appear as a testimony to how Transcendent or Great their Nation, God, Freedom, and so forth is - surely far above the ordinary or profane things of the world. In Žižek's Lacanian terms, these things are Real Things, precisely insofar as they in this way stand out from the reality of ordinary things and events.
In the struggle of competing for political ideologies, Žižek hence agrees with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the aim of each is to elevate their particular political perspective (about what is just, best, and so forth) to the point where it can lay claim to the name, give voice to or represent the political whole. In order to achieve this political feat, Žižek argues, each group must succeed in identifying its perspective with the extra-political, sublime objects accepted within the culture as giving body to this whole (for example: "the national interest," "the dictatorship of the proletariat"). Or else, it must supplant the previous ideologies’ sublime objects with new such objects. In the absolute monarchies, as Ernst Kantorowicz argued, the King's so-called "second" or "symbolic" body exemplified paradigmatically such sublime political objects as the unquestionable font of political authority (the particular individual who was King was contestable, but not the sovereign's role itself). Žižek's critique of Stalinism, in a comparable way, turns upon the thought that "the Party" had this sublime political status in Stalinist ideology. Class struggle in this society did not end, Žižek contends, despite Stalinist propaganda. It was only displaced from a struggle between two classes (for example, bourgeois versus proletarian) to one between "the Party" as representative of the people or the whole and all who disagreed with it, ideologically positioned as "traitors" or "enemies of the people."
Views
Quotations:
"The last support of the ideological effect (of the way an ideological network of signifiers 'holds' us) is the non-sensical, pre-ideological kernel of enjoyment."
"The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape."
"I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it."
"Most people think I'm making jokes, exaggerating - but no, I'm not. It's not that. First I tell jokes, then I'm serious. No, the art is to bring the serious message into the forum of jokes."
"I always emphasize: don't expect this from me. I don't think that the task of a guy like me is to propose complete solutions. When people ask me what to do with the economy, what the hell do I know? I think the task of people like me is not to provide answers but to ask the right questions."
"I'm a pessimist in the sense that we are approaching dangerous times. But I'm an optimist for exactly the same reason. Pessimism means things are getting messy. Optimism means these are precisely the times when change is possible."
"Cut all your roots, that is the solution."
Membership
Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Personality
Slavoj Žižek has a raucous, contrarian, and outspoken personality.
Interests
Reading
Connections
Slavoj Žižek has been married four times. His first wife was Argentine model Analía Hounie, whom he married in 2005. Žižek has two sons.