Slavoj
Žižek, (born March 21, 1949, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia [now in
Slovenia]) Slovene philosopher and cultural theorist whose works
addressed themes in psychoanalysis, politics, and popular culture.
The broad compass of Žižek’s theorizing, his deliberately
provocative style, and his tendency to leaven his works with humour
made him a popular figure in the Western intellectual left from the
1990s. He was one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the
late 20th and early 21st centuries.
EDUCATION
AND CAREER
Žižek
studied philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, where he obtained
bachelor’s (1971), master’s (1975), and doctoral (1981) degrees
and served as researcher and professor from 1979. In the late 1970s
his interests shifted from the social theory of the Frankfurt School,
which provided him with a psychoanalytic and Marxist critique of
ideology, to the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. In the early
1980s he studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII,
receiving a second doctoral degree (1985) for an unorthodox Lacanian
interpretation of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Saul Kripke. While in
Paris he also underwent psychoanalysis with Lacan’s son-in-law and
intellectual heir, Jacques-Alain Miller. During the 1980s Žižek was
actively involved in the democratic opposition to the independent
socialist regime in Yugoslavia, of which Slovenia was then a part.
Through his teaching and writing, including a weekly column for the
newspaper Mladina, he helped to define the theoretical orientation of
many student activists, introducing motifs from German idealism (the
subject of his first doctoral dissertation), French structuralist
Marxism (particularly the work of Louis Althusser), and Lacanian
psychoanalysis. As the candidate of Slovenia’s Liberal Democratic
Party in the first democratic elections in the country, in 1990, he
narrowly failed to win a place in the (then) four-person collective
presidency. From the early 1990s he served as visiting professor at
numerous universities in Europe and the United States.
THE
SUBLIME OBJECT OF IDEOLOGY
The
influence of Hegel is apparent in Žižek’s first major work, Le
Plus Sublime des Hystériques: Hegel Passe (1988; “The Most Sublime
of Hysterics: Hegel Passes”), a revision of his second
dissertation. German idealism was subsequently an abiding interest
for him. His first work in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology
(1989), is widely considered his masterpiece. It was published with a
preface by the Argentine political theorist Ernesto Laclau, who
suggested that the nonlinear structure of the text is faithful to the
“retroactive” effect in Lacanian psychoanalysis, in which later
events reframe and transform one’s understanding of what went
before. The book’s title is indebted to Lacan’s objet petit a
(literally, “object little-a”—the “a” signifying autre, or
“other”), an unconscious and unattainable fantasy object that
takes a distinct form for each individual. The work is largely a
critique of the notion that it is possible to escape ideology: to
make choices and to find satisfaction outside or independently of it.
Indeed, for Žižek, this idea is ideological fantasy par excellence.
The theoretical resources and political concerns of the work are
evident in much of Žižek’s later writings.
In
The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek rejects the notion of a
substantial individual subject, the usual understanding of the “I”
of René Descartes’s dictum “Cogito, ergo sum” (Latin: “I
think, therefore I am”). Recalling the negative moment of the
Hegelian dialectic (the second stage in the cyclic progress of
history and ideas through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis), Žižek
conceives of the subject as something purely negative, a void or an
emptiness of being (which Lacan refers to as the incomplete, divided,
or “barred” subject of the unconscious). Accordingly,
transformations of the subject in psychoanalysis and in politics (the
latter occurring when people’s self-understanding is affected by
profound political change) constitute for Žižek a kind of creative
refusal to accept taken-for-granted psychic or political realities.
Such refusals are catalyzed in a radical decision that is not
entirely conscious—an “act” (a notion borrowed from Lacan) that
disturbs the “symbolic coordinates,” or unconsciously accepted
assumptions and norms, of everyday life. In a psychoanalytic setting,
for example, such an act may occur when a patient finally abandons
his attachment to a love object modeled on what his parents would
have wished for him, to a particular career path valued by others in
his life, or to the analysis itself (whose ending, in Lacanian
psychoanalysis, is not contractually decided in advance). Žižek was
particularly interested in stimulating acts that constitute a refusal
of life under capitalism (a dramatic and successful example being the
Russian Revolution of 1917).
Žižek
stressed Lacan’s account of the Freudian superego, according to
which it is not merely an agency that forbids but also one that
incites jouissance, an excessive and simultaneously painful kind of
enjoyment derived from transgressing the superego’s own
prohibitions. According to Žižek, the experience of jouissance is
the necessary but hidden complement of institutional authority,
operating as what he called the “obscene underside of the law.”
The experience of jouissance, in cultural practices such as sporting
events and the consumption of alcohol and drugs, allows people to
distance themselves from the rules and proprieties of public life and
to feel as though their everyday conformity to such strictures is a
free choice. Limited transgression of the rules thus serves to
reinforce their legitimacy and to inhibit any authentic “act”
that would seriously challenge them.
Žižek
provided a sustained critique of political and philosophical appeals
to a supposedly authentic substantial “community,” one of the
grounds of his recurring attacks on the 20th-century German
philosopher Martin Heidegger, who in the 1930s notoriously posited
the German Volk as the ground of “Being.” His critique was
facilitated by his account of the “theft of enjoyment” in racist
fantasy: the unconscious supposition by racists that “others”
(who are configured as objects of both hatred and admiration) have
stolen their jouissance and that the recovery of this jouissance
would restore the racists’ lost, balanced community. Žižek
continued his criticism of the notion of balance in his subsequent
writings on ecology as a form of ideology.
Another
of Žižek’s themes in The Sublime Object of Ideology is his
opposition to the notion of underlying or hidden meaning or value.
According to Žižek, for example, there is no real meaning of a
dream or any real value of a commodity, contrary to the views of
Sigmund Freud and Marx, for example. He explored the homology between
Freud’s analysis of dreams and Marx’s analysis of commodities to
show that each attends to concealment as such (to the disguising of
repressed wishes in dreams—“dreamwork”—or to the process of
commodification) rather than to what seems to be concealed (as latent
meaning or as “use value”). He also rejected deconstruction (as
represented by Jacques Derrida) and postmodernism (as represented by
Jean-François Lyotard), ultimately seeing both as manifestations of
the increasing commodification and homogeneity of culture under
global capitalism.
LATER
WRITINGS
Žižek’s
use of humour, 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
many other writings include Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques
Lacan Through Popular Culture (1991), a literary- and media-studies
argument for the importance of psychoanalysis; Tarrying with the
Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (1993), a
detailed study of German idealism and politics; The Monstrosity of
Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (2009), a treatment of Christian
theology (though Žižek professed atheism); Living in the End Times
(2010); and Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical
Materialism (2012). Žižek also worked in other media, a notable
example being his three-part film The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
(2006). Zizek!, a documentary, was released in 2005.
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