Slavoj Zizek Philosophy
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.
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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