The Philosopher
Slavoj Žižek
The face
The background
- Nationality:
- Slovenian
- Schools:
- Continental philosophy, Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Post-Hegelianism, Freudo-Marxism, Hegelianism
The synopsis
Slavoj Žižek (born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian neo-Marxist philosopher, cultural theorist, and public intellectual. He holds positions at New York University, the European Graduate School, and the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana. Žižek's work engages with continental philosophy, particularly Hegelianism, psychoanalysis (especially Lacanian), and Marxism, alongside political theory, film criticism, and theology. He is recognized for his distinctive style, characterized by the use of pop culture references, jokes, and politically incorrect provocations, which has brought him both fame and criticism. His early involvement in Slovenian democratization movements and his prolific writing across numerous journals and books have established him as a prominent, albeit controversial, figure in contemporary thought.
The works
The Sublime Object of Ideology
Pogled s strani
The Fragile Absolute
The Parallax View
Living in the End Times
Heaven in Disorder
The quotes
Liberal democracy - as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today's left effectively offers global capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not.
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.
My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions.
I - and I still consider myself, I'm sorry to tell you, a Marxist and a Communist, but I couldn't help noticing how all the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure.
I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.
When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.
You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.
Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.
Communism will win.
What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth.
I am what you might call abstractly anti-capitalist. For instance, I am suspicious of the old leftists who focus all their hatred on the United States. What about Chinese neo-colonialism? Why are the left silent about that? When I say this, it annoys them, of course. Good!