Slavoj Žižek

• 1. Introduction

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  Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher whom one admirer called the Elvis of cultural theory and whom another label dubbed the most dangerous philosopher in the West. He was born on the 21st of March 1949 and has written over 50 books. He speaks Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, English, German and French. His lectures and essays pair dense German idealism with obscene jokes and examples from popular culture. He also issues political provocations that even sympathetic readers find hard to defend.

  How does a thinker from Titoist Yugoslavia end up with professorships in New York and a directorship in London? What do Hegel and a French psychoanalyst have to do with how people vote? And why do fans and detractors, sometimes in the same breath, call his work brilliant, maddening and empty?

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• 2. Dissident Years

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  Žižek was born in Ljubljana, then part of Yugoslavia, into a middle-class family. His father, Jože, was an economist and civil servant from Prekmurje in eastern Slovenia. His mother, Vesna, came from the Gorizia Hills and worked as an accountant for a state enterprise. Most of his childhood passed in the coastal town of Portorož, where Western film, theory and popular culture reached him.

  Filmmaking was his first ambition. After his family moved back to Ljubljana and he attended Bežigrad High School, he dropped that plan and chose philosophy.

  In 1967, during a period of liberalization under Tito, he enrolled at the University of Ljubljana to study philosophy and sociology. That same year he published the first Slovenian translation of a text by Jacques Derrida. He had been reading French structuralists before he even arrived. He moved among dissident intellectuals, including the Heideggerian philosophers Tine Hribar and Ivo Urbančič. He also wrote for alternative magazines such as Praxis, Tribuna and Problemi, and he edited Problemi himself.

  In 1971 he took a job as an assistant researcher with a promise of tenure. Then the authorities denounced his Master's thesis as non-Marxist, and the job was gone. He finished a Doctor of Arts in philosophy in 1981, writing on the relevance of French structuralism. The following years were later described as a professional wilderness. They included a year of national service in the Yugoslav People's Army in Karlovac.

  By the late 1980s he had a public platform as a columnist for Mladina, an alternative youth magazine. Mladina criticized Tito's policies and Yugoslav politics, above all the militarization of society. Žižek had belonged to the League of Communists of Slovenia, but he quit in October 1988. He left in protest over the JBTZ trial, together with 32 other Slovenian intellectuals.

  From 1988 to 1990 he took part in several movements fighting for the democratization of Slovenia. The best known was the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights. In the first free elections, held in 1990, Žižek's name appeared on the ballot as the Liberal Democratic Party's candidate for the four-person collective presidency of Slovenia.

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• 3. Hegel Through Lacan

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  In 1986 Žižek completed a second doctorate, this time in psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII, under Jacques-Alain Miller. Its French title was La philosophie entre le symptôme et le fantasme. Throughout the 1980s he edited and translated Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud and Louis Althusser. He used Lacan's work to interpret Hegelian and Marxist philosophy. He also wrote introductions to Slovene editions of detective novels by G. K. Chesterton and John le Carré.

  A 1988 book called Pogled s strani was his first devoted entirely to film theory. A year later came The Sublime Object of Ideology, his first book in English. It introduced the thinking of the Ljubljana School to English-speaking readers. That school is a group of Slovenian academics working on German idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, ideology critique and media criticism. The book also brought Žižek international recognition as a social theorist.

  Commentators often describe his approach as Hegelo-Lacanian, but his own emphasis has moved. Early in his career he named three centres of gravity: Hegelian dialectics, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and contemporary criticism of ideology. He called Lacan's theory the fundamental element. In 2010 he reversed the ranking. "Even Lacan is just a tool for me to read Hegel," he said. "For me, always it is Hegel, Hegel, Hegel." By 2019 he was saying that, in some sense, all of philosophy happened in the fifty years between Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 and Hegel's death in 1831.

  Their ideas meet in his account of the subject. A person can take on a social position, he argues, but the act of taking it on implies an "I" standing apart from that position. Nothing positive can be said about this "I". It shows itself only through a failed attempt to put it into symbols. In his first English book he wrote: "the subject of the signifier is a retroactive effect of the failure of its own representation; that is why the failure of representation is the only way to represent it adequately."

  He traces this idea to Hegel, who described man as "the night of the world". He also traces it to Lacan and his barred, split subject. Žižek sees both as developing the Cartesian cogito. That puts him at odds with Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, who treat subjects as bound by, and reducible to, their historical or cultural context. Once the subject slips free of its context, the question becomes how ideology can hold anyone at all.

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• 4. Ideology and Unfreedom

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  The Sublime Object of Ideology and the documentary The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, in which Žižek stars, are the best-known places to meet what many consider his major contribution to political theory. He argues that ideology is often misread as dualistic. In that misreading, there is a real world of material relations and objects outside oneself, and reason can reach it. He rejects that picture. Like Marx, he sees ideology as fictions that structure political life, and in Lacan's terms it belongs to the symbolic order.

  Those fictions, he says, are maintained mainly at an unconscious level. Psychoanalysis holds that the unconscious can drive action while bypassing awareness, as in slips of the tongue called parapraxes. So ideology can show up in behaviour whatever a person consciously believes. This breaks with orthodox Marxist accounts that treat ideology as a system of mistaken beliefs.

  Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason supplies the next step. Postmodern subjects are openly cynical about the political situation. Yet Žižek argues that they keep reinforcing it through what they do. Being cynical, on his account, does not get anyone out of ideology.

  A 2002 article endorsed Lenin's distinction between formal and actual freedom. Liberal society, he wrote, contains only formal freedom, which is "freedom of choice within the coordinates of the existing power relations". Actual freedom is "the site of an intervention that undermines these very coordinates." In a much-quoted passage from a book of the same year, he said that under liberal censorship, "we 'feel free' because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom."

  In 2019 he credited Marx with spotting how the market economy joins personal and political freedom to social unfreedom. Freely selling oneself on the market is, in that view, the very form of one's unfreedom. Yet in 2014 he had refused the "pseudo-Marxist" habit of scorning formal freedom altogether. He called it necessary for critique: "When we are formally free, only then we become aware how limited this freedom actually is."

  During the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests he co-signed a petition on behalf of students. It condemned disproportionate force and retaliatory brutality by Hong Kong police on university campuses. It closed by calling academic freedom, free speech, press freedom and freedom of assembly universal causes.

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• 5. Christian Atheism and Communism

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  The New York Times carried Žižek's declaration that "Atheism is a legacy worth fighting for." Yet he finds great conceptual value in Christianity, especially Protestantism. His 2000 book The Fragile Absolute has the subtitle "Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?" He calls his own position Christian Atheism and has written about theology at length.

  In The Pervert's Guide to Ideology he claims that "the only way to be an Atheist is through Christianity." His reasoning is that atheism often stays faithful to an outside guarantor of meaning, simply swapping God for natural necessity or evolution. The doctrine of the incarnation works differently. It brings God down from the beyond into human affairs. For Žižek that is more authentically godless, because the external guarantee has been abolished.

  The word communism sits just as awkwardly in his mouth. He sometimes accepts the label radical leftist, but he also calls himself a communist. At the same time he rejects the twentieth-century version as a "total failure". He has described Stalinism and its network of phenomena as "maybe the worst ideological, political, ethical, social (and so on) catastrophe in the history of humanity."

  Why keep the word at all? He answers that only "communism" signals a genuine step outside the existing order. In his view, "socialism" has lost its radical edge and now means no more than caring for society.

  In the 2011 film Marx Reloaded he rejects both twentieth-century totalitarianism and spontaneous local self-organisation, direct democracy and councils. There he endorses defining communism as "a society where you, everyone would be allowed to dwell in his or her stupidity." He credits Fredric Jameson with the idea. Elsewhere he has called himself a "communist in a qualified sense" and has advocated a "moderately conservative Communism."

  At a conference on The Idea of Communism, he applied the label, in qualified form, to the Occupy Wall Street protestors. They were not communists, he said, if communism means the system that collapsed in 1990. The communists still in power, he pointed out, run the most ruthless capitalism, in China. Their only communist trait was caring for the commons of nature and knowledge. They were not dreamers, he insisted. They were "awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare."

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• 6. Celebrity Philosopher

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  Foreign Policy named Žižek to its 2012 list of Top 100 Global Thinkers, calling him a celebrity philosopher who gave voice to an era of absurdity. Others have called him the leading Hegelian of our time and the foremost exponent of Lacanian theory. Professors David J. Gunkel and Paul A. Taylor founded the International Journal of Žižek Studies to engage with his work.

  His institutional addresses are spread across continents. He is Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University. He is also a professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School and a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana. From 2004 until September 2025 he was international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. He is a series editor of the Diaeresis series at Northwestern University Press, and he has written for Lacanian Ink, In These Times, the New Left Review, the London Review of Books and the Slovenian newspapers Dnevnik and Delo.

  In 2003 he wrote the text to accompany Bruce Weber's photographs in a catalog for Abercrombie & Fitch. Asked whether a major intellectual should write ad copy, he told The Boston Globe that, given a choice between that and kissing up for a tenured American academic post, "I would with pleasure choose writing for such journals."

  Cameras have followed him for decades. A German documentary from 1996, Liebe Dein Symptom wie Dich selbst!, was an early portrait. In the 2004 film The Reality of the Virtual he gave an hour-long lecture on Lacan's three registers, the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. Astra Taylor directed Zizek! in 2005. The Pervert's Guide to Cinema followed in 2006 and The Pervert's Guide to Ideology in 2012. In the 2008 film Examined Life, he talks about ecology while standing at a garbage dump.

  In 2019 he began hosting a mini-series on the RT network, How to Watch the News with Slavoj Žižek. That April he debated the psychology professor Jordan Peterson at the Sony Centre in Toronto, over happiness under capitalism versus Marxism.

  His tastes are stated as loudly as his politics. For the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll, he listed 10 favourite films, including 3:10 to Yuma, Dune and The Sound of Music. "I opted for pure madness," he explained. "The list contains only 'guilty pleasures'." On music, he named Arnold Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder as the piece he would take to a desert island, and he has a special love for Wagner's Das Rheingold and Parsifal. In literature, he often names Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Andrei Platonov as his three absolute masters of the twentieth century. He prefers Beckett to James Joyce and Daphne du Maurier to Virginia Woolf.

  He has been married four times and has two adult sons, Tim and Kostja. His second wife was the Slovene philosopher Renata Salecl, a fellow member of the Ljubljana School. His third was the Argentinian model Analia Hounie, whom he married in 2005. He is now married to the Slovene journalist, author and philosopher Jela Krečič.

  In early 2018 Bell's palsy paralysed the right side of his face. He kept giving lectures and interviews anyway. On the 9th of March 2018, in a London lecture on political revolutions, he used his paralysis as a metaphor for political idleness.

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• 7. Wagers and Provocations

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  At the Subversive Festival in May 2013, Žižek said that people who failed to support SYRIZA would get from him a "first-class one-way ticket" to a gulag. Greece's center-right New Democracy party answered that the remark should be read literally, not ironically. He has a habit of this kind of line. He once wrote that the convention center where nationalist Slovene writers hold their conventions should be blown up. Then he added that, since we live in a time without any sense of irony, he did not mean it literally.

  Just before the 2017 French presidential election, he said one could not choose between Macron and Le Pen. Macron's neoliberalism, he argued, would only give rise to neofascism anyway. Many on the left were urging support for Macron to stop a Le Pen victory. Žižek belongs to the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, which was founded in 2016. In 2022 he voiced support for the Slovenian party Levica, or The Left, at its 5th annual conference.

  In a 2016 interview with Channel 4, he said that if he were American he would vote for Donald Trump. "I'm horrified at him," he said, but he saw Hillary Clinton as the true danger. His hope was that a Trump victory would force both big parties to return to basics and rethink themselves. He did not expect fascism. Left Voice derisively called the view accelerationist, and Noam Chomsky labelled it regressive.

  In 2019 and 2020 he defended the wager. Trump's election, he said, had created a true American left for the first time in decades, citing a boost to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. By the 2020 election, though, he said, "Trump is a little too much." With the coronavirus, he concluded, "Biden better than Trump." In his 2022 book Heaven in Disorder, he wrote that Trump was corroding the ethical substance of our lives.

  His 1997 article on multiculturalism argued that a supposedly neutral viewpoint, from which every culture is observed in its particularity, repeats the racist procedure of Othering. A fixation on particular identities, he added, abandons the universal struggle against global capitalism. In his 1998 article "A Leftist Plea for 'Eurocentrism'" he proposed a leftist appropriation of the European legacy, built around Étienne Balibar's term equaliberty. Nivedita Menon answered in her 2010 article "The Two Zizeks." She criticised him for treating the European Enlightenment Christian legacy as neutral. In the mid-2010s Walter Mignolo argued that decolonial struggle should forget European philosophy. Žižek replied that Frantz Fanon himself had European intellectual influences.

  His 2016 article "The Sexual Is Political" argued that all subjects, like transgender subjects, are in discord with the sexual position assigned to them. He called for a third bathroom marked "GENERAL GENDER". Critics including Che Gossett, Sam Warren Miell and Chris Coffman objected to his terminology and his reading of Lacan. When his 2019 piece was titled "Transgender dogma is naive and incompatible with Freud," McKenzie Wark had t-shirts printed with the transgender flag and the words "Incompatible with Freud." Douglas Lain defended Žižek, saying he targeted a phony liberal ideology rather than the struggle of LGBTQ people. In a 2023 piece for Compact, Žižek took a hard line against puberty blockers for trans youth. He also opposed sending trans adults to prisons matching their gender, and he attributed both positions to wokeness.

  On foreign affairs, he wrote that the 2011 intervention in Libya threw the country into chaos. He added that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq created the conditions for the rise of the Islamic State. He also writes that Mao himself created the ideological conditions for rapid capitalist development in China by tearing apart traditional society. After the Russian invasion, he argued in The Guardian for full support of Ukraine and a stronger NATO. After the October 7 attacks, he wrote that Israel's right to defend itself should be supported unconditionally, as should sympathy for the Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied territories. In April 2024 he said that Israel's true goal in Gaza was to annex both Gaza and the West Bank.

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• 8. Charges of Emptiness

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  In a very negative review of Less than Nothing, the philosopher John Gray accused Žižek of celebrating violence and failing to ground his theories in historical fact. He charged him with a formless radicalism that claims to be communist yet lacks any belief that communism could succeed. Gray concluded that the work, though entertaining, was intellectually worthless, and he played on the book's title to say it amounts to "less than nothing."

  The post-Marxist Ernesto Laclau made a related complaint. He wrote that Žižek uses class as a "deus ex machina" to play the good guy against the multicultural devils. Gabriel Rockhill observed that Žižek's Eurocentrism, his Trump endorsement and his attacks on socialist projects in Cuba and China could make him look like a right-wing ideologue.

  Style draws its own fire. Harpham described his writing as a stream of nonconsecutive units arranged in arbitrary sequences. O'Neill said the rhetoric works to beguile, browbeat, dazzle and overwhelm the reader into acceptance. Chomsky accused him of using polysyllables and pretending to have a theory. The conservative Roger Scruton said Žižek slips between philosophical and psychoanalytical modes of argument, bewitched by Lacan's gnomic utterances.

  Scholars have also questioned his rigour. Tania Modleski argued that in trying to make Hitchcock fit Lacan, he simplifies what happens in the films. Yannis Stavrakakis said that Žižek's reading of Antigone ignores both the play and Lacan's own interpretation in his 7th Seminar. Noah Horwitz warned that the Ljubljana School conflates Lacan and Hegel, which risks turning psychoanalysis into a discourse of self-consciousness.

  In 2014 The New York Times accused him of self-plagiarism after an op-ed reused portions of an earlier book. Žižek said he was perplexed by the harsh tone. In July of that year Newsweek reported that bloggers led by Steve Sailer had found long passages in a 2006 article by Žižek that matched a review by Stanley Hornbeck in the journal American Renaissance, which the Southern Poverty Law Center condemned as a white nationalist publication. Žižek said a friend had sent him a summary that seemed free to use. He apologized and wrote that he deeply regretted the incident.

  In his book Living in the End Times, he turned the pile of accusations into an argument. He listed being called anti-Semitic, a Zionist liar, a covert Slovene nationalist, a traitor to his nation and a crypto-Stalinist. Then he drew his own conclusion: "maybe, just maybe I am on the right path, the path of fidelity to freedom."

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