Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek (, ; ; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Department of Philosophy. He primarily works on continental philosophy (particularly Hegelianism, psychoanalysis and Marxism) and political theory, as well as film criticism and theology.

Žižek is the most famous associate of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, a group of Slovenian academics working on German Idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, ideology critique, and media criticism. His breakthrough work was 1989's '' The Sublime Object of Ideology'', his first book in English, which was decisive in the introduction of the Ljubljana School's thought to English-speaking audiences. He has written over 50 books in multiple languages. The idiosyncratic style of his public appearances, frequent magazine op-eds, and academic works, characterised by use of obscene jokes and pop cultural examples, as well as politically incorrect provocations, have gained him fame, controversy and criticism both in and outside academia.

In 2012, ''Foreign Policy'' listed Žižek on its list of Top 100 Global Thinkers, calling him "a celebrity philosopher", while elsewhere he has been dubbed the " Elvis of cultural theory" and "the most dangerous philosopher in the West". Žižek has been called "the leading Hegelian of our time", and "the foremost exponent of Lacanian theory". A journal, the ''International Journal of Žižek Studies'', was founded by professors David J. Gunkel and Paul A. Taylor to engage with his work.

Life and career

Early life

Žižek was born in Ljubljana, PR Slovenia, Yugoslavia, into a middle-class family. His father Jože Žižek was an economist and civil servant from the region of Prekmurje in eastern Slovenia. His mother Vesna, a native of the Gorizia Hills in the Slovenian Littoral, was an accountant in a state enterprise. His parents were atheists. He spent most of his childhood in the coastal town of Portorož, where he was exposed to Western film, theory and popular culture. When Žižek was a teenager his family moved back to Ljubljana where he attended Bežigrad High School. Originally wanting to become a filmmaker himself, he abandoned these ambitions and chose to pursue philosophy instead.

Education

In 1967, during an era of liberalization in Titoist Yugoslavia, Žižek enrolled at the University of Ljubljana and studied philosophy and sociology.Tony Meyer
Slavoj Zizek - His Life
lacan.com, from: Slavoj Zizek, London: Routledge, 2003.

Žižek had already begun reading French structuralists prior to entering university, and in 1967 he published the first translation of a text by Jacques Derrida into Slovenian. Žižek frequented the circles of dissident intellectuals, including the Heideggerian philosophers Tine Hribar and Ivo Urbančič, and published articles in alternative magazines, such as ''Praxis'', ''Tribuna'' and ''Problemi'', which he also edited. In 1971 he accepted a job as an assistant researcher with the promise of tenure, but was dismissed after his Master's thesis was denounced by the authorities as being "non-Marxist".Žižek's response to the article "Če sem v kaj resnično zaljubljena, sem v življenje Sobotna priloga Dela, p. 37 (19.1. 2008) He graduated from the University of Ljubljana in 1981 with a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy for his dissertation entitled ''The Theoretical and Practical Relevance of French Structuralism''. He spent the next few years in what was described as "professional wilderness", also fulfilling his legal duty of undertaking a year-long national service in the Yugoslav army in Karlovac.

Academic career

During the 1980s, Žižek edited and translated Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and Louis Althusser. He used Lacan's work to interpret Hegelian and Marxist philosophy.

In 1986, Žižek completed a second doctorate (Doctor of Philosophy in psychoanalysis) at the University of Paris VIII under Jacques-Alain Miller, entitled "La philosophie entre le symptôme et le fantasme".

Žižek wrote the introduction to Slovene translations of G. K. Chesterton's and John Le Carré's detective novels.
In 1988, he published his first book dedicated entirely to film theory, ''Pogled s strani''. The following year, he achieved international recognition as a social theorist with the 1989 publication of his first book in English, ''The Sublime Object of Ideology''.

Žižek has been publishing in journals such as '' Lacanian Ink'' and '' In These Times'' in the United States, the ''New Left Review'' and '' The London Review of Books'' in the United Kingdom, and with the Slovenian left-liberal magazine '' Mladina'' and newspapers ''Dnevnik'' and '' Delo''. He also cooperates with the Polish leftist magazine '' Krytyka Polityczna'', regional southeast European left-wing journal ''Novi Plamen'', and serves on the editorial board of the psychoanalytical journal ''Problemi''. Žižek is a series editor of the Northwestern University Press series Diaeresis that publishes works that "deal not only with philosophy, but also will intervene at the levels of ideology critique, politics, and art theory".

Political career

In the late 1980s, Žižek came to public attention as a columnist for the alternative youth magazine '' Mladina'', which was critical of Tito's policies, Yugoslav politics, especially the militarization of society. He was a member of the Communist Party of Slovenia until October 1988, when he quit in protest against the JBTZ trial together with 32 other Slovenian intellectuals. Between 1988 and 1990, he was actively involved in several political and civil society