Slavoj Žižek

1949-present · Slovenian · Continental philosophy and psychoanalysis

Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our 'reality' itself.

Slavoj Žižek wrote his way out of communist Yugoslavia, trained as a Lacanian psychoanalyst in Paris, once ran (unsuccessfully) for the presidency of Slovenia, and became the most flamboyant philosopher of the age — lecturing in a rumpled t-shirt, sniffing and tugging at his nose, splicing Hegel and Hollywood into the same breathless sentence. Behind the stand-up persona is a serious and relentless project: a fusion of Hegel's dialectics, Lacan's psychoanalysis, and Marx's critique of ideology.

Topics Slavoj Žižek addresses

• the Lacanian Real
• ideology
• the sublime object of ideology
• the big Other
• the symbolic order
• surplus enjoyment
• the parallax view
• the act
• transcendental materialism
• the death drive
• the obscene supplement of the law
• interpassivity
• the empty signifier
• cynical reason
• the barred subject
• substance as subject
• the night of the world
• the quilting point
• traversing the fantasy
• the ticklish subject
• absolute recoil
• less than nothing
• Christianity as authentic atheism
• the communist hypothesis

Questions to put to Slavoj Žižek

Lacan, Hegel, and the Subject

• What do you mean when you say the subject is a void?
• How does Lacan help us read Hegel correctly?
• Why do you insist Hegel is the philosopher of negativity, not totality?
• What's the difference between the symbolic order and the Real?
• How does the subject emerge from the body without being reducible to it?

Ideology and the Big Other

• What's wrong with thinking ideology is just false beliefs?
• What do you mean by 'they know very well what they are doing, but still they are doing it'?
• How does fantasy structure social reality?
• What is the obscene supplement of the law?
• Why do you say cynicism is the dominant mode of ideology today?
• What does it mean to traverse the fantasy?

Drive, Enjoyment, and the Death Drive

• What's the difference between drive and biological instinct?
• How is surplus-enjoyment like Marx's surplus-value?
• Why does prohibition generate the very enjoyment it promises to contain?
• What do you mean by the death drive?
• How should I understand your claim that we are driven to freedom?

Christianity and Atheist Materialism

• How is Christianity the religion of authentic atheism?
• What happens at the Crucifixion that makes it so important for you?
• What's the difference between your materialist Christianity and traditional theology?
• Why do you think Christianity contains the resources for its own dissolution?
• How do you read the Holy Spirit as the community of believers?

Communism and the Critique of Liberal Capitalism

• Why do you still defend communism after 1989?
• What's at stake for you in the communist hypothesis?
• How is multiculturalism the ideology of late capitalism?
• Why do you criticize identity politics from the left?
• What would an authentic political act look like today?
• How does liberal tolerance depoliticize class antagonism?

Popular Culture and Philosophical Method

• Why do you use Hitchcock and Lynch to explain Lacan?
• What's the philosophical point of analyzing jokes?
• How does popular culture reveal ideological structures?
• What makes a cultural object a good illustration of a concept?
• Why do you move between high theory and crude humor in the same text?

Converse with Slavoj Žižek on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Slavoj Žižek's own writing, cited to the page.