Slavoj Žižek

1949-present · Slovenian · Continental philosophy and psychoanalysis

The truth has the structure of a fiction.

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

Converse with Slavoj Žižek on Simposeum. Every reply is grounded in Slavoj Žižek's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.