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Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian-born political philosopher and cultural critic. He was described by British
literary theorist, Terry Eagleton, as the “most formidably brilliant” recent theorist to have emerged from
Continental Europe.
Žižek’s work is infamously idiosyncratic. It features striking dialectical reversals of received common
sense; a ubiquitous sense of humor; a patented disrespect towards the modern distinction between high
and low culture; and the examination of examples taken from the most diverse cultural and political
fields. Yet Žižek’s work, as he warns us, has a very serious philosophical content and intention. He
challenges many of the founding assumptions of today’s left-liberal academy, including the elevation of
difference or otherness to ends in themselves, the reading of the Western Enlightenment as implicitly
totalitarian, and the pervasive skepticism towards any context-transcendent notions of truth or the good.
One feature of Žižek’s work is its singular philosophical and political reconsideration of German
idealism (Kant, Schelling and Hegel). Žižek has also reinvigorated the challenging psychoanalytic
theory of Jacques Lacan, controversially reading him as a thinker who carries forward founding
modernist commitments to the Cartesian subject and the liberating potential of self-reflective agency, if
not self-transparency. Žižek’s works since 1997 have become more and more explicitly political,
contesting the widespread consensus that we live in a post-ideological or post-political world, and
defending the possibility of lasting changes to the new world order of globalization, the end of history,
or the war on terror.
This article explains Žižek’s philosophy as a systematic, if unusually presented, whole; and it clarifies
the technical language Žižek uses, which he takes from Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxism, and
German idealism. In line with how Žižek presents his own work, this article starts by examining
Žižek’s descriptive political philosophy. It then examines the Lacanian-Hegelian ontology that
underlies Žižek’s political philosophy. The final part addresses Žižek’s practical philosophy, and the
ethical philosophy he draws from this ontology.
Table of Contents
1. Biography
2. Žižek’s Political Philosophy
3. Criticism of Ideology as “False Consciousness”
4. Ideological Cynicism and Belief
5. Jouissance as Political Factor
6. The Reflective Logic of Ideological Judgments (or How the King is King)
7. Sublime Objects of Ideology
8. Žižek’s Fundamental Ontology
9. The Fundamental Fantasy & the Split Law
10.Excursus: Žižek’s Typology of Ideological Regimes
11.Kettle Logic, or Desire and Theodicy
12.Fantasy as the Fantasy of Origins
13.Exemplification: the Fall and Radical Evil (Žižek’s Critique of Kant)
14.From Ontology to Ethics—Žižek’s Reclaiming of the Subject
15.Žižek’s Subject, Fantasy, and the Objet Petit a
16.The Objet Petit a & the Virtuality of Reality
17.Forced Choice & Ideological Tautologies
18.The Substance is Subject, the Other Does Not Exist
19.The Ethical Act Traversing the Fantasy
20.Conclusion
21.References and Further Reading
1. Primary Literature (Books by Žižek)
2. Secondary Literature (Texts on Žižek)
1. Biography
Slavoj Žižek was born in 1949 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He grew up in the comparative cultural freedom
of the former Yugoslavia’s self-managing socialism. Here—significantly for his work— Žižek was
exposed to the films, popular culture and theory of the noncommunist West. Žižek completed his PhD
at Ljubljana in 1981 on German Idealism, and between 1981 and 1985 studied in Paris under Jacques
AlainMiller, Lacan’s son-in-law. In this period, Žižek wrote a second dissertation, a Lacanian reading
of Hegel, Marx and Kripke. In the late 1980s, Žižek returned to Slovenia where he wrote newspaper
columns for the Slovenian weekly “Mladina,” and cofounded the Slovenian Liberal Democratic Party.
In 1990, he ran for a seat on the four-member collective Slovenian presidency, narrowly missing office.
Žižek’s first published book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, appeared in 1989. Since then,
Žižek has published over a dozen books, edited several collections, published numerous philosophical
and political articles, and maintained a tireless speaking schedule. His earlier works are of the type
“Introductions to Lacan through popular culture / Hitchcock / Hollywood …” Since at least 1997,
however, Žižek’s work has taken on an increasingly engaged political tenor, culminating in books on
September 11 and the Iraq war. As well as being visiting professor at the Department of
Psychoanalysis, Universite ParisVIII in 1982-3 and 1985-6, Žižek has lectured at the Cardozo Law
School, Columbia, Princeton, the New School for Social Research, the University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor, and Georgetown. He is currently a returning faculty member of the European Graduate School,
and founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana.
5. Conclusion
Slavoj Žižek’s work represents a striking challenge within the contemporary philosophical scene.
Žižek’s very style, and his prodigious ability to write and examine examples from widely divergent
fields, is a remarkable thing. His work reintroduces and reinvigorates for a wider audience ideas from
the works of German Idealism. Žižek’s work is framed in terms of a polemical critique of other leading
theorists within today’s new left or liberal academy (Derrida, Habermas, Deleuze), which claims to
unmask their apparent radicality as concealing a shared recoil from the possibility of a subjective,
political Act which in fact sits comfortably with a passive resignation to today’s political status quo.
Not the least interesting feature of his work, politically, is indeed how Žižek’s critique of the new left
both significantly mirrors criticisms from conservative and neoconservative authors, yet hails from an
avowedly opposed political perspective. In political philosophy, Žižek’s Lacanian theory of ideology
presents a radically new descriptive perspective that affords us a unique purchase on many of the
paradoxes of liberal consumerist subjectivity, which is at once politically cynical (as the political right
laments) and politically conformist (as the political left struggles to come to terms with). Prescriptively,
Žižek’s work challenges us to ask questions about the possibility of sociopolitical change that have
otherwise rarely been asked after 1989, including: what forms such changes might take?; and what
might justify them or make them possible?
Looked at in a longer perspective, it is of course too soon to judge what the lasting effects of Žižek’s
philosophy will be, especially given Žižek’s own comparative youth as a thinker (Žižek was born in
1949). In terms of the history of ideas, in particular, while Žižek’s thought certainly turns on their heads
many of today’s widely accepted theoretical notions, it is surely a more lasting question whether his
work represents any more lasting a break with the parameters that Kant’s critical philosophy set out in
the three Critiques.
Author Information
Matthew Sharpe
Email: matthew.sharpe@dewr.gov.au
Australia