Slavoj Žižek

Abstract

Slavoj Žižek was born on March 21, 1949, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in the former Yugoslavia. Žižek studied philosophy and sociology as an undergraduate student and completed a master of arts degree in philosophy in 1975 at the University of Ljubljana, writing a 400-page thesis on French structuralism. In 1981, he earned his first doctor of arts degree in philosophy, writing his dissertation on German idealism. Four years later, Žižek successfully defended his second doctoral dissertation titled, “Philosophy Between the Symptom and the Fantasy,” a Lacanian reading of Hegel, Marx, and Kripke, which he completed under the direction of Lacan’s son in law, Jacques-Alain Miller, in Paris. Žižek is one of the most prominent members of the Ljubljana Lacanian School, a group of theorists who have been affiliated with the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis in Ljubljana since the 1970s. Žižek also cofounded the Liberal Democratic Party in Slovenia and ran as its candidate in the first multiparty presidential elections in the country in 1990, narrowly missing office. Later, he completely broke with Slovene public space and became engaged in global radical Leftist politics. He is currently a researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana; the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London; Eminent Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; returning faculty member of the European Graduate School; and visiting professor at the German Department of New York University. Since 1991 he has also held visiting positions at different universities in the United States and United Kingdom. He is also the editor of three major book series, including WO ES WAR, Short Circuits, and SIC Series. In 2012, Foreign Policy listed Žižek as one of its top influential 100 global thinkers, and in 2018 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid, Spain). Ever since the publication of his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, in 1989, Žižek has become known as one of the most provocative and innovative philosophers in the world. Žižek has developed a challenging dialectical materialist philosophical system that appropriates the late Lacan to reload and retrieve Hegel through Marxism, Christianity, and quantum physics in order to describe the structure of reality (ontology) and to articulate the basis for collective revolutionary change through a wide range of cultural, folkloric (jokes), literary, religious, political, scientific, and philosophical references. Žižek has published extensively, almost a monograph a year, on a wide range of topics, and has been engaged in many debates and controversies that attest to his commitment to reformulating the questions that philosophers, psychoanalysts, political scientists, activists, and the general public have been asking about common everyday notions about reality and its relationship to the subject. Žižek has consequently established a phenomenal presence in the lecture circuits, online, and in the media that has made him a household name and one of the most iconic international public figures and philosophers in the world.