Slavoj Žižek: biography of Slovenian philosopher and politician

A lover of controversy and political incorrectness, Žižek is a cultural icon of the 21st century.

Slavoj Žižek is known for explaining psychoanalytic theory through examples from popular culture and cinema. He has also been gaining fame by being very harsh in criticizing the current state of politics.

His novel vision of Lacan and Hegel and his way of violently attacking other philosophical and cultural positions that have appeared in recent decades, such as the third wave of feminism, cognitivism and New Age beliefs, have earned him the nickname of the most dangerous philosopher in Europe.

Biography of Slavoj Žižek

Let's take a deeper look at the exciting life and work of this Slovenian philosopher.

Early years

Slavoj Žižek was born in Ljubljana, present-day Slovenia.Žižek was born on March 21, 1949, in a middle-class Yugoslav family.

Žižek spent most of his childhood living in Portorož, where he had the opportunity to learn about theories, popular culture and films from the West.

As a teenager, Žižek's family moved back to Ljubljana, where the young Slavoj studied at the Bežigrad High School.

Education

During the 1960s, Yugoslavia was involved in a series of measures imposed by President Josip Broz Tito that allowed some liberalization in the socialist country.

Thanks to this, Žižek had the opportunity to study philosophy and sociology at the University of Ljubljana.

During his university years, Žižek had the opportunity to establish contact with some intellectual dissidents, as well as publishing in alternative journals such as Praxis, Tribuna and Problemi.

In 1971 he was accepted to work in the field of research on a permanent basis, however, he was rejected in the end because the authorities considered that his master's thesis dissociated itself from Marxism.

In later years he did his military service in the Yugoslav army in Karlovac.

Professional career

Žižek has had a prolific intellectual life translating into Slovenian the works of great thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser.

In 1979 he joined the sociology department of the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana.

In the late 1970s he founded together with other Yugoslav psychoanalytic colleagues the Society of Theoretical Psychoanalysis.

In 1985 Žižek obtained a doctorate of philosophy in psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII.

His name became world famous in 1989 with the publication of his first book in English: The Sublime Object of Ideology.

In addition, he has contributed to several newspapers such as the American Lacanian Ink and In These Times, The New Left and The London Review of Books in the UK, as well as several magazines in his native Slovenia.

In 2007 the International Journal of Žižek Studies was founded, an Open Access research journal that has become the inspiration for the creation of four operas made from publications by the Slovenian philosopher, announced by the British Royal Opera House in 2013.

Policy

Since the late 1980s, Žižek became known as a columnist for the alternative youth magazine Mladinain which he took a critical view of President Tito's measures and, in particular, the militarization of society.

Žižek was a member of the Slovenian Communist Party until 1988, however, that year he resigned along with 32 other Slovenian intellectuals in protest against the JBTZ political trial, in which four newspaper editors were sentenced for having been critical of the Yugoslav army.

In the late 1980s, he participated in several social and political movements calling for democracy in the Slavic country and was a member of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights.

In the first free elections held in Slovenia, Žižek ran as the Liberal Democratic Party's candidate for the country's presidency.

One of the reasons why he joined this party and not others closer to communism, according to Žižek, was to prevent Slovenia from becoming a country like Croatia or Serbia, where nationalism was achieving great hegemony.

Despite his involvement in liberal projects, he has always been very critical of ideologies mostly on the right side of the political spectrum, such as nationalism, conservatism and liberalism in its most classical version. In fact, Žižek himself considers himself a 'radical Stalinist philosopher'.

Well into the 2000s he was moving away from parliamentary activity, but publishing several analyses on the political situation, showing his support, not always in the most politically correct way, for left-wing parties at the European level, such as Syriza and Podemos.

Personal life

Slavoj Žižek has one son and has been married a total of three times: first to a Slovenian philosopher, Renata Saleci, then to a model Analia Houlie, and finally to Jela Krečič. He is fluent in Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, French, German and English..

Thoughts

The following are the keys to understanding Slavoj Žižek's ideas in different fields.

1. Criticism of multiculturalism and nationalism

Žižek has been very critical of current political ideologies.. His starting point is that nationalism and liberalism should not be conceived as if they were two completely autonomous worlds that do not interact with each other, but rather act as the extremes of the same logic.

Thus, these two ways of seeing the world should be analyzed not only at the economic level but also at the libidinal level, i.e., how by interacting with each other they are in turn the creators of other political ideologies that seek to achieve maximum pleasure/satisfaction for the individual.

On this basis, Žižek's conclusion is that multiculturalism, i.e. the idea that promotes tolerance of any social movement is, in turn, the cause of that which pretends to confront it.

Žižek rejects the hybrid ideologies that, according to him, are the result of the liberal left, which, according to him, are nothing more than the politically correct form with which the fiercest capitalism shows itself.

This view of Žižek can be found further explained in several works:

• The Permanence of the Negative (2016).
• Who said totalitarianism: five interventions on the (mis)use of the notion (2002).
• The Metastases of Jouissance. Six essays on women and causality (2003).
• The New Class Struggle. Refugees and terror (2016)
• Cultural Studies. Reflections on Multiculturalism (1998).
• In Defense of Intolerance (2008)

2. Vision of the state and politics in general.

Žižek considers the state to be a system that regulates the behavior of its citizens and molds it to the image and likeness of his ideal vision of how society should behave.

Unfortunately, in the view of this same philosopher, political decisions have been transformed into something normal and indisputable instead of being conveniently contextualized to the moment in which they are developed.

An example of this is how certain ideologies, especially right-wing ones, defend cuts in basic services, treating them as if they were something objective and extremely necessary.

Despite the fact that in Western societies there has been greater citizen participation in governmental decisions, either through elections or referendums, many of these decisions are made in favor of capital rather than social welfare.

Bibliographical references:

• Kotsko, A. (2008). Politics and Perversion: Situating Žižek's Paul. Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. 9 (2): 48.
• Boyle, K. (2016). "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Slavoj Žižek's Psychoanalytic Marxism." International Journal of Žižek Studies. Vol 2.1.
• Žižek, S. (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso.
• Sinnerbrink, R. (2008). The Hegelian 'Night of the World': Žižek on Subjectivity, Negativity, and Universality. International Journal of Žižek Studies. 2 (2).
• Holbo, J. (2004). On Žižek and Trilling. Philosophy and Literature. 28 (2): 430–440.