Slavoj Zizek
Slavoj Zizek
Slavoj Žižek; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian psychoanalytic philosopher, cultural critic, and Hegelian Marxist. He is a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London. His work is located at the intersection of a range of subjects, including continental philosophy, political theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, film criticism, and...
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth21 March 1949
what-if way problem
What if the way we perceive a problem is already part of the problem?
desire problem satisfied
The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.
names eating trash
I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.
distance native-american white
For the multiculturalist, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are prohibited, Italians and Irish get a little respect, blacks are good, native Americans are even better. The further away we go, the more they deserve respect. This is a kind of inverted, patronising respect that puts everyone at a distance.
philosophical interesting trials
For me, Stalinism was even a greater philosophical problem than Nazism. Under Nazism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed, no questions asked, you had nothing to prove. Under Stalinism, of course, most [victims] were on trial for false accusations; most of them were not traitors. There is one interesting feature: that they were tortured or through some kind of blackmail forced to confess to being traitors.
religious doe different
[T]aking the Third into account does not bring us into the position of pragmatic consideration, of comparing different Others; the task is rather to learn to distinguish between false conflicts and the true conflict. For example, today's conflict between Western liberalism and religious fundamentalism is a false one, since it is based on the exclusion of the third term which is its truth: the Leftist emancipatory position.
academia haunting spectre
A spectre is haunting Western academia (...), the spectre of the Cartesian subject.
iceland clouds earth
The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland—a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth—can bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is a reminder of how, with all its power to transform nature, humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth.
facts accepted capitalism
Global capitalism is simply accepted as a fact that you cannot do anything about. The only question is, Will you accommodate yourself to it, or will you be dismissed and excluded?
liking-someone taste aggressive
When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.
meaningful order world
For me, ideology is defined only by how the coordinates of your meaningful experience of the world, and your place within society, relate to the basic tensions and antagonisms of social orders.
kitsch verge
Undoubtedly [Beethoven's] music often verges on kitsch
religious data way
You can be a fanatical millennialist religious mystic, and you are, in a certain way, not outside of ideology. Your position can be that of perfectly describing the data and nonetheless your point is ideological.
blessing thinking democratic-socialism
What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth.