Slavoj Zizek b. 1949

Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural critic, and one of the most prominent public intellectuals working in the broadly Hegelian and Lacanian tradition. The Sublime Object of Ideology, his 1989 breakthrough, applied Lacanian psychoanalysis to ideology and to the cinema of Hitchcock with equal seriousness, and his later The Ticklish Subject and Less Than Nothing reread Hegel and German Idealism through the lens of psychoanalysis and dialectical materialism. He has written prolifically on cinema, theology, communism, and contemporary politics, and is associated with the European Graduate School and the University of Ljubljana.

Slavoj Žižek was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, then within Yugoslavia, in March 1949. He studied philosophy and sociology at the University of Ljubljana, where he took his doctorate in 1981 on German idealism, then went to Paris and trained in psychoanalysis under Jacques-Alain Miller at Université Paris VIII, taking a second doctorate in 1985 on Hegel and Lacan. After being denied an academic post in Slovenia in the 1970s, he became a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology in Ljubljana, stood as a candidate for the Slovenian presidency in 1990, and from the 1990s held visiting and director positions at Birkbeck, the European Graduate School, Columbia, NYU, and Chicago.

His books include The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), For They Know Not What They Do (1991), Tarrying with the Negative (1993), The Indivisible Remainder (1996), The Plague of Fantasies (1997), The Ticklish Subject (1999), Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002), The Parallax View (2006), In Defense of Lost Causes (2008), Living in the End Times (2010), the systematic Less Than Nothing (2012), Absolute Recoil (2014), Sex and the Failed Absolute (2019), and Surplus-Enjoyment (2022).

Žižek has carried out a sustained reinterpretation of Hegel through Lacan and of Marx through both, treating ideology not as false consciousness but as the very fantasy that organises social reality, and defending a renewed communist hypothesis at a moment of liberal exhaustion. His blend of high theory, popular cinema, jokes, and political polemic has made him one of the most widely read and frequently filmed philosophers of his generation.