Slavoj Žižek and Dialectical Materialism

Pro-Fil, 2014

2018

When reading Slavoj Žižek, it does not take long to realize that Hegel’s philosophy is one of his most important theoretical points of departure. Unlike most other contemporary political theorists and thinkers, he does not even hesitate to call himself a Hegelian. In an interview from 2002, he says, for example, “even when I sometimes try to be critical of Hegel, I remain a Hegelian”.1 Like many other political radical Hegelians, Žižek is also in some way influenced by the theories of Marx as well as by Lenin and other later Marxist thinkers. Nevertheless, it would be incorrect to regard him as an orthodox or traditional Marxist. Ian Parker is therefore right when he writes: “Žižek does indeed see traditional Marxism as out of date, no longer applicable to new conditions of global capitalism”, with the important addition, “and this does lead him back to Hegel”.2 Žižek’s readings of Hegel’s texts are based on Jacques Lacan’s theories of the subject and the unconscious, and less on Ma...

Social Science Research Network, 2010

Review of Slavoj Zizek's Less Than Nothing. Bookforum, October 2012

Zizek’s synthetic ontology is nothing less than an attempt to understand the real as the failed attempt. Failure penetrates the entirety of the text and is reminiscent of Doc Hammer’s take on The Venture Brothers, “It’s about the beauty of failure. It’s about the failure that happens to all of us.” For Zizek, the real is inseparable both from the radicalized material reality that forms everyone and everything from stardust as the heavenly bodies explode and collapse in the creative destruction of our ever expanding universe and the social meanings of our unique presentation as Nancy would say, as being(s) singular plural.