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    Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide
    Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide
    Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide
    Ebook292 pages1 hour

    Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

    By Christopher Kul-Want and Piero Pierini

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Charting his meteoric rise in popularity, Christopher Kul-Want and Piero explore Zizek's timely analyses of today's global crises concerning ecology, mounting poverty, war, civil unrest and revolution.

    Covering topics from philosophy and ethics, politics and ideology, religion and art, to literature, cinema, corporate marketing, quantum physics and virtual reality, Introducing Slavoj Zizek deftly explains Zizek's virtuoso ability to transform apparently outworn ideologies – Communism, Marxism and psychoanalysis – into a new theory of freedom and enjoyment.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIcon Books
    Release dateJun 5, 2014
    ISBN9781848317765
    Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

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      Book preview

      Introducing Slavoj Zizek - Christopher Kul-Want

      The most dangerous philosopher …

      Dubbed by the American neo-conservative magazine New Republic as the most dangerous philosopher in the west and by the British Observer newspaper as the superstar messiah of the new left, Slavoj Žižek is a radical intellectual and an outspoken public figure.

      Žižek has gained his reputation as a polemicist. As the title to one of his recent books – Living in the End Times (2010) – indicates, his philosophical concern is with the widespread sense of impending world catastrophe and its underlying ideological causes. His work addresses the present political, economic and environmental global crisis.

      A CRISIS THAT IS FAST APPROACHING A CERTAIN ZERO POINT.

      The subject of several television documentaries, Žižek maintains a demanding schedule of sell-out public appearances and lectures across both Europe and the US that receive hundreds of thousands of YouTube views. With his work now translated into over twenty languages, no other contemporary philosopher can touch him for sheer popularity – even though his ideas are often complex and demanding.

      What are the reasons for this popularity? Many people are eager to listen to a philosopher, such as Žižek, who has thought deeply about global problems of poverty, ecology and political repression.

      I AM PREPARED TO OFFER NEW APPROACHES AND, WHERE REQUIRED, CLEAR SOLUTIONS TO THESE PROBLEMS.

      The oratorical approach

      Žižek has published numerous articles in journals and on the web, and over 50 books – at a rate sometimes of one book a year. Unlike many philosophers, Žižek’s writing springs essentially from an oratorical approach to thinking and discourse, and this is part of his appeal both in hearing him talk and in reading his writing.

      Žižek’s process of writing is highly indicative of his direct approach to communicating ideas.

      FIRSTLY, I WRITE OUT NOTES OF MY IDEAS AS I WOULD SAY THEM … THEN I FLESH THEM OUT RATHER THAN PAINSTAKINGLY BUILDING UP AN ARGUMENT.

      This method of writing has the added advantage of preserving the spontaneity of his thoughts, and it reflects his enjoyment in expounding ideas.

      A native and lifelong resident of Ljubljana, Slovenia, Slavoj Žižek was born in 1949, when the small Alpine capital was part of Communist Yugoslavia. An only child, he grew up in the household of professional parents.

      LIKE MANY OTHER YOUNG PEOPLE IN THE FORMER SATELLITE STATES OF THE SOVIET UNION, I CONSUMED WESTERN POPULAR CULTURE AVIDLY IN PREFERENCE TO OFFICIALLY APPROVED DOMESTIC TELEVISION, BOOKS, AND FILMS.

      Much of his knowledge of Hollywood cinema – a subject he has written about extensively – was acquired during his teenage years, when he spent a lot of time at an auditorium that specialized in showing foreign films.

      Psychoanalysis, the suspect science

      As an undergraduate at the University of Ljubljana, Žižek did not support Communist orthodoxy and came into conflict with the authorities. Not sticking to approved course lists, he immersed himself in the works of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and other philosophers, mostly French, whose writings had found little favour in socialist circles.

      FROM OUR SOCIALIST POINT OF VIEW, LACAN’S WORK IS PARTICULARLY SUSPECT, BECAUSE PSYCHOANALYSIS IS PREOCCUPIED WITH THE SELF AND THE INDIVIDUAL MIND.

      Žižek’s eventual philosophical project became about reconciling psychoanalysis with collectivist politics.

      Žižek earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and sociology in 1971, and then pursued a master’s degree, also at the University of Ljubljana, writing his master’s thesis on the French philosophers whose ideas he had been studying. His research stirred up interest among the university’s philosophy faculty, but its ideologically suspect qualities were more troublesome.

      WE FORCED ZIZEK TO ADD AN APPENDIX IN WHICH HE OUTLINED THE DIVERGENCES OF HIS IDEAS FROM APPROVED MARXIST THEORY. ZIZEK WAS FINALLY AWARDED A MASTER’S DEGREE IN PHILOSOPHY IN 1975.

      Although Žižek had been promised a job at the university, it was given to another candidate whose ideas were closer to the party line.

      FOR SEVERAL YEARS I DEPENDED ON WORK AS A TRANSLATOR TO PAY THE BILLS, BUT IN 1977 I GAVE IN TO PRESSURE AND JOINED THE COMMUNIST PARTY.

      This opened up government speech-writing jobs, as well as the chance to take a job as a researcher at the Institute of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana in 1979. Žižek retained that position for the next several decades, even after gaining international renown.

      The Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis

      In the 1970s, Žižek became part of a significant group of Slovenian scholars working on the theories of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–81), and together they founded the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis in Ljubljana. This society, among whose best-known members are Mladen Dolar (b. 1951) and Žižek’s second wife Renata Salecl (b. 1962), established editorial control over a journal called Problem!.

      I WAS NOT AFRAID TO WRITE BAD REVIEWS OF MY OWN BOOKS, OR EVEN TO WRITE REVIEWS OF BOOKS THAT DID NOT EXIST! WE ALSO BEGAN TO PUBLISH A BOOK SERIES CALLED ANALECTA.

      Žižek himself points out that the popularity of psychoanalysis in Slovenia owed to the fact that, in contrast to the other countries in the former Yugoslavia, there was no established psychoanalytic community to hamper or mitigate their interest in the usually controversial subject.

      In 1981 Žižek left for Paris, where he studied with Lacan’s son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller (b. 1944). Miller conducted open discussions about Lacan in Paris but he also ran a more exclusive 30-student seminar at the École de la Cause Freudienne in which he studied in depth the works of Lacan. Both Žižek and Dolar were invited to join this seminar, and it is there that Žižek developed his understanding of the later works of Lacan that still informs his thinking today. Miller also procured a teaching fellowship for Žižek and became his psychoanalyst.

      ALTHOUGH THESE SESSIONS OFTEN TENDED TO END UP AS INTELLECTUAL MIND-GAMES.

      Political engagement

      Žižek took an active part in politics during the 1980s, a period during which Yugoslavia’s Communist central government gradually began to lose control over the country’s cultural life. He penned a popular newspaper column, and in 1990, when Slovenia was on

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