about Slavoj Zizek (1949—)

Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian-born political philosopher and cultural critic. He was described by Terry Eagleton as the “most formidably brilliant” recent theorist to have emerged from Continental Europe. Zizek’s work is infamously idiosyncratic. It features striking dialectical reversals of received common sense; a ubiquitous sense of humor; a patented disrespect towards the modern distinction between high and low culture; and the examination of examples taken from the most diverse cultural and political fields. Yet Zizek’s work, as he warns us, has a very serious philosophical content and intention. Zizek challenges many of the founding assumptions of today’s left-liberal academy, including the elevation of difference or otherness to ends in themselves, the reading of the Western Enlightenment as implicitly totalitarian, and the pervasive skepticism towards any context-transcendent notions of truth or the good. One feature of Zizek’s work is its singular philosophical and political reconsideration of German idealist philosophy (Kant, Schelling and Hegel). Zizek has also reinvigorated Jacques Lacan’s challenging psychoanalytic theory, controversially reading him as a thinker who carries forward founding modernist commitments to the Cartesian subject and the liberating potential of self-reflective agency, if not self-transparency. Zizek’s works since 1997 have become more and more explicitly political, contesting the widespread consensus that we live in a post-ideological or post-political world, and defending the possibility of lasting changes to the new world order of globalization, the end of history, or the war on terror.

This article explains Zizek’s philosophy as a systematic, if unusually presented, whole; and it clarifies the technical language Zizek uses, which he takes from Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxism, and German idealism. In line with how Zizek presents his own work, this article starts by examining Zizek’s descriptive political philosophy. It then examines the Lacanian-Hegelian ontology that underlies Zizek’s political philosophy. The final part addresses Zizek’s practical philosophy, and the ethical philosophy he draws from this ontology.

Source : http://www.iep.utm.edu