Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Institute for Sociology and Philosophy who has also worked at Birkbeck in London and New York University. He combines the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan with the philosophy of Hegel and a Marxist critique of ideology. His first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, argued that ideology works less through false beliefs than through what we do and enjoy. Known for using films, jokes and popular culture to explain theory, he has written more than fifty books.

Key ideas

• Ideology is less a false belief than a fantasy that structures everyday practice, so even those who see through it go on obeying it.
• Cynical distance is itself a form of ideology: people know very well what they are doing, but still they are doing it.
• Lacan's concepts of the Real, fantasy and enjoyment can explain political and social life.
• Hegel's dialectic, read through Lacan, shows reality itself to be incomplete and inconsistent.

Major works

• The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)
• The Ticklish Subject (1999)
• The Parallax View (2006)
• Less Than Nothing (2012)

In the Book corner

• The Sublime Object of Ideology 1989 · Advanced
  Žižek's first book in English, which rereads the theory of ideology through the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and the philosophy of Hegel.…

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