Slavoj Žižek
Ideology is not a lie we believe but a fantasy we live by even when we know better – and Hegel and Lacan help expose it.
Placement
Slovenian philosopher who reads Hegel through Lacan and both against the ideology of the present – with jokes, films and paradoxes.
Key ideas
- Ideology as fantasy
- Lacanian Hegelianism
- The parallax gap
Influence
Influenced by 8
Immanuel Kant
influenced by ✓
Žižek read Kant’s paralogisms, in which the subject cannot know itself as a substance, as anticipating Lacan’s empty subject (Tarrying with the Negative, 1993). S. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (1993)
Immanuel Kant › 1724–1804
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
influenced by ✓
Žižek read Hegel through Lacan, treating negativity and contradiction as constitutive of the subject and of reality itself (Less Than Nothing, 2012). S. Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (2012); Tarrying with the Negative (1993)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel › 1770–1831
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
influenced by ✓
In The Indivisible Remainder (1996) Žižek read Schelling’s Ages of the World as an account of how the Word emerges from a pre-symbolic ground of drives. S. Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (1996); The Abyss of Freedom (1997)
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling › 1775–1854
Karl Marx
influenced by ✓
Žižek read Marx’s formula ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’ as locating ideology in practice, not belief (The Sublime Object of Ideology, 1989). S. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989); K. Marx, Das Kapital I (1867), on the fetish character of the commodity
Karl Marx › 1818–1883
Sigmund Freud
influenced by ✓
Žižek read Marx’s commodity form like Freud’s dream, whose secret lies in the dream-work, not the latent content (The Sublime Object of Ideology, 1989). S. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989); S. Freud, Die Traumdeutung (1900)
Sigmund Freud › 1856–1939
Jacques Lacan
influenced by ✓
Žižek took up Lacan’s registers of the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real and his concept of fantasy to analyse ideology and popular culture (Looking Awry, 1991). S. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989); Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (1991)
Jacques Lacan › 1901–1981
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Louis Althusser
influenced by ✓
Žižek took up Althusser’s theory of ideology as interpellation and material ritual, arguing that interpellation never fully succeeds (The Sublime Object of Ideology, 1989). S. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989); L. Althusser, “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État” (1970)
Louis Althusser › 1918–1990
Karatani Kōjin
influenced by
Žižek built The Parallax View (2006) on Karatani’s Transcritique: On Kant and Marx (2003), taking over its notion of the “parallax” between irreducible perspectives. S. Žižek, The Parallax View (2006), Introduction; “The Parallax View”, New Left Review 25 (2004); K. Karatani, Transcritique (2003)
Evidence: AI draft
Karatani Kōjin › b. 1941
Criticism
Criticized by 1
Judith Butler
criticised by
Butler objected that Žižek’s Lacanian Real works as an ahistorical, quasi-transcendental limit that fixes sexual difference beyond political contest (Bodies That Matter, 1993; Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 2000). J. Butler, Bodies That Matter (1993), ch. 7 “Arguing with the Real”; J. Butler, E. Laclau & S. Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000)
Evidence: AI draft
Judith Butler › b. 1956
Criticizes 3
Gilles Deleuze
criticised
Žižek preferred the Deleuze of The Logic of Sense to the Anti-Oedipus Deleuze, whose praise of desiring flows he saw as fitting late capitalism (Organs without Bodies, 2004). S. Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (2004)
Evidence: AI draft
Gilles Deleuze › 1925–1995
Jürgen Habermas
criticised
Žižek opened The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) by reading Habermas’s neglect of Lacan as symptomatic, setting Lacan’s constitutive antagonism against Habermas’s ideal of transparent communication. S. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Introduction
Evidence: AI draft
Jürgen Habermas › 1929–2026
Antonio Negri
criticised
Žižek credited Hardt and Negri’s Empire as an analysis of global capitalism but said it leaves open who the multitude is and what it should do (2001). S. Žižek, “Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century?”, Rethinking Marxism 13 (2001)
Evidence: AI draft
Antonio Negri › 1933–2023
Works
Ideology is not false consciousness but a fantasy that structures reality itself – Marx and Hegel read with Lacan.
An irreducible gap between two perspectives – in philosophy, science and politics.
A thousand pages on Hegel in the shadow of dialectical materialism – read with Lacan.
Position
Žižek reads Hegel through the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, and both against the ideology of the present. Ideology, he argues, is not a false picture covering the real world but a fantasy that structures our reality itself: we often know very well what we are doing and do it anyway. His examples come from Hollywood films, jokes and everyday life as much as from philosophy. In The Parallax View and Less Than Nothing he develops a materialism in which reality itself is incomplete and split by gaps. Prolific and provocative, he became one of the best-known public intellectuals of the early twenty-first century.
Life & context
Žižek was born in Ljubljana, then part of Yugoslavia, in 1949 and studied philosophy and sociology there. In Paris he trained in Lacanian psychoanalysis and took a second doctorate. With Mladen Dolar and others he formed the Ljubljana School. In 1990 he ran for Slovenia’s collective presidency. He works at the University of Ljubljana and has held many guest positions, including in London and New York.
Appears in
- Journey ‘Hegel’s Heirs’ · Stop 10 of 10
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