[D66] How to Read Žižek

[Antid Oto]

How to Read Žižek by Adam Kotsko
September 2nd, 2012

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK, a philosopher and psychoanalyst from Slovenia, is one of 
the few academics to have achieved a degree of genuine popularity among 
general readers. He regularly lectures to overflow crowds, is the 
subject of a documentary film (called simply Žižek!), and surely counts 
as one of the world’s most visible advocates of left-wing ideas. When 
Žižek first broke into the English-speaking academic scene, however, few 
would likely have predicted such success. For one thing, his research 
focused on an unpromising topic: the long-neglected field of “ideology 
critique,” a staple of Marxist cultural criticism that had fallen into 
eclipse as Marxism became less central to Western intellectual life in 
the second half of the twentieth century.

“Ideology” is one of those philosophical terms that has entered into 
everyday speech with an impoverished meaning. Much as “deconstruction” 
means little more than “detailed analysis” in popular usage, so 
“ideology” tends to refer to a body of beliefs, most often with 
overtones of inflexibility or fanaticism. But as Žižek argued in his 
1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology, ideology is not to be found in 
our conscious opinions or convictions but, as Marx suggested, in our 
everyday practices. Explicit opinions are important, but they serve as 
symptoms to be interpreted rather than statements to be taken at face value.

Racism, for example. Žižek recommends that we look for symptomatic 
contradictions, as when the anti-Semite claims that the Jews are both 
arch-capitalist exploiters and Bolshevik subversives, that they are both 
excessively tied to their overly particular tradition and deracinated 
cosmopolitans undercutting national traditions. In the Jim Crow South, 
blacks were presented simultaneously as childlike innocents needing the 
guidance of whites and as brutal sexual predators. In contemporary 
America, Mexican immigrants are viewed at once as lay-abouts burdening 
our social welfare system and as relentless workaholics who are stealing 
all our jobs.

These contradictions don’t show that ideology is “irrational” — the 
problem is exactly the opposite, that there are too many reasons 
supporting their views. Žižek argues that these piled-up 
rationalizations demonstrate that something else is going on.

A similar sense that something else is going on always strikes me when I 
read a review of Žižek’s work in the mainstream media. (A recent example 
is John Gray’s review of two of Žižek’s books in the New York Review of 
Books, to which Žižek has responded.) Now academics are always ill-used 
in the mainstream press, particularly if they deal in abstract concepts 
and refer to a lot of European philosophers. Yet there’s something 
special about the treatment of Žižek. In what has become a kind of 
ritual, the reader of a review of Žižek’s work always learns that Žižek 
is simultaneously hugely politically dangerous and a clown with no 
political program whatsoever, that he is an apologist for the worst 
excesses of twentieth-century Communism and a total right-wing 
reactionary, both a world-famous left-wing intellectual and an 
anti-Semite to rival Hitler himself.

The goal is not so much to give an account of Žižek’s arguments and 
weigh their merits as to inoculate readers against Žižek’s ideas so they 
feel comfortable dismissing them. To find left-wing thinkers and 
movements simultaneously laughable and dangerous, disorganized and 
totalitarian, overly idealistic and driven by a lust for power is to 
suggest: there is no alternative. Rather than simply knocking around a 
poor, misunderstood academic in the public square, it is an attempt to 
shut down debate on the basic structure of our society. The rolling 
disaster of contemporary capitalism — war, crisis, hyper-exploitation of 
workers, looming environmental catastrophe — demands that we think 
boldly and creatively to develop some kind of livable alternative. Žižek 
can help.

The biggest obstacle facing the reader of Žižek’s work is not the 
academic trappings — the technical terms, the references to other 
thinkers — but a writing style that defies convention. Broadly speaking, 
the general expectation of argumentative writing is that it will lay out 
a more or less straightforward chain of reasons supporting a clear 
central claim. Even though we acknowledge that this format is almost 
never encountered in its pure form, it still remains a kind of ideal. In 
Žižek’s writing, though, it’s difficult to pick out anything like a 
“thesis statement,” and the argument most often proceeds via intuitive 
leaps rather than tight chains of reasoning. This is true even of pieces 
that are more or less totally non-academic, and it is doubtless one of 
the reasons his work is so often misunderstood. One thing I hope to show 
here, though, is that his method fits with his goals and with the kinds 
of phenomena he is trying to get at. Although Žižek’s work can be 
difficult to get into at first, he is one of the most engaging and 
thought-provoking writers working in philosophy today, with a unique 
ability to get people excited about philosophy and critical theory. He 
is, in short, a gateway drug, and I’m the pusher.



I.

Already in this brief discussion of ideology, one of the most consistent 
features of Žižek’s work shines through: his fascination with 
contradictions and reversals. Žižek will frequently present what he 
views as a commonly accepted belief, then turn around and ask, “But is 
not the exact opposite the case?!” And then, as one continues reading, 
it often begins to seem as though the forcefully asserted opposite view 
is not quite Žižek’s own; it too gets called into question, with the 
surprising result that the first naïve view begins to look somehow less 
naïve.

The initial reversal can sometimes look alarmingly like a cheap, 
Christopher Hitchens-style contrarianism, particularly since Žižek’s 
political writings often start with a mainstream liberal view and then 
assert one that sounds much more right-wing. Yet the point is not simply 
to “provoke” liberals or to play devil’s advocate. Rather, these 
reversals are part of a strategy to keep the thought in motion. Instead 
of proposing a solution or finding a resting place, Žižek relentlessly 
seeks out further conflicts and contradictions, carrying out what Marx 
called “the ruthless criticism of everything existing.” The goal is not 
to arrive at a settled view, but to achieve greater clarity about what 
is really at issue, about what is really at stake in a given debate.

And what is always at stake is a conflict, because for Žižek, society is 
always riven with conflict and contradiction. That’s why ideology 
produces mutually conflicting answers — it’s responding to an underlying 
reality that is inherently contradictory, a struggle so deep and 
irreconcilable that it can’t directly be put into words. Nothing is a 
complete and harmonious whole, from quarks all the way up to the most 
abstract philosophical ideal. Nothing is inherently stable, but only 
temporarily stabilized. It’s not that there are first positions that 
then come into conflict — all our positions amount to a kind of 
“fall-out” of our attempts to manage this ultimately unmanageable conflict.

Remaining faithful to the Marxist tradition, Žižek believes that the 
most apt name for the conflict at the heart of modern society is “class 
struggle.” The “struggle” is not between two pre-existing classes — the 
working class and the capitalist or owner class — that happen to enter 
into some kind of conflict. These two classes are the “fallout” of 
capitalism, which is itself conflictual in nature: people “worked” 
before capitalism, but the working class as a massive population of 
landless laborers who must sell their labor power to survive only came 
about as a result of capitalist development. Similarly, there were rich 
people before capitalism, but not a class of people who sought to 
extract profits from this “free” labor power. The conflict is the 
system, the system the conflict.

“Class struggle” is important for Žižek because it produces two 
completely incompatible and conflictual views of the world — the 
difference between the exploited and the exploiter is more than a 
difference of opinion, it is a completely different framework. 
Reasonable people from “both sides” cannot come together and hash out a 
compromise that takes everyone’s interests into account. The “middle 
ground” is an unbridgeable chasm, and ideology represents our attempts 
to paper over and ignore that chasm.

So when people in the U.S. produce the vision of the Mexican immigrant 
as the workaholic welfare queen, what is really at stake can’t be a 
conflict between cultures, because for Žižek that would imply 
pre-existing, more or less stable or homogeneous cultures that first 
exist and then subsequently happen to come into conflict. Nor can it be 
about the Mexicans who come to America and disturb the balance of our 
local culture, because that balance didn’t exist in the first place. No, 
the conflict is inherent in capitalist exploitation. The Mexicans aren’t 
taking “our” jobs — the owners are doing whatever they can to suppress 
wages, with no interest in who they pay.



II.

The example of immigration demonstrates that conflict is never truly 
eliminated, but can be shifted. The task of the critic is to shift the 
conflict back to its proper place. Since straightforward argument 
presupposes a shared frame of reference, it is not a suitable tool for 
carrying out the kind of frame-shifting that Žižek is trying to achieve. 
More indirect methods are necessary.

One of Žižek’s primary tactics for shifting the frame of reference is 
overidentification. This strategy grows out of his experience under the 
Communist regime in Yugoslavia. Observing his country’s political life, 
Žižek came to a paradoxical realization: the fact that no one “really” 
bought into the official socialist ideology was not an obstacle for the 
rulers — cynical distance was part of their strategy for maintaining 
control. In this situation, Žižek proposed, the best way to resist was 
to take the ruling ideology at its word, naïvely demanding that the 
leaders fulfill the promise of their ideals.

The political situation in the contemporary West is not as 
straightforward, but Žižek continues to carry out a version of this 
strategy of overidentification in his political writings. His diagnosis 
of the basic political situation is found in his 1993 book Tarrying With 
the Negative, where he claims that mainstream liberal political leaders 
are fundamentally complicit with right-wing nationalism, using it as a 
tool in their attempt to maintain the capitalist status quo. On the one 
hand, right-wing outbursts and movements serve as helpful distractions, 
diverting people’s energy away from the real problem (people who might 
otherwise be rioting against bank bailouts are demanding to see Obama’s 
birth certificate, or arguing that birthers are crazy). On the other 
hand, they serve as an ever-present threat, as in the demands for the 
Greek electorate to approve of the E.U.-I.M.F. program, lest fascism 
overrun the land. One can see both sides of this dynamic in the 
Democratic Party’s political strategy: on the one hand, they must 
continually make unfortunate concessions to the political right out of a 
supposed “realism,” but on the other hand, they present themselves as 
the only thing standing between us and the unmitigated horror of a Tea 
Party government.

In this situation, where liberals are continually conceding that the 
right wing is expressing “legitimate concerns,” Žižek says essentially: 
yes, they are expressing legitimate concerns, but not the ones they 
think they’re expressing. To return to the immigration example, Žižek 
would proceed by agreeing that right-wing outbursts should be taken 
seriously — not as signs of the need for a more homogeneous culture, or 
for preserving American jobs, or for keeping foreigners from 
overwhelming the welfare state, but as symptoms of the disruptive 
contradictions of capitalism. Similarly, when liberals acknowledge that 
conservatives have a point about the need to preserve “the European 
tradition” or “the Christian heritage,” Žižek agrees that they do indeed 
have a point: we absolutely need to preserve the European tradition of 
radical revolution and the Christian heritage of radical equality! He 
shifts the conflict from one between liberals and conservatives to the 
one at the heart of the cultural tradition itself.

This strategy of overidentification — which can be summarized in the 
vertiginous formula, “Yes, of course I agree completely, but aren’t you 
actually completely wrong?!” — may be difficult to follow, but it 
produces jolting shifts that could not easily be produced any other way.



III.

In his more academic texts, Žižek rarely states his own view directly, 
but routes it through the great thinkers of contradiction: above all, 
the German Idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and the French 
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan — two thinkers who proceed through dialogue 
and whose own views are notoriously difficult to decipher. This coupling 
of Lacan and Hegel is absolutely crucial for him. In fact, in the 
introduction to his latest major work, Less Than Nothing, he claims that 
for him and his close intellectual comrades, “whatever we were doing, 
the underlying axiom was that reading Hegel through Lacan (and vice 
versa) was our unsurpassable horizon.” Other thinkers are also extremely 
important to him — most notably Marx, another great thinker of 
contradiction who worked primarily in the mode of critique — but none so 
much as these two.

Yet it should be emphasized that this combination is in many ways 
counterintuitive, if only because Lacan is himself very distrustful of 
Hegel’s philosophy, and most so in the very works that are central for 
Žižek. This is far from the only example of a counterintuitive pairing 
in Žižek’s work — one of his earliest books is entitled Everything You 
Ever Wanted to Know about Lacan: But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, 
dedicated to explaining Lacan’s psychoanalytic concepts through 
Hitchcock’s films. Similarly, he can pair Kant with Blade Runner or 
Schelling with Lassie Come Home. He can explain Hegel by means of an 
obscene joke, and he can end a book on the subversive potential of 
Christianity with a meditation on a cheap candy with a toy in the middle 
(the “Kinder Egg”). He calls these “short-circuits,” unexpected pairings 
that produce striking insights. The goal is not to show how the two 
fields are “actually” connected in a previously unseen way. “The reader 
should not simply have learned something new,” he says. “The point is, 
rather, to make him or her aware of another — disturbing — side of 
something he or she knew all the time.” The same could be said of 
Žižek’s work as a whole: the point isn’t so much to learn about a topic 
as to be jolted into a new (and yes, disturbing) perspective on the 
familiar.



IV.

Like Marx’s, Žižek’s “ruthless critique of everything existing” doesn’t 
critique “both sides” in a conflict equally. Contradictions are always 
asymmetrical. In the conflict between the capitalists and the workers, 
for example, it isn’t a matter of two different, equally limited 
viewpoints. In the ultimate short-circuit, the particular position of 
the workers represents the “truth” of the entire situation — the worker 
embodies the contradiction of capitalism. Similarly, the relationship 
between men and women in our male-dominated society cannot be accounted 
for in terms of stable complementary roles for the two sexes — in 
another short-circuit, the woman’s position directly reveals the central 
contradiction around which the entire society is structured.

In short, for Žižek, one must take sides in order to have access to the 
truth. Truth is not “universal” in the traditional sense of applying 
equally in every situation — each situation has its own truth. In Less 
Than Nothing, Žižek explains this dynamic in terms of the relationship 
between the universal and the particular, a topic that has bedeviled 
philosophers for centuries. Whereas we might normally view a “universal” 
as an unattainable ideal like justice or democracy that we must always 
strive to approximate in our particular circumstances, Žižek takes the 
opposite view: particular societies aren’t inadequate compared to the 
universal, but rather the very idea of the universal arises out of the 
inherent inadequacies of every particular system. In other words, the 
truly universal dimension is not the noble ideal, but the complaint — 
what unites us is not our devotion to high ideals and deep human values, 
but the fact that the world sucks, everywhere.

Žižek does not hold out the utopian hope of eliminating all conflict — 
in fact, he believes our supposedly “post-ideological” era is blinded by 
the truly utopian hope that all genuine conflicts might be resolved, 
allowing the system of liberal-democratic capitalism to go on more or 
less forever. What Žižek hopes for, in tracking down the contradiction 
at the heart of our society and identifying with the class that embodies 
it, is not that the world will no longer suck, but that it will no 
longer suck in this particular way, that we will no longer be stuck in 
this particular vicious cycle, that we can somehow find a way to stop 
frantically grasping at rationalizations for our self-destructive 
fixations and do something else — in short, to jolt us into the 
realization that there is an alternative.

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