[D66] And so on: A necessarily incomplete guide to Slavoj Žižek

[René Oudeweg]

insidestory.org.au
And so on: A necessarily incomplete guide to Slavoj Žižek
Administrator
18–23 minutes

Never have so many understood so little of so much — so much writing, 
that is, in this case by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Most of his 
followers, as sociologist Eliran Bar-El discovered when he explored 
Žižek-related online communities, engage very little with his 
substantive philosophical works. I suspect the same can be said of many 
of his detractors.

Perhaps the sheer number of Žižek’s books — averaging about two each 
year since the early 2000s — makes it hard to find a definitive 
entry-point. Perhaps it is his free-flowing style, alternating between 
anecdotes and esoteric, jargon-laden philosophical argumentation. Or 
perhaps it’s a well-deserved dose of his own medicine: he confesses to 
not having seen half of the movies he criticises, with the latest 
offence being committed against Matrix Resurrections in 2022.

For some, his wide-ranging commentaries and humorous style signify a 
public intellectual par excellence; for others, they reveal a clownish 
charlatan. A podcast dedicated to discussing his ideas is called Žižek 
and So On, capturing his most famous signature phrase (“pure ideology” 
comes a close second). His personal idiosyncrasies include incessant 
nose-rubbing and sniffling and a studied refusal to wear a button-up 
shirt in public appearances.

Two YouTube videos, in juxtaposition, testify to Žižek’s internet-era 
pop-star status. The first is a nine-hour collage of a lecture series he 
delivered on Friedrich Hegel; the other, a seven-second clip, shows the 
philosopher obliviously enjoying hotdogs on the street, probably in his 
hometown of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he still resides. Both have 
attracted hundreds of thousands of views and many adoring comments.

Although Žižek made his name interpreting Marx, Hegel and Jacques Lacan 
— and interpreting the world through them — he seems to have consciously 
renounced the position of authoritative intellectual. His eccentricities 
are the performative embodiment of this stance — as the philosopher 
himself insists, the truth of one’s belief is in one’s actions, not some 
elusive, self-deceiving inner life. Perhaps his nervous tics are a 
physiological manifestation of the imposter syndrome which he fully 
embraces.

Bar-El’s new book, How Slavoj Became Žižek: The Digital Making of a 
Public Intellectual, likewise embodies some of the qualities it ascribes 
to Žižek. As his title suggests, Bar-El is not concerned primarily with 
Žižek’s theories or politics, but the sociological and historical 
process by which he became a global phenomenon. The substance is in the 
form.

Zižek’s emergence from the political and intellectual crossroads that 
was Slovenia, where he was born in 1949, had a certain inevitability. As 
the west-most component of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 
Slovenia enjoyed a connection with the “free world” unmatched by other 
socialist states thanks to the relatively liberal rule of Josip Tito and 
his successors. A vibrant intellectual scene was facilitated by its soft 
border with Italy and thus the rest of Western Europe.

In the absence of a unified and rigid official Marxist doctrine, 
Yugoslavia’s door was open to various theoretical formations. The 
Frankfurt School, Existentialism and Structuralism all found audiences 
and interlocutors there. Žižek was reading “Marx at age fifteen, 
Heidegger at twenty, Derrida at twenty-five, and Lacan and Hegel at 
thirty,” writes Bar-El, and embarked on his second PhD in Paris in 1979, 
having worked briefly in the communist bureaucracy.

Žižek and his theoretical fellow-travellers formed the Ljubljana School 
in the early 1980s. Rather than submitting to Eastern Marxism or Western 
Structuralism, they appropriated the core insights of Hegelian 
dialectics and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and also drew on a mix of other 
traditions. It was an early example of Žižek’s “superpositioning,” a 
term from quantum mechanics that Bar-El uses to describe the creation of 
a third position from an existing opposition as a way of breaking out of 
theoretical and political deadlocks.

Žižek’s move to France had a crude materialist rationale too: he wanted 
to escape his uncertain prospects in an institution in which the 
Yugoslav party-state pickled its dissident intellectuals. Unemployed on 
returning from France, Žižek is no stranger to marginalisation.

Dissidents enjoyed much greater freedom in Yugoslavia than in any other 
self-proclaimed socialist countries. In fact, not only did the 
authorities tolerate cynicism about the country’s doctrine of 
“self-managed socialism” but also they regarded such cynicism as a 
prerequisite for continued compliance to the system. One of Žižek’s 
favourite anecdotes was how, in the mid 1970s, two of his acquaintances 
lost their party jobs for being true believers of official ideology.

The best way to challenge a purportedly tolerant, self-critical regime 
was therefore through self-conscious “overidentification,” which 
dissident art collectives, especially the punk movement, increasingly 
did in their public performances throughout the 1980s. While attacking 
an ideological edifice from without could unwittingly reproduce shared 
presuppositions, overidentification threatened to lay bare their hidden 
reversal in the regime’s operation.

Like Žižek’s other lessons from “real socialism,” this insight would be 
applied to his intellectual intervention in the liberal-democratic West. 
The torture carried out in Abu Ghraib prison, for instance, was not 
scandalous because it deviated from “American values” but because it was 
the “obscene supplement… the barbarism that sustains our civilisation” 
in the middle of a “pre-emptive war” that sacrificed the lives and 
livelihoods of Iraqis for the perceived security of America and its allies.

Žižek’s theories are always immanently political while seemingly easily 
discoverable in popular culture. Having himself undergone military 
service, he finds overidentification in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal 
Jacket, in which the protagonist remains a proficient soldier because of 
his cynical distance, while “Private Pyle” is subsumed by the “voice of 
the superego [of military discipline]” and becomes (self-)destructive. 
Bar-El doesn’t include this example, but he does identify 
superpositioning between fact and fiction as another characteristic 
Žižekian move.

As “actually existing socialism” crumbled and the future of Slovenia 
became uncertain, pluralist left-wing movements vied for influence 
against neoliberal nationalists. The vision of a capitalist regime 
contained in an organic national community was the antithesis of the 
Ljubljana School’s theoretical lynchpin of the “split subject”: the 
inherently contradictory individual subjectivity within any 
politico-ideological system, which are themselves contradictory too.

Žižek narrowly lost the race to be one of four presidents of Slovenia in 
1990, running as a candidate of the Liberal Democratic Party — a move 
intended, he explained, to claim the popular banner of liberalism before 
free-market proponents could. He seems to enjoy performing such 
politically charged linguistic manoeuvres. During the 2020 US election 
campaign he advised progressives to embrace the label “moral majority” 
on the basis of their commitment to equality and meeting human needs, in 
contrast to a political right that was increasingly resorting to 
“alternative facts,” brutality, and obscenity. It was the same reason he 
gave for his tame presentation — for some, frustratingly tame — in his 
famous 2019 debate with Jordan Peterson.

Bar-El details the contrast between Žižek’s lacklustre reception in 
France in the late 1980s and his subsequent phenomenal success in the 
Anglophone world. The making of a public intellectual is inexorably 
social. The French scene, with long-established and heavily fortified 
intellectual communities, left little room for a new entrant 
distinguished by his superpositioning between disciplines, between 
academic and politically engaged writing styles, and between French 
theories and German Idealism. Nor was Žižek helped by the controversial 
status of his PhD supervisor, Jacques-Alain Miller, or his own 
insistence on taking Lacanian psychoanalysis out of clinics and into the 
realm of philosophy (to the disapproval of Miller himself).

Helped by the “post-Marxist” political philosopher Ernesto Laclau, who 
also provided a preface, Žižek published his first English-language 
book, the theory-dense The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). As Laclau 
articulated it, Zizek was positioned — by himself and others — “to 
address the problems of constructing a democratic socialist political 
project in a post-Marxist age.” Thus began his long association with the 
leftist non-academic publisher Verso, which would open up an 
international readership for others in the Ljubljana School.

Professional and personal networks brought Žižek and his theories into 
dialogue with Judith Butler, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and other 
prominent intellectuals. The fall of communism in Europe also created a 
space for him to, as Bar-El succinctly puts it, “explain the East to the 
West, in Western theoretical terms and channels.” An early example, not 
mentioned in the book, was a 1996 documentary that opens with Žižek 
standing on a bridge in Ljubljana and informing his audience that the 
river beneath him is the geographical boundary between Mitteleuropa 
(Central Europe) and the Balkans. On one side is “horror, oriental 
despotism,” where women are subject to horrendous violence and “like 
it”; on the other is “Europe, civilisation,” where women suffer likewise 
“but don’t like it.” The obvious materialist point aside, this was the 
quintessential Žižek: forsaking scholarly respectability for black 
humour; delving into “low culture” to reveal inherent, deep 
contradictions; questioning seemingly natural oppositions to gesture at 
what he sees as a true alternative.

Žižek’s rise in the global scene coincided with the onset of the digital 
revolution during the 1990s, a decade in which his unparalleled output 
and “copy-and-paste” quality (“self-plagiarism” for his critics) fitted 
perfectly. His “Hegelacanese” — as Bar-El calls his synthesis of Hegel 
and Lacan — proved remarkably apt at encoding key ideas in easily 
transmittable packages, regardless of whether the consumer has the 
wherewithal to decode them properly. If anyone was producing memes it 
was Žižek.

After the 9/11 attacks and during the war on terror his prolific and 
timely commentary propelled him into prominence, and here Bar-El 
provides an excellent summary of his counterintuitive arguments and 
their reception. From then on, Žižek would not let an international 
cataclysm go untheorised — the global financial crisis, the Arab Spring, 
the ongoing ecological crisis and (presumably too late to be included by 
Bar-El) the Covid-19 pandemic, publishing a book on the latter as early 
as March 2020. His growing intellectual and cultural impact is attested 
to by his growing associations, including with Julian Assange, Yanis 
Varoufakis and Sophie Fiennes, who directed two documentary films that 
brought Žižek and psychoanalysis into the cinema.

The public interventions came at the expense of Žižek’s scholarly 
credibility, with academics increasingly viewing his (often 
suspiciously) swift public interventions as regurgitative and 
crowd-pleasing. Some, such as the political philosopher John Gray, fault 
Žižek for “reproduc[ing] the compulsive, purposeless dynamism that he 
perceives in the operations of capitalism” and thus achieving a 
“deceptive substance.” His Hegelacanese has attracted controversy, and 
his ever-expanding interdisciplinary forays also led to further 
questions of his status as a philosopher. Indeed, Žižek positions 
himself as a member of the public that he addresses, with his subjective 
doubt resonating with that of his audience.

Bar-El is very precise here: “Žižek both assumes and rejects the 
position of an authoritative intellectual, enjoying its universal and 
general status while denying its elitism and exclusivity.” In this he 
follows Lacan in arguing that the “subject-supposed-to-know” — the 
benevolent, internally consistent authority, fully identified with the 
role conferred by the social order — does not exist. As Lacan famously 
put it, “The madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but 
also a king who thinks he is a king.”

Like the French, the Anglophone world has trouble determining what 
Žižek’s role really is. His work is often introduced in the context of 
literature studies rather than philosophy, and most of his followers 
discovered him outside the universities. And yet, as evidenced by the 
commercial success of his thousand-page doorstopper, Less Than Nothing 
(2012), there is a hunger in the reading public for a philosopher who 
brings the intellectual ivory tower and the masses to each other’s 
level, seemingly without compromising either philosophical niceties or 
socio-political relevance.

Žižek’s insistence on demonstrating philosophical ideas through 
examples, even mundane or vulgar ones, is not merely a pragmatic choice. 
He treats pop-culture artifacts as a window into the ideological 
unconscious that operates beneath visible social phenomena. In 
accordance with his reading of Hegel, he doesn’t regard theory as 
existing separately from its concrete manifestations. Indeed, examples 
can subvert the ideas they are supposed to reflect.

He thus rejects a common leftist refrain that Marxism was never truly 
practised in the communist countries, as if there was some “pure” spirit 
of Marxism on an astral plane invariably perverted by historical 
contingences. The failure of “actually existing socialism” must instead 
be traced to the blueprints and their authors — though without negating 
the necessity to continue to “fail better,” as Žižek’s favourite Samuel 
Beckett refrain goes.

This is one of most important keys to understanding Žižek. It isn’t 
mentioned by Bar-El, whose focus on the process and phenomenon of 
Žižek’s rise and fall within the confines of 189 pages inevitably 
requires trade-offs. Certain historical details, especially pertaining 
to the Slovenian scene of the 1980s, could also have clarified Žižek’s 
positions and performances. Bar-El might well have looked with 
understandable envy at Žižek’s freedom from constraints of contemporary 
academic publishing.

By the late 2010s, with his habitual “superpositioning” earning him 
increasing ire in progressive and leftist circles, Žižek had essentially 
vanished from publications like the Guardian and the London Review of 
Books. One controversy Bar-El briefly mentions is Žižek response to the 
refugee crisis, though his views on the 2016 US presidential election 
and transgenderism also rankled (and the latter continue to do so), and 
some further details here might be illustrative. Rejecting the 
mainstream humanitarian framing of the issue, Žižek argued that Europe 
has an obligation to resettle many more asylum-seekers because it was 
culpable in the destruction that generates mass dislocation. 
Resettlement must be conducted in a highly organised and coordinated 
way, he opined, rejecting the “open border” stance of many on the left. 
And the visible suffering of the drowning migrants shouldn’t obscure the 
plight of those who don’t even have the means to escape.

More controversial is Žižek’s critique of multiculturalism. He insists 
that irreducible differences exist between communities’ “ways of life,” 
the shared ethical frameworks and customs that enable them to function. 
Any polity that hopes to accommodate immigrant populations successfully 
must therefore openly renegotiate some of the basics so that discontent 
isn’t repressed and harnessed by xenophobic reactionaries.

True to his Hegelian bent, though, Žižek also contends that some 
struggles “cut across civilisations” to form the basis of universal 
solidarity — and who could deny that Europe and America are not 
themselves grappling with fundamentalism, of the Christian variety, and 
anti-feminist backlash? I leave it to the reader to judge for themselves 
whether Žižek’s suggested renegotiation is more practical than calls for 
“open borders.”

While Bar-El’s purpose largely precludes subjective judgements about 
Žižek, he doesn’t conceal his sympathy. And given his often-brief 
treatment of the content of Žižek’s various interventions, a reader 
needs to be somewhat familiar with the Žižek cannon and style in order 
to follow the narrative with ease. Fortunately, aside from Žižek’s 
voluminous writings and innumerable public appearances available online, 
there is also The Žižek Dictionary, published in 2017. (For his critics, 
its existence — and that of the International Journal of Žižek Studies, 
is further evidence of the self-indulgent posturing of the man and his 
disciples.)

Bar-El’s repeated invocation of terms like superpositioning can, at 
times, make his text feel mechanistic, although it does double as a 
tribute to Zizek’s own highly reiterative style. His sympathy extends to 
somewhat uncritically using the term “cancel culture” to describe 
Žižek’s intellectual marginalisation, a move that uncannily mirrors his 
subject’s insistence upon terms like “gender-identity ideology,” which 
risks lending credence to conservative rhetoric. As Bar-El points out, 
however, the function of Žižek’s transgressions has been to reveal the 
“normative social field” — the unquestioned presuppositions that have 
led to the ideological deadlocks in which the left too often finds itself.

Ultimately, Eliran Bar-El offers a useful framework with which to 
examine Žižek’s work in the past and present: as an intellectual who 
defies easy categorisation, as a one-man phenomenon made in a network of 
influences and for a digital age, and as a figure whose performances are 
inseparable from his philosophical insights.

His latest act of superpositioning, responding to Russia’s 2022 invasion 
of Ukraine, Žižek rang the alarm on Putin’s expansionist intent and 
called for a “stronger NATO — but not as a prolongation of US politics,” 
making him even more suspect among some leftists as well as alienating 
him from Moscow-controlled Russia Today, one of the few remaining 
outlets that still regularly published him and with a wide reach. On the 
other hand, his warning of Ukraine’s other “colonisation” by Western 
neoliberalism has not endeared him to the liberal or conservative 
mainstream either.

It is perhaps appropriate to consider how the term “superpositioning” 
serves as a signpost to a relatively recent iteration of Žižek’s 
philosophy. Explicitly borrowing from the Copenhagen interpretation of 
quantum mechanics, Žižek posits “ontological incompleteness” — that our 
reality itself has an inherent incompleteness at its most fundamental 
level. This is Žižek at his purest, as Bar-El accurately describes: 
superpositioning himself as an (anti-)philosopher attempting to grapple 
with the horizon of understanding imposed by language. The Lacanian 
“lack” at the heart of the human subject and the “big Other” — the 
virtual symbolic order that guarantees meaning — is thus inscribed into 
existence itself, as if the universe rejects its own authority.

This incompleteness has a temporal dimension as well, in that the 
meaning of the past is determined by what transpires in the future. For 
Žižek, catastrophes like the failed communist experiment cannot be 
redeemed. But whether they remain meaningless deviations from progress 
or a manifestation of historical cycles, or whether they can be 
re-rendered into the first iterations of an emancipated world we can’t 
hope to foresee, is the stake of the universalist struggles being waged 
today. •

How Slavoj Became Žižek: The Digital Making of a Public Intellectual
By Eliran Bar-El | University of Chicago Press | $49.95 | 256 pages