Žižek, Slavoj

Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949) is one of the most outspoken proponents of Lacanian psychoanalysis working in contemporary social theory. Born in 1949 in Ljubjlana, Slovenia, Žižek holds a PhD in philosophy from the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana and a PhD in psychoanalysis from the Université Paris-VIII. Over the last 15 years, the aptly nicknamed “Giant of Ljubljana” has attended over 250 international philosophical and cultural studies conferences, published over 25 books, and is currently the senior researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana. Not only is he an internationally recognized social theorist, he has also been known to dabble in politics, campaigning for the Slovenian presidency in 1990. Overall, Žižek is a provocative voice that has challenged many assumptions both inside and outside of academia.

While the scope of Žižek writings is far too vast to cover in this brief entry, there is a clear theoretical argument that runs throughout his work. His overarching theoretical program is perhaps best outlined in the book The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) in which he presents a Lacanianinspired form of ideological critique. For Žižek, ideology attempts to stitch together the fractured social field, which is traversed by inconsistencies and antagonisms. Social antagonisms, such as class struggle, are for Žižek equivalent to Lacan's notion of the Real as a traumatic kernel that resists symbolization. There are essentially two mechanisms by which ideology reconstructs the social as a unified, harmonious, and coherent totality. To effectively erase internal contradictions, ideology propagates sublime objects such as “the nation” or “the people.” These symbolic fictions act as virtual stand-ins, repressing internal social antagonisms, which nonetheless reappear in the form of symptoms (e.g., class conflict, World Trade Organization [WTO] protests, global warming, or the increasing homeless population). Second, to purify its harmonious self-image, ideology not only represses social ambiguities but also externalizes them. In this manner, internal contestations are projected outward onto the proverbial other. Through ideology as a fantasy construct, the social is able to maintain its illusory integrity.

For Žižek, a Lacanian-inspired form of ideological critique is paramount to going through the social fantasy until the subject is able to identify with the symptom. As an example, Žižek references the Nazi construction of the Jew. Within the ideological fantasy of National Socialism, the Jew becomes the stumbling block that prevents the realization of the perfected Aryan race. The internal antagonisms found within the German social field are conveniently projected onto the Jew as the external other. To deconstruct this ideological projection, the subject should “traverse the phantasy” of Nazism, realizing that the traumatic kernel preventing the full realization of the Aryan myth is not external but internal to the Nazi project itself. Through the application of Lacanian concepts to the study of ideology, Žižek thus equips cultural critics with powerful analytical tools that complement and enlarge the leftist vocabulary.

In texts such as Looking Awry (1991), Enjoy Your Symptom! (1992), and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (1992), Žižek brings cultural studies and Lacan into dialog with one another. As a philosophical DJ, Žižek likes to mix it up, often employing a surprising combination of Kant, Marx, Hegel, Schelling, Badiou, and of course, Lacan to explore a wide range of contemporary cultural phenomena that include, but are by no means limited to, the Internet, Hollywood films, television, tea bag mantras, and other banal aspects of the American cultural sphere. While other cultural theorists see popular culture as merely an ideological mystification, Žižek believes that an understanding of the media is paramount to understanding the human psyche [Page 896]as such. According to Lacan, the unconscious is quite literally the symbolic order, or the discourse of the Other. Rather than a deep, dark, secret hidden within our minds, the unconscious resides outside us, embedded within everyday institutions, media culture, and social practices. Taking advantage of the ubiquity and the popularity of the American media, Žižek often employs concrete examples drawn from mainstream culture to clearly elucidate rather opaque Lacanian concepts. In perhaps his most famous example, Žižek uses sitcom laugh tracks to demonstrate the Lacanian maxim “desire is the desire of the other.” In a typical Žižekian inversion of commonsense assumptions, he argues that laugh tracks do not tell us when to laugh, instead they literally laugh for us. The symbolic order—that is, the Lacanian Big Other—has relieved the viewer of the burden to laugh, laughing in our place.

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