Slavoj Zizek Popular Books

Slavoj Zizek Biography & Facts

Slavoj Žižek ( SLAH-voy ZHEE-zhek, Slovene: [ˈslaʋɔj ˈʒiʒɛk]; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Department of Philosophy. He primarily works on continental philosophy (particularly Hegelianism, psychoanalysis and Marxism) and political theory, as well as film criticism and theology. Žižek is the most famous associate of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, a group of Slovenian academics working on German idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, ideology critique, and media criticism. His breakthrough work was 1989's The Sublime Object of Ideology, his first book in English, which was decisive in the introduction of the Ljubljana School's thought to English-speaking audiences. He has written over 50 books in multiple languages and speaks Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, English, German, and French. The idiosyncratic style of his public appearances, frequent magazine op-eds, and academic works, characterised by the use of obscene jokes and pop cultural examples, as well as politically incorrect provocations, have gained him fame, controversy and criticism both in and outside academia.In 2012, Foreign Policy listed Žižek on its list of Top 100 Global Thinkers, calling him "a celebrity philosopher", while elsewhere he has been dubbed the "Elvis of cultural theory" and "the most dangerous philosopher in the West". Žižek has been called "the leading Hegelian of our time", and "the foremost exponent of Lacanian theory". A journal, the International Journal of Žižek Studies, was founded by professors David J. Gunkel and Paul A. Taylor to engage with his work. Life and career Early life Žižek was born in Ljubljana, PR Slovenia, Yugoslavia, into a middle-class family. His father Jože Žižek was an economist and civil servant from the region of Prekmurje in eastern Slovenia. His mother Vesna, a native of the Gorizia Hills in the Slovenian Littoral, was an accountant in a state enterprise. His parents were atheists. He spent most of his childhood in the coastal town of Portorož, where he was exposed to Western film, theory and popular culture. When Žižek was a teenager his family moved back to Ljubljana where he attended Bežigrad High School. Originally wanting to become a filmmaker himself, he abandoned these ambitions and chose to pursue philosophy instead. Education In 1967, during an era of liberalization in Titoist Yugoslavia, Žižek enrolled at the University of Ljubljana and studied philosophy and sociology.Žižek had already begun reading French structuralists prior to entering university, and in 1967 he published the first translation of a text by Jacques Derrida into Slovenian. Žižek frequented the circles of dissident intellectuals, including the Heideggerian philosophers Tine Hribar and Ivo Urbančič, and published articles in alternative magazines, such as Praxis, Tribuna and Problemi, which he also edited. In 1971 he accepted a job as an assistant researcher with the promise of tenure, but was dismissed after his Master's thesis was denounced by the authorities as being "non-Marxist". He graduated from the University of Ljubljana in 1981 with a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy for his dissertation entitled The Theoretical and Practical Relevance of French Structuralism. He spent the next few years in what was described as "professional wilderness", also fulfilling his legal duty of undertaking a year-long national service in the Yugoslav People's Army in Karlovac. Academic career During the 1980s, Žižek edited and translated Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and Louis Althusser. He used Lacan's work to interpret Hegelian and Marxist philosophy.In 1986, Žižek completed a second doctorate (Doctor of Philosophy in psychoanalysis) at the University of Paris VIII under Jacques-Alain Miller, entitled "La philosophie entre le symptôme et le fantasme".Žižek wrote the introduction to Slovene translations of G. K. Chesterton's and John Le Carré's detective novels. In 1988, he published his first book dedicated entirely to film theory, Pogled s strani. The following year, he achieved international recognition as a social theorist with the 1989 publication of his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology.Žižek has been publishing in journals such as Lacanian Ink and In These Times in the United States, the New Left Review and The London Review of Books in the United Kingdom, and with the Slovenian left-liberal magazine Mladina and newspapers Dnevnik and Delo. He also cooperates with the Polish leftist magazine Krytyka Polityczna, regional southeast European left-wing journal Novi Plamen, and serves on the editorial board of the psychoanalytical journal Problemi. Žižek is a series editor of the Northwestern University Press series Diaeresis that publishes works that "deal not only with philosophy, but also will intervene at the levels of ideology critique, politics, and art theory". Political career In the late 1980s, Žižek came to public attention as a columnist for the alternative youth magazine Mladina, which was critical of Tito's policies, Yugoslav politics, especially the militarization of society. He was a member of the Communist Party of Slovenia until October 1988, when he quit in protest against the JBTZ trial together with 32 other Slovenian intellectuals. Between 1988 and 1990, he was actively involved in several political and civil society movements which fought for the democratization of Slovenia, most notably the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights. In the first free elections in 1990, he ran as the Liberal Democratic Party's candidate for the former four-person collective presidency of Slovenia.Žižek is a member of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) founded in 2016. Public life In 2003, Žižek wrote text to accompany Bruce Weber's photographs in a catalog for Abercrombie & Fitch. Questioned as to the seemliness of a major intellectual writing ad copy, Žižek told The Boston Globe, "If I were asked to choose between doing things like this to earn money and becoming fully employed as an American academic, kissing ass to get a tenured post, I would with pleasure choose writing for such journals!"Žižek and his thought have been the subject of several documentaries. The 1996 Liebe Dein Symptom wie Dich selbst! is a German documentary on him. In the 2004 The Reality of the Virtual, Žižek gave an hour-long lecture on his interpretation of Lacan's tripartite thesis of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. Zizek! is a 2005 documentary by Astra Taylor on his philosophy. The 2006 The Pervert's Guide to Cinema and 2012 The Pervert's Guide to Ideology also portray Žižek's ideas and cultural criticism. Examined Life (2008) features Žižek speaking about his conception of ecology at a garbage dump. He .... Discover the Slavoj Zizek popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Slavoj Zizek books.

Best Seller Slavoj Zizek Books of 2024

  • Introducing Slavoj Zizek synopsis, comments

    Introducing Slavoj Zizek

    Christopher Kul-Want

    Charting his meteoric rise in popularity, Christopher KulWant and Piero explore Zizek's timely analyses of today's global crises concerning ecology, mounting poverty, war, civil un...

  • Postcapital synopsis, comments

    Postcapital

    Iván de la Nuez

    Las críticas que aparecen en Postcapital. Crítica del futuro, fueron publicadas por Iván de la Nuez durante unos seis años y recorren el tránsito entre el siglo XX y el siglo XXI. ...

  • Trouble in Paradise synopsis, comments

    Trouble in Paradise

    Slavoj Žižek

    One of our most famous, most combative philosophers explains how we can find a way out of the crisis of capitalism   There is obviously trouble in the global capitalist paradi...

  • Hegel y el cerebro conectado synopsis, comments

    Hegel y el cerebro conectado

    Slavoj Žižek

    Lejos de ser un estudio corriente, Hegel y el cerebro conectado nos muestra nuestro mundo actual bajo una perspectiva hegeliana. Slavoj Žižek analiza las consecuencias de la creaci...

  • Slavoj Zizek synopsis, comments

    Slavoj Zizek

    Tony Myers

    Slavoj Zizek is no ordinary philosopher. Approaching critical theory and psychoanalysis in a recklessly entertaining fashion, Zizek's critical eye alights upon a bewildering and ex...

  • Poetry from the Future synopsis, comments

    Poetry from the Future

    Srećko Horvat

    'A compelling vision, an urgent necessity, and not beyond reach' Noam ChomskyThe past is forgotten, and the future is without hope. Dystopia has become a reality. This is the new ...

  • Robespierre. Virtud y terror synopsis, comments

    Robespierre. Virtud y terror

    Slavoj Žižek

    "Si el resorte del gobierno popular en tiempos de paz es la virtud, el resorte del gobierno durante la revolución son, al mismo tiempo, la virtud y el terror. la virtud sin la ...

  • El sexo y el fracaso del absoluto synopsis, comments

    El sexo y el fracaso del absoluto

    Slavoj Žižek

    Para delimitar el nuevo materialismo, Žižek critica y desafía no solo el trabajo de Alain Badiou, Robert Brandom, Joan Copjec, Quentin Meillassoux y Julia Kristeva (por nombrar sol...

  • Revoluciones sin sujeto synopsis, comments

    Revoluciones sin sujeto

    Santiago Castro-Gómez

    De ser candidato a la presidencia de su país, Eslovenia, el filósofo Slavoj Zizek pasó a convertirse en una figura de culto mediático y su imagen circula en películas, revistas y p...

  • Citas de Stalin synopsis, comments

    Citas de Stalin

    Iósif Stalin & Borja García Vázquez

    Recopilado y ordenado temáticamente, Citas de Stalin recoge fragmentos tanto de los textos como de los discursos formulados por Iósif Stalin, quien fuera secretario general del Com...

  • Slavoj Zizek synopsis, comments

    Slavoj Zizek

    Ian Parker

    'When I read Ian Parker's manuscript, I experienced an underlying solidarity: despite obvious differences, we share the same basic political concerns and visions. And this makes hi...

  • Das Reale des Antagonismus. Politische Theorie und Psychoanalyse bei Slavoj Zizek synopsis, comments

    Das Reale des Antagonismus. Politische Theorie und Psychoanalyse bei Slavoj Zizek

    Michael Turinsky

    Der als global agierender PhilosophieEntertainer geltende Psychoanalytiker und Philosoph Slavoj Zizek, herausragender Vertreter der sogenannten Laibacher LacanSchule, zählt zu den ...

  • Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry synopsis, comments

    Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry

    Annie Caulfield

    Annie Caulfield's early years were spent by the seaside in Ireland. However, the family shifted to Sixties London and soon she wasn't sure who she was was she English, was she Iri...