![]() He illustrates his points with a wide range of cultural references, from classic Hitchcock films such as Psycho and Rear Window, more recent films such as Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer (a lesser-known facet of the US President’s early career), to Wagner, Mozart, contemporary Hegelian philosophers such as Catherine Malabou, and Jane Austen, who he claims was a Hegelian writer, though I doubt she was aware of it. You meet the same ideas, even identical chunks of text, in several of Žižek’s works so if you don’t grasp an idea first time, you’ll have a better chance the second or third time around. His main influences are Hegel, Marx, Jesus, and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Žižek has a Stakhanovite work ethic and has published some sixty books, six in 2014 alone. When Slovenia became independent from Yugoslavia in 1991, it instituted a four-person Presidency, for which Žižek stood. There is even an Institute of Žižek Studies. Žižek (born 1949), who packs out public lecture halls around the world, is currently International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Ljubljana – from which he was expelled in the 1970s because his PhD thesis was “too Hegelian and not Marxist enough.” He’s made films too, including one entitled The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema (2006). “The thinker of choice for Europe’s young intellectual vanguard”, a “punk philosopher”, “a roller-coaster ride”, “sometimes bonkers but never boring” and “the Elvis of philosophers” are among the many things that have been said about Slovenian philosopher, culture critic and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek and his works. SUBSCRIBE NOW Articles Slavoj Žižek – The Elvis of Philosophy? Chris Bainbridge zips through the greatest hits of the celebrity post-Marxist. ![]()
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