www.egs.edu Slavoj Žižek, Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Public open lecture for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought Saas-Fee/Switzerland. June 16 2017.
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian-born philosopher and psychoanalyst. He is a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS, a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, and founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana. Aside from these appointments, Žižek tirelessly gives lectures around the globe and is often described as “the Elvis of cultural theory”. Although, more seriously, as British critical theorist Terry Eagleton confers, Žižek is the “most formidably brilliant” theorist to have emerged from Europe in decades. Many, in fact, now consider Žižek to be “the most dangerous philosopher in the West.”
He grew up in in Ljubljana, Slovenia, which at the time was part of the former Yugoslavia. The regime’s more permissive, albeit “pernicious,” policies allowed for Žižek’s exposure to Western theory and culture, in particular film, English detective novels, German Idealism, French structuralism, and Jacques Lacan. Studying at the University of Ljubljana, he completed his master's degree in philosophy in 1975 with a thesis on French structuralism and his Doctoral degree in philosophy in 1981 with a dissertation on German Idealism. He then went to Paris, along with Mladen Dolar, to study Lacan under Jacques Alain-Miller (Lacan’s son-in-law and disciple). During this time in Paris, from 1981-85, Žižek completed another dissertation on the work of Hegel, Marx, and Kripke through a Lacanian lens. After his return to Slovenia, he became more politically active writing for , a weekly newspaper, co-founding the Slovenian Liberal Demorcratic Party, and running for one of four seats that comprised the collective Slovenian presidency (Žižek came in fifth).
Žižek rose to prominence in 1989 following his first book published in English, . Since then he has written countless books, in fact, perhaps the only thing more numerous than the talks he tirelessly gives across the globe are the books on which those interviews stand. For the last twenty-five years Žižek has been writing predominantly in English, and to a far lesser extent in his native Slovenian, for obvious reasons. His books of the last decades include: (1991), (1993), (1997), (1999), (2006), (2001), (1996), (1992), (1991), (2015), (2003), (2002), (2010), (1994), (2002), (2009), (2009), (2007), (2012), (2007), (2001), (2008), (2000), and (2012). Along with these and many other books, he has also co-authored a number of books with Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Eric Santner, John Millbank, Ernesto Laclau, Boris Gunjević, and Agon Hamza, among others. Further, he is the editor of a number of consequential series, including Wo Es War by Verso, SIC by Duke University Press, and Short Circuits by MIT Press.