Welcome to Žižek’s Beard

Abstract

The problems and possibilities of educating in ways that enable people to break free from their shackles continues to exercise critical educationalists. This is where Žižek takes his stage as a skilled provocateur; he is notoriously difficult to read and is criticised for speaking through excessive storytelling and exemplification of points, often without actually stating what his point is (or might be). With a dialectical twist, however, here is Žižek in his full pedagogical glory, sharing important learning opportunities with us; it is us who have to take an active role in making sense of what ‘the point’ is, and what to do with it once we think we have grasped it. Žižek thinks, writes and performs like a cocktail with a kick: a Marxist liquid base, mixed with a dash of Lacan and Hegel on the rocks. The result is a commitment to tackling and navigating a contemporary capitalist society in ways which expose the hidden tricks and illusions that mobilise our deep unconscious motivations, often in contradictory ways. Never with a clear solution in sight, these underpinnings form a kind of Žižekian critical pedagogy; a way of engaging us in thinking about education without set or prescribed answers, but with crucial questions that take us on intellectual rollercoasters of inquiry about what education might involve, and therefore what it might become. But Žižek warns us, every perspective can only ever be partial, so bearing this in mind, welcome to our story of Žižek’s beard.