Abstract
Slavoj Žižek is a cultural phenomenon. Throughout the last three decades, the Slovenian philosopher has become one of the most influential thinkers of our time. He has been described as ‘the most despicable philosopher in the west’ (Kirsch),1 the ‘Elvis of cultural theory’ (Taylor)2 and a ‘cross between guru and gadfly, sage and showman’ (Eagleton).3 His work has been the subject of numerous analyses and commentaries; it has been reviewed dozens of times. His more than fifty books have been translated into twenty languages, and — as Sharpe and Boucher put it in a recent introduction to Žižek — he has ‘radically divided critics and commentators, often along political lines.’4 Yet despite his undisputed success as a cultural critic and philosopher, there are still a great number of people who simply don’t like him very much.
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Notes
Matthew Sharpe and Geoff M. Boucher, Žižek and Politics: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 1.
See especially Geoffrey Galt Harpham, ‘Doing the Impossible: Slavoj Žižek and the End of Knowledge’, Critical Inquiry, 29(3), 2003, 453–458 and a few of the more critical essays in Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (eds), The Truth of Žižek (London: Continuum, 2007); in particular Jeremy Gilbert’s ‘All the Right Questions, All the Wrong Answers’, 61–81.
Slavoj Žižek, ‘Connections of the Freudian Field to Philosophy and Popular Culture’, in Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (eds), Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real (London: Continuum 2005), 75.
See, for example, Robert S. Boyton, ‘Enjoy Your Žižek: An Excitable Slovenian Philosopher Examines the Obscene Practices of Everyday Life Including His Own’, Linguafranca, 26 March 2006. Accessed on 21 December 2013, http://www.lacan.com/Žižek-enjoy.htm. Also compare Denise Gigante, ‘Toward a Notion of Critical Self-Creation: Slavoj Žižek and the “Vortex of Madness”’, New Literary History, 29(1), 1998, 153–168
Sarah Kay, Žižek: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Polity Press, 2003).
Matthew Sharpe, Slavoj Žižek: A Little Piece of the Real, (Aldershot & Burlington: Ashgate, 2004) offers a more critical overview.
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 33.
Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), 10.
Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2011), 360.
Slavoj Žižek, ‘Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology’, in Slavoj Žižek (ed.), Mapping Ideology (London & New York: Verso, 1994), 6.
Slavoj Žižek, ‘Fantasy as a Political Category: A Lacanian Approach’, in Elizabeth Wright & Edmond Wright (eds), The Žižek Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 89.
Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 21.
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge & London: MIT Press, 2006), 17.
Compare Martin Puchner’s recent contribution to the ongoing discussion of an apparent gap between philosophy and theatre and what we can all do to make more productive use of it. Martin Puchner, ‘Afterword: Please Mind the Gap between Theatre and Philosophy’, Modern Drama 56(4), 2013, 540–553.
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© 2014 Alex Mangold
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Mangold, A. (2014). Introduction: Performing Žižek: Hegel, Lacan, Marx, and the Parallax View. In: Chow, B., Mangold, A. (eds) Žižek and Performance. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403193_1
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