Personal Life
Žižek was born in 1949 in Ljubljana, the capital city of
Slovenia which was at the time a part of Yugoslavia. He spent a great part of
his childhood in the coastal town of Portorož. His parents moved back to the
Slovenian capital while he was a teenager and enrolled him to a prestigious
high school in Ljubljana. Žižek continued his education at the University of
Ljubljana where he studied philosophy and sociology. After receiving a Doctor’s
degree, he went to Paris where he studied psychoanalysis.
At the time Žižek began to study philosophy, the communist
Yugoslavia was entering a period of liberalisation. But he was studying French
structuralists even before he became a student of philosophy and sociology at
the University of Ljubljana. As a high school student, Žižek published the
first Slovene translation of Jacques Derrida.
Despite the fact that Žižek studied philosophy during the
era of liberalisation, he was influenced greatly by his teacher, Slovenian
Marxist philosopher Božidar Debenjak. The latter was a professor at the Faculty
of Arts in Ljubljana where he taught German idealism and Karl Marx’s Capital
from the Hegelian (philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel) perspective.
In the early 1970s, Žižek became an assistant researcher at
the University of Ljubljana and was promised tenure. However, soon thereafter
the Communist regime removed liberal leaders throughout Yugoslavia including
what was then the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. As a result of toughening of
the regime and Žižek’s Master’s work being evaluated as anti-Marxist, he lost
his position at the University of Ljubljana.
In 1977, after being unemployed for four years, Žižek found
a job at the Slovenian Marxist Center where he worked as a recording clerk. At
that time he also came into contact with a group of scholars who introduced him
to the theories of Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who
had a major influence on his later work. In the late 1970s, Žižek returned to
the University of Ljubljana and was employed by the Institute of Sociology.
In the late 1980s, Žižek attracted a lot of attention both
at home and abroad. At home, he gained a lot of publicity as a columnist of the
alternative magazine called Mladina (“Youth”) which was critical towards the
Communist regime. Žižek who was a member of the Communist Party (like the
majority of scholars and intellectuals at that time) returned his membership
out of protest due to the so-called JBTZ trial. It was a trial held against two
Mladina journalists, the magazine’s editor and a sergeant at the Yugoslav
People’s Army for betrayal of military secrets in 1988. Žižek became active in
political and civil movements for democratisation and even ran for Presidency
of the Republic of Slovenia at the first free elections in 1990.
In the international scene, Žižek attracted attention in the
late 1980s with his book The Sublime Object of Ideology and established himself
as one of the most influential social theorist and contemporary philosopher.
Work
Despite the fact that Žižek was actively involved in the
democratisation process in Slovenia, he is committed to the communist idea and
describes himself as a “radical leftist” and “communist in a qualified sense”.
His political ideas and criticism of the existing political and economic
systems caused a great deal of controversy in the intellectual circles on the
one hand, and earned him the title of one of the foremost thinkers of modern
times and a near celebrity-status on the other.
[…]
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