ABSTRACT
Slavoj Žižek (1949-) is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, his hometown. He has also been a visiting professor at several American universities.
Following formal education, Žižek was initially unable to acquire an academic post (purportedly because he was not sufficiently Marxist) and resorted to working as a translator. In the 1970s he helped form the Ljubljana Lacanians, a small band of young intellectuals interested in LACAN (Žižek himself spent time in Paris working with both Lacan and Jacques Alain-Miller, Lacan’s mentee and son-in-law). The group took over the journal Problemi. Žižek’s own contributions to this journal are often parodies or literary hoaxes. Once he wrote an anonymous negative review of one of his own books on Lacan. This kind of playfulness continues in his later work.
