ABSTRACT
When crossing ways with any written testimony of Slavoj Žižek’s thought, the unwarned reader may be baffled by the broad ideational terrain and seamless eclecticism unfolding before one’s eyes. Equally controversial and captivating, Žižek’s corpus nonchalantly sails through numerous heterogeneous disciplines, unrelated historical epochs, and radically disparate ways of thinking. As Sarah Kay observes: “Reading Žižek is like taking an exhilarating ride on a roller-coaster through anecdote, Kant, popular film, science, religion, smut, current affairs, modern art, Derrida, political correctness, canonical literature, cyberspace, etc., etc., being constantly buffeted as you do so in the twists and turns of Hegelian dialectic and Lacanian theory.”1 Slavoj Žižek was born on March 21, 1949 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. His first doctoral degree on German idealism was received in his hometown, while the second, on Lacan and Hegel, was completed in Paris. The vast recognition Žižek enjoys today is due to both his gigantesque work (over fifty singly authored books translated into twenty languages) and an assiduous lecturing activity. A visiting professor at numerous North American universities, Žižek holds permanent positions at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana, and at the European Graduate School. He is also the founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana. Currently, he serves as International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. His latest interests orbit around such socio-political topics as globalization, multiculturalism, ideology, Leninism, while his increasing concern for ethics, theology, and even opera adds an interesting twist to the communist-revolutionary ideals he proudly upholds. The superlative appraisals of his authorship did not lag behind. 2
Regarding Žižek’s mentors, Hegel and Marx occupy the foreground, followed closely by Kant and Schelling. However, the axis mundi of his theoretical cosmos remains the unorthodox French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. Generally speaking,
1 Sarah Kay, Žižek: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press 2003, p. 1. 2 For illuminating discussions of Žižek’s theories, philosophical or otherwise, see Tony Myers, Slavoj Žižek, London and New York: Routledge 2003; Ian Parker, Slavoj Žižek: A
Slavoj Žižek advocates an essentialism or an ontology of the void.3 That is to say, he inoculates the language of essentiality with constant references to gaps, splits, and various other instantiations of non-identity. For him, reality “is never a complete, self-enclosed, positive order of being,”4 but rather the timeless “ontological gap”5 in the very heart of existence. Therefore, truth should be predicated only on “the interstice, the non-self-coincidence of Being, that is, [on] the ontological nonclosure of the order of Being.”6 However, Žižek’s ontology is suffused with such concepts as impossibility, primordial trauma, and unbearable surplus. In this line of thinking, every structured pattern appears as “precariously balanced on a seething morass of disorder, and at the same time incomprehensibly penetrated by it, so that, in the midst of the order there always persists an ‘indivisible remainder’ of chaos.”7 In the following, we shall see how this unique mélange of essentialism, pathological bellicosity, and subtle nihilism insinuates itself into Žižek’s reading of Kierkegaard.
