Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek (1949–) is a Slovene philosopher who has written numerous books about Lacan, Marx, and Hegel, peppering reams of copy with heavy interpretations of the most esoteric of Freudian thinkers with jokes about the Cold War, Alfred Hitchcock, and the difference between toilets in various European countries.

Thinking hardly
or hardly thinking?
Philosophy
Major trains of thought
The good, the bad
and the brain fart
Come to think of it
v - t - e
“”I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.
—Slavoj Žižek on ideology[1]

He went absolutely berserk when Occupy Wall Street happened, but he still has doubts about anarchism and thinks Hegel proves that a strong State is needed.

On religion

While Žižek's philosophy often draws heavily on Christian theology, he is a staunch defender of atheism.[2]

Žižek has also come out against conflating criticisms of Islam with Islamophobia, refusing to accept (quote): "prohibiting any critique of Islam as a case of ‘Islamophobia’".[3]

On Marxism

Slavoj Žižek identifies himself as a Marxist but argues that prizing action rather than thinking is a big error as it damages an ideology[4]. He also refuses the Marxist/Leninist Planned Economy, which suggests everything will become great until a period of industrialization that requires oppression. He says that all of those systems don't switch to a libertarian system after getting industrialized. [5]

On Comparing "Transgenderism" With Interspecies Marriage

In August 2016, Žižek wrote a terrible opinion piece for The Philosophical Salon called "The Sexual is Political", in which he wrote:[6]

And a similar tension is present in transgenderism. Transgender subjects who appear as transgressive, defying all prohibitions, simultaneously behave in a hyper-sensitive way insofar as they feel oppressed by enforced choice (“Why should I decide if I am man or woman?”) and need a place where they could recognize themselves. If they so proudly insist on their “trans-,” beyond all classification, why do they display such an urgent demand for a proper place? Why, when they find themselves in front of gendered toilets, don’t they act with heroic indifference–“I am transgendered, a bit of this and that, a man dressed as a woman, etc., so I can well choose whatever door I want!”? Furthermore, do “normal” heterosexuals not face a similar problem? Do they also not often find it difficult to recognize themselves in prescribed sexual identities? One could even say that “man” (or “woman”) is not a certain identity but more like a certain mode of avoiding an identity… And we can safely predict that new anti-discriminatory demands will emerge: why not marriages among multiple persons? What justifies the limitation to the binary form of marriage? Why not even a marriage with animals? After all we already know about the finesse of animal emotions. Is to exclude marriage with an animal not a clear case of “speciesism,” an unjust privileging of the human species?

Despite being a philosopher, he clearly does not understand what a slippery slope is: allowing transgender people to transition and be accepted for who they are, does not logically lead to bestiality.

gollark: But don't fall into the trap of blindly copying some real-life thing into Minecraft like *so many* people do with "OS"es.
gollark: I think what might work better is some sort of loan thing?
gollark: There are *shops* (and groups of shops) which do, but they're not organized like companies.
gollark: They just jump straight to "stock exchanges are cool real life things, how do I make one". And ignore the older, duller, but still important stuff.
gollark: For example, if you buy stock in "GTech Stores", you'd expect to get dividends if I sell anything. But nobody has actually designed a mechanism for company krist accounts, paying dividends automatically, calculating profit, accounting and all that.

References
  1. The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (2012), via Wikiquote
  2. Slavoj Žižek. Atheism is a Legacy Worth Fighting For, New York Times, Mar. 13, 2006.
  3. http://qz.com/767751/marxist-philosopher-slavoj-zizek-on-europes-refugee-crisis-the-left-is-wrong-to-pity-and-romanticize-migrants/
  4. Don't Act, But Think by Slavoj Zizek
  5. VICE's Slavoj Zizek Interview
  6. https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-sexual-is-political/
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