Slovenian philosopher, born 1949
Slavoj Žižek
Žižek criticises communist ideology while defending the communist idea. He rejects populism in theory yet sometimes seems to endorse it in practice. These contradictions point to a position rather than to mistakes: it is here that his thinking on ideology, populism and utopia becomes clearest.
The post-communist communist
Žižek is the best-known member of the so-called Ljubljana School, the circle of Slovenian philosophers who since the 1980s have read Hegel and Marx through Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis. His breakthrough, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), appeared the year the Berlin Wall fell.
At the heart of his work lies what looks like an oxymoron: a post-communist communism, an attempt to criticise historically existing communism while still remaining a communist. Many readers have therefore set one side aside, dismissing his communism as yet another provocation, or seeing his critique as a veil over a longing for totalitarianism. I take both sides seriously.
Four strands in my reading
From ideology to idea
Žižek’s defence of the idea of communism grows out of his long engagement with communist ideology. What matters is how he understands the idea itself. The early, Kantian understanding, summed up in Beckett’s “fail again, fail better”, measures the idea against an ideal it will always fall short of. The later, Hegelian one sees the idea as something that transforms itself in the course of its actualisation. Revolution then no longer depends on the heroic act of a subject but on the idea’s own logic, and the utopia only emerges afterwards, in the light of a failure.
Populism: first tragedy, then farce
The debate between Žižek and Ernesto Laclau is usually read as a choice between reformist populism and revolutionary communism. I read it instead as a disagreement over the relationship between theory and political practice. Žižek sees a fetishistic tendency in Laclau, one that domesticates the negativity Lacan calls objet a. His contradictory stance on populism, sometimes affirming it in practice while always rejecting it in theory, thus becomes a staging of populism’s limits: any leftist populism, whatever its successes, ends in disaster.
Irony or catachresis
If democracy is understood antagonistically, populism can no longer be dismissed as purely anti-democratic. Laclau focuses on catachresis, giving a name to what has none of its own. Žižek focuses on irony. Irony shows that we cannot decide on theoretical grounds whether populism as such is democratic: it can move between the democratic and the non-democratic core of democracy. That is why populism can work in practice but never in theory.
Dialectical sophistics
Žižek reads the debate between Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin as a new version of the dialogue between Plato and the sophists. Through him, a dialectical sophistics becomes possible: only by acknowledging that neither philosophy nor sophistics can ever close into a complete totality can we move beyond their antagonism. Faced with so-called post-truth, this means that the way to truth runs through post-truth, not around it.
My work on Žižek
2020. Slavoj Žižek and Dialectical Sophistics. Philosophy & Rhetoric 53(2). Post-truth, Badiou, Cassin and dialectical sophistics.
2023. Ironier och katakreser: Populismens logik eller kommunismens idé? (in Swedish). Rhetorica Scandinavica 85. Žižek and Laclau, with the Swedish Moderates as the example.
2023. From Communist Ideology to the Idea of Communism. Filozofski vestnik 44(1). How Žižek’s notion of communism changes.
2025. Tragedy, Then Farce: Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Populism. Crisis & Critique 12(1). The debate with Laclau as a question of theory and practice.
Where to start reading
The way in. The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso, 1989).
On the idea of communism. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (Verso, 2009).
On populism. “Against the Populist Temptation”, Critical Inquiry 32(3) (2006).
The main work. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Verso, 2012).
