The ‘Elvis of cultural theory' on Trump, hope and history's lessons
Slavoj Žižek has many intellectual heroes. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci is one. Arrested and imprisoned by Mussolini's Fascist regime in 1926, Gramsci died in 1937 in prison.
Fredric Jameson is another. The American literary-cultural theorist wrote about futurism, tech utopia, science fiction, pop culture, postmodernity and late capitalism. Last September, Jameson died, aged 90, at his home in the US. Shortly after, Žižek published a glowing obituary.
'Jameson was the last true genius in contemporary thought,' the Slovenian philosopher wrote in a Substack post: 'He was the ultimate Western Marxist, fearlessly reaching across the opposites that define our ideological space: a 'Eurocentrist' whose work resonated deeply in Japan and China.'
That poignant tribute could easily be used to describe Žižek's life and legacy. Often referred to as 'the Elvis of cultural theory', Žižek is the author of more than 50 books, which have been translated into 20 languages. Among his most famous are The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2008) and Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist (2024). He's written and presented numerous documentaries too, such as The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (2006) and The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (2012), which examine film in a philosophical and a psychoanalytic context.
'I'm a moderately conservative communist,' the provocative 76-year-old philosopher explains from his home in Ljubljana, Slovenia. 'I use the term ironically. But I think we need a radical re-arrangement of our way of life that moves towards global solidarity.' He is also a pessimistic realist. 'Optimists are always disappointed. But remaining pessimistic means when something good happens occasionally in life, the surprise brings unexpected joy.'
Next week Žižek publishes Zero Point, a collection of essays. The title is borrowed from a term used by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Five years after grabbing power, Lenin wrote a short text called On Ascending a High Mountain (1922): it used the image of a climber who retreats to a 'zero point' to rethink old strategies that have proved politically ineffective.
Žižek is fond of quoting other authors and idealists, distilling and reframing them in his own words with frantic urgency. In the opening pages of Zero Point, he borrows a line from Archaeologies of the Future (2005), in which Fredric Jameson observed that for some people 'it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism'.
Žižek says many Western leftists are still stuck in this nihilistic mindset, but there are historical reasons for this. Specifically, he's referring to the left in the West, which, in his view, traditionally meant North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. From the 1960s onwards, he says, the left began to prioritise cultural freedom and individual liberty over collective economic and political freedom.
He refers to this transition as 'the culturalisation of politics'. In his view, the left became distracted by political correctness and gave the right total control of global economic power, via neoliberalism. With its fixation on free trade, faith in markets, deregulation, globalisation, privatisation, and minimum state intervention, neoliberalism became the dominant political and economic philosophy in the West from the early 1980s, until the global economic crisis in 2008.
The left, he says, spent decades 'babbling on about neoliberalism' but lacked the strength, unity, or courage to take sufficient action to combat it. 'It gives me no pleasure to say this, but the global economy that Donald Trump has recently introduced with tariffs, trade wars, and so forth, in effect, put an end to neoliberal, global capitalism,' he says.
'Capitalism has now transformed itself into a new post-capitalist order. Which is starting to look more like techno feudalism. We are entering a new era. The left just hasn't yet fully realised it or come to terms with it yet.'
The new populist right, meanwhile, treats communism and corporate capitalism as two sides of the same coin. 'Trump pretends he is for total market freedom, but Trump is all about state intervention. He is constantly criminalising his ideological opponents, trying to control what people do, and even how they think,' says Žižek. 'This is classic communist logic. We have not seen this since the 1970s, when communism was still the dominant idea in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.'
Žižek spent most of his adult life living in a communist country. 'Without communist oppression in the mid-1970s, I would have probably ended up as a minor, local philosophy professor in Ljubljana,' he says.
He was born in 1949 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The small central European nation had then recently become part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: a one-party, multi-ethnic federation, made up of six republics, led by Marshal Josip Broz Tito. 'Yugoslavia was in one sense a totalitarian communist country, where we knew who controlled power. But it was comparably more open and liberal than other communist countries,' says Žižek. 'From the early 1960s onwards, the borders were completely open for most of the population.'
He completed a master of arts degree in philosophy in 1975 at the University of Ljubljana, and in 1981, earned his first doctor of arts degree in philosophy. That same decade he spent time in Paris, writing a second doctoral dissertation,a Lacanian interpretation of the work of Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and Saul Kripke.
A self-confessed workaholic, Žižek attributes his enormous output to the freedom that comes with being a globetrotting academic. Today, at 76, he holds several academic positions, including international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, a visiting professor at New York University, and a senior researcher in the University of Ljubljana's Department of Philosophy.
'I give talks here and there, and I am a permanent researcher, which means I have the freedom to do exactly what I want,' he says. This includes time for creative endeavours such as writing, reading, and speaking freely, without fear of censorship.
The latter half of his new book provides an account of the speech he delivered at the opening ceremony of the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2023. A controversy began with Žižek's support of Adania Shibli. The Palestinian novelist was due to receive an award at the fair for her novel Minor Detail, a fictionalised account of the rape and murder of a Palestinian Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers in 1949. But the ceremony was cancelled after October 7.
In his speech, Žižek called the decision to postpone the ceremony scandalous. He also pointed to an irony that comes with Germany's unconditional support of Israel: it contributes to the growth of antisemitism. 'Today we are witnessing something terrifying,' he says. 'The old neo-fascist European right — which was traditionally antisemitic — is now taking the side of Israel. This is a mega tragedy. Especially for Jews.'
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But does some hope loom on the horizon? To answer this, he cites a quote from a letter that the novelist Franz Kafka penned to his friend Max Brod in the 1920s. 'There is infinite hope – just not for us,' Kafka wrote.
You can read that letter two ways, Žižek explains. One interpretation says we are all doomed. Another says: there isn't much hope for us, now, at least not in our present state. But there might be if we can change how we think and act.
That, in essence, is the main argument of Žižek's latest collection of essays.
He remains cautiously sceptical about the future. 'I don't think we learn a lot from history,' he concludes. 'We are condemned to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Today, history is radically open. But there is no guarantee that we will survive.'
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