Slavoj Žižek ( (listen) SLAH-voy ZHEE-zhek; Slovene: [ˈslaʋɔj ˈʒiʒɛk]; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher, a researcher at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Arts; an International director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London.; Global Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea. He works in subjects including continental philosophy, political theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, film criticism, Marxism, Hegelianism and theology.
In 1989 Žižek published his first English-language text, The Sublime Object of Ideology, in which he departed from traditional Marxist theory to develop a materialist conception of ideology that drew heavily on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian idealism. His theoretical work became increasingly eclectic and political in the 1990s, dealing frequently in the critical analysis of disparate forms of popular culture and making him a popular figure of the academic left.
Žižek's idiosyncratic style, popular academic works, frequent magazine op-eds, and critical assimilation of high and low culture have gained him international influence, controversy, criticism and a substantial audience outside academia. In 2012, Foreign Policy listed Žižek on its list of Top 100 Global Thinkers, calling him "a celebrity philosopher" while elsewhere he has been dubbed the "Elvis of cultural theory" and "the most dangerous philosopher in the West". A 2005 documentary film entitled Zizek! chronicled Žižek's work. A journal, the International Journal of Žižek Studies, was founded to engage with his work.
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