It’s a problem when you and your spouse keep different hours. Slavoj Žižek’s wife goes to bed late, at around 4am, but he goes at 1am. In the morning he cleans, goes to the store and prepares breakfast: fresh bread, soft-boiled egg and, for her, a grapefruit. By 4pm he is tired, but his wife often claims they’ve just got up. “I say f*** you! You got up!” he cries, jabbing a middle finger in the air. “I’m already seven hours on my feet!”
The evening is his wife’s golden time. “She says, ‘Now the working day for me is over, I deserve a rest.’ She sits on the couch, her legs up, she has some small things to eat – chain-smoking – and watches a film. She wants this to be our social moment; to talk and watch TV together. And I say, ‘F*** you!’ I didn’t do anything yet! I need to do some work!”
The Slovenian journalist Jela Krečič, Žižek’s fourth wife, is a fellow Lacanian. I meet her one afternoon by chance in the street in Ljubljana; a striking, dark-haired woman with a backpack, hurrying back from university. Žižek seems genuinely excited to see her. He tells me why he fell in love with her, but it’s the only thing in eight hours of interviews that is off the record.
Though I am in Slovenia, I don’t see their apartment. I’m not missing anything, he tells me: “You will not find this mythical British place – an office with books, a pipe and a tweed jacket – it doesn’t exist.” Žižek, our most famous living cultural theorist, works on the sofa next to his wife, on his laptop, and uses a Russian pirate website from which to cut and paste quotes: Marx, Hegel, Lacan, Kierkegaard, Schelling, you name it – and his own.
Žižek can’t stop talking, but he can turn up on time. He is always early for our many meetings, which take place over two days in June. While his home is off limits, his city, he claims, is entirely uninteresting – but we take a tour of it anyway in the warm rain. He has brought me an umbrella; he also has his own – he pats his top pocket – which in Žižek language is “of anal [pronounced annal] character”, meaning compact and easy to hide. Žižek has the obsession with the bodily and the filthy that often hangs around the great intellectuals, yet he is also very proper. He constantly checks for reactions to his jokes, to see if he’s gone too far.
Amid the baroque streets of the capital there’s a handful of muscular statues cast in bronze, a glimpse of the country’s communist past under Tito. To Žižek, they’re just “some bullshit” and not worth explaining. “Now we come to the centre of power,” he says, pointing to a modernist block off Republic Square. This building was the People’s Assembly under communism, then the Slovenian parliament after the breakup of Yugoslavia – “and that, with the flag, was the most feared building: the secret police. So nice! I always say this is the Hegelian triad: the people, the party and the real power!”
Žižek is a great fan of the secret police. “In many authoritarian countries they were the source of truth,” he says. “Absolutely crucial. Pragmatic. In Cuba – I’m very pessimistic about Cuba, they screwed it up – they developed technology to track vehicles and Castro said, ‘Wonderful, now there will no longer be black market smuggling!’ The secret police said, ‘Are you crazy? Our people are starving, the only thing that allows them to survive is the black market! If you do this, there will be a revolution!’”
From the secret police museum in Budapest, he bought a candle the shape of Stalin’s head. That Žižek “loves” Stalin, the unpalatable face of communism, while celebrating the failure of the regime in his own country, is one of many things that make him appear a howling paradox. Communism sounds like a right laugh in Slovenia, though Žižek was considered a dissident: “The golden era of freedom was the last years of communism. You know why? Because the communists knew they had lost.” By the late 1980s you could get 120 satellite channels for a few pounds a month.
Zižek turned 75 in March this year. His late-life, “rock star” fame as a public intellectual came in the wake of his commentary on the financial crisis, and his Lacanian world-view chimed with a renewed interest in the connection between politics and psychoanalysis. He made films, such as The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), which offered the kind of tangible pop culture critical theory not seen since Roland Barthes. He has written nine books in the past four years – and 50 (not including co-authored titles) since 1989, when he published The Sublime Object of Ideology, sometimes referred to as his masterpiece.
When the communist regime collapsed in Slovenia in 1990, he ran for the presidency with the Liberal Democratic Party. This is not as grand as it sounds, he says: he ran as one member of a collective body for the presidency, and was not elected. But while he’d take capitalist democracy over totalitarian horror any day, he has an almost erotic interest in why communism failed. He sees theory and sex in the same way. When he gets excited by an idea, his tics go into overdrive: the swipe of the nose, the sniff, the flattening of the lips with two fingers into a triangle, and, my favourite, a quick look down from left nipple to right, as though crossing himself with his own eyes.
“Why did Stalinism go so wrong?” he says, within 20 minutes of meeting. “We still don’t have a good theory as to why. The Enlightenment project had a totalitarian potential. The Nazis were obscure biologists and racists but Stalinism’s origins were pure Enlightenment – yet it turned into an even worse terror.”
We have arrived at his favourite place, “and this is morbid”: Nebotičnik, the 1930s skyscraper built by Vladimir Šubic, once the highest building in the Balkans. The interior is polished black marble, and a narrow spiral staircase stretches vertically upwards into infinity, forming a tiny shoot: “When I was younger this was the most popular place for suicide,” Žižek says. “I think we should just organise it more. You should come here” – he gestures with a sweep of his arms – “queue up, a doctor quickly examines you, assesses whether you’re depressed enough, then a team of people comes in and cleans up the mess.”
I ask whether Lacanians have any particular thoughts on suicide, and he looks a bit shocked. Žižek’s jokes often seem to come from a sense of horror. The only phrase he says more often than “obscene” is “trigger warning”, which he announces with a great roll of the “r”, and quote marks mid air with his fingers. His mind is punctuated with human stories from terrible regimes. The Bosnian women systematically raped in front of their fathers. The Chinese cooks in Russian gulags who’d undercook rice, retrieve it undigested from the latrines and then cook it again and eat it, preventing themselves from starving.
He learned this from the novels of the Russian writer Varlam Shalamov, and claims he fell out with Jordan Peterson over literary representations of the gulag. Žižek does not share Peterson’s love for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “Solzhenitsyn is a cheap moralist. Peterson is an idiot.” When Žižek debated Peterson in Toronto in 2019, many were bemused by the lack of friction, given that their views – on the individual, the state, the Enlightenment – could not be further apart. He says he wanted to show Peterson’s followers that there was a place for them on the left.
Throughout our two days, half a dozen young men approach him in the street, blushing, to express their admiration. He undercuts their polite requests with performatively chauvinistic humour, agreeing to selfies as long as they’re meant for a female friend.
While students recognise him, the Slovenian media ignores him and so, increasingly, does the mainstream left-wing press internationally. Žižek is in a strange place in 2024. Jokes are innate to his political pessimism, and his pessimism is offset by his energy; while humour drives his work, it also undermines its seriousness. “The fans are attracted to my dirty jokes, the idea that I am normal,” he says, “but this perception, the right-wingers use against me. They call me one of the world’s best-known ridiculous clowns.”
A few years ago, he was done for self-plagiarism by the New York Times: “It’s like calling masturbation self-rape,” he cries. He justifies this “ecological” approach to his material – or rather, recycling – via Lacan. “The continuity of Lacan’s thought is not so much theories, as stories and examples. His written words, let’s be frank, are very difficult to read – but his seminars are almost like the associations of a patient, and the public is his analyst. His ideas change – people don’t take this into account.”
He is working on a book about soft fascism – “though I will be accused of trying to redeem it… Nazism was an exception: it was suicidal fascism, kill them all. But Mussolini and Franco were soft fascism. If Mussolini had not been so stupid as to join with Hitler, he’d have been one of the godfathers of the European Union. The future is soft fascism. Deng Xiaoping changed China from a communist country to soft fascism: liberalise the economy, liberalise culture, but the party retains absolute control. Erdoğan is doing exactly the same. But Putin is closer to Hitler.”
In March this year, Žižek said the UK was on the way to being a failed state, along with France. He has little interest in UK politics – “You have one big central modest right party, called the Labour Party, then you have some fringe crazy lefties called the Conservatives” – and, though he was in London on 4 July, he did not watch the election. But the French elections captured his imagination – specifically the scale of Le Pen’s defeat, a phenomenon he thinks was achieved by French voters fully accepting the reality of her triumph, then “mobilising” themselves to change their destiny.
Ukraine is a hinge-point for Žižek: his stance has alienated some on the left. “I see the reasoning: that war never solves it,” he says. “But war does solve it, I’m sorry! Ukraine is like Gaza; in both, the attacker talks about ‘peace’, but peace means their total victory. More and more, the story of the left is self-criminalisation: didn’t we provoke Russia too much with Ukraine? F*** you, it didn’t begin with Ukraine!”
In fact, the left is so factionalised that Žižek and the Centre for Ideology Critique and Žižek Studies at Cardiff University no longer talk to one another. The course convenor, Professor Fabio Vighi, tells me he objects to Žižek’s increasing “conservatism”, calling him a “good old neurotic afraid to lose his ‘place in the sun’ under Western capitalism”. Žižek says Vighi “thinks the Ukraine war is just a plot of the big capital to keep the working class under control”.
“It feels so stupid when people accuse me of being a Nato agent in the big media,” Žižek continues. “Fifteen years ago, at least once a month, I did the op-ed for New York Times. Newsweek. Guardian. Now I’m prohibited everywhere!” He takes me through media outlets one by one, on his fingers. The New Left Review never really liked him, he says, because of what Tariq Ali calls “Slovene egotism”. “The Guardian couldn’t forgive me my Trump joke,” he says, referring to his endorsement of Trump in 2016. “I meant, before he becomes too strong, give him a chance with the hope that he will screw things up,” he says. “Today, one must unconditionally oppose Trump. His new presidency would have terrible consequences internationally – the US would become another [totalitarian] Brics country like Russia and China.”
“Dead to me!” he says, by email, a few weeks later. “This is how I feel – the outside world is dead to me!” But he earns decent money from his Substack, which is put together by Hanif Kureishi’s son Carlo.
As we sit in a café one afternoon, I notice, over Žižek’s shoulder, a man approaching slowly; cropped hair, small round glasses and the kind of umbrella made famous by spies in Soviet Russia. He starts shouting something at the back of Žižek’s head. Žižek doesn’t notice. The man retreats, then changes his mind and spins on his heel, coming back. Žižek turns. After a conversation in raised voices, he tells me, “He was saying, ‘You can sit here philosophising but what are we going to do about everything?’ He was a touch aggressive, this man.”
The question of “What are we going to do about it?” hangs in the air. We live in an age unsuited to the contradiction of dialectical reasoning. The philosopher and New Statesman writer John Gray met Žižek at a conference on Spinoza in Amsterdam. “Not a streak of modesty, the self deprecation is a form of camouflage,” he says. “Žižek has a lot in common with GK Chesterton,” Gray tells me. “He is not your standard liberal or even Marxian humanist. He tends to think in a dialectical fashion, which seeks out the weaknesses of progressive thinking, even if he is in himself a kind of ultra-progressive. He is very hard to categorise – that’s a good feature of him. There is a conservative element to his thinking; at the same time, his message is: ‘Carry on, persist in your dreams, even if you know that none of them are going to come true.’”
Gray does not think Žižek’s philosophy original: he calls him “a brilliant and witty pastichist of the highest order. He may have the suspicion that once he’s gone, once he’s not keeping them entertained on the cabaret stage, he will be forgotten – and he might be.” But he has sympathy for his treatment by the left-wing press. “Žižek is running against the grain of the sensibility of the current left, which is censorious, angry, indignant and unforgiving. These days a ‘critical thinker’ on the left is one who repeats robotic formulae. Žižek is a genuine critical thinker – that’s one reason they dislike him!”
Perhaps Žižek is bored? Politics is ephemeral: he refers to his shorter texts as “that political bullshit”. At the top of the suicide tower, before lunch, he enters a kind of automatic speech, talking for so long without pause that in my eyeline, our stomachs rumbling, he starts to go fuzzy round the edges. Later, revived by pork cutlets, he puts it like this: “I call myself a moderately conservative communist, and I mean it. Not in the sense of proletarian revolution, f*** that. Communist in the sense of the crisis we are approaching ecologically, war, immigration; even stronger state authority is not enough… This is why I’m not only against Brexit, but I’m against how Europe is now falling apart. What I like about a united Europe is that there are certain basic rights – ecology, women’s rights, welfare, healthcare – that should be the minimum. Then you can be conservative, whatever, I don’t care.”
Žižek’s sensibility is perhaps better suited to opposing the culture wars. He likes to say things like: “To be really anti-racist is to be racist towards every nation, including your own.” He offended the American philosopher Judith Butler with a joke about her sexuality. “I knew I had gone too far. I called her and said sorry; she said, ‘No apology is needed.’ I said, ‘OK. I take my apology back.’ This is the paradox of language: if I do something tasteless, the proper way for you to accept my apology is to say, ‘No apology needed.’ If you accept my apology, it means you didn’t really forgive me!”
“We are in a regressive era,” he continues. “Some points should be simply out of debate. Like when people argue against rape. I don’t want to live in a society where you have to argue all the time against rape. I want to live in a society where if someone excuses rape – with all the stupidities they use – they appear an idiot.”
That evening, we meet again, at the National Museum’s cultural centre, after a three-hour break during which he won’t say what he did. We sit in the shadow of a bush, around a corner where he won’t get recognised, and he sucks down three Pepsis – Žižek doesn’t drink alcohol – while he encourages me to eat “a shitty croque madame thing”. He sets the alarm on his phone to go off for when his wife wants him to come home: a gentle, soothing ringtone. At first he talks about how dishwashers that really get your plates clean cost around £30,000. Then he tells me about his parents.
When Žižek’s mother was dying of cancer, 20 years ago, there was a period of four days when she was conscious and trying to speak, but couldn’t: “This was a trauma for me.” The bribery system in hospitals was an open secret. Žižek is fascinated with corruption, but these memories upset him. His mother had been put in a room with seven beds. For 300 German marks, he could get her into a room with three; for a thousand, she could be alone. You had to put the cash in an envelope, and place it in a paper bag, with a bottle of brandy. “I was so ashamed. The doctor took the bag, then immediately came out and said he had found a room for her. Where is the dignity? I thought he would be a little more discreet. I thought he would leave it a couple of hours.”
His phone bleeps: his son is using his credit card to order a takeaway.
“If someone close to me died, I would ask one question: was it quick? If it was, no problem, I’ll have another Coke – if not, I don’t know if I would survive.”
What was his relationship with his parents? “In the usual way, I loved them, but I didn’t really like them,” he says. “My mother was too inquisitive. One of my nightmarish memories: in high school I had a crush on a girl from my class, very dramatic. She didn’t want me. My mother found out about it, and went to the mother of the girl and complained. The mother told the girl. And the girl mockingly told me. This was traumatic.”
His father was a civil servant for the Tito regime: “In some sense honest, but self-convinced, and so arrogant. He was a communist, but at the same time an opportunist. He was controlling, but he was envious. When I ran for the presidency, he went crazy: ‘This will ruin your life!’ He refused to help my mother with the housework, out of principle. I was so ashamed. He had small rituals, which I resented. When I was 13 or 14, he’d come home from work, sit down on a comfortable chair and ask me to untie his shoes. Then he’d say, please talk some nonsense to distract me a little bit. It was so humiliating.” When Žižek was 16, his parents moved with his father’s work to Stuttgart, and he lived alone in Ljubljana: “This saved me.”
Though he is the most famous associate of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, his own experience of analysis was limited to just two or three months in the 1980s, when a love affair had left him suicidal. At the time of the affair, he was married to his first wife with whom he had a son, and studying psychoanalysis at University Paris 8. He lived on 100 francs a day, and the sessions for personal analysis, with Lacan’s son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller, were 200 francs each. The Lacanian tradition includes a variable approach to time, which he now parodies: “Psychoanalysis helped me very much, but in a bureaucratic way,” he says. “In the true Lacanian way, sessions were a maximum of five minutes and an analyst can tell you to come back immediately, or one hour later. To avoid any unpleasant surprises, I always prepared enough stuff for two or three sessions in advance – it’s my bureaucratic attitude. I thought: ‘I could kill myself, but the day after tomorrow I have the analytic session and the analyst would be annoyed.’ That’s why I love bureaucracy! It saved my life.”
Žižek met Lacan only once: he says Lacan would dip a madeleine cake in his tea and suck it noisily while a patient spoke about their trauma. Miller wanted to establish a Lacanian school, and hoped Žižek would train as an analyst: “You do a one-hour interview with me and you get to ask me one question!” he says. “Can you imagine me just sitting there and listening to my patient? Half a minute, then I’d begin to talk.”
It is in this setting, and on these themes – subjectivity, illusion, the unconscious – that Žižek comes alive. In the failing light, with a church bell chiming nine times in the background, he looks like a Greek philosopher talking to invisible acolytes. Soon it is dark and I cannot see his face at all. “With Lacan, the unconscious is a fake, it’s a lie!” he cries. Does Žižek not believe in the unconscious? “I do, but I prefer not to know about it. I don’t want to know too much about myself because I will discover that I’m full of s***, deep within myself. I believe in surface. Nice manners.”
He tries to forget his dreams. “If I have sexual dreams, they are never dreams of enjoyment,” he says sadly. “There is a lady I want to have sex with. She’s emitting the proper voices, but then all of a sudden I notice that she’s a doll, all plastic, and then I don’t even have an erection. All is fake. This is my typical sex dream.”
If he could have dinner with anyone, it would not be Lacan or Marx but, indeed, GK Chesterton, whose critique on the Book of Job partially inspired Žižek’s new book on Christian atheism. The concept – that only through the structure of Christianity, with its innate sense of subjectivity, can true atheism be attained – is the kind of paradox pleasing to Žižek: it is rooted in Hegel. At the moment Christ, on the cross, cries, “My Lord, why have you forsaken me?” he extinguishes God, creating an egalitarian community of believers on Earth with no higher power.
The theologian John Milbank agrees with Žižek’s reading of Hegel. Žižek’s world-view, Milbank says, is “very negative and pessimistic… Yet he’s not a gloomy person – it’s fascinating! He is laughing. Even though he comes across as crazy, in a way he represents sanity. There is a weird common sense about him. He rejects wokery, but is not tempted towards populism. He may prove to be a transitional figure, but an important one.”
Back at the museum, in the dark garden, Žižek’s wife alarm sounds. “Now,” he says, with flair, “I will go directly to the point. As for tomorrow, something came up. I am very friendly with my heart doctor – it’s the only way to survive – and I have an appointment, so morning is s***. Evening is s*** because I have to visit my first wife and son. So if you want to do a quickie, I have a gap around half past three.”
I see him one last time, after his regular cardiogram: he has heart palpitations and diabetes. He also has regular colonoscopies: “These are no problem for me – I have a very straight bowel.” He complains that he’s been feeling tired this year, and it stops him working so much.
“Yes, I have all these jokes,” Žižek tells me, “but I write serious, fat books. I still believe in the Big Other, in the sense of some real public who read them.” Not that he’s always pleased with them. “The one I thought would be doing better – though I’m not really into it – is Hegel in a Wired Brain [about AI]. Then I thought Freedom: A Disease Without Cure would be the big one, but it’s a little bit too confused!” Less Than Nothing, a philosophical mega-work first turned down by MIT Press and later published by Verso, outsells his political texts. “No, people are not idiots! I still have this naive trust that if you really put an effort into it, there still is some serious public which is interested.”
Žižek has an insatiable desire to connect, and correspondents are instantly “friends”. He refers constantly to his friends – from Rowan Williams to the late Toni Morrison (“totally my style”) to the Native Americans of Missoula, Montana. He still has fierce armies of supporters in the academic world and travels internationally, speaking at conferences on German idealism. But his life is also very small: “Wives, children, a couple of theorists and that’s it!” He has written to the quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli. “Ontological questions are returning with a vengeance,” he says. “The past is not self-enclosed: it is open, waiting for the future.”
He has long had a tradition of taking his sons on holidays in places with totalitarian, “capitalist” regimes. “Big sinful holidays”, he calls them. He has been to Macao for the super-casinos; Shanghai and Hong Kong, all business class. “No sinful holiday this year,” he says, by email, a few weeks after we meet. “Too busy, plus too old and too tired.”
“Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist” is published by Bloomsbury; “Against Progress: Essays” is forthcoming in October
[See also: Joseph Stiglitz: the UK’s tax system is “inexcusable”]
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This article appears in the 25 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2024