Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek (born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. Žižek is a Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School and senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana. He was the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London from 2004 until September 2025.

He primarily works on continental philosophy (particularly Hegelianism, psychoanalysis and Marxism) and political theory, as well as film criticism and theology. Žižek is an associate of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, a group of Slovenian academics working on German idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, ideology critique, and media criticism. His first book in English is The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), which was used in the introduction of the Ljubljana School's thought to English-speaking audiences.

He has written over 50 books in multiple languages and speaks Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, English, German, and French. The idiosyncratic style of his public appearances, frequent magazine op-eds, and academic works, characterised by the use of obscene jokes and pop cultural examples, as well as politically incorrect provocations, have gained him fame, controversy, and criticism both in and outside academia.