Why Did Slavoj Žižek Become So Popular?

It’s not quite right to think of Slavoj Žižek as a mere theorist; he is closer, in line with Parisian haute langue, to an “event.” As well as the numerous books he’s written, there are dozens about him. There is a journal devoted to Žižek, a Žižek dictionary, Žižek conferences, even a Žižek nightclub and a Žižek fashion collection. And before long, given the scandalous pace of capital, there may well be Žižek soft drinks, action figures, and Žižekrypto.

A perfect symbol of our overdetermined age, the Slovenian philosopher is all sound and fury, signifying everything. Were a feature film to be made about him, the lead actor would undoubtedly be accused of overcooking it. Žižek is the Platonic ideal of the “mad professor” — distracted, manic, mannered. He is a political theorist without solutions, a Marxist who rejects teleology, a skeptic about revolution, an atheist who praises Paul, and a pessimist who admits to being filled with hope by catastrophe. And he is also something rarer still: a continental philosopher who can be understood.

His lucidity is even more remarkable when one considers his intellectual genealogy: Hegelian Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. From Hegel he takes the lesson of “dialectics” — that contradictions and tensions are present in any historical situation, and that making these contradictions visible is a key part of intellectual labor. From Marx he takes the idea that, under capitalism, we are beholden to certain invisible frameworks — “ideology” — which are rendered invisible and so need to be exposed and critiqued. From psychoanalysis — and particularly the work of Jacques Lacan — he extends the ideology critique, showing how ideology displaces and smooths over the disturbing, even traumatic, tensions in social reality.

Žižek is, at times, as serious as canonical figures like Louis Althusser or Judith Butler, with whom he shares some pedigree. But his genius is not to be found in his theoretical wrestles with his forebears. It’s rather in his capacity to wield their thinking on matters of contemporary culture and politics. He revitalizes Hegelianism or psychoanalysis or dialectical materialism by showing that these intellectual traditions might help us come to grips with the world we live in. Žižek is less interested in demonstrating the theoretical rightness of Hegel or Lacan than in showing how they might be used to throw light on contemporary cultural curiosities like Kung Fu Panda or Lady Gaga. And his stylistic approach to this is excitable, hyperbolic, profane, digressive, and energetic to the point of mania.

Žižek is something like a natural phenomenon that one doesn’t turn up to hear so much as to witness; he seems less an aging academic giving a talk, and more a geyser who sprays Hegel, Lacan, and amatory jokes whether anyone is around to listen or not. But people are listening to him, by the millions. And so the question of his popularity and influence arises. Why has he gained this cultural role? And how has he done it?

Into the explanatory breach steps Eliran Bar-El’s How Slavoj Became Žižek: The Digital Making of a Public Intellectual (the University of Chicago Press, January 2023). Bar-El, a lecturer in sociology at the University of York, in England, attempts to account for Žižek’s rise to prominence from Slovenian graduate student and political figure to Marxist philosopher, and finally, to zeitgeist intellectual cause célèbre and bête noire.

Bar-El has done his homework. He dove into Žižek’s books, videos, and articles. He interviewed Žižek and his research collaborators, circulated questionnaires to Žižek Facebook groups, tracked citation indexes and Google Trends, and availed himself of N-gram analyses. Part of this data-driven orientation is a reaction against what Bar-El sees as theoretical excesses in the sociology-of-knowledge tradition of Karl Mannheim, where ideological constructs run roughshod over the empirical particulars of the world we actually inhabit.

How Slavoj Became Žižek is decidedly scholarly, not only in the sense that it has hundreds of footnotes and focuses on the intra-intellectual arena, but in the sense that it uses terms like “the intra-intellectual arena.” For Bar-El, giving a talk is a “spatiotemporal intellectual intervention,” and an argument is “a discursive process oriented toward the presentation and elaboration of reasons invoked in order to justify a stance, belief, conviction, opinion, or narrative.” Žižek’s intellectual language, Bar-El says, is “Hegelacanese.” (And we should perhaps be thankful that Žižek has read Hegel and Lacan so that we don’t have to. As an old philosophy lecturer of mine used to say, “Reading Hegel is difficult — very difficult. But if you stick with it and put in the work, you’ll also get bored.”)

In his contributions to culture, Žižek isn’t quite like disease distribution, social mobility, or ethnic conflict; and yet, Bar-El sets out to understand him as a sociological “phenomenon.” Bar-El’s focus is less on what Žižek says than on his myriad ways of saying — it is an account of those networks of critics, colleagues, publishers, and technologies that sustain Žižek’s work through circulation, critique, and defense. From this perspective, Žižek’s novel reading of Freud in The Parallax View (2006) may be less relevant to Bar-El’s task than is the marketing of that book by MIT Press as a “long-awaited magnum opus,” or that the book’s blurbs include Terry Eagleton in full gush. For Bar-El, it’s perhaps as important that Ernesto Laclau wrote the preface to Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) as it is that the book tackles certain theoretical deadlocks of the 1980s. It is an inquiry led by “positioning theory,” with a focus on where Žižek sits within a variety of media, political, intellectual, and academic contexts.

Žižek’s rise, according to Bar-El, can be accounted for in large part by his practice of “superpositioning”: “the creation of a ‘third’ position out of an existing opposition.” Žižek moves psychoanalysis outside the clinic and into the public domain; he slides pop culture up against high culture, drawing in different publics, and moves beyond their existing dichotomies; he sidles jokes and anecdotes up against Serious Theory; he moves outside the academic monograph and positions his work in pop-cultural fora. This superpositioning is part of Žižek’s success, Bar-El maintains, as well as the source of many of the criticisms stacked against him.

There is no question that the idea applies to Žižek’s work, but whether the notion itself is new, or simply newly named, is less clear. Theoretical terms run the risk of simply masking quotidian theses with an aura of rigor. What Bar-El names superpositioning has been a central feature of the humanities since the 1950s, integral to their self-concept (and often their most banal conceits). In 1955, in Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss famously gave ironic instructions on how to make intellectual work in philosophy appear profound, a method he claimed to have learned at the Sorbonne:

If nothing else, the humanities have long advertised their wares in terms of the abject, the interdisciplinary, the liminal — in “borderwork,” as a form of “betweenness,” as engaged with the “interstitial,” as between high and low culture, margins and center, in terms of the medial, the hermetic, and so on. From feminist autotheory and liberal studies to critical theory and cultural studies, what Bar-El calls superpositioning has for some time granted humanists minor industries and endless labor. One thinks of the famous Birmingham school of cultural studies and its piñata-of-choice, Theodor Adorno, the man who saw jazz as a form of cultural decline and who was, apocryphally, killed by a pair of naked breasts. (Žižek would never be so threatened.)

Why do we need “superpositioning” in the first place? The book is predicated on what a Bayesian might call the “antecedent improbability” of Žižek’s celebrity — that there is something here to be explained. All contingencies are forced into an overall scheme. That Žižek is Slovenian; that he is 74 years old; that he trained under Jacques-Alain Miller, with whom he later had a falling out; that Žižek has a beard; that he tells bawdy jokes; to all this, the sociologist says, “Ah! We could have predicted this!”

Forget Žižek for a moment. How do we explain — sociologically or otherwise — that a video of a waffle falling over has 12-million views? That the scrunchie or pie-crust hairdo returned? The emergence (and fading) of Fidget Spinners, suicidal planking, CrossFit, or Gangnam Style?

We are perennially tempted to use a kind of retrodictive logic to reconstruct something’s rise. And yet, as philosophers of science might say, the theories are underdetermined by the available data. Academic trends in philosophy are a very long game. One might have witnessed the execution of Socrates and concluded, with the Athenian state — “See? You kill the leader and you nip the whole movement in the bud!” Long-term trendspotting makes idiots of us all.

We probably wouldn’t require an explanation for a tenured Cambridge or Harvard professor from London or New York. And yet marketing language on the back cover of How Slavoj Became Žižek asks, “How did an intellectual from a remote Eastern European country come to such popular notoriety?” This is apparently anomalous, like a toddler astronaut or a dodo novelist. But what exactly is unique here?

Slovenia isn’t remote. It borders Austria and Italy and historically has undergone a melting pot of influences, from Slavic, Germanic, and Romance languages and cultures — alternately Communist, democratic, nonaligned — and historically incorporated into more than half a dozen empires. As a country, it is younger than Taylor Swift, but few places are like it with respect to cultural mixture.

We could easily also ask how a woman born of a milliner and a Tasmanian advertising salesman in an ex-penal colony came to debate Norman Mailer in New York, appear in the sights of William F. Buckley Jr’s. Firing Line, and write one of the feminist classics of the 20th century; or how an awkward kid from a working-class part of south Sydney, whose dad died in the war and whose mother was a factory worker, became a notorious public intellectual, poet, talk-show host, and uneven translator. In other words, how do we explain Germaine Greer and Clive James?

Žižek, James, and Greer are clearly “provincials,” to use the Australian critic Ivor Indyk’s language in his analyses of “the provincial imagination.” Indyk uses the term to describe those erstwhile jesters at culture’s royal courts, whose irreverence is matched only by a kind of disarming encyclopedism — the gall, and often the capacity, to write about almost anything, and to capture the public imagination in so doing.

If nothing else, Žižek has captured the public imagination. Like other provincial jesters, he expresses a studied naïveté toward the culture or society he reflects on: He professes not to know what others take for granted; he revivifies questions others consider answered; he points to differences overlooked and draws parallels where others see only differences.

Žižek rose to public prominence after 9/11, writing novel essays that sought to make sense of the global public trauma. These articles were circulated on email lists and later wound up in a collection, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002).

Aside from his standard Marxist take on “class struggle,” what was distinctive about Žižek’s writing was his denial that some fundamental clash of religions, civilizations, or ideologies was occurring. He insisted that if what America feared on September 11, 2001, was an “evil Outside,” that “Outside” also contained “the distilled version of our own essence.” Whether or not Žižek’s account is convincing or even coherent, it was timely, arresting, and showed a deft capacity to move between pop-cultural references, “high” theory, and current affairs. It stood out.

A similar vein of work covered the financial crisis, the Arab Spring, and, more recently, Covid-19. Central to its success is the speed of Žižek’s commentary. He intervenes while events are still occurring, hoping to influence outcomes at the level of interpretation. Žižek habitually asks about how much discussion on these issues occludes or excludes the social or political questions that typically frame them.

Despite his interventions on the coronavirus, Žižek decidedly isn’t an expert in public health, immunology, or health policy. In this context, he is what Bar-El calls a “sacrificial intellectual”: a figure who eschews “expert” or “authoritative” status and thus sacrifices their position or reputation in making their thought accessible to a wider audience. This, Bar-El says, contrasts with “authoritative” intellectuals like Sartre, Badiou, or Chomsky, who are seen as “establishment” academics. Never the solemn, official voice of the academy, Žižek gives the impression of a brilliant, if crazed, outsider.

Žižek also sacrifices the sort of distance usually expected of credentialed authorities, and in doing so risks error, ridicule, and other bantam humiliations. Rather than waiting for the historical dust to settle, Žižek is prone to charge into a topic before clarity on it — perhaps even his own — has emerged. Where Judith Butler’s meticulous and sober What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology came out late last year, Žižek’s first book on the pandemic was released in the spring of 2020, only a few months after the first cases of Covid-19 were found. Behind this impulse is a conception of thinking itself as a form of action, an inversion of Marx’s damnation and injunction: “The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

Why would a public intellectual’s renunciation of his authority result in popularity? One possibility is that such a move decreases resentment toward figures of authority. If modern culture is a scene, the only way of attaining centrality these days may be by claiming a margin. It matters not whether it’s Trump declaring himself the most persecuted person in American history or Jussie Smollett’s hate-crime hoax — modern claims to legitimacy are indissociably tied to self-portrayals of marginalization.

Žižek doesn’t claim victimhood but achieves a similar effect: He defangs the resentment of others through self-mockery and an ongoing deference to great names like Hegel and Lacan. Unlike other self-promotional philosophers — such as some “speculative realists” who would have you take their approach to be the next big thing and who are consumed with philosophical revolutions and a wearying attempt to secure their own place in them — Žižek typically refers to himself to achieve comic effect.

Less flatteringly, Žižek’s appeal also partly relates to a political radicalism that demands nothing of us but that we continue to watch YouTube. In this way, his is a kind of politics in the way the New Age is a kind of religion — it offers a certain assurance without demanding we show up, give money, or stop sleeping around. It’s symbolic of a leftist radicalism that lives triumphant after the demise of “actually existing socialism,” no longer having to apologize for it, let alone commit to a program of re-establishing it. But this charge, given Žižek’s explicit commitment to asking fundamental questions without supplying neat solutions, may be unfair; further, it does not distinguish him from most other contemporary “radical” thinkers at all.

And there’s another reason to be cautious about peremptory dismissal: It has become fashionable to disdain Žižek. He has become too successful, and success in the market, for intellectuals, is a sign of selling out. It also supplies detractors a far more private provocation: envy. Despite occasional claims about his lowbrow crassness, Žižek has become something far worse than that: middlebrow. For the educated classes, middlebrow is equivalent to intellectual kitsch. It is Jonathan Franzen and Radiohead and Sally Rooney and Carl Jung; it’s Banksy, Steven Pinker, and Marina Abramović. Although often at pains to signal his own marginality, Žižek undoubtedly suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous success.

Lamenting the state of public intellectuals is a popular pastime, and like any cultural role, there is not one perfect way to play the part. Diogenes of Sinope offered one model of the public intellectual — sleeping in a barrel, defecating in the street, and swearing at passers-by. Žižek’s “Communism” is an analogous provocation. (Outside of teenagerdom, Parisian cafés, and the Italian upper-middle class, to call oneself a “Communist” in front of Educated People is like declaring oneself “Roman Catholic” — it is seen as either ethically tasteless or a confession of being in the thrall of a host of criminal nostalgias.)

Yet one of the enduring roles of the public intellectual is to test society’s immune system by placing its complacently adopted ideas in doubt. Even if the intellectual’s ideas are rejected, society is likely to come away with a stronger sense of its own identity and some greater openness to the world outside it. That we are moving into a time in which this is harder to do makes the task more urgent.

Modern culture resembles nothing so much as an infinite jukebox, where everyone can select what songs they’d like to hear before risking a listen. And so part of the challenge of the public intellectual is the challenge of not just talking to a public, but of constituting one. Public intellectuals are like a stream of contestants on some reality TV show, entertainers before they are anything else, auditioned before citizen algorithms, and sent away if they are deemed unfit for programming.

They are caught in a difficult situation — to talk to a public, an intellectual needs to draw in different sides. But to constitute an audience, partisanship is now the order of the day. The problem becomes self-reinforcing: The public intellectuals who succeed are precisely the ones most prone to conceiving of their task as being commissioned officers in an ongoing cultural war. We are also plagued by a logic of contiguity: Just as Spotify can use your playlist to construct other ones you’ll enjoy, social media and streaming services can all but guarantee we need rarely — if ever — come across a view which might contradict those we find appealing.

Consider, for instance, the reasons for Jordan Peterson’s fame: his vocal stance against a Canadian gender-identity-rights bill and against “political correctness,” and his appearances on the Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin podcasts in which he — in his fans’ eyes — destroys feminists and anyone who is politically to the left of Francis Fukuyama. Peterson and his ilk are the right kind of thinker for a public that conflates personal integrity with ideological purity. Nuance here is for the dunderheaded, and admissions of complexity the road to fascism. Putting us at no risk of learning anything new, these thinkers can be pushed into battle, where they will win battles on our behalf against the legions of the great unwashed.

Our enemies are fundamentally rotten, the reasoning goes, and so we are relieved of the exceedingly difficult task of bringing people around to our position. Public intellectuals should of course take sides where this is demanded; but they are also called to ask the hardest questions about debates where deadlocks might be broken in ways not yet entertained. The barbs and one-liners of talk-show intellectuals may entertain us, but we also doubt their polysyllabic pantomime. Whatever one thinks of Žižek’s output, it is hard to argue that many of his positions can be easily reduced to the drearily rehearsed set pieces with which we have become so familiar.

Žižek, of course, is not the only example of the potential of the contemporary public intellectual — nor is he the best. As well as sadly missed figures like Mary Midgley, bell hooks, Michael Oakeshott, and Zygmunt Bauman, we have plenty of living examples. To name a few: Martha Nussbaum, Cornel West, Yuval Levin, Cass Sunstein, Roxane Gay, and David Runciman. There are also huge numbers of relatively unknown thinkers and writers who aim not only to solve urgent problems but to change our conception of the nature of those problems in ways that don’t always map onto the intellectual coordinates and attendant moral melodramas of a priori partisanship.

In the Book of Samuel, the Israelites, rejecting God, beg for a king. As an act of punishment, God — the master ironist — allows them one. Our curse, similarly, is that we believe we can know in advance our own goods, pursue them, and then get what we want. Publics end up creating the intellectuals that most reflect their own most cherished resentments and preoccupations; intellectuals then gratify the judgments of the people who have so elected them.

This process is not inevitable. But change requires we become open to different kinds of thinking, to different ways of dealing with one another, and to different ways of crafting the cultural space. Change would look like a willingness to hear and answer some vague, faint call to do something else entirely.