Slavoj Žižek

Žižek was born in Ljubljana in Yugoslavia to an economist and a civil servant. He studied philosophy and sociology at the University of Ljubljana, where his 1975 master's thesis was rejected as 'not Marxist enough', leaving him without a post for years and working at home as a translator and writer. He took his doctorate in 1981, then studied in Paris with Lacan's son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller and took a second doctorate in 1985 with a Lacanian reading of Hegel, Marx and Kripke.

In the 1980s he was active in the Slovene democratic opposition, founding a journal, and in 1990 stood as the Liberal Democratic candidate in Slovenia's first presidential election, finishing fourth. The Sublime Object of Ideology, published in English in 1989, made his name at once. Ideology, it argues, is not false consciousness: people do not really believe, but their actions 'believe for them', and cynical distance is exactly how ideology works; ideology supplies a fantasy that conceals the impossibility of society itself, forever torn by the trauma of a 'Real' that cannot be symbolised.

He then wrote at astonishing speed, producing over seventy books on subjects from Hitchcock, David Lynch and Hollywood to Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Christianity and Lenin, in a style that switches constantly between the most abstruse philosophy and the crudest jokes, often within one paragraph. His central tools are Lacan's three registers (imaginary, symbolic, real), the concept of jouissance, the 'big Other' and the void of the subject, used to reread Hegel: negativity is not a moment to be sublated but the subject itself. The thousand-page Less Than Nothing (2012) is his philosophical summa.

He is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy in Ljubljana and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London, and has taught at NYU and across Europe; the documentaries The Pervert's Guide to Cinema and The Pervert's Guide to Ideology made him a figure of popular culture, 'the Elvis of cultural theory'. He calls himself a 'moderately conservative communist', backed Occupy and Sanders, attacks political correctness and liberal multiculturalism, and his positions on Ukraine, Israel and Trump infuriate left and right alike. Chomsky said his work was 'empty'; he replied that Chomsky had not understood it. He still publishes several books a year.