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This article may contain original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding references. Statements consisting only of original research may be removed. More details may be available on the talk page. (February 2012)

An ideology is a set of ideas that constitute one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things (compare worldview), as in several philosophical tendencies (see Political ideologies), or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society (a "received consciousness" or product of socialization). The main purpose behind an ideology is to offer either change in society, or adherence to a set of ideals where conformity already exists, through a normative thought process. Ideologies are systems of abstract thought applied to public matters and thus make this concept central to politics. Implicitly every political or economic tendency entails an ideology whether or not it is propounded as an explicit system of thought. It is how society sees things.

(For the Marxist definition of ideology, see Ideology as an instrument of social reproduction below.)

History[link]

This section contains information which may be of unclear or questionable importance or relevance to the article's subject matter. Please help improve this article by clarifying or removing superfluous information. (November 2010)

The term "ideology" was born in the highly controversial philosophical and political debates and fights of the French Revolution and acquired several other meanings from the early days of the First French Empire to the present. The word was coined by Destutt de Tracy in 1796,^[1][2] assembling the parts idea (near to the Lockean sense) and -logy. He used it to refer to one aspect of his "science of ideas" (to the study itself, not the subject of the study). He separated three aspects, namely: ideology, general grammar, and logic, considering respectively the subject, the means, and the reason of this science.^[3] He argues that among these aspects ideology is the most generic term, because the science of ideas also contains the study of their expression and deduction.

According to Karl Mannheim's historical reconstruction of the shifts in the meaning of ideology, the modern meaning of the word was born when Napoleon Bonaparte (as a politician) used it in an abusive way against "the ideologues" (a group which included^{[citation needed]} Cabanis, Condorcet, Constant, Daunou, Say, Madame de Staël, and Tracy), to express the pettiness of his (liberal republican) political opponents.

Perhaps the most accessible source for the near-original meaning of ideology is Hippolyte Taine's work on the Ancien Regime (the first volume of "Origins of Contemporary France"). He describes ideology as rather like teaching philosophy by the Socratic method, but without extending the vocabulary beyond what the general reader already possessed, and without the examples from observation that practical science would require. Taine identifies it not just with Destutt De Tracy, but also with his milieu, and includes Condillac as one of its precursors. (Tracy read the works of Locke and Condillac while he was imprisoned during the Reign of Terror.)

The word "ideology" was coined long before the Russians coined "intelligentsia", or before the adjective "intellectual" referred to a sort of person (see substantive), i.e. an intellectual. Thus these words were not around when the hard-headed, driven Napoleon Bonaparte took the word "ideologues" to ridicule his intellectual opponents. Gradually, however, the term "ideology" has dropped some of its pejorative sting, and has become a neutral term in the analysis of differing political opinions and views of social groups.^[4] While Karl Marx situated the term within class struggle and domination,^[5][6] others believed it was a necessary part of institutional functioning and social integration.^[7]

Analysis[link]

Meta-ideology is the study of the structure, form, and manifestation of ideologies. Meta-ideology posits that ideology is a coherent system of ideas, relying upon a few basic assumptions about reality that may or may not have any factual basis, but are subjective choices that serve as the seed around which further thought grows. According to this perspective, ideologies are neither right nor wrong, but only a relativistic intellectual strategy for categorizing the world. The pluses and minuses of ideology range from the vigor and fervor of true believers to ideological infallibility. Excessive need for certitude lurks at fundamentalist levels in politics and religions.

The works of George Walford and Harold Walsby, done under the heading of systematic ideology, are attempts to explore the relationships between ideology and social systems. Charles Blattberg has offered an account which distinguishes political ideologies from political philosophies.^[8]

David W. Minar describes six different ways in which the word "ideology" has been used:

1. As a collection of certain ideas with certain kinds of content, usually normative;
2. As the form or internal logical structure that ideas have within a set;
3. By the role in which ideas play in human-social interaction;
4. By the role that ideas play in the structure of an organization;
5. As meaning, whose purpose is persuasion; and
6. As the locus of social interaction, possibly.

For Willard A. Mullins, an ideology is composed of four basic characteristics:

1. it must have power over cognition
2. it must be capable of guiding one's evaluations;
3. it must provide guidance towards action;
4. and, as stated above, it must be logically coherent.

Mullins emphasizes that an ideology should be contrasted with the related (but different) issues of utopia and historical myth.

The German philosopher Christian Duncker called for a "critical reflection of the ideology concept" (2006). In his work, he strove to bring the concept of ideology into the foreground, as well as the closely connected concerns of epistemology and history. In this work, the term ideology is defined in terms of a system of presentations that explicitly or implicitly claim to absolute truth.

Though the word "ideology" is most often found in political discourse, there are many different kinds of ideology: political, social, epistemological, ethical, etc.

Ideology as an instrument of social reproduction[link]

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Karl Marx posits that a society’s dominant ideology is integral to its superstructure.

In the Marxist economic base and superstructure model of society, base denotes the relations of production, and superstructure denotes the dominant ideology (religious, legal, political systems). The economic base of production determines the political superstructure of a society. Ruling class-interests determine the superstructure and the nature of the justifying ideology—actions feasible because the ruling class control the means of production. For example, in a feudal mode of production, religious ideology is the most prominent aspect of the superstructure, while in capitalist formations, ideologies such as liberalism and social democracy dominate. Hence the great importance of the ideology justifying a society; it politically confuses the alienated groups of society via false consciousness, such as in the case of commodity fetishism—the belief that value is inherent to a commodity, rather than external, added to it via labor.

The ruling class affect their social reproduction by the dominant ideology's representing—to every social-economic class—that the economic interests of the ruling class are the economic interests of the entire society. Some explanations have been presented. György Lukács proposes ideology as a projection of the class consciousness of the ruling class. Antonio Gramsci uses cultural hegemony to explain why the working-class have a false ideological conception of what are their best interests.

Chronologically, the dominant ideologies in Capitalism are:

1. classical liberalism
2. modern liberalism^[9]
3. social democracy
4. neo-liberalism

corresponding to these three capitalist stages of development:

1. extensive stage
2. intensive stage
3. contemporary capitalism (late capitalism)

The Marxist formulation of "ideology as an instrument of social reproduction" is conceptually important to the sociology of knowledge, viz. Karl Mannheim, Daniel Bell, and Jürgen Habermas et al. Moreover, Mannheim has developed, and progressed, from the "total" but "special" Marxist conception of ideology to a "general" and "total" ideological conception acknowledging that all ideology (including Marxism) resulted from social life, an idea developed by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

[edit] Louis Althusser's Ideological State Apparatuses

Louis Althusser proposed a materialistic conception of ideology, which made use of a special type of discourse: the lacunar discourse. A number of propositions, which are never untrue, suggest a number of other propositions, which are. In this way, the essence of the lacunar discourse is what is not told (but is suggested).

For example, the statement "All are equal before the law," which is a theoretical groundwork of current legal systems, suggests that all people may be of equal worth or have equal "opportunities". This is not true, for the concept of private property and power over the means of production results in some people being able to own more (much more) than others. This power disparity contradicts the claim that all share both practical worth and future opportunity equally; for example, the rich can afford better legal representation, which practically privileges them before the law.

Althusser also proffered the concept of the Ideological State Apparatus to explain his theory of ideology. His first thesis was "ideology has no history": while individual ideologies have histories, interleaved with the general class struggle of society, the general form of ideology is external to history. His second thesis, "Ideas are material", explains his materialistic attitude, which he illustrates with the "scandalous advice" of Pascal toward unbelievers: "kneel and pray, and then you will believe". For Althusser, beliefs and ideas are the products of social practices, not the reverse. What is ultimately important for Althusser are not the subjective beliefs held in the "minds" of human individuals, but rather the material institutions, rituals, and discourses that produce these beliefs.

Feminism as critique of ideology[link]

Naturalizing socially constructed patterns of behavior has always been an important mechanism in the production and reproduction of ideologies. Feminist theorists have paid close attention to these mechanisms. Adrienne Rich, for example, has shown how to understand motherhood as a social institution. However, feminism is not a homogeneous whole, and some corners of feminist thought criticize the critique of social constructionism, by advocating that it disregards too much of human nature and natural tendencies. The debate, they say, is about the normative/naturalistic fallacy—the idea that just something "being" natural does not necessarily mean it "ought" to be the case.

Political ideologies[link]

Many political parties base their political action and program on an ideology. In social studies, a Political Ideology is a certain ethical set of ideals, principles, doctrines, myths, or symbols of a social movement, institution, class, or large group that explains how society should work, and offers some political and cultural blueprint for a certain social order. A political ideology largely concerns itself with how to allocate power and to what ends it should be used. Some parties follow a certain ideology very closely, while others may take broad inspiration from a group of related ideologies without specifically embracing any one of them.

Political ideologies have two dimensions:

1. Goals: how society should work
2. Methods: the most appropriate ways to achieve the ideal arrangement.

An ideology is a collection of ideas. Typically, each ideology contains certain ideas on what it considers to be the best form of government (e.g. democracy, theocracy, etc.), and the best economic system (e.g. capitalism, socialism, etc.). Sometimes the same word is used to identify both an ideology and one of its main ideas. For instance, "socialism" may refer to an economic system, or it may refer to an ideology which supports that economic system.

Ideologies also identify themselves by their position on the political spectrum (such as the left, the center or the right), though this is very often controversial. Finally, ideologies can be distinguished from political strategies (e.g. populism) and from single issues that a party may be built around (e.g. legalization of marijuana). Philosopher Michael Oakeshott provides a good definition of ideology as "the formalized abridgment of the supposed sub-stratum of the rational truth contained in the tradition."

Studies of the concept of ideology itself (rather than specific ideologies) have been carried out under the name of systematic ideology.

Political ideologies are concerned with many different aspects of a society, some of which are: the economy, education, health care, labor law, criminal law, the justice system, the provision of social security and social welfare, trade, the environment, minors, immigration, race, use of the military, patriotism, and established religion.

There are many proposed methods for the classification of political ideologies. See the political spectrum article for a more in-depth discussion of these different methods (each of whom generates a specific political spectrum).

Today, many commentators claim that we are living in a post-ideological age,^[10] in which redemptive, all-encompassing ideologies have failed, and this is often associated with Francis Fukuyama's writings on "the end of history".^[11]

LANGUAGE & IDEOLOGY Andrew Goatly, the contemporary cognitive scholar, reminds us in his 'Washing the Brain' (2007) that ideologies are always maintained in language. Resisting ideolologies involves resisting the conceptual metaphors which an ideology adopts and imposes upon us, Goatly argues, following George Lakoff and his critique of conceptual metaphors in contemporary politics. But does ideology take root in language or in languages? James W. Underhill, in 'Creating Worldviews: ideology, metaphor & language' (2011, Edinburgh UP) investigates the way ideologies encrust within different languages, harnessing key concepts such as 'the people' and 'struggle' and 'history'. But he also demonstrates the way Czechs resisted the conceptual constraints being foisted upon them, and the way Germans resisted the Hitlerdeutsch being promoted by the fascists. These studies are revealing in that they show that ideologies must take root within the worldview of the language, but, at the same time, individuals resist the appropriation of concepts and the new emerging patterns of thought by thinking, speaking and writing. Propaganda belongs to the Party and the State, but, to a large extent, the language always belongs to the people. Underhill's multilingual studies of key concepts, truth, love, hate & war, (in 'Ethnolinguistics & Cultural Concepts', Cambridge UP 2012) investigate the uniqueness of each of these concepts in different languages (English, French, German and Czech). These studies also trace the ways in which ideological discourse spreads to other languages via translation (see the spread of neoconservative worldview and the discourse of the War on Terror).

Epistemological ideologies[link]

Even when the challenging of existing beliefs is encouraged, as in scientific theories, the dominant paradigm or mindset can prevent certain challenges, theories, or experiments from being advanced.

A special case of science adopted as ideology is that of ecology, which studies the relationships among living things on Earth. Perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson believed that human perception of ecological relationships was the basis of self-awareness and cognition itself. Linguist George Lakoff has proposed a cognitive science of mathematics wherein even the most fundamental ideas of arithmetic would be seen as consequences or products of human perception—which is itself necessarily evolved within an ecology.

Deep ecology and the modern ecology movement (and, to a lesser degree, Green parties) appear to have adopted ecological sciences as a positive ideology.

Some accuse ecological economics of likewise turning scientific theory into political economy, although theses in that science can often be tested. The modern practice of green economics fuses both approaches and seems to be part science, part ideology.

This is far from the only theory of economics to be raised to ideology status—some notable economically based ideologies include mercantilism, mixed economy, social Darwinism, communism, laissez-faire economics, and free trade. There are also current theories of safe trade and fair trade which can be seen as ideologies.

Psychological research[link]

Psychological research^[12] increasingly suggests that ideologies reflect motivational processes, as opposed to the view that political convictions always reflect independent and unbiased thinking. Research in 2008^[12] proposed that ideologies may function as prepackaged units of interpretation that spread because of basic human motives to understand the world, avoid existential threat, and maintain valued interpersonal relationships. The authors conclude that such motives may lead disproportionately to the adoption of system-justifying worldviews. Psychologists have generally found that personality traits, individual difference variables, needs, and ideological beliefs seem to have a common thread.^{[citation needed]}

Ideology and semiotic theory[link]

According to the semiotician Bob Hodge, ideology "identifies a unitary object that incorporates complex sets of meanings with the social agents and processes that produced them. No other term captures this object as well as 'ideology'. Foucault's 'episteme' is too narrow and abstract, not social enough. His 'discourse', popular because it covers some of ideology's terrain with less baggage, is too confined to verbal systems. 'Worldview' is too metaphysical, 'propaganda' too loaded. Despite or because of its contradictions, 'ideology' still plays a key role in semiotics oriented to social, political life".^[13] Authors such as Michael Freeden have also recently incorporated a semantic analysis to the study of ideologies.

See also[link]

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Christian Duncker (Hg.): Ideologiekritik Aktuell – Ideologies Today. Bd. 1. London 2008,[2]. ISBN 978-1-84790-015-9
• Christian Duncker: Kritische Reflexionen Des Ideologiebegriffes, 2006, ISBN 1-903343-88-7
• Minar, David M. (1961) "Ideology and Political Behavior", Midwest Journal of Political Science. Midwest Political Science Association.
• Mullins, Willard A. (1972) "On the Concept of Ideology in Political Science." The American Political Science Review. American Political Science Association.
• Pinker, Steven. (2002) "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature." New York: Penguin Group, Inc. ISBN 0-670-03151-8

Further reading[link]

• Marx, Karl ([1845-46] 1932) The German Ideology [3]
• Lukács, Georg (1919–23) History and Class Consciousness [4]
• Mannheim, Karl (1936) Ideology and Utopia Routledge
• Althusser, Louis (1971) 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays Monthly Review Press ISBN 1-58367-039-4
• Minogue, Kenneth (1985) Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology, Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 0-312-01860-6
• Zizek, Slavoj (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology Verso ISBN 0-86091-971-4 [5]
• Eagleton, Terry (1991) Ideology. An introduction, Verso, ISBN 0-86091-319-8
• Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. New York: Knopf, 1965. New York: Random House/ Vintage 1973
• Freeden, Michael. 1996. Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-829414-6 [6]
• Hawkes, David (2003) Ideology (2nd ed.), Routledge, ISBN 0-415-29012-0
• Sorce Keller, Marcello. “Why is Music so Ideological, Why Do Totalitarian States Take It So Seriously: A Personal View from History, and the Social Sciences”, Journal of Musicological Research, XXVI(2007), no. 2-3, pp. 91–122.
• Malesevic, Sinisa and Iain Mackenzie (ed). Ideology after Poststructuralism. London: Pluto Press.
• Owen, John (2011) "The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510-2010", Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-14239-4

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ideology

Look up ideology in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Ideology Study Guide
• Louis Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"
• Ideology and Symbolic Power: Between Althusser and Bourdieu

Jonah Goldberg
Jonah Goldberg in February 2012.
Born	March 21, 1969 (1969-03-21) (age 43)
Citizenship	United States
Alma mater	Goucher College (1991)
Occupation	Journalist, author
Employer	National Review Online
Religion	Jewish[1]
Spouse	Jessica Gavora
Children	1 daughter
Parents	Sidney & Lucianne Goldberg

Jonah Jacob Goldberg (born March 21, 1969) is an American conservative syndicated columnist and author. Goldberg is known for his contributions on politics and culture to National Review Online, of which he is editor-at-large. He is the author of Liberal Fascism (2008), which reached #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list.

He appears on such television programs as Special Report with Bret Baier, Good Morning America, Nightline, Hardball with Chris Matthews, Real Time with Bill Maher, Larry King Live, Your World with Neil Cavuto and most recently the Glenn Beck Program and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. From 2006 to 2010 he was a frequent participant on bloggingheads.tv.

Early life and career[link]

Goldberg graduated from Goucher College in 1991. His was the second class at Goucher to admit men. He was active in student politics at Goucher and was the co-editor of the school newspaper,The Quindecim, for two years. He and Andreas Benno Kollegger were the first men to run the paper. He later interned for Scripps Howard News Service, United Press International, and other news organizations.^[when?] He also worked for Delilah Communications, a publishing house in New York.^[when?]

After graduation, he taught English in Prague for under a year before moving to Washington to take a job at the American Enterprise Institute.^[when?] While at AEI he worked for Ben J. Wattenberg. He was the researcher for Wattenberg’s nationally syndicated column and for Wattenberg's book, Values Matter Most. He also worked on several PBS public affairs documentaries, including a two-hour special hosted by David Gergen and Wattenberg.^{[citation needed]} Goldberg also served for three years on the Board of Trustees of Goucher College.^[when?]

In 1994, he was a founding producer for Wattenberg's Think Tank with Wattenberg. That same year he moved to New River Media, an independent television production company, which produced "Think Tank" as well as numerous other television programs and projects. Goldberg worked on a large number of television projects across the United States, as well as in Europe and Japan. He wrote, produced, and edited two documentaries, Gargoyles: Guardians of the Gate and Notre Dame: Witness to History.

He joined National Review as a contributing editor in 1998. By the end of that year he was asked to launch National Review Online (NRO) as a sister publication to National Review. He served as editor of NRO for several years and later became editor-at-large.^[when?]

Clinton–Lewinsky scandal[link]

Goldberg’s career as a pundit was launched following his mother Lucianne Goldberg's role in the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal, when he wrote about the “media siege” on his mother’s apartment in The New Yorker.^[2][3]

Goldberg has spoken of his mother and the Lewinsky scandal:

My mother was the one who advised Linda Tripp to record her conversations with Monica Lewinsky and to save the dress. I was privy to some of that stuff, and when the administration set about to destroy Lewinsky, Tripp, and my mom, I defended my mom and by extension Tripp... I have zero desire to have those arguments again. I did my bit in the trenches of Clinton's trousers.^[4]

These tapes became the focal point of the Lewinsky scandal. Goldberg was privy to the tapes and the conversations his mother had with Tripp because he served as a vice president of his mother's now-defunct literary agency. When the scandal broke, Goldberg defended his mother and Tripp during the ensuing media firestorm.^{[citation needed]}

Current work[link]

Goldberg has twice-weekly column at National Review Online, which is syndicated to numerous papers across the United States, and at Townhall.com. He also writes an occasional "Goldberg File" column at National Review that is typically longer, and more culture or interest oriented. Goldberg is also a frequent poster at the National Review Online blog "The Corner".

In other online media, in addition to appearances on Bloggingheads.tv, Goldberg is a frequent participant in programs produced by the center-right Web site Ricochet.com, including the weekly Ricochet Podcast and The Ricochet Roundtable, which features Goldberg, columnist Mark Steyn and Ricochet co-founder Rob Long.

Aside from being a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, he has written for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The Public Interest, The Wilson Quarterly, The Weekly Standard, The New York Post, and Slate. The Los Angeles Times added Goldberg to its editorial lineup in 2005.

His book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (ISBN 0-385-51184-1) was published in January 2008. It reached #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list of hardcover nonfiction in its seventh week on the list.^[5] While in preparation, the book had a number of different subtitles, including "The Totalitarian Temptation From Hegel to Whole Foods" and "The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton". After being published in paperback, the subtitle was changed to The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change. Some historians have denounced the book as being "poor scholarship," ^[6] "propaganda," ^[7] and not "scholarly." ^[8] Other reviewers described the book as "provocative"^[9] and "a wealth of challenging insights, backed up by thorough research".^[10]

Commentary[link]

Frequent topics[link]

Some frequent topics of his articles include censorship, meritocracy, liberty, federalism and interpretation of the Constitution, his attacks on the ethics and morals of liberals and Democrats, and his disagreements with libertarians also appear often in his writings. He is a supporter of the Iraq War and has advocated for American military intervention elsewhere in the world. He has defended historical colonialism in places such as Africa as more beneficial than it is generally given credit for; in one column, he suggested that U.S. imperialism on the continent could help solve its persistent problems.^[11] When he wrote in October 2006 that invading Iraq was a mistake, he called it a "noble" mistake and still maintained that liberal opponents to the war policy wanted America to fail: "In other words, their objection isn't to war per se; it's to wars that advance U.S. interests... I must confess, one of the things that made me reluctant to conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake was my distaste for the shabbiness of the arguments on the antiwar side."^[12]

He popularized and expanded on a commentary by the late Time writer William Henry III. Henry had written on the subject of multiculturalism and cultural equality, stating that "[i]t is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose." Goldberg stated that "[m]ulticulturalism — which is simply egalitarianism wrapped in rainbow-colored paper — has elevated the notion that all ideas are equal, all systems equivalent, all cultures of comparable worth."^[13]

Francophobia and anti-Europeanism[link]

Goldberg has publicly admitted to disliking France or, as he writes, being in the "frog-bashing business", using the derogatory term "frog" to designate the French: "the frog-bashing business has changed a lot since I first started just a few years ago".^[14] He has also called for "the total destruction of France"; he later clarified his statement as meaning "the destruction of France as an idea".^[15] Some commentators, like Brian Dunaway, consider that Goldberg's attitude towards the French is francophobic: "The poor souls that visit Goldberg’s columns know that he has made Francophobia a favorite pastime".^[16] Other commentators, such as Timothy Garton Ash, explain Goldberg's attitude, among others, by a deeply rooted "anti-Europeanism" in the United States.^[17]

Relations with other writers and public figures[link]

On the political left, Goldberg has publicly feuded with Juan Cole over U.S. Iraq policy and Air America Radio commentators such as Janeane Garofalo, who has accused him of being a chickenhawk on the Iraq War. On February 8, 2005, Goldberg offered Cole a wager of $1,000 "that Iraq won't have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it".^[18] Cole refused to accept and the wager was never made.^[19] Goldberg later conceded that if Cole had accepted the bet, Cole would have won.^[20]

Goldberg and Peter Beinart of The New Republic for a time hosted a conservative vs. liberal webtv show, What's your Problem?, which originally could be found on National Review Online^[22] but has appeared on Bloggingheads.tv^[21] as of 2008.

Goldberg and others at National Review Online (including editor Rich Lowry) broke with conservative writer Ann Coulter over statements she made about the September 11, 2001 attacks that they considered irresponsible. Coulter stopped writing for National Review Online after the publishing of her column on September 13, 2001, opining that "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity".^[23]

Media[link]

Regarding Fox News, Goldberg said, "Look, I think liberals have reasonable gripes with Fox News. It does lean to the right, primarily in its opinion programming but also in its story selection (which is fine by me) and elsewhere. But it's worth remembering that Fox is less a bastion of ideological conservatism and more a populist, tabloidy network."^[24]

Goldberg has criticized liberals for disliking Fox News, claiming they have no "problem with the editorializing of MSNBC's Keith Olbermann or Chris Matthews, they think it's just plain wrong for conservatives to play that game."^[24] Goldberg has referred to Olbermann as "MSNBC’s answer to a question no one asked."^[25]

Humor and lighter topics[link]

The "Goldberg File" frequently involves humor, often at the expense of liberals. Alec Baldwin, who Goldberg insinuates cannot read, has been a frequent target of such jibes. Goldberg also makes occasional allusions to Star Trek.^[26] More recently, Battlestar Galactica has become a favorite topic.^[27] Goldberg also likes to link to "timewaster" online games in his postings at "The Corner".

Family[link]

Jonah Goldberg is married to Jessica Gavora, former chief speechwriter and a senior policy adviser to former Attorney General John Ashcroft,^[28] and they have a daughter. Their dog Cosmo,a.k.a. "Snowball", "of indeterminate parentage and upbringing", also contributes articles to National Review.^[29]

Goldberg's brother, Joshua Goldberg, died on February 10, 2011, from injuries he sustained in a fall. Their late father, Sidney Goldberg (1931–2005), was Jewish, and their mother, Lucianne Goldberg, is Episcopalian.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jonah Goldberg

• Goldberg's syndicated column (at Townhall.com)
• Goldberg's National Review Online biography
• Liberal Fascism: The Blog
• Some Goldberg quotes
• Salon.com Interview
• Video discussions/debates in which Goldberg has taken part on Bloggingheads.tv
• Hudson Institute Washington, D.C. January 30, 2008 on Fora.tv
• In Depth interview with Goldberg, November 7, 2010

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Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek at Warsaw, Poland, May 15, 2009.
Born	(1949-03-21) 21 March 1949 (age 63) Slovenia (then part of Yugoslavia)
Era	20th- / 21st-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Hegelianism Psychoanalysis Marxism
Main interests	Ontology · Film theory Psychoanalysis Ideology · Theology Marxism
Influenced by G. W. F. Hegel · F. W. J. Schelling Jacques Lacan · Karl Marx Friedrich Engels · Theodor W. Adorno Sigmund Freud · Vladimir Lenin Ernesto Laclau Maximilien Robespierre Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Influenced Michael Hardt · Alenka Zupančič · Terry Eagleton

Slavoj Žižek (pronounced [ˈslavoj ˈʒiʒɛk]; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic^[1] working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory and theoretical psychoanalysis.

Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European Graduate School.^[2] He has been a visiting professor at, among others, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, London Consortium, Princeton University, New York University, The New School, the University of Minnesota, the University of California, Irvine and the University of Michigan. He is currently the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana.^[3]

Žižek uses examples from popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian philosophy and Marxist economic criticism to interpret and speak extensively on immediately current social phenomena, including the current ongoing global financial crisis. In a 2008 interview with Amy Goodman on the New York City radio show Democracy Now! he described himself as a "communist in a qualified sense" and in another appearance on the show in October 2009 he described himself as a "radical leftist".^[4][5]

It was not until the 1989 publication of his first book written in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, that Žižek achieved international recognition as a social theorist. Since then, he has continued to develop his status as a confrontational intellectual.

He writes on many topics including subjectivity, ideology, capitalism, fundamentalism, racism, tolerance, multiculturalism, human rights, ecology, globalization, the Iraq War, revolution, utopianism, totalitarianism, postmodernism, pop culture, opera, cinema, political theology, and religion.

He has been called "the most dangerous political philosopher in the West".^[6]

Life[link]

Žižek was born in Ljubljana, People's Republic of Slovenia, Yugoslavia, to a middle-class family. His father Jože Žižek was an economist and civil servant from the region of Prekmurje in eastern Slovenia. His mother Vesna, native of the Brda region in the Slovenian Littoral, was an accountant in a state enterprise.^[7][8] He spent most of his childhood in the coastal town of Portorož.^[9] The family moved back to Ljubljana when Slavoj was a teenager. His parents were both atheists.^[8] Žižek attended the prestigious Bežigrad High School.^[9] In 1967, he enrolled at the University of Ljubljana, where he studied philosophy and sociology. He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault.

Žižek's early career was hampered by the political environment of 1970s Yugoslavia. He started his studies in an era of relative liberalization of the Communist regime. Among his early influences was the Slovenian Marxist philosopher Božidar Debenjak who introduced the thought of the Frankfurt School to Slovenia.^[10] Debenjak taught the philosophy of German idealism at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana, and his reading of Marx's Das Kapital from the perspective of Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind influenced many future Slovenian philosophers, including Žižek.^[11]

Žižek frequented the circles of dissident intellectuals, including the Heideggerian philosophers Tine Hribar and Ivo Urbančič,^[8] and published articles in alternative magazines, such as Praxis, Tribuna and Problemi, of which he was also an editor.^[9] In 1971, he was given employment at the University of Ljubljana as an assistant researcher with the promise of tenure. In 1973, after Josip Broz Tito and Stane Dolanc removed the reformist Slovenian leadership and the regime's policies toughened again, he was dismissed after his Master's thesis was explicitly accused of being "non-Marxist".^[12] He spent the next few years undertaking national service in the Yugoslav army in Karlovac.

After four years of unemployment, Žižek gained a job as a recording clerk at the Slovenian Marxist Center. At the same time, he became involved with a group of Slovene scholars, among whom were Mladen Dolar and Rastko Močnik, whose theoretical focus was on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan.^[13] In 1979, he was hired as a researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Ljubljana with the help of philosopher Ivan Urbančič.^[12] In the early 1980s, he published his first books, focusing on the interpretation of Hegelian and Marxist philosophy from the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. He became one of the foremost members of the so-called Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis. Within its editorial and institutional framework, Žižek edited numerous translations of works by Lacan, Sigmund Freud and Althusser to Slovene (during that period he also became an active member of the Slovenian Association of Literary Translators).^[14] In addition, he wrote the introduction to Slovene translations of G. K. Chesterton's and John Le Carre's detective novels. In 1988, he published his first book dedicated entirely to film theory.

In the late 1980s, he came to public attention as a columnist for the alternative youth magazine Mladina, which assumed a critical stance towards the Titoist regime, criticizing several aspects of Yugoslav politics, especially the militarization of society. Žižek was member of the Communist Party of Slovenia until October 1988, when he quit in protest against the JBTZ-trial together with 32 other Slovenian public intellectuals.^[15] Between 1988 and 1990, he was actively involved in several political and civil society movements which fought for the democratization of Slovenia, most notably the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights.^[16] In the first free elections in 1990, he ran as candidate for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution abolished in the constitution of 1991) for the Liberal Democratic Party. In a 2008 interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, he described himself as a "communist in a qualified sense," and in another appearance in October 2009 he described himself as a "radical leftist".^[4][5]

It was not until the 1989 publication of his first book written in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, that Žižek achieved international recognition as a social theorist. Since then, he has continued to develop his status as a confrontational intellectual. One of Žižek's most widely discussed books, The Ticklish Subject (1999), explicitly positions itself against Deconstructionists, Heideggerians, Habermasians, cognitive scientists, and what Žižek describes as New Age "obscurantists".

Over the course of 25 years, Žižek was able to go from academic ghettoization to attending worldwide conferences and being a premier speaker on theory; he is pictured here at a 2009 lecture in Poland

Ian Parker claims that there is no "Žižekian" system of philosophy because Žižek, with all his inconsistencies, is trying to make us think much harder about what we are willing to believe and accept from a single writer (Parker, 2004). Indeed, Žižek himself defends Jacques Lacan for constantly updating his theories, arguing that it is not the task of the philosopher to act as the Big Other who tells us about the world but rather to challenge our own ideological presuppositions. The philosopher, for Žižek, is more someone engaged in critique than someone who tries to answer questions.^[17]

However, this claim about the role of the philosopher/theorist is complicated by how Žižek frequently derides the consumerist fashionability of postmodern cultural criticism while affirming his universal emancipatory stance and love for "grand explanations" (Žižek, 2008). In contrast to Parker, Adrian Johnston's book Zizek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity argues against the position that Žižek's thought has no consistency or underlying project. Specifically, Johnston claims in his Preface that beneath "what could be called 'the cultural studies Žižek'" is a singular "philosophical trajectory that runs like a continuous, bisecting diagonal line through the entire span of his writing (i.e. the retroactive Lacanian reconstruction of the chain Kant-Schelling-Hegel)." Žižek's affirmation of this claim suggests that like his predecessor Hegel, Žižek's work is better described as rigorous in the sense of systematic rather than as comprising a single, all-encompassing "system."

Žižek wrote text to accompany Bruce Weber photos in a catalog for Abercrombie & Fitch. Questioned as to the seemliness of a major intellectual writing ad copy, Žižek told the Boston Globe: "If I were asked to choose between doing things like this to earn money and becoming fully employed as an American academic, kissing ass to get a tenured post, I would with pleasure choose writing for such journals!"^[18] He is widely regarded^{[by whom?]} as a fiery and colorful lecturer who does not shy away from controversial remarks. His three-part documentary The Pervert's Guide to Cinema was broadcast on British television by the More4 channel in July 2006 and is available on DVD. Žižek has been publishing on a regular basis in journals such as Lacanian Ink and In These Times in the United States, the New Left Review and The London Review of Books in the United Kingdom, and with the Slovenian left liberal magazine Mladina and newspapers Dnevnik and Delo. He co-operates also with the influential Polish leftist magazine Krytyka Polityczna, regional South-East European left-wing journal Novi Plamen, and serves on the editorial board of the psychoanalytical journal Problemi.^{[citation needed]}

He is a fluent speaker of Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, English, French and German. He also has basic knowledge of Italian.^[19] He was formerly married to Slovenian philosopher Renata Salecl and to Argentine model Analia Hounie.^[20]

Astra Taylor's 2005 documentary Žižek! documented its title subject, and Žižek also appeared in her 2008 Examined Life. The International Journal of Žižek Studies was launched in 2007, and since 2005, Žižek has been an associate member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.^[21]

He is a returning professor at New York University where he has taught alongside the deconstructionist Avital Ronell in the place of the late Jacques Derrida during the fall semester.^[22]

Throughout his political writings, Žižek has consistently emphasized his belief that a strong, centralized, hierarchically-organized political party is essential to the task of ending neoliberal capitalism. For instance, his extended criticism of Gilles Deleuze largely stems from his perception that Deleuze's philosophy is opposed to just such a centralized political structure. Despite the fact that the Occupy movement's horizontal-anarchic form of political organization is in complete contradiction to the top-down party system that Žižek has espoused throughout his career, Žižek has sought to cast himself as the Occupy movement's native philosopher. Toward this end, Žižek offered his unqualified support for the Occupy movement while speaking at Occupy Wall Street in New York City during October 2011.^[23]

In April 2012 he was interviewed by Julian Assange on The World Tomorrow debating with other guest David Horowitz a radical right-wing Zionist. Aired on RT. During this interview, Žižek made his nostalgia for American imperialism clear: "Don’t you think that nonetheless… and this is a tragedy… it’s not even a good thing… for me the great failure of Bush presidency was that with his… I wouldn’t even use the word aggressive… not intelligent politics… that the result of his decay was that the United States effectively came close to losing the position of universal world power. Under Bush, the United States lost effectively control of Latin America and so on and so on… and I think… and this is not… I don’t say this with some leftist glee ‘oh oh finally we got the United States’… and I think we are entering, I even tend to agree with you, a very dangerous multi-centered world." ^[24]

Thought[link]

This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. Please help improve this article to make it understandable to non-experts, without removing the technical details. The talk page may contain suggestions. (July 2011)

Ontology[link]

Žižek appropriates various ontologies as critical tools for his investigations. In doing so, Žižek does not posit his own ontology, rather he refigures discordant disciplines through their application to a topic of relevant interest and their differential relationship to one another. This radical approach results in a critique of such uses as misinterpretations. While Žižek posits a return to the category of the Cartesian subject, a return to German idealism, and a return to Lacan, he does so in a way that undercuts their foundations and re-energizes their potential.

1. The defense of the category of the subject involves first a vindication of the notion of subjectivity for an adequate descriptive political theory. Žižek argues that hegemonic regimes function by interpellating individuals into social roles and mandates within a given polity: we cannot understand how power functions without some account of the psychology of political subjects. Secondly, there is the vindication of the "category of the subject". Following Lacan, Žižek contends that subjectivity corresponds to a lack (manque) that always resists full inscription into the mandates prescribed to individuals by hegemonic regimes.
2. In his deployment of the category of "ideology", Žižek finds the notions of ideology in Karl Marx' The German Ideology—which center on the notion of "false consciousness"—to be irrelevant in a period of unprecedented subjective reflexivity and cynicism as to the motives and workings of those in authority (see The Sublime Object of Ideology). It can be argued however that Žižek's most original aspect comes from its insistence that a Lacanian model of the barred or split subject, because of its stipulation that individuals' deepest motives are unconscious, can be used to demonstrate that ideology has less become irrelevant today than revealed its deeper truth (see Matthew Sharpe, Slavoj Žižek.)
3. In a contentious extension of the referential scope of ideology, Žižek maintains that dominant ideologies wholly structure the subject's senses of reality. Yet, The Real is not equivalent to the reality experienced by the subjects as a meaningfully ordered totality. To him, the Real names points within the ontological fabric knitted by the hegemonic systems of representation and reproduction that nevertheless resist full inscription into its terms, and which may as such attempt to generate sites of active political resistance.

Front cover of Žižek's 2006 work The Parallax View, published by MIT Press

In The Parallax View (2006), Žižek stages confrontations between idealist and materialist understandings of various aspects of ontology. One such confrontation between idealism and materialism is expressed in Lacanian terms between an idealism's purported ability to theorize the All versus a Materialism's understanding that an apparent All is really a non-All. His penchant for staging a confrontation between idealism and materialism leads him to describe his work in such paradoxical terms as a "materialist theology." Žižek offers that reality is fundamentally open and a materialist "minimal difference"—the gap that appears in reality between a reductionist description of physical process and one's experience of existence—is the real of human life and the crucial domain that an ontology must attempt to theorize. Žižek equates the gap with the Freudian death drive, as the negative and mortifying "thing that thinks." Although biological psychology might one day be able to completely model a person's brain, there would still be something left over that could not be explained. This "remainder" formally corresponds precisely to the Freudian death drive and Schellingian/Hegelian self-reflecting negativity or "Night of the World," all of which Žižek formulates as the zero-level of subjectivity. It is death drive which takes this role, not the limit-function to pleasure called the pleasure principle, thus it is the negative aspect of consciousness that breaks and offers judgment on the unrepresentable totality. Žižek points to the fact that consciousness is opaque. Taking his cue from Descartes' problem of the possible automaton in hat & coat and the Husserlian failure to fully account for the selfhood of the other (through resort to the metaphor of "empathy"), Žižek claims a primary characteristic of consciousness is that one cannot ever know if an apparently conscious being is truly conscious or merely an effective mime.

Žižek's metaphysics are, to a certain extent an anti-metaphysics, because he believes it is absurd to theorize the All, because something will always remain untheorized. This can be explained in Lacanian terms, in terms of the relationship between the Symbolic and the Real. For Žižek, we can view a person in several ways, but these ways are mutually exclusive. For example, we can see a person as either an ethical being with free will or a determined biological creature but not both. These are the Symbolic interpretations of the Real, ways of using language to understand that which is non-All, that which cannot be totally understood by description. For Žižek, however, the Real is not a thing which is understood in different ways depending on how you decide to look at it (person as ethical being versus person as biological being); the Real is instead the movement from one vantage point to another—the "parallax view". Žižek tries to sidestep relativism by claiming that there is a diagonal ontological cut across apparently incommensurable discourses, which points to their intersubjectivity. This means that although there are multiple Symbolic interpretations of the Real, they are not all relatively "true." Žižek identifies two instances of the Real; the abject Real, which cannot be symbolized, and the symbolic Real (see On Belief), a set of signifiers that can never be properly integrated into the horizon of sense of a subject. The truth is revealed in the process of transiting the contradictions; or the real is a "minimal difference", the gap between the infinite judgement of a reductionist materialism and experience as lived.

Žižek discussing in 2011

The Real[link]

There are also three modalities of the real:

• The "symbolic real": the signifier reduced to a meaningless formula like quantum physics, which can only be understood by normal people using simplistic metaphors.
• The "imaginary real": a horrific thing, that which conveys the sense of horror in horror films
• The "real real": an unfathomable something that permeates things as a trace of the sublime. This form of the real becomes perceptible in the film The Full Monty, in the fact of disrobing the unemployed protagonists completely; in other words, through this extra gesture of "voluntary" degradation, something else, of the order of the sublime, becomes visible. Zizek also used the film The Sound of Music as an example, where the "invaded" Austrians are depicted more like provincial fascists (blond, beautiful, historic dresses), while the Nazis are managers, bureaucrats, etc., "like cosmopolitan decadent corrupted Jews." He posits that the movie has a hidden pro-fascist message that is not directly seen but embedded in the texture.

Postmodernism[link]

Žižek refers to the law throughout his work. The term "the law" signifies the principles upon which society is based, designating a mode of collective conduct based upon a set of prohibitions. However, for Žižek, the rule of the law reveals the act of creation of The Law as the ultimate act if that which it seeks to establish on order upon - the real crime is the act of law itself which reduces all other crime to banal and impossible to be fully realised as criminal via the establishment of the law itself as an always already mediating force; nullifying crime itself. (See For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor.)

One key aspect of the universalization of reflexivity is the resulting disintegration of the big Other, the communal network of social institutions, customs and laws. For Žižek, the big Other was always dead, in the sense that it never existed in the first place as a material thing. All it ever was (and is) is a purely symbolic order. It means that we all engage in a minimum of idealization, disavowing the brute fact of the Real in favor of another Symbolic world behind it. Žižek expresses this disavowal in terms of an "as if". In order to coexist with our neighbors we act "as if" they do not smell bad or look ridiculous. The big Other is then a kind of collective lie to which we all individually subscribe. (See Jacques Lacan on other/Other and Žižek's For They Know Not What They Do.)

Paradoxically, then, Žižek argues that the typical postmodern subject is one who displays an outright cynicism towards official institutions, yet at the same time believes in the existence of conspiracies and an unseen Other pulling the strings. This apparently contradictory coupling of cynicism and belief is strictly correlative to the demise of the big Other. Its disappearance causes us to construct an Other of the Other in order to escape the unbearable freedom its loss encumbers us with. (See Looking Awry: an Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture.)

Žižek follows Louis Althusser in jettisoning the Marxist equation: "ideology equals false consciousness." Ideology, to all intents and purposes, is consciousness. Ideology does not "mask" the real—one cannot achieve true consciousness. This being the case, post-ideological postmodern "knowingness"—the cynicism and irony of postmodern cultural production—does not reveal the truth, the real, the hard kernel. Knowing that we are being "lied" to is hardly the stuff of revolution when ideology is not, and never has been, simply a matter of consciousness, of subject positions, but is the very stuff of everyday praxis itself. The cynics and ironists, not to mention the deconstructionists et al., may know that reality is an "ideological construction"—some have even read their Lacan and Derrida—but in their daily practice, caught up in an apparently unalterable world of exchange-values (capital), they do their part to sustain that construction in any case. As Marx would say, it is their very life process that is ideological, what they know, or what they think they know, being neither here nor there. The postmodern cultural artifact—the "critique," the "incredulity"—is itself merely a symptom/commodity fetish. Thus has capital commodified even the cynicism that purports to unmask its "reality," to "emancipate."

Politicization[link]

Today, in the aftermath of the "end of ideology", Žižek is critical of the way political decisions are justified; the way, for example, reductions in social programs are sometimes presented as an apparently 'objective' necessity, though this is no longer a valid basis for political discourse. He sees the current "talk about greater citizen involvement" or "political goals circumscribed within the rubric of the cultural" as having little effectiveness as long as no substantial measures are devised for the long run. But measures such as the "limitation of the freedom of capital" and the "subordination of the manufacturing processes to a mechanism of social control"—these Žižek calls a "radical de-politicization of the economy" (A Plea for Intolerance).

So at present Slavoj Žižek is arguing for a politicization of the economy. For indeed the "tolerant" multicultural impulse, as the dogma of today's liberal society, suppresses the crucial question: How can we reintroduce into the current conditions of globalization the genuine space of the political? He also argues in favor of a "politicization of politics" as a counter balance to post-politics. In the area of political decision making in a democratic context he criticizes the two-party system that is dominant in some countries as a political form of a "post-political era", as a manifestation of a possibility of choice that in reality does not exist.

Politicization is thus for him present whenever "a particular demand begins to function as a representative of the impossible universal". Žižek sees class struggle not as localized objective determinations, as a social position vis-à-vis capital but rather as lying in a "radically subjective" position: the proletariat is the living, "embodied contradiction". Only through particularism in the political struggle can any universalism emerge. Fighting for workers interests often appears discredited today ("indeed in this domain the workers themselves only wish to implement their own interests, they fight only for themselves and not for the whole"). The problem is how to foster a politicizing politics in the age of post-politics. Particular demands, acting as a "metaphorical condensation", would thus aim at something that transcends those particular demands, a genuine reconstruction of the social framework. Žižek, following Jacques Ranciere, sees the real political conflict as being that between an ordered structure of society and those without a place in it, the "part that has no part" in anything but nonetheless causes the structure to falter, because it refers to—i.e. embodies—an "empty principle" of the "universal".

The very fact that a society is not easily divided into classes, that there is no "simple structural trait" for it, that for instance the "middle class" is also intensely fought over by a populism of the right, is a sign of this struggle. Otherwise "class antagonism would be completely symbolized" and no longer both impossible and real at the same time ("impossible/real"). His solution to capitalism is a rapid repoliticization of the economy.

Atheism[link]

Žižek is an atheist. He has said he does not consider religion an enemy but rather one of the fields of struggle. He has also referred to himself as a "Christian materialist". Žižek believes the universalist aspect of Christianity should be secularized into militant egalitarianism, against the "pagan notion of destiny".^[25] This universalism he derives from what he perceives as the alleged Christian death of God: God died on the cross and lives on as the "Holy Spirit", that is, in human community.^{[citation needed]}

In 2006, Žižek wrote an opinion piece published in the New York Times entitled "Atheism is a legacy worth fighting for," and voiced his support for the propagation of atheism in the continent.^[26] He has written many pieces on the reinterpretation of the religious and the theological such as The Puppet and the Dwarf, On Belief and The Fragile Absolute.

Critiques[link]

Žižek has become popular for a cultural critic and philosopher while causing controversy amongst other theorists; he is seen here signing books in 2009.

Slavoj Žižek's notoriety in academic circles has increased rapidly, especially since he began publishing widely in English. Many hundreds of academics have addressed aspects of Žižek's work in professional papers.^[27]

Argumentative method[link]

Žižek's style is a matter of some debate:

Critiques include Harpham (2003)^[28] and O'Neill (2001).^[29] Both agree that Žižek flouts standards of reasoned argument. Harpham calls Žižek's style "a stream of nonconsecutive units arranged in arbitrary sequences that solicit a sporadic and discontinuous attention." O'Neill concurs: "a dizzying array of wildly entertaining and often quite maddening rhetorical strategies are deployed in order to beguile, browbeat, dumbfound, dazzle, confuse, mislead, overwhelm, and generally subdue the reader into acceptance."

While criticizing Žižek's style in general, David Bordwell criticizes his humor as an "academic humor" and in Bordwell's words academic humor is to humor what "military intelligence is to intelligence."^[30] Supporters such as R. Butler^[31] argue that such critiques miss the point and instead support Žižek's thinking: "As Žižek says, it is our very desire to look for mistakes and inconsistencies in the Other that testifies to the fact that we still transfer on to them...."^[32]

Social policy[link]

John Holbo of the National University of Singapore has criticized Žižek^[33] for his alleged refusal to lay out what social formation he would replace the existing order with. Holbo argues that Žižek's "irrational" approach to thought disregards the ontic benefits brought about by late capital, specifically in its liberal-democratic form. A similar criticism, from a scholar akin to Žižek, is made by Ernesto Laclau in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. In his "Response to Žižek", Laclau claims that Žižek's political thought is dogmatically Marxist, and often out of keeping with his psychoanalytic theories. Noting that "all of Žižek's Marxist concepts come from either Marx himself or from the Russian Revolution", Laclau asserts that "Žižek uses class as a sort of deus ex machina to play the role of the good guy against the multicultural devils. Laclau concludes that Žižek's political thought suffers from "'combined and uneven development'" and that "while his Lacanian tools, combined with his insight have allowed him to make considerable progress in the understanding of ideological processes in contemporary societies, his strictly political thought... remains fixed in traditional categories".^[34]

Alleged misreading of Lacan and Hegel[link]

Some of Žižek's critics have accused him of misreading other philosophers and theorists, particularly Jacques Lacan and G. W. F. Hegel.

Ian Parker, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, complains that Žižek "delights in the most extreme formulations of what the end of psychoanalysis might entail" (Ian Parker, Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction, Pluto Press: London and Sterling, 2004; p. 78). For Parker, this is particularly difficult when Žižek attempts to carry over concepts from Lacan's teachings into the sphere of political and social theory. Parker notes that Lacan's seminars were originally addressed to an audience of psychoanalysts for use in their clinical practice rather than for philosophers such as Žižek to produce new theories of political action. This is particularly true, claims Parker, of Žižek's appropriation of Lacan's discussion of Antigone in his 1959/1960 seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. In this seminar, Lacan uses Antigone to defend the claim that "the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire" (Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, Verso: London, 1994; p. 69). However, as Parker notes, Antigone's act (burying her dead brother in the knowledge that she will be buried alive) was never intended to effect a revolutionary change in the political status quo; yet, despite this, Žižek frequently cites Antigone as a paradigm of ethico-political action. Parker concludes that carrying over concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis "into other spheres requires something a little less hasty and less dramatic than what we find in Žižek" (Parker, p. 80).

Noah Horwitz's essay "Contra the Slovenians: Returning to Lacan and away from Hegel" (Philosophy Today, Spring 2005, pp. 24–32) is a critique of Žižek's reading of Hegel. Horwitz claims that Žižek mistakenly conflates Lacan's unconscious with Hegel's unconscious. Horwitz notes that "the 'it' one is meant to identify with in [Lacanian] psychoanalysis is not some inert, substance irreducible to one, but rather the radically other scene where thinking occurs" (Horwitz, p. 30). According to Horwitz, the Lacanian unconscious and the Hegelian unconscious are two totally different mechanisms. If we take speech, Lacan's unconscious reveals itself to us in the slip-of-the-tongue or parapraxis we are therefore alienated from language through the revelation of our desire (even if that desire originated with the Other, as Lacan claims, it remains peculiar to us). In Hegel's unconscious, however, we are alienated from language whenever we attempt to articulate a particular and end up articulating a universal (so if I say 'the dog is with me', although I am trying to say something about this particular dog at this particular time, I actually produce the universal category 'dog').

Recognition[link]

He was listed #25 on Top 100 Public Intellectuals Poll.^[35]

Bibliography[link]

Other works cited[link]

• Canning, P. "The Sublime Theorist of Slovenia: Peter Canning Interviews Slavoj Žižek" in Artforum, Issue 31, March 1993, pp. 84–9.

Critical introductions to Žižek[link]

• Christopher Hanlon, "Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek." New Literary History 32 (Winter, 2001).
• Tony Myers, Slavoj Žižek (London: Routledge, 2003).
• Sarah Kay, Žižek: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2003).
• Ian Parker, Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2004).
• Matthew Sharpe, Slavoj Žižek, a little piece of the Real (London: Ashgate, 2004).
• Rex Butler, "Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory" (London: Continuum, 2005).
• Jodi Dean, Žižek's Politics (London: Routledge, 2006).
• Walter A. Davis, "Slavoj Zizek, or the Jouissance of the Abstract Hegelian" in Death's Dream Kingdom (London: Pluto Press, 2006).
• Adam Kotsko, Žižek and Theology (New York: T & T Clark, 2008).
• Marcus Pound, Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Interventions) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).
• Adrian Johnston, Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008).
• Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2009).
• Dominik Finkelde, Slavoj Žižek zwischen Lacan und Hegel. Politische Philosophie, Metapsychologie, Ethik (Wien: Turia + Kant, 2009).
• Paul A. Taylor, Žižek And The Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).
• Raoul Moati (ed.), Autour de S., Žižek, Psychanalyse, Marxisme, Idéalisme Allemand, Paris, PUF, "Actuel Marx", 2010
• Fabio Vighi, On Žižek’s Dialectics: Surplus, Subtraction, Sublimation, (Continuum, 2010).
• Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher "Zizek's and Politics: A Critical Introduction" (Edinburgh University Press, 2010)
• Chris McMillan, "Žižek and Communist Strategy: On the Disavowed Foundations of Global Capitalism" (Edinburgh University Press, 2012)

References[link]