Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian Marxist philosopher and cultural critic, born March 21st 1949. His work and thought, aims to provoke and critique common views of the self and the world. The philosopher, for Žižek is more someone engaged in critique than someone who tries to answer questions by creating a theory. Žižek achieved international recognition as a social theorist after the 1989 publication of his first book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, which disputed a Marxist interoperation of ideology as a false consciousness and argued for ideology as an unconscious fantasy that structures reality. Žižek considers himself a political, radical and critic of neoliberalism. His political thought represents one of two paths of a progressive alternative. Either a return to the program of socialism, or the proposal of an alternative vision of social arrangements.

His unorthodox style, frequent newspaper op-eds, and popular academic books have gained Žižek a wide following and international influence. He has been labelled by some the Elvis of cultural theory. Foreign Policy listed him on its 2012 list of Top 100 Global Thinkers, naming him as a celebrity philosopher.

Ontology, ideology, and the real

In developing a thesis of ideology and its function, Žižek makes two intertwined arguments:

1. He begins with a critique of Marx's concept of ideology in which people are beholden to false consciousness that prevents them from seeing how things really are. Žižek argues that peoples deepest motives are unconscious and that ideology functions as a justification for the existing social order. That is reality, constructed through ideology.
2. However, the real is not equivalent to the reality experienced by subjects as a meaningfully ordered totality. For Žižek, the real name points within the ontological fabric, knitted by the hegemonic systems of representation and reproduction. Which nevertheless resists full inscription into its terms, and that may as such attempt to generate sites of active political resistance.

Žižek gives primacy to the creative subject who can manipulate discourse even while he or she is shaped by it. This is illustrated by the proposition that although biological psychology might one day be able to completely model a persons brain, there will still be something left over that can not be explained. Žižek suggests that consciousness is opaque. He says that one can not ever know if an apparently conscious being is truly conscious or a mime, and furthermore, that this confusion is fundamental to consciousness itself.

The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (2009)
Slavoj Žižek guides viewers through some of the greatest movies ever made, discussing the hidden language in film and revealing what movies can show people about themselves. Here he delves into the work of David Lynch, prompting revaluation of opinions about Alfred Hitchcock films.

• In Possessed (1947), the train acts as order. She views the 'magic of the screen', almost as she is in a cinema. Class, race and social construction of the world is portrayed.
• The Matrix (1999), the blue pill and red pill is not a choice between illusion and reality.
• The Birds (1963), is a psychological story surrounded by females. Why do the birds attack? A foreign dimension intrudes, that literally tears apart reality.
• Psycho (1960), explored Freud's theory, of the id, ego and superego. The id is the basement, the ego is the ground floor dealing with reality and normality, and the superego is the attic with the mother being the dominant voice.