Žižekianism

Žižekianism is a political ideology, based on Slavoj Žižek, that is characterized by the advocation of Ideology Disintegrationism, but considering people cannot live without ideologies, and it also advocates utopic communism, considering that it is possible to realize a fast transition to a communist state without so much problems and even turn the whole world into communist if people want..

Philosophical Beliefs
Studies: Marxism, Ontology, Political Theory, Psychoanalysis, Cultural Theory, Film Theory, Theology, German Idealism and Dialectic.

Notable ideas: Interpassivity, Over-Identification, Ideological Fantasy (ideology as an unconscious fantasy that structures reality), revival of Dialectical Materialism.

Subjectivity
For Žižek, although a subject may take on a symbolic (social) position, it can never be reduced to this attempted symbolisation, since the very "taking on" of this position implies a separate 'I', beyond the symbolic, that does the taking on. Yet, under scrutiny, nothing positive can be said about this subject, this 'I' that eludes symbolisation; it cannot be discerned as anything but "that which cannot be symbolised". Thus, without the initial, attempted, failed symbolisation, subjectivity cannot present itself. As Žižek writes in his first book in English: "the subject of the signifier is a retroactive effect of the failure of its own representation; that is why the failure of representation is the only way to represent it adequately."

Žižek attributes this position on the subject to Hegel, particularly his description of man as "the night of the world",and to Lacan, with his description of the barred, split subject, who he sees as developing the Cartesian notion of the cogito.According to Žižek, these thinkers, in insisting on the role of the subject, run counter to "culturalist" or "historicist" positions held by thinkers such as Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, which posit that "subjects" are bound by and reducible to their historical/cultural(/symbolic) context.

Ideology
Žižek's Lacanian-informed theory of ideology is one of his major contributions to political theory; his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, and the documentary The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, in which he stars, are among the well-known places in which it is discussed. Žižek believes that ideology has been frequently misinterpreted as dualistic and, according to him, this misinterpreted dualism posits that there is a real world of material relations and objects outside of oneself, which is accessible to reason.

For Žižek, as for Marx, ideology is made up of fictions that structure political life; in Lacan's terms, ideology belongs to the symbolic order. Žižek argues that these fictions are primarily maintained at an unconscious level, rather than a conscious one. Since, according to psychoanalytic theory, the unconscious can determine one's actions directly, bypassing one's conscious awareness (as in parapraxes), ideology can be expressed in one's behaviour, regardless of one's conscious beliefs. Hence, Žižek breaks with orthodox Marxist accounts that view ideology purely as a system of mistaken beliefs (see False consciousness). Drawing on Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason, Žižek argues that adopting a cynical perspective is not enough to escape ideology, since, according to Žižek, even though postmodern subjects are consciously cynical about the political situation, they continue to reinforce it through their behaviour.

Communism
Although sometimes adopting the title of 'radical leftist',Žižek also controversially insists on identifying as a communist, even though he rejects 20th century communism as a "total failure", and decries "the communism of the 20th century, more specifically all the network of phenomena we refer to as Stalinism as "maybe the worst ideological, political, ethical, social (and so on) catastrophe in the history of humanity." Žižek justifies this choice by claiming that only the term 'communism' signals a genuine step outside of the existing order, in part since the term 'socialism' no longer has radical enough implications, and means nothing more than that one "care[s] for society"

In Marx Reloaded, Žižek rejects both 20th-century totalitarianism and "spontaneous local self-organisation, direct democracy, councils, and so on". There, he endorses a definition of communism as "a society where you, everyone would be allowed to dwell in his or her stupidity", an idea with which he credits Fredric Jameson as the inspiration.

Žižek has labelled himself a "communist in a qualified sense". When he spoke at a conference on The Idea of Communism, he applied (in qualified form) the 'communist' label to the Occupy Wall Street protestors:

They are not communists, if 'communism' means the system which deservedly collapsed in 1990 - and remember that the communists who are still in power today run the most ruthless capitalism (in China). ... The only sense in which the protestors are 'communists' is that they care for the commons - the commons of nature, of knowledge - which are threatened by the system. They are dismissed as dreamers, but the true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely the way they are now, with just a few cosmetic changes. They are not dreamers; they are awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. They are not destroying anything; they are reacting to how the system is gradually destroying itself.

Personality and Behaviour

 * He likes dialectical materialism but criticizes mainstream Marxist-Leninism for its strict views on doctrine.
 * He detests liberals seeing them as culturally obsessed ideologues who often ignore the economics of politics.
 * He has a sniffing problem & often interrupts himself mid-sentence by sniffing which is seen as funny by others.

[[file:Wikipedia.png]] Wikipedia

 * [[file:Wikipedia.png]] Slavoj Žižek [[File:Žižekism.png]]