A Slovenian philosopher born in 1949 (#timeline/ce20), suspicions of dissidence consigned him to academic backwaters. He came to western attention in 1989 with his first book written in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, a re-reading of Žižek’s great hero Hegel.
He challenges many of the founding assumptions of today’s left-liberal academy, including the elevation of difference or otherness to ends in themselves, the reading of the Western Enlightenment as implicitly totalitarian, and the pervasive skepticism towards any context-transcendent notions of truth or the good.
One feature of Žižek’s work is its singular philosophical and political reconsideration of German Idealism (Kant, Schellingand Hegel)
Slavoj Žižek: Do Christians really believe in God? The paradox of belief