Critiques of Slavoj Žižek

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. Inevitably, in the course of such scholarly discussion, many other thinkers differ with aspects of Žižek conceptual approach or specific arguments. While there is no indication that Žižek has received more criticism than have other continental philosophers of similar repute, this article discusses certain criticisms.

Argumentative method
Žižek's style is a matter of some debate:

Critiques include Harpham (2003) and O'Neill (2001). Both agree that Žižek flouts standards of reasoned argumentation. 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." Supporters such as R. Butler argue that such critiques miss the point and instead support Žižek's own theories: "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...."

Social policy
John Holbo of the National University of Singapore has criticized Žižek for his alleged refusal to lay out precisely 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 more closely 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".

Alleged Misreading of Lacan and Hegel
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 psychoanaylsis might entail" (Ian Parker, Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction, Pluto Press: London and Sterling, 2004; p. 78). For Parker, this is particularly problematic 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').