Editing Slavoj Žižek (section)

==Criticism and controversy==
{{Controversy section|date=October 2024}}
===Inconsistency and ambiguity===
Žižek's philosophical and political positions have been described as ambiguous, and his work has been criticized for a failure to take a consistent stance.<ref>{{cite web |last=Kuhn |first=Gabriel |year=2011 |url=http://www.alpineanarchist.org/r_anarchist_hypothesis.html |title=The Anarchist Hypothesis, or Badiou, Žižek, and the Anti-Anarchist Prejudice |website=Alpine Anarchist |access-date=4 September 2013 |archive-date=28 April 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210428121741/http://www.alpineanarchist.org/r_anarchist_hypothesis.html |url-status=live }}</ref> While he has claimed to stand by a revolutionary Marxist project, his lack of vision concerning the possible circumstances which could lead to successful revolution makes it unclear what that project consists of. According to [[John Gray (philosopher)|John Gray]] and John Holbo, his theoretical argument often lacks grounding in historical fact, which makes him more provocative than insightful.<ref name="ViolentVisions">{{cite journal|last=Gray|first=John|title=The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek|journal=New York Review of Books|date=12 July 2012|volume=59 |issue=12 |url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jul/12/violent-visions-slavoj-zizek/|access-date=22 September 2012|archive-date=20 November 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151120004119/http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jul/12/violent-visions-slavoj-zizek/|url-status=live}}</ref><ref name=Holbo-2004>{{cite journal|last=Holbo|first=John|title=On Žižek and Trilling|journal=Philosophy and Literature|date=1 January 2004|volume=28|issue=2|pages=430–440|doi=10.1353/phl.2004.0029|s2cid=170396508|quote=...an unhealthy anti-liberal is one, like Z+iz=ek, who ticks and tocks in unreflective revulsion at liberalism, pantomiming that he is de Maistre (or Abraham) or Robespierre (or Lenin) by turns, lest he look like Mill.}}</ref><ref name=Holbo-CT-2010>{{cite news|last=Holbo|first=John|title=Zizek on the Financial Collapse&nbsp;– and Liberalism|url=http://crookedtimber.org/2010/12/17/zizek-on-the-financial-collapse-and-liberalism/|access-date=21 August 2012|newspaper=Crooked Timbers|date=17 December 2010|quote=To review: Zizek does this liberal = neoliberal thing. Which is no good. And he doesn't even have much to say about economics. And Zizek does this liberal = self-hating pc white intellectuals thing. Which is no good.|archive-date=4 March 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120304223230/http://crookedtimber.org/2010/12/17/zizek-on-the-financial-collapse-and-liberalism/|url-status=live}}</ref>

In a very negative review of Žižek's book ''Less than Nothing'', John Gray attacked Žižek for his celebrations of violence, his failure to ground his theories in historical facts, and his 'formless radicalism' which, according to Gray, professes to be communist yet lacks the conviction that communism could ever be successfully realized. Gray concluded that Žižek's work, though entertaining, is intellectually worthless: "Achieving a deceptive substance by endlessly reiterating an essentially empty vision, Žižek's work amounts in the end to less than nothing."<ref name="ViolentVisions"/>

Žižek's refusal to present an alternative vision has led critics to accuse him of using unsustainable Marxist categories of analysis and having a 19th-century understanding of class.<ref>{{cite web|title=Slavoj Zizek responds to his critics|last=Žižek|first=Slavoj|work=[[Jacobin (magazine)|Jacobin]]|date=3 July 2012|url=https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/07/slavoj-zizek-responds-to-his-critics/|access-date=13 April 2018|archive-date=2 March 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180302225322/https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/07/slavoj-zizek-responds-to-his-critics/|url-status=live}}</ref> For example, [[post-Marxist]] [[Ernesto Laclau]] argued that "Žižek uses class as a sort of ''[[deus ex machina]]'' to play the role of the good guy against the multicultural devils."<ref>Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek ''Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left''. Verso. London, New York City 2000. pp. 202–206</ref>

In his book ''Living in the End Times'', Žižek suggests that the criticism of his positions is itself ambiguous and multilateral:

{{blockquote|I am attacked for being anti-Semitic ''and'' for spreading [[Zionism|Zionist]] lies, for being a covert Slovene nationalist ''and'' unpatriotic traitor to my nation, for being a crypto-Stalinist defending terror ''and'' for spreading Bourgeois lies about Communism... so maybe, just maybe I am on the right path, the path of fidelity to freedom.<ref>{{cite book |first=Slavoj |last=Žižek |title=Living in the End Times |page=xiv}}</ref>}}

===Stylistic confusion===
Žižek has been criticized for his chaotic and non-systematic style: Harpham calls Žižek's style "a stream of nonconsecutive units arranged in arbitrary sequences that solicit a sporadic and discontinuous attention".<ref>Harpham [http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/issues/v29/v29n3.harpham1.html "Doing the Impossible: Slavoj Žižek and the End of Knowledge"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120330100325/http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/issues/v29/v29n3.harpham1.html |date=30 March 2012 }}</ref> 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."<ref>{{citation |last=O'Neill |url=http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n17oneill |title=The Last Analysis of Slavoj Žižek |access-date=14 May 2008 |archive-date=4 July 2008 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080704081134/http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n17oneill |url-status=live }}</ref> [[Noam Chomsky]] deems Žižek guilty of "using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever", adding that his views are often too obscure to be communicated usefully to common people.<ref>{{cite web |last=Springer |first=Mike |date=28 June 2013 |url=http://www.openculture.com/2013/06/noam_chomsky_slams_zizek_and_lacan_empty_posturing.html |title=Noam Chomsky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Empty 'Posturing' |website=OpenCulture.com |access-date=20 June 2018 |archive-date=19 March 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220319200117/http://www.openculture.com/2013/06/noam_chomsky_slams_zizek_and_lacan_empty_posturing.html |url-status=live }}</ref>

Conservative thinker [[Roger Scruton]] claims that: 
{{blockquote|To summarize Žižek's position is not easy: he slips between philosophical and psychoanalytical ways of arguing, and is spell-bound by [[Lacan]]'s gnomic utterances. He is a lover of paradox, and believes strongly in what [[Hegel]] called 'the labour of the negative' though taking the idea, as always, one stage further towards the brick wall of paradox.<ref>{{cite book |last=Scruton |first=Roger |author-link=Roger Scruton |date=2015 |title=Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left |publisher=Bloomsbury |page=256 |isbn=978-1408187333}}</ref>}}

===Careless scholarship===
Žižek has been accused of approaching phenomena without rigour, reductively forcing them to support pre-given theoretical notions. For example, [[Tania Modleski]] alleges that "in trying to make [[Hitchcock]] 'fit' [[Lacan]], he [Žižek] frequently ends up simplifying what goes on in the films".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Modleski |first1=Tania |title=The Women Who Knew Too Much |date=2005 |publisher=Routledge |location=New York & London |page=132 |edition=2}}</ref> Similarly, [[Yannis Stavrakakis]] criticises Žižek's reading of ''[[Antigone (Sophocles play)|Antigone]]'', claiming it proceeds without regard for both the play itself and the interpretation, given by Lacan in his 7th [[Seminars of Jacques Lacan|Seminar]], which Žižek claims to follow. According to Stavrakakis, Žižek mistakenly characterises [[Antigone]]'s act (illegally burying her brother) as politically radical/revolutionary, when in reality "Her act is a ''one-off'' and she couldn't care less about what will happen in the polis after her suicide."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Stavrakakis |first1=Yannis |title=The Lacanian Left |date=2007 |publisher=Edinburgh University Press |location=Edinburgh |page=115}}</ref>

Noah Horwitz alleges that Žižek (and the [[Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis|Ljubljana School]] to which Žižek belongs) mistakenly conflates the insights of Lacan and Hegel, and registers concern that such a move "risks transforming Lacanian psychoanalysis into a discourse of ''self-consciousness'' rather than a discourse on the psychoanalytic, Freudian ''unconscious''."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Horwitz |first1=Noah |title=Contra the Slovenians |journal=Philosophy Today |date=2005 |volume=49 |issue=1 |page=24|doi=10.5840/philtoday200549161 }}</ref>

====Allegations of plagiarism====
Žižek's tendency to recycle portions of his own texts in subsequent works resulted in the accusation of [[self-plagiarism]] by ''[[The New York Times]]'' in 2014, after Žižek published an [[op-ed]] in the magazine which contained portions of his writing from an earlier book.<ref name="Newsweek">{{cite web|url=http://www.newsweek.com/slavoj-zizek-self-plagiarized-new-york-times-269221|first=Taylor|last=Wofford|title=Slavoj Žižek On 'Self Plagiarism' in The New York Times: What's the Big Deal?|website=[[Newsweek]]|date=10 September 2014|access-date=29 September 2015|archive-date=29 September 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150929234428/http://www.newsweek.com/slavoj-zizek-self-plagiarized-new-york-times-269221|url-status=live}}</ref> In response, Žižek expressed perplexity at the harsh tone of the denunciation, emphasizing that the recycled passages in question only acted as references from his theoretical books to supplement otherwise original writing.<ref name="Newsweek"/>

In July 2014, ''[[Newsweek]]'' reported that online bloggers led by [[Steve Sailer]] had discovered that in an article published in 2006, Žižek plagiarized long passages from an earlier review by Stanley Hornbeck that first appeared in the journal ''[[American Renaissance (magazine)|American Renaissance]]'', a publication condemned by the [[Southern Poverty Law Center]] as the organ of a "white nationalist hate group".<ref name="American_Renaissance_Plagiarism">{{cite web |url=http://www.newsweek.com/did-marxist-philosophy-superstar-slavoj-zizek-plagiarize-white-nationalist-journal-258433 |first=Taylor |last=Wofford |title=Did Marxist Philosophy Superstar Slavoj Žižek Plagiarize a White Nationalist Journal? |work=Newsweek |date=11 July 2014 |access-date=13 July 2014 |archive-date=13 July 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140713053008/http://www.newsweek.com/did-marxist-philosophy-superstar-slavoj-zizek-plagiarize-white-nationalist-journal-258433 |url-status=live }}</ref> In response to the allegations, Žižek stated:
{{blockquote|The friend send [sic] it to me, assuring me that I can use it freely since it merely resumes another's line of thought. Consequently, I did just that—and I sincerely apologize for not knowing that my friend's resume was largely borrowed from Stanley Hornbeck's review of Macdonald's book.&nbsp;... In no way can I thus be accused of plagiarizing another's line of thought, of 'stealing ideas'. I nonetheless deeply regret the incident.<ref>{{cite web|last1=Dean|first1=Michelle|title=Slavoj Žižek Sorta Kinda Admits Plagiarizing White Supremacist Journal|url=http://gawker.com/slavoj-zizek-sorta-kinda-admits-plagiarizing-white-supr-1604590014|website=[[Gawker]]|date=14 July 2014|access-date=20 February 2015|archive-date=19 February 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150219010643/http://gawker.com/slavoj-zizek-sorta-kinda-admits-plagiarizing-white-supr-1604590014|url-status=dead}}</ref>}}