The Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek was born in Ljubljana in 1949. Wildly prolific, with a love of provocation, he has published more than 50 books and hundreds of essays and articles on a wide variety of subjects from Lacanian psychoanalysis to Hollywood to Covid-19. Žižek is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. He has two sons and lives in Ljubljana with his fourth wife, the writer Jela Krečič. In his latest book, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure, published by Bloomsbury, he argues that the concept of freedom is less concrete than we would like to believe.
1. Place
Longyearbyen, Svalbard Islands
Svalbard is halfway from Norway to the North Pole. I went there with my younger son for a few days’ holiday and stayed in the main settlement, Longyearbyen, an ex-mining town. When you exit, there are signs saying: “Don’t cross this line without a gun,” because of polar bears, and when you re-enter, it says: “Leave your guns at the entrance,” like in a western. I like the feeling of emptiness and freedom and peace to work. It gives you a kind of distance from which you can see how crazy our world really is.
2. Book
Let Them Rot: Antigone’s Parallax by Alenka Zupančič
I hate reading books where you find your own opinion confirmed. Much better are books that create a reaction of intense hatred, like: “Fuck you, you’ve ruined my day, I have to rethink everything!” That’s why I’m choosing this book about Antigone by the Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič. I wrote my own version of Sophocles’s play a few years ago and I thought I had the formula, but in this short book Zupančič successfully ruins my case. It highlights the logic of exception in Antigone and makes a more elaborate philosophical argument.
3. TV
I’m a Virgo (Prime Video, 2023)
This TV series from Boots Riley is the best depiction I’ve seen of what’s wrong with today’s United States, not only at the economic level but at the level of politics. It’s about a guy born to a Black family who is more than four metres high. He is totally isolated from the world but not from ideology, because he’s reading cheap comics and watching a lot of stupid, commercial TV. Then he breaks out, and of course he’s terribly exploited. He is in a way a true Barbie, more Barbie than Barbie. On top of it all, it’s very funny.
4. Music
Gurre-Lieder by Arnold Schoenberg
This is a really intimate choice, almost a kind of mystical experience for me. In my teens, I heard Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder on the radio and it immediately marked me. Schoenberg wrote the basic melodic line before [he embraced] atonality and then orchestrated it afterwards, so it’s not just externally a work of passage between late-expressionist, neo-romantic music and properly atonal modern music, but the work itself reproduces this passage. I’m still joyfully addicted to it. Go to YouTube and find the 1965 recording conducted by Rafael Kubelik. That’s absolutely the version. It is breathtaking.
5. Food
My tastes in food are terrifying. When I’m in England, I eat pork pies and scotch eggs and totally unhealthy things. I’m very decadent. But when I asked myself: “Is there a food that I would be happy to eat all the time?”, my answer was bibimbap. It’s a popular Korean dish that’s basically boiled rice, vegetables, a fried egg and some slices of meat. You can get it in London – there’s a bibimbap cafe on Museum Street in Bloomsbury. It’s so simple. It’s also ecologically relatively sane because, OK, there’s meat, but only a couple of slices. It’s something that I really enjoy.
6. Film
Maidan (dir Sergei Loznitsa, 2014)
Loznitsa is a Ukrainian director who, for me, adopts a proper heroic stance, because he’s absolutely pro-Ukrainian, but at the same time he’s hated by nationalists in Ukraine because he doesn’t go in for this bullshit of prohibiting Russian writers or film-makers. Maidan is an excellent documentary about the 2013-14 demonstrations in Kyiv. There’s this Russian propaganda adopted by many in the west that Maidan was some kind of proto-fascist, CIA-financed coup. But if you watch this documentary, filmed over several months, you see that it was a genuine political and artistic awakening.
