Onassis Discussions: Slavoj Žižek in conversation with Afroditi Panagiotakou

Slavoj Žižek is not someone who enters a room to confirm what you already believe. He enters to stir it all up, even to overturn it. Reading the world through Hegel, Lacan, and Marx, Žižek has devoted his work to the contradictions that shape politics, ideology, and desire.

A philosopher, psychoanalyst, political activist, film critic, and former candidate for the presidency of Slovenia, he has spent the past few decades doing something few intellectuals manage to achieve: turning theory into public spectacle without simplifying it.

That is who Slavoj Žižek is. Disarming, excessive, funny, irritating, always ready to blow apart every certainty we hold. He has written books at such a pace that no one can keep up with them. Not even Žižek himself, as he has admitted. Among them are “The Sublime Object of Ideology” (1989), “Less Than Nothing” (2012), “Lenin 2017: Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (2017), “The Courage of Hopelessness” (2017), and “Hegel in a Wired Brain” (2020).

The documentary “Žižek!” (2005) introduced him to a wider audience as something more than an academic. In the film “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema” (2006), he steps inside the sets of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, and Andrei Tarkovsky, among others, as if determined to reveal what the camera conceals at the very moment you are looking elsewhere. “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology” (2012) returns to the question that runs through his entire body of work: how the ideas we believe to be our own shape our lives without us realizing it.

Because Žižek’s true consideration is never simply politics or philosophy. It is the stories we tell ourselves in order to understand the world, and, above all, those we do not realize we are telling.

The celebrated provocateur takes to the Main Stage of the Onassis Stegi for a conversation with the Onassis Stegi’s Artistic Director, Afroditi Panagiotakou, a conversation whose beginning and end no one knows. After all, Žižek is not known for his ability to provide answers, but for his ability to make the questions more difficult.