Žižek’s appeal, use to Iranians
Slavoj Žižek (born March 21, 1949), the famous Slovenian political philosopher, has written numerous treatises on a variety of topics, including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political truth, globalization, subjectivity, humanity, gender, truth, and philosophy. He has also written on law, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-Marxism, Alfred Hitchcock, and David Lynch, among others. He has a good grasp of various cultural, political, and social issues of our time. As such, he is a famous philosopher in the world of thought. His fame in Iran, a country with a long tradition of thought, is undeniable. He recently said in an interview that all of his books have been translated in Iran, and many Iranian writers and translators are from the younger generation who think that Žižek’s words are their own. Therefore, the young Iranian generation is right that, thanks to the vast social media and the Internet, they are getting acquainted with the times and their developments earlier and are thinking about them. However, for researchers, the question about Žižek is very serious and important. For example, why does everyone read Žižek? Why has he become so popular in Iran today?
By Gholamreza Mansouri
Political science researcher
In this article, we will try to express our findings about the readers of this Slovenian leftist philosopher in Iran. Here are seven reasons why Žižek is important to us Iranians:
First reason: Žižek is a leftist thinker in the neoliberal and postmodern periods, and it seems that he will always be so. In Iran and places that are not sufficiently developed, in the scientific arena and, of course, in the public arena, leftism is the mainstream among the intellectuals of that society. In the contemporary history of Iran from the Qajar era to the present day, this trend has always been influential.
We must also pay attention to the unequal structure of society (such as unequal opportunities in the field of employment, education, etc.) and, more importantly, the unequal position of these countries in global positions. For these two reasons as well, the leftist perspective is very popular and formidable in the intellectual circles of such societies.
Second reason: Žižek is strongly influenced by Hegel, the 19th-century German philosopher, and in particular his theory of dialectics. The aim of Žižek’s philosophy is to show that not only is our perception dialectical, but also reality: every field of reality (every “world”) is always unframed in advance and is seen within an invisible framework.
This dialectical position allows the Slovenian thinker to demand change through ideological inversion. That is, he shows that in order to overcome capitalism, it is first necessary to abandon “all forms of resistance which help the system reproduce itself by ensuring our participation in it”. Here we see Žižek’s leftist views, which were in fact based on Hegel’s thoughts.
Let us not forget that Iranian thinkers, mainly in the last 60 or 70 years (whether they be philosophers, sociologists, or other left-wing thinkers), have interpreted Hegel’s philosophy through the lens of Marxist ideas, and therefore the acceptance of Žižek, himself a Hegelian philosopher, by Iranian thinkers today is not unexpected.
Third reason: Žižek’s different views of identity and ideology is what has endeared him to Iranians in his writings. In this case, Žižek was influenced by the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan.
Lacan invented a new way of looking at Hegel. Lacan argued that much of human behavior is driven by irrational motivations and desires that we do not consciously understand. One of the reasons for Žižek’s success is his great ability to help make sense of Lacan for us today by using examples from pop culture, jokes, and politics. Žižek’s fundamental Lacanian claim, in terms of his “critique of ideology,” is that people do not always identify with political causes on rational grounds. The element of rationality in the critique of ideology is sometimes abandoned even by Iranian thinkers. They explore emotional and sometimes unconditional identities based on their first attachments to the personalities of individuals, both dead and living. Therefore, they identify with what Žižek calls the “transcendental objects” of ideologies: whether this is a “charismatic” leader or a transcendental idea such as “revolution” or “human freedom”.
Fourth reason: The fourth reason is Žižek’s attention to the issue of “love”. The currently common view is that love is the devil. Žižek, however, has an unusual idea about the creation of our planet, and he loves it when he says that an imbalance occurred in the world, a kind of error, which led to the creation of our planet. It was such a huge mistake that they invented a remedy to fix it, love. This view is rare among philosophers. Žižek states that love happens on the assumption that a mistake was made, and continuing to the end happens to cover up the mistake as a kind of consolation. This kind of consolation, when you think about it, necessarily makes it devilish. Among Iranians, whether ordinary people or intellectuals, whenever love is brought up, they mostly passively surrender to love, and even leftist Iranian intellectuals also resort to poets like Hafez, Rumi, Saadi, and others in expressing their thoughts.
Fifth reason: The fifth reason is that Žižek’s field of activity encompasses all global crises and problems, from workers’ struggles and demonstrations for equality to wars in Syria, Yemen, Africa, and Gaza. As Edward Said once said, an intellectual must be “an outsider, living in self-imposed exile, and on the margins of society”, that is, free from academic, religious and political institutions. Otherwise, he simply resigns himself to the inevitability of events. Žižek prefers to be honest and expose himself to criticism in order to express his philosophical and political thinking clearly and dogmatically, according to Santiago Zabala. It is natural that an Iranian is as aware of environmental crises, economic crises, and regional wars as a Japanese or an American, and therefore Žižek’s interpretation of these crises is a point of connection between the desires of different people around the world.
Sixth reason: The Palestinian issue has been raised in political, cultural, and economic circles around the world for more than 70 years and is now of great concern to the world. The title of one of Žižek’s article published in January 2024 was “Time to tell the truth about Gaza.” There, he wrote:
“A month or so ago, I wrote about how the formula ‘from the river to the sea’ is now been de-facto appropriated by Israel. I said that this is what Israel is actually planning and doing — expanding Israel’s control from ‘The River to the Sea’ — but would never admit that in public. Now, the slogan is being used by the Israeli PM himself, a clear case of the public obscenity of our political discourse.”
The main concern of many Muslims is that the Palestinian issue be resolved, and this concern is not limited to Iran but to all countries.
Seventh reason: The issue of freedom is very important to him. Žižek recently published a book called ‘Freedom: A Disease Without a Cure’ (2023). In this book, he tries to show that the freedom that exists in today’s neoliberal society is not enough freedom, and perhaps better said, is a cover for true freedom. In this book, he argues that the concept of freedom is deceptively simple. We think we understand it, but the moment we try to define it, we encounter contradictions. In this new philosophical exploration, Slavoj Žižek argues that the experience of true, radical freedom is transient and fragile. To counter the idea of libertarian individualism, Žižek draws on the philosophers Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, as well as the works of Kandinsky and Agatha Christie, to examine the many facets of freedom and what we can learn from each of them.
The issue of freedom in Iranian society has always been a fundamental concern among thinkers, and the talk of freedom from every voice is pleasant and pleasing to freedom enthusiasts.