Slavoj Žižek is one of the most famous public intellectuals. At the time of writing, Žižek’s citations number in the ∼58,000 range (Research.com n.d.),Footnote ¹ putting him in the territory of notable intellectuals such as Edward Said and Charles Taylor. Žižek’s influence and power are not just tied to his publications and influence in the academy, however, as he has become a cult figure in the media – something that contemporary intellectuals are not typically known for. As Bar-El points out, Žižek is perhaps the only political theorist to have both a nightclub and a fashion collection named after him (p. 1). As well as this, Žižek’s celebrity status has catapulted him into a regular feature on mainstream news, a favourite of popular online podcasts, and most impressively, a movie star. His debate with self-help guru and psychologist Jordan Peterson sold out more quickly than the local hockey playoffs. In an era which is skeptical or simply uninterested in intellectuals, especially those associated with Marxism and French Theory, it is equally perplexing and impressive to see a philosopher on the red carpet. Eliran Bar-El’s How Slavoj Became Žižek Footnote ² seeks to explain this curious phenomenon.

Using a ‘sociohistorical narrative’ and databases such as Google Scholar and NGRAM to look at citation trends, as well as drawing from the author’s interviews and observations, Bar-El plots the ‘wider scale of the Žižek effect as part of broader intellectual fashions’ (p. 23). Bar-El’s book begins with a useful engagement with the history and sociology of public intellectuals. Then, each chapter (covering about a decade) charts Žižek’s life and work, starting out with his early academic career, where he began identifying with a complex mix of post-structuralism and Marxism before finding his own Hegelacanese – a term Bar-El uses throughout the text to describe Žižek’s idiosyncratic mix of G.W.F. Hegel and Jacques Lacan. Then, the book moves from philosophy to Žižek’s entry into popular culture in the 2000s, which saw him publishing in mainstream venues such as The Guardian and writing adverts for Abercrombie & Fitch. The book then closes discussing Žižek’s increasingly polarised reception and decreasing citation trends after some controversies in the mid to late 2010s, before concluding with a psychoanalytic meditation on Žižek as an ‘internet philosopher’ (Burnham Reference Burnham, Flisfeder and Willis2014, 201 cited in 189).

Despite Žižek’s popularity, he has been criticised by those across the political spectrum – not just for his controversial and offensive statements, but also for his self-plagiarising.Footnote ³ Some of Žižek’s provocative statements and lazy scholarship have led critics to ask ‘what is Žižek for?’ (Moller-Nielsen Reference Moller-Nielsen2019). While reviewing a movie he has not watched and using offensive language may drive traffic towards Žižek’s interviews and increase ticket sales to his latest lecture, these provocations oftentimes appear ill-considered and desperate attempts to court controversy, or ‘trolling’ – to use internet slang. Bar-El does address some of these criticisms, but overall, there is a slightly defensive tone taken. Bar-El could have done a lot more to explain what drives Žižek to act so obnoxiously.

This leads to another problem. The goal of Žižek’s intellectual project is not particularly clear. Where the serious Hegelian–Marxist political thinker starts and where the comedian writing Abercrombie & Fitch adverts in 10 minutes (p. 128) ends is not demarcated. Bar-El could have provided a detailed response to the work of Gabriel Rockhill (Reference Rockhill2023) and Thomas Moller-Nielsen (Reference Moller-Nielsen2019) for example, who have attacked Žižek on serious political grounds, to unpick this. Instead, the reader is only provided with a fairly weak defence of Žižek against Noam Chomsky and John Gray (pp. 154–162).

Is Žižek a provocative intellectual jester, or a dangerous radical distracting us with shock jock antics manufactured for the modern attention economy? I’m still left wondering…