Platon dreamt of a state, led by philosophers and Zizek is kind of transposing this idea with the party Troika in Slovenia, together with two other philosophers.
Zizek, a critical and maybe unconventional thinker of our time, combing psychological methods of Lacan with the dialectic of Hegel (also Zizek tries to re-connect the Lacain rejection of philosophy). Making philosophy not only relevant in pop-cultural way, but also as a system of making an opinion in order to analyze the differences arousing in political conflicts, in historical-dialectic process.
Zizek is opening discourse that is interlinking different disciplines, also connecting media as examples for underlining his point. Showing a critical understantment of happenings, that are often the product of ideology. Drawing attention of phenomena that is suppressed by media in order to let the audience in a dogmatic black-and-white-thinking, like an article published in the New York Times in 2014, where survivors of the Shoa are condemning 'the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Palestine'. Likewise the paradox that whenever global finances crash, the stock markets register an upswing (quoting Yanis Varoufakis). Also that we do not live in a system of capitalism, more appropriate: In a Neo-Feudalism of Companies and that all groups that reject this system (mostly Islam influenced communites, but also indigenious folks..) are in the same breath presented in an anti-democratic behavior...
Still I am shaked, when reading about the PR-work behind the justification of the Iraq-war and I recommend to read Zizek's work "The Borrowed Kettle" in which he is tracing the geo-political intentions behind this war.
As Zizek emphasizes continously: The catastrophy has happened, but we haven't recognized.
Prima facie it is some kind of uncomfortable to see and hear him speaking (touching his nose and snorting, speaking not fluently and his rhetoric skills…), when used to read him.
So it was a mental work for me to 'comprehend' his theories without being extracted by those superficialities,
as for my opinion, there was and is a link of fineness of in- and outside.
But this is exactly the work and therapeutic aim behind Zizek, to accept our own discomfort, when hearing him, to look more into the deepness of some sentences, that seem to been thrown out a gut-feeling, but is more the work of critical analysis, not clinging into political directions of right and left, but showing the fatality in both. A stand point that is missed in the politcal discourse.
It will stay a fragment to present all those enlightening ideas and summaries of Zizek, as he had also the time and experience to built his world-view around a historic-philosophic-psychological order. Not always I can agree on his ideas (e.g. ciritsing the criticers of Eurocentric methods as hypocratical, because in his opinion, the methods of critism are rooting in 'pure European thinking', but I have my problems by locating the human consciousness in one contitent, as we can not divide the reciproce influences from all time and areas, like the 'European heritage of Ancient Greece' would have been lost without the mental work in Toledo, also a wonderful proof in history how all religious were able to work together ; Also I miss a critical analysis of the Covid-pandemia in a Foucault-Bio-Power-way, not to negate the danger of the virus, but the methods of politcal practice.)
But this is exactly what a good conversation must include, approach the 'truth' through discussions and disagreements.
