Slavoj Žižek on Hegel, Marx, and Utopia

This week’s episode of Žižek and So On, includes an interview with Slavoj himself, conducted on February 1st of this year. In the interview Žižek parses out what he calls the “post-modern deadlock.” This theoretical and political impasse, specific to the epoch of post modernism, is the product of a tension between what he identifies as the broad realist approach and the transcendental. In exploring this deadlock, Žižek speaks about the limits of Marx’s historical materialism, Judith Butler’s gender theory, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, each as separate examples of transhistorical ontology. Beyond this impasse, and in response to the current global situation, Žižek proposes historicizing historicism, in the practice of Hegel, so that we might see the emergence of an immanent, yet entirely new version of utopia, and that in the event of the catastrophic, there is something at work which is both potentially emancipatory, and universal.