Slavoj Žižek Axworthy Lecture

On April 18, 2019, world renowned philosopher Slavoj Zizek delivered the 2019 Spring Axworthy Lecture in Ridell Hall to an audience of 750 in Ridell Hall, University of Winnipeg. The lecture kicked off the Department of Religion and Culture Spring Institute “Thinking the Human” — a two-week (May 6 – 17) intensive course at UWinnipeg that featured local scholars as guest lecturers. It’s very exciting UWinnipeg will be hosting a scholar of the caliber of Slavoj Žižek,” said Dr. Jane Barter, professor of religion and culture, who will be led the Thinking the Human Spring Institute. “His work has managed to combine global politics, film, popular culture, psychoanalysis, and Marxism to help diagnose the ills of late capitalism. The audience is certain to be challenged and inspired by his lecture.”

Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949) is a Slovenian-born philosopher and psychoanalyst. He is a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS, a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, and founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana. Aside from these appointments, Žižek tirelessly gives lectures around the globe and is often described as “the Elvis of cultural theory”. Although, more seriously, as British critical theorist Terry Eagleton confers, Žižek is the “most formidably brilliant” theorist to have emerged from Europe in decades. Many, in fact, now consider Žižek to be “the most dangerous philosopher in the West.” “Over the past 30 years, Žižek has amassed an enormous following and popularity due to his energetic style of public speaking, his use of humour, and his constant and seamless references to popular culture,” said Dr. Matthew Flisfeder, assistant professor of writing, rhetoric, and communications at UWinnipeg. Flisfeder is the author of The Symbolic, The Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film and is co-editor of Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader. Since his groundbreaking first work The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Zizek has published more than 50 books, which have been translated into more than 20 languages, Žižek is a professor at the European Graduate School; International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London; and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.