New Leading Thinkers course on Slavoj Žižek

April 5 – June 7, 2026
6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. (CET) / 12:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. (EST)
The price for this 10-weeks course is $575. It will be conducted on Zoom.

If you wish to register for this course, please contact EGS Program Director, Nemanja Mitrović (nemanja.mitrovic@egs.edu).

A new and upcoming leading thinkers seminar at the European Graduate School will be devoted to one of the most notorious European contemporary thinkers, the giant of Ljubljana, Slavoj Žižek. Žižek, as you will certainly know, is like no other philosopher and in this sense a real singularity. This is, inter alia, because he is and was always able to fuse the most difficult and demanding of conceptual thought with popular or general contemporary culture. He was able to do this to such a degree that it was once said about him that no cultural phenomenon (be it a film, a commercial, a series, a novel, a drama, a philosophy) is foreign to him or would ever remain unanalysed. His unique aptitude to discuss together, for example, Hegel and quantum mechanics, Kung Fu Panda and contemporary ideology, the most fundamental metaphysical questions of how to conceive of being and how subjectivity fits or does not fit into it in relation to, say, the films of Alfred Hitchcock or David Lynch has made him nothing less than, maybe the first ever, global theory superstar. But despite his global and popular appeal in all kinds of fields that by far exceed the walls of university lecture halls, his thought is and remains highly demanding, complex and nuanced, maybe especially even though it is frequently misperceived as non-systematic.

In the upcoming leading thinkers seminar on his work we will for ten weeks devote our attention and efforts precisely to the systematic aspects of Žižek’s thought and explore how his creative bringing together of Hegel, Lacanian psychoanalysis and ideology critique and / or contemporary science effectuates a far-reaching renewal of philosophy and of its task to think and conceive of its present by means of creating and inventing new concepts and novel conceptual frameworks. In these ten weeks we will examine, among other things, his very early work that has not yet been translated into English and only exists in Slovene, we will look at his conception of ideology in its different versions, will explore his concept of materialism, inter alia in relation to contemporary quantum physics, closely examine his approach to popular culture and of a anti-racist, universalist politics, we will trace his relation to Kant, Hegel, and explore his unique version of dialectical. We will discuss how Lacanian psychoanalysis provides a new take on philosophy and its history for Žižek, but we will also explore in detail how the psychoanalytic account of sexuality produces in and for Žižek not only a novel thought of subjectivity but also of our very framing and understanding of what is more generally. For this project the European Graduate School was able to bring together a series of impressive thinkers whose specialisms and singular approaches to the systematicity of Žižek’s work, we will certainly all benefit from. In these 10 weeks you will hear apart from my very own reading of some of Žižek’s most influential books, from some of his long- time companions and most powerful interlocutors, like Mladen Dolar, Adrian Johnston, Robert Pfaller, Zahi Zalloua, Dany Nobus, and Alenka Zupančič. And at the end Žižek himself will give us his thoughts: on Žižek. I am hugely looking forward to thinking together with these brilliant minds and hope to also get a chance to see you there and think with you.

Frank Ruda