Paul Holdengräber is joined by philosopher Slavoj Žižek on episode 124 of The Quarantine Tapes. Slavoj is in Slovenia and they discuss his experience of the pandemic there before diving into Slavoj’s analysis of this political and social moment.

Slavoj and Paul talk about the response to the pandemic and what it will take to get out of it, Slavoj offers his thoughts on technology and language and what this crisis is revealing about long-standing restrictions to our privacy and freedom. He ends the episode with a story for his visit to Julian Assange prior to the pandemic and a reminder of what is at stake in that ongoing trial.

Guest Bio

Slavoj Žižek, born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 1949, studied philosophy in Ljubljana and psychoanalysis in Paris. He is now Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, and international director at the School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London. He held courses at many US universities (Princeton, Columbia, NYU). His main fields of work are the legacy of German  Idealism, philosophical reading of psychoanalysis, critique of ideology. The central axis of his work is the attempt to read Hegel through the conceptual apparatus developed by Jacques Lacan. His latest publications: PANDEMIC! (O/R Books 2020), HEGEL IN AS WIRED BRAIN (Bloomsbury 2020), A LEFT THAT DARES TO SPEAK ITS NAME (Polity Press 2020).

Credits:

Paul Holdengraber - Co-Creator, Host, OLA Director
Anthony Audi - Co-Creator, Researcher, OLA Director
Alejandro Cohen - Co-Creator, Producer, Composer
Christian Pitt - Production Coordinator 
Erin Cooney - Copy, Production
Dublab Team