Conditions of Possibility: Slavoj Žižek Part I

As part of the series Critical Theory Today, eminent theorist Slavoj Žižek joins Martin Hägglund and Adrian Johnston in a discussion about "Conditions of Possibility," with respect to philosophy, literary theory, religion, and psychoanalysis. Drawing on such diverse and archetypal figures as Kant, Hegel, Freud, Derrida, and Lacan, the panel will explore the notion of philosophical critique and its transformation in contemporary theory.

Slavoj Žižek is the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Ljubljana, and a professor at the European Graduate School in Saas Fe, Switzerland. Trained in both philosophy and psychoanalysis, he is the author of numerous books translated into many languages. His work addresses a wide range of subjects, including German idealism, Lacanian theory, leftist politics, and a plethora of socio-cultural phenomena. His most recent book is Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Martin Hägglund is associate professor of comparative literature and humanities at Yale University. He is the author of Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov; and Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. His work has been the subject of a special issue of CR: The New Centennial Review. Adrian Johnston is a professor in the department of philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. He is the author of Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity; and Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change.