SOURCE: Miklitsch, Robert. “‘Going through the Fantasy’: Screening Slavoj Žižek.” South Atlantic Quarterly 97, no. 2 (spring 1998): 475-507.

In the following essay, Miklitsch discusses Žižek's scholarship in the cultural and political context of Slovenian culture after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Far from being the Other of Europe, former Yugoslavia was rather Europe itself in its Otherness, the screen onto which Europe projected its own repressed reverse.

—Slavoj Žižek, “Caught in Another's Dream in Bosnia”

The Giant of Ljubljana? The Casanova of Slovenia? The Balkan Lacan? Saint Slavoj?

Who, exactly, is Slavoj Žižek, and where does he hail from?

It is all, one might say, in the name. An anecdote: when I first came across this particular proper name—significantly, while reading Terry Eagleton's introduction to Ideology—I was struck less by Žižek's remarks on ideology, which offered a slight but crucial revision of...