"His last wife was an Argentine lingerie model, 30 years his junior." (Image by Andy Miah.)

A very entertaining douchebag who needs to be smacked with both hands, the Slovenian philosopher and Leftist cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek is the subject of a profile by Philipp Oehmke on the Spiegel website. An excerpt:

“He gives more than 200 lectures a year and has held visiting professorships at elite American universities. He recently spoke to an audience of 2,000 people in Buenos Aires. He is the subject of two documentary films, and in another film he interprets movies from a psychoanalytical point of view as he speeds across the ocean in a motorboat. There are Žižek T-shirts and Žižek records, and there is a Žižek club and an international Žižek journal.

His repertoire is a mix of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegel’s idealist philosophy–of film analysis, criticism of democracy, capitalism and ideology, and an occasionally authoritarian Marxism paired with everyday observations. He explains the ontological essence of the Germans, French and Americans on the basis of their toilet habits and the resulting relationship with their fecal matter, and he initially reacts to criticism with a cheerful ‘Fuck you!’–pronounced in hard Slavic consonants. He tells colleagues he values but who advocate theories contrary to his own that they should prepare to enter the gulag when he, Žižek, comes into power. He relishes the shudder that the word gulag elicits.”