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這位肯恩博士滿嘴噴糞，虧他還以「哲學家」自居。在我看來，他未必不學無術；但此君沒有把書讀懂、讀通，則是板上釘釘的事(分見兩欄2026/05/24，2026/02/17貼文的「編者前言」)。
不過，從我的立場看，齊澤克最近的論述也大掉鏈子(該欄2025/12/10貼文的「編者前言」)；但這個議題不是三言兩語能交代清楚，以後慢慢再談。
下文雖然用了一拖拉庫的哲學「術語」，基本上它屬於「罵街」一族；自然難登大雅，只能置於此欄；算是眾生百態吧。
Slavoj Žižek: A Clownish Charlatan Who Abuses Philosophy
Nihilism and the worst of continental showboating
Benjamin Cain, 05/22/26
One of the few scandals of late-modern philosophy is that Slavoj Žižek is regarded as a prominent philosopher.
We can imagine what it must take for a philosopher to gain notoriety in the era of rampant social media slop, when few people read books or care to ponder meta-questions. What you’d have to do, apparently, is act like a clown and spout pretentious gibberish.
Nothing is clearer in his output than that Žižek gives philosophy a bad name. Sure, Žižek didn’t singlehandedly throw academic philosophy into its late-modern hole. Analytic and continental philosophers did that to themselves a century ago with positivism and neo-Hegelianism. But Žižek certainly has ridden the wave of postmodern obfuscation.
Just watch and listen to Žižek speak, such as in his 2026 public “discussion” with the YouTuber Alex O’Connor in London, and you ought to be appalled at what you see and hear. His onslaught of obnoxious mannerisms is breathtaking, and I’m speaking about both his nasal twitches and the words streaming incoherently from his mouth. His public performances are insufferable, but his books are hardly less obscure.
If you want to know what’s disastrously wrong with continental philosophy, simply listen to Žižek speak. If analytic philosophers pride themselves on being clear and rigorous, taking scientific discourse as their exemplar, Žižek must think his task is to do the opposite. His modus operandi is to make as little sense as possible. He showboats, indulges himself with name-dropping tangents, and interrupts his own sentences rather than completing his thoughts because he knows the thoughts are pointless. His thoughts are sinking ships, and he jumps from one to the next at the earliest convenience.
Žižek is the philosophical equivalent of a shock jock (嘩眾取寵的「談話節目」主持人). He excels at issuing scattershot, masturbatory pronouncements and hollow, bizarre arguments by assertion. There’s no logic or responsible argumentation in his speech or writing. It’s all just literary fluff and radical posturing, accompanied in person by his barely decipherable accent and interminable sniffing and twitching.
Now, I happen to have Tourette syndrome, so I’d be the last one to criticize someone for his or her distracting tics. But I don’t think you can understand what’s wrong with Žižek’s pseudo-philosophy, and indirectly with continental philosophy as a whole, without noticing that his tics seem psychosomatic. Let me explain. (psychosomatic：心理因素導致身體官能失調症)
At the root of late-modern philosophy, from Friedrich Nietzsche onward, is the threat of nihilism. John Vervaeke gained public attention on YouTube for calling this the “meaning crisis.” The problem is that God “died,” which is to say that religion became irrelevant and useless for grounding liberal values and secular lifestyles. We distracted ourselves with consumerism, but fundamentally, we believe in nothing because no worthy myths remain to guide our habits or goals.
Continental philosophy expresses this nihilism most obnoxiously by taking everything to be a hollow game. If reason led us to this quagmire, by disenchanting nature and killing God, there’s no point in arguing or trying to make any sense when you speak or write. Everything is absurd and hopeless, so the best we can do is have fun scheming and pulling the wool over each other’s eyes. That’s what continental philosophers do best.
So along comes Žižek, whose mentor was Jacques “the quack” Lacan. Žižek is supposed to have synthesized Lacanian psychoanalysis with French structuralist Marxism, which is exactly like saying he had the dishonour of combining two torrents of nonsense.
Incidentally, I suspect Žižek doesn’t credit the recent consensus that the foundation of Lacan’s “theorizing,” Freud’s psychoanalysis, was a flat-out pseudoscience. Peter Watson goes over this revision in his book Ideas, where he points out that the most serious charge is that “the entire edifice of psychoanalysis is based on clinical evidence and observations that are at best dubious or flawed, and at worst fraudulent.” Here, then, we have a lineage of fraudsters, from Freud to Lacan to Žižek.
Unsurprisingly, Žižek first had the gall to pontificate and pretend that gibberish is oracular wisdom when he studied Georg WF Hegel for his doctoral dissertation. Just as Immanuel Kant set the pseudo-rigorous, legalistic tone for analytic philosophers, his successor Hegel established the obscurantist literary style for continental ones.
But whereas analytic philosophers overcame the threat of nihilism by clinging to the undeniable progress of science and technology, continental philosophers politicize science and everything else, so they succumb to the conspiracy theory that everything is an absurd will to power, or as Žižek puts it, an “ideological fantasy.”
How, then, does Žižek attempt to do his part in this absurd game? How will he dominate by defrauding his listeners or readers? By being an insufferable pseudo-intellectual, spouting pretentious jargon, and substituting literary poses for arguments and evidence-backed explanations.
In his talk with O’Connor, for instance, Žižek hardly paid O’Connor the courtesy of having a conversation with him. The pair sat on a stage in front of an audience, with a big, black screen behind them boasting both of their names, yet Žižek easily spoke 90% of the time. (One of the most amusing comments under the video on Alex O’Connor’s channel says, “Dude’s nose had more mic time than Alex.”)
Now, if Žižek deserved his cult status, maybe he’d also deserve to hog the stage since listening to him speak would be worthwhile. But that’s obviously not the case.
Žižek spent the first 15 minutes pontificating about the supposed genius of his concept of “Christian atheism.” Žižek says he’s an atheist, but he’s also a Christian, and not just in Richard Dawkins’ cultural sense. No, Žižek is a true Christian because this religion somehow implies atheism by featuring the death of God (that is, Jesus’s crucifixion). Never mind the Incarnation, Resurrection, or Trinity. Christianity is somehow just equivalent to atheism, or Christians were all along wrestling with God’s irrelevance.
True, by repudiating idols and thus theistic literalism, Jewish monotheism led to secular humanism, as I’ve argued elsewhere. But Christianity is better understood in something like Nietzsche’s terms, as an expression of underclass hope for retribution in the afterlife, which only God could provide. Certainly, most Christians didn’t dedicate themselves to establishing God’s egalitarian kingdom on Earth, such as by challenging the civilizational norms of monarchical, feudal, patriarchal, theocratic, and imperialist dominance hierarchies. The monks who renounced natural dominance hierarchies worked with the Church that co-opted them.
Only when Christendom’s compromises gave way to liberal secular revolutions did the ideal of equality overcome Christianity’s mere inversion of ancient social hierarchies. The pre-Christian norm was for the rich to rule over the poor. Christians fantasized about how the poor might rule over the rich. That’s this religion’s core message, and ever since the Roman Empire bastardized Jesus’s prophesies, Christianity has offered polytheistic excuses for secular degradations.
In any case, there’s Žižek talking nonsense on stage, dominating the audience rather like how Donald Trump is known for rambling. As the critic Michael Wolff suspects, Trump rambles to dominate the conversation and avoid awkward moments of silence that might provide a space for introspection or for his listeners to win the moment by getting a word in edgewise. Similarly, Žižek deals with nihilism or the modern meaning crisis by managing his cult. He hides the truth of his philosophy’s emptiness by always changing the subject, not finishing his sentences, and leaping from one bizarre tangent to the next.
But to return to the point about his tics, they exacerbate the dominance simply by making his performance more obnoxious. This is the subtext of his discourse: he wants you to feel icky whenever he speaks because his medium is his message. Underlying his gibberish or dressing up his platitudes is just late-modern European nihilism, the inability to reconstruct civilized values on a naturalistic, humanistic basis. This is to say that Žižek isn’t bright, humble, or creative enough to face the harsh truths and build a meaningful philosophical response.
Instead, his method accepts nihilism, which compels him merely to attempt to exploit, befuddle, or annoy his audience and readers. When speaking in public, he does this by wasting everyone’s time with his incoherent meandering, which is presented with the pretense that it’s a work of literary genius. And as I said, accompanying that primary farce is the side hustle of his off-putting twitches that resemble the gestures of a coke fiend.
What’s annoying about his twitches is their consistency with the rest of his schtick, and how the madness of his method is just a weak surrender to nihilism. Nihilists are wont to resort to frauds and cults to run out their clock since that’s the best they think they can do, once they accept that everything is absurd, grotesque, and pointless.
Now, that nihilism is false, as I argue throughout my philosophical writing. Here, I’ll close just by summarizing my opposing view of how to make sense of naturalism in a way that doesn’t undercut people’s progressive enterprises.
What we should do is accept the nihilist’s premise that godless nature is horrific and absurd, and use those basic facts as existential springboards, recognizing that one of nature’s absurdities is its wild penchant for self-negations. So nonlife negated itself, as it were, by evolving life, and animal life evolved into a genus of people. People, in turn, became godlike creators of anti-natural domains known as encultured lifestyles that developed into high-tech civilizations.
So you see, it’s not the case that postmodern gamesmanship, pretentious rhetorical showboating, and cultish obfuscations and manipulations are the only games in town. The humanist’s acknowledgment that real progress has occurred in history thwarts that cynical perspective.
If cognitive, social, and technological progress were impossible, then perhaps charlatans like Žižek would be justified in running their cults with audacious poses and overcomplicated sophistry. But let Žižek argue with a scientist and see how far he gets. How long would it take for the scientist to realize that Žižek is a pompous fraudster with nothing worthwhile to say? I doubt ten seconds would pass before the scientist would suspect that this poseur gives philosophy a bad name.
No, you don’t have to succumb to nihilism to support the pretense that twaddle is wisdom. You can acknowledge the modern threats to meaningfulness from reason, technoscientific empowerment, and liberal bureaucracies, while recognizing that a far nobler task than tricking fellow people is the terraforming of nature’s wildness. Our existential opportunity isn’t merely to scheme for petty dominance in hollow cults, but to out-create our Maker by building societies that honour people’s rights, based on objective knowledge of the real patterns that emerge from nature’s bedrock horrors and absurdities.
Žižek’s distractions are like the cotton-candy mischief you find on social media platforms. The fact that he’s known as a popular philosopher is a travesty.
Further reading
* The Abyss That’s Engulfing Western Philosophy
* Postmodernity: When Progress Becomes Poisonous
* From the Age of Reason to Postmodern Sophistry
* Liberalism Withstands the Decadence of European Cynics
* The Bible and Quran are Proto-Lovecraftian Satires
* No, Nihilists, Morality Isn’t Vacuous in Nature
* “Slavoj Žižek and Alex O’Connor Live in London,” on YouTube
Written by Benjamin Cain
Ph.D. in philosophy/Knowledge condemns. Art redeems. /https://benjamincain.substack.com/https://ko-fi.com/benjamincain/ benjamincain8@gmailDOTcom
Published in Philosophy Today
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